Are they providing what you need? Do they make you feel supported? Imagine you just had dinner with them. Think about the most significant relationships in your life currently. Prompt: “Conversations with make me feel…” What are the needs you can meet on your own, and what are the needs you need help from others meeting? Use this as a guiding principle when forming new or evaluating existing relationships. It also helps to examine what it is you actually want your relationships to provide. If a friendship only provides you and the friend a space to come together and gossip or talk negatively about yourselves and others, it may be time to let the friendship go. Take a look at the significant relationships in your life (partners, close friends, etc.) What do those relationships provide? Is it support? Love? Advice? Joy? If you can’t figure out what positive things are being provided within your relationships, it may be time to examine whether that relationship has run its course. This is a good prompt to examine the overall health of your relationships. Even if it feels silly (ex.: “I like it when you text me X times a day”) it’s important to recognize and share what makes you feel loved! Knowing and sharing your favorite ways to be loved gives the people in your life (friends, family, partners) the opportunity to express their love for you in a way that will mean the most to you. And then, with that acknowledgement, and the knowledge of what makes us feel the most loved, we can then share that information with our loved ones. When we explore what makes us feel seen, known, and loved, we are giving ourselves permission to acknowledge our own needs. Knowing what makes us feel loved the most is the first step in cultivating relationships that provide those things. That’s why today I’ve put together a list of journaling prompts for you to use to examine your relationships while in self-quarantine. Often we take our social lives and relationships for granted, and this new space and distance between all of us can help to shed some light on what types of relationships bring us comfort, which relationships are reciprocal, which are fulfilling–and which are not. But the distancing can actually help to provide us with new, useful and interesting insights to our own needs. It might seem odd–since social distancing is restricting our capabilities to be social in many ways (though not completely!)–to focus on relationships right now. Taking care of ourselves is more important now than ever, and that includes our mental and social wellbeing.Īlong with making sure we’re giving ourselves lots of good foods, rest, and following social distancing guidelines, we should make time to check in with the status and health of our various relationships. And while it can definitely be frightening and overwhelming, this can also be a time to do some self reflection. Whether it’s due to increased professional stress (both increased work for essential workers, and loss of work for non-essential folks), health stress, or personal stress from self-quarantining–we’re all facing big life changes now. With the spread of COVID-19 many of us are worried for our own health, worried for the health of loved ones, and we’re all facing a huge shift in our daily lives. It is a strange and scary time right now.
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