Mike Carruthers:
Americans today have fewer truly close and intimate friends and
relatives than ever before.
Dr. Will Miller:
People say, "Hey, look, my life's too busy, I don't have
enough time for new friendships." But I have to say back
to those people, "Do you not have friends because you're
too busy, or have you made yourself too busy because you don't
have friends?"
Dr. Will Miller,
author of the book Refrigerator
Rights.
I think a lot
of our lifestyle behavior is a compensation for what we don't
have fundamentally, which is brothers and sisters and the kinds
of relationships that are refrigerator rights relationships,
which would be much more preferable a life.
Refrigerator
rights relationships are with people who can go into your refrigerator
and take something without asking your permission. Most of us
have few of those close relationships, except maybe the one
with our spouse.
As a therapist,
I can tell you, the majority of marriages that fail, fail because
two people became too dependent on just one other person. We're
not wired that way; we're wired to be in connection with a variety
of relationships.
Dr. Miller not
only preaches the philosophy of refrigerator rights relationships,
he has lived it.
When I made the
connection that my own struggles with anxiety and worry and
difficulty being a person of serenity was connected to my social
isolation, and I began attending to that and connecting to the
people that are in my community, it has had a tremendous positive
effect on my mood.
You can link
to Dr. Miller's website from
ours, somethingyoushouldknow.net.
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."
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