Freedom Friday: Are Your Friends Safe?

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Hello, hello, hello everybody, and welcome once again to the Unlearned Podcast.

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I am your host, redabby Gale aka RA, and this is Freedom Friday, where me or a friend of mine come and share something we've unlearned recently and how it has made us just a little bit more free.

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So if you have watched or listened to this week's episode with Talks with Middle Adults, jaquita and I are talking about discomfort, feeling uncomfortable and feeling unsafe and how that is actually very crucial right to your growth process.

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A lot of times we like to run away from discomfort or from feelings of not being safe, and again we stress the feelings part because there are actual unsafe situations.

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And then there are situations where it's not so much unsafe as it feels unsafe because it's unfamiliar, and so we talk about that.

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If you haven't listened to that, do that.

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I think it's a really, really good reminder of the things that we have to unlearn as we journey towards growth.

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And for us, we talk about, you know, our growth from our twenties into our thirties and what that looks like, kind of the things we have to unlearn there.

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But we are we're constantly alerting every day, just like you are, so it's a great opportunity, no matter what stage of life you're in, to unlearn the idea of being uncomfortable.

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Unlearn running from discomfort, because it is the.

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I believe discomfort is the hack to growth that a lot of us are unwilling to endure, and so check that out In that.

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One of the things that we actually did talk about on the episode but I think is important to unlearn when it comes to this idea of really this idea of being safe, right, emotionally safe conversation with a friend of mine and we were talking about friendships and we're talking about how difficult it is to make friends as adults, and I think we've talked about this on the podcast before but how it's really challenging, right To make, to find friendships as an adult.

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And so I think a lot of times, what we end up doing is, because it can be really hard to find friends as an adult, we put too much safety, we put too much trust in people too quickly who have not proven that they are trustworthy.

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Why?

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Because we need companionship, we need friendship, we need people who we can.

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You know, we need a community, and so I think one thing we have to unlearn when it comes to this idea of, when it comes to this idea of living in the discomfort is that sometimes that is going to take more time.

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It's uncomfortable not feeling like you have a community.

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It's uncomfortable not feeling like you have people that you can trust and confide in, especially as an adult.

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But sometimes that discomfort is necessary in order to get to the right people.

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And so something that my father taught us and he actually just my father's a preacher for those of you that don't know, and he actually just talked about this in a sermon a couple of weeks ago, uh, so if you heard it, just so you know, it comes from our kitchen table.

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We used to hear that all the time.

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Uh, growing up he was, he would, literally he would sit us down and talk about this principle of friendship.

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And so he kind of broke it down into four different parts that I've just kind of adopted as something that I use as a filter for who gets to be in my trust bucket and who doesn't.

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And sometimes, if it takes a little longer to get to the trust, it's worth it because once you get there, it's there and it's permanent.

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You aren't unsafe because you have actually vetted the types of people that you are now putting your trust into.

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So there are four different categories of friends.

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You have your casual friends, friends that you just run into, that you just life, you kind of meet.

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You might meet occasionally, you might have a couple of mutual people and you're cool, you hang out, you have a good time together.

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Uh, but there's really no depth in your, in your relationship.

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Those are, those are, those are casual friends that you have your cohorts.

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Cohorts are people that you run into that have a commonality with right.

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So you might go to the same church, you might go to church, your kids might go to the same school, you might go to the same school, might work together, you might be a part of a club together, but you have something in common, right, you might play together in a band.

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You have something in common.

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That's a cohort, right, that can feel and I'll be the first to say a cohort can feel like someone you can trust quickly because you have those things in common.

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Unfortunately, one of the things we have to learn is that just because you have something in common doesn't mean you're trustworthy.

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And so a lot of us, especially as adults, we spend most of our time at work.

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We spend most of our time at work, all right, most of our time at work.

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Right, that's not an opinion, that's a fact.

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We spend the majority of our time at work and then at home.

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And then for those of us that have other things we might do, whether it's church or clubs or other social groups or whatever, maybe you have kids or you have their sports teams or you have their activities and parents are there, but the majority of time usually is at work.

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And so, even if you are, and even if you are spending that kind of time at work or that kind of time at other social groups, because you have something in common, because your kids like the same thing, because your kids go to the same school, because you go to the same church, you're the same Sunday school class, because those are some of the easiest relationships to build, because you're in their face multiple hours of the day it can make it feel like oh, this is a person I can trust and you know what.

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I know that a lot of people have gotten burned that way because they're not.

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They're not as close as you think.

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You are Like, you're a cohort, we have something in common and that's it.

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Now you can become the next level as a close friend, somebody that you uh, there you have some uh, some longevity with.

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So I have cohorts who have become close friends.

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We started off as having something in common.

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We did something and over the over time we've gotten into other parts of each other's lives and we've gotten into other parts of each other's lives and we've become trustworthy from each other.

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So we can start there and so.

