Unless your BFF is the Dalai Lama, keep your own counsel when a relationship is in its formative stages.
It’s not that we can’t or shouldn’t talk to friends about what’s going on. It’s a question of the quality of feedback we’ll get in doing so. Each person comes with their own baggage and emotional landscape.
Well-meaning friends can taint our vision of what we’re experiencing, sheerly by their perspective. Unless you consider this person to be of high-functionality, and one you trust to see the totality of events with supreme clarity… wait before relaying the details of your new love affair.
You’ve got enough to process in your own mind without the impact of another’s perspective added to the mix. Friends may want to help, advise or give direction in “what you need to do.” But more times than not, this information has a tendency to confuse or mislead you.
New relationships are fragile in the navigation of discoveries about our partner. To keep our own counsel is to keep our clarity. Once we’ve had time to process our own thoughts and feelings, we are then in a better position to share this information with others.
We need to trust ourselves and our own awareness, rather than run to peers for their opinions on each situation.
They didn’t live the moments we lived. They can’t see the story in detail. Highlights of past events and conversations shot through our perspective, then relayed to others, are subject to incomplete interpretation. In doing so, we’ve just added another layer of decreased clarity to the original occurrence.
The only one who really knows what to feel about any given situation, is us.
Taking time to check-in with ourselves allows the ability to tune into our feelings. When additional perspective is required, we have a stable platform from which to present the information. Knowing our interpretation, we may ask for alternative views on the given scenario.
This is a different type of sharing. It comes from a grounded authentic analysis, seeking only reconfirmation. We are less apt to be swayed off course from our original thinking, and closer to the truth as we experienced it.
Friends are great as a sounding board, but best utilized when we’ve arrived at our own conclusions. We learn to trust ourselves first, then open to opinions of others.
