Becoming a Better Friend With Barnet Bain

0:03Thank you for joining us for episode 556 of Live Happy Now. February is Friendship Month, so this is the perfect time to figure out how we can make the most of our friendships. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and today I'm joined by award-winning filmmaker Barnet Bain, whose interest in exploring friendships led him to create a master's course for psychologists at Columbia University and then write the book, How to Be a Friend in an Unfriendly World. He's here to share what made him so fascinated with friendships and what he's learned about being a better friend. Let's have a listen. Barnett, thank you for coming on Live Happy Now.

0:41It is such an honor to have you on the show. It's really a pleasure to be here. So now we're kicking off Friendship Month right now, and it is the perfect time to talk to you about your book, How to Be a Friend in an Unfriendly World. So let's start with your why. What made you so interested in studying friendship? It's not like I had it all figured out. I realized that I wasn't very good at it. My daughter brought that to my attention. She went away to school, to college, first time away from home. And she came back and we went out to dinner, just the two of us. And she was sharing excitedly all about her new life, what she was doing, where she was going, who she was with.

1:23And I kept coming at her with these questions. And I would like to say that these were curious questions. But the truth is, they were like weighted with judgment. And my own ideas, fixed ideas about the courses she should be taking, the people she should be taking. It was all about me. And she pumped the brakes on this. She said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is going on with you? This is not how you showed up. for the first 16, 17 years of my life. And it was true. And I stopped and I had to take in that something unexamined about the way I behave is hurtful to people. And in this case, hurtful to one of the persons that I love most in my life was hurtful and hostile.

2:19That was part one. that's an unsettling thing to sit with absolutely i did sit with it and not long after i was walking near a park by my house and i came across this street performer and he was magical he had this wonderful costume on with little stars and mirrors sewn into him he's just wonderful and he had two sticks and a length of yarn tied between the sticks and a bucket of soapy water. And he would dip in the sticks and he would fling these bubbles into the air and he'd make them into all kinds of incredible shapes. And I was captivated. And then his piece de resistance came up. He created this enormous, enormous bubble and wrapped it around himself, stepped into it.

3:08And he was suddenly fully, fully encased in this shimmering, shimmering soap bubble. And I realized, oh my goodness, this is what we all do. This is what I do. I live inside a bubble. And it's a bubble of my history and my belief systems and my ideas about life and all my fixed ideas and all my shoulda, coulda, wouldas. and most of which are not even original with me. They're all like, they all borrow these. They're all like hand-me-down, you know, that I just take as gospel. And I realized that is what I do. And so this idea, I'll thread it back to my daughter again, which is what happened in the moment.

3:58I immediately thought of my daughter, Sophie, and what happened between us. And I realized as long as I'm in my bubble and other people are reflecting my bubble back at me, it's cool. But the moment that she went away and began to invent her own life and become her own person, small baby steps to becoming her own person, it rubbed me the wrong way. I no longer saw myself. So it's like that story of Narcissus, the Greek mythology. Right. But Narcissus is the young man who caught his reflection in a pond and didn't know it was his own reflection and fell in love with himself. And I thought, well, this is what is going on with me and my bubble and perhaps everybody and their bubbles.

4:45We live in these bubbles of our education and our background and our religious beliefs and our racial beliefs and our sexuality and our politics and on and on and on and on. And as long as other people reflect our bubbles, we're cool. but the moment others do not reflect my own bubbles I push back and in the case of Sophie I pushed back in a way that was hurtful in the heart because suddenly she was no longer reflecting me she was becoming her own person so when that happens we resist or we challenge or we disagree or we get bent out of shape. And maybe worst of all, if people are too different in their bubbles from mine, I'll make them invisible, which is maybe the most hostile thing you could do.

5:42So I thought, well, I don't know anything about friendship. And no one ever taught me how to do it. It's a bit like, you know, this sort of like, you live in Nashville. So, you know, I love country and Western songs, but I remember years ago, the themes of so many of these songs was about how you just fall in love. You just fall in love. It's so easy, isn't it? It's a snap. And if it's not easy, it's not the right guy or it's not the right gal. The only thing you can count on is your truck and your dog. And there will be a train in there somewhere too. Exactly. So I thought, I think it's harder than that, because I clearly don't know how to do it.

6:26You know, we just fall into it like a pothole. And occasionally, it's smooth sailing, at least for a while. And then, you know, eventually, you lose your tire. So I thought, I really need to, for myself, I don't want to hurt people I love. And I don't want to have this quiet little ache in my heart that if I slow down long enough, it shows up. And it just says, you know, I just feel a little separate from people. I feel sometimes I feel a little lonely. If I'm not like being overactive, I feel a little lonely. And when I look out, other people seem to know how to do it. So did I miss that class?

7:05So I thought I'm going to start to investigate. That's how it started. Well, how did you go about studying it? Because you ended up teaching a course on it for psychologists. How did you study it? How did you develop that information? So 2 ,000 years ago, I began with a book called How to Be a Friend. And I borrowed the title because 2 ,000 plus years have passed. And I wanted to pay respect to Marcus Trullius Cicero, who's not just a pizza place, but also an ancient philosopher and statesman, and he wrote How to Be a Friend. And I began there, and I was shocked at how little has changed in 2 ,000 years.

7:51So I began there, and it was a really wonderful entry point. And then after that, it was really a question of slowing down and testing myself, examining myself, looking more closely into what goes on when I'm with somebody and they seem to disappear or I start to ghost them. What is really going on there? I just kind of wanted to take a good look of what happens that leads to my decision to push somebody away or to lash out or to be unpleasant or to be passive aggressive or to be sarcastic. All these behaviors, where are they coming from and why? And what does that have to do with being a friend?