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But there's a difference between somebody who's a cohort and somebody who's a close friend, and so close friends are people that have longevity, that you are in multiple pieces of their life Like you don't.

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You might not just have something in common, but you, you've been to their house, you know their kids, you know you know their spouses.

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Y'all do life together.

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You go on vacations together.

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You, you know, you go out together, you have fun and you also maybe, maybe you work together, maybe you work on something together, maybe you have a goal together.

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There's all these pieces of your life that are integrated.

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When you're close, you're doing life on a more regular daily basis and it doesn't just live in one section of your life, right, it is not just compartmentalized.

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You have real relationship with these people.

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I have found that is usually the place where trust being trustworthy and actual you feeling as if there is real safety in that relationship.

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That's where it starts.

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If you only spend time with somebody in one section of your life, it's going to be hard to gain that kind of trust because they don't know you in every area.

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And so we have to be willing to wait and wade through the discomfort of feeling like I don't have the people I need in my life, at the risk of giving yourself away too quickly to folks who have not proven that they can actually operate in multiple parts of your life.

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So you have your casual friend, your cohort, your close friends, and then you have something called covenant companions, which I think is most people stop at the close friend and maybe interchange close friend with best friend, and then you have covenant companion, which is, I think it's really interesting.

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I think these are people who are purpose partners.

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These are people who kind of transcend just that daily life piece.

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They you might have daily life with them, you might not, but this is, these are purpose partners.

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These are those people that, like you, there is something deeper and there's a deeper purpose that they have that you have in each other's lives beyond just getting to know each other really well and do a life together, like there's a bigger impact that you have, that your relationship can have, right, there's a bigger impact that, as a result of you all being in a relationship, something big happens outside of yourself, and so those are pretty rare, those are not things that happen all the time.

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Maybe you have that, maybe you don't, but if you do, that's a really, really beautiful thing and I would say there's also, there's a spiritual connection, right, there's a level of spiritual maturity that has to be at that level and I would also say that that is a safe place because, again, it's a little deeper, it's more of a soul connection and I'm not saying like a soulmate or anything like that, but it's more of a soul connection.

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Your connection goes beyond, again, just that daily we're in each other's lives, we're doing life together.

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It's just, it's a layer deeper.

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Those last two are, in my opinion, would be where safety lies, and so being patient and being it is uncomfortable to not feel like you have people to confide in, not feel like you have a community to really lead into, to share with that, that you can trust, that you can trust Is it going to burn you on the other side of that or to hold something against you, uh, but it's worth being uncomfortable for a season or a couple of seasons in order to get to the place where you are around the right people and you're not hurt because you aren't hurt because you moved a little too quickly in a friendship.

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The reality is, all friends aren't safe and that's something we have to unlearn.

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All people you have something in common with aren't safe for you emotionally, aren't safe for you mentally.

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It doesn't mean that they're bad people.

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It doesn't mean that I'm not saying that some of the people you might be around are bad people, that they mean you any harm or anything like that, but for you it's just not that you haven't reached that layer of safety, that layer where you can really really trust.

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That takes some more time and it takes time.

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There are some more boxes that need to be checked.

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If you will Hope that makes sense.

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So again, you have your casual friends, your cohorts, your close friends and your covenant companions.

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Casual friends and cohorts are great, we all have them and we need them.

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But it doesn't make them close because you have something in common.

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It doesn't make them purpose partners because your kids do similar things, because your kids do similar things.

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We have to be more judicial in where we put our trust, and sometimes it can be uncomfortable to wait for that, but it's worth the wait, because then you can really lead into relationships that hopefully impact way beyond what you're able to see.

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All right, that's it.

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So keep tuning in to our episodes that are dropping.

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We have a series coming up Unlearning Entrepreneurship that I'm really excited about and that'll start dropping in August, and so we will be.

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Keep tuning in to Freedom Fridays and keep tuning in to Talks with Middle Adults.

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Man, I hope you're getting free.

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We're getting free every time we come to this mic and we love engaging with you.

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Feel free to share like comment.

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Let us know what you're thinking.

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Thank you for those of you who have let us know that you're listening and for those of you that have let us know that you're enjoying what that you're, you're growing and you're encouraged.

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Man, that is awesome.

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We do this because we believe that we can really, uh, help people to get free.

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Right, we're all about people gaining the courage to find freedom, because freedom can be unfamiliar, and to go into the unfamiliar you need to be, you need to have courage.

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It's going to be different than what you're experiencing right now, and so we want this to be a platform for you to for you to be able to do that and to help to walk through that process with you.

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And so let's keep alerting so that we can be more free until next week, y'all Peace, so that we could be more free Until next week.

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Y'all Peace.

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Thank you once again for listening to the Unlearned Podcast.

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We would love to hear your comments and your feedback about the episode.

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Feel free to follow us on Facebook and Instagram and to let us know what you think.

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We're looking forward to the next time when we are able to unlearn together to move forward towards freedom.

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See you then.

Freedom Friday: Are Your Friends Safe?

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