8:36Well, from Cicero, I learned that friends help us become better. Well, then I thought, well, how do friends help us become better? And again, from my own experience, I thought, And I make a distinction between my friends. I have, you know, I go on social media. I have 5 ,000, 6 ,000 friends. I've never met any of them. But there's friends and capital F friends. Those capital F friends, they're curated the way I have a garden outside my office here, a little garden. And if I don't tend to that garden, there's no flowers, there's no vegetables. The same goes for a friend circle. If that garden was two acres, I could not by myself tend to it.

9:21I couldn't give it the attention. So there is a size limitation to my ability to respond to what it takes to be a friend. If friends help us become better, the way Cicero said, It means that friending offers the possibility of a container in which we get to practice honesty and the acts of kindness that are ideally the fabric of a relationship and a society. So it's a practice place. Now, you know, my wife, when I first said, Eureka, listen to this, I had this thought. She said, well, don't we do that? We've been married for 40 years. Don't we do that? Thought about that. Of course, we do do that.

10:14But there is a slight difference. Capital F friends, they stand on equal footing. There's any kind of power imbalances or flattery or fear distort the relationship. The spouses, children, those are close and tender relationships that allow us to grow. It's even in the marriage vows. I'm with you. It's sickness and health and richer and poorer and all of that stuff, which is strangely similar to the post office vows. But it is a contract that says they're going to be there and we're going to work it out. We're going to want the best for each other. And when one or the other says something that is messy, if I find myself flinching or fixing, it's a growth edge.

11:00And in a healthy, mature marriage or friendship relationship, we have the space and the safety in there to explore it. In a friendship, the friends have an equal footing and there are no contracts. The friendship is given from the heart. It's freely given. So there's no indebtedness. There's obligation, just as I have an obligation to the roses outside my window. If I don't feed them, there's no roses. But there's no indebtedness. I don't owe the roses. The roses don't owe me. And even in close relationships like marriage relationships, most of the time there are some obligations. There are many obligations, and there is some indebtedness.

11:49So friendship is a unique, unique lab to discover how we learn loyalty, how we learn courage, how we learn honesty about ourselves and each other. We'll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

12:12And now let's hear more from Barnett Bain. One thing that's so interesting is we are not, as you've noted, we're not taught to be friends. And we think like, you know, we send our kids to school, just like we went to school, go make friends, go do that. And why haven't we put the kind of effort into learning what friendships need and how to create them that we put into other relationships? I think it goes back to, well, first of all, I just want to unpack that a little bit. What other relationships. Say like a marriage relationships, dating, things like that. We don't learn anything about that either.

12:48But there's a lot of books out there. There's a ton of books. If we want to learn, we can certainly pick them up. Friendship, it's a different realm. People take it for granted. They just take it for granted. For example, going back to this idea of the bubble. So we take for granted that our bubble is reality, is that that's the way it is and that's the way it should be. And if other people don't agree with our bubble, they're wrong. There's a little sidebar. A number of years ago is when I first started, even before I began this project. You know, it always sort of gnawed away at me about, I have a weird relationship with friending.

13:34I'm not that good at it. And so I would tend to blame politics or technology and algorithms, whatever it was. But the real trouble usually starts much closer to home, inside that bubble of these fixed ideas that, for the most part, we don't even know we're living in. Change is my worldview. So why do we have many models to show us what friending looks like? Because people live inside their bubbles. They either haven't come to the understanding that maybe they'd like to change something or maybe that changes can be made or maybe they haven't realized friending is a skill and it can be learned just like loving is a skill it can be learned what is involved in loving what is involved in friending how do you you have to learn how to see somebody without trying to fix them be with somebody without trying to change them you know In my world, my day job, I'm a filmmaker.

14:34And we have these improv schools and improv techniques. One rule of improv, Saturday Night Live skits is whatever somebody says to you, you don't push back on it. You go, yes, and you expand it. So the beauty of that is that it keeps a relationship going. And it's not about agreeing. I don't have to agree with somebody's where they're coming from in their bubble, but I acknowledge it. I hear you. And I can build on what you're saying, even if it means offering a different angle. We stop treating every disagreement as a zero-sum contest. So this is something that has to be modeled. We learn by seeing it in the culture.

15:22It has to be modeled. It's not modeled in our media or in our films and in our television. It's not modeled in the school system. So what is the main thing that we need to know to become better friends? Well, you know, I think, number one, you provide safety. If your friend doesn't feel safe with you, that's the ballgame. And it doesn't mean bubble wrap. It means that if somebody can't be frank with you without you going hostile, then it's something to look at. it means that you're not weaponizing for example their vulnerability somebody says something to me that is closes themselves deeply i can remember times many when i responded with a snarky response or sarcastic or demeaning or judgmental that's not helpful another one is we all are a little afraid that people will disappear.

16:24So consistency and friendships matters more than intensity. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Just showing up. We show up. We show up, you know, so I like try this today. You text one friend that you've drifted from a little bit and you say something like, you know, thinking of you, no reply necessary. Other one, and these are really practical. You make an effort to be aware of reducing the fear of shame or humiliation in another person. Nothing shuts a person down faster than embarrassment. So when somebody risks honesty or vulnerability, you cherish the moment. You don't come at them. You cherish the moment.

17:05I've done that too. Or you honor where they're coming from and where they're going. Everybody is carrying an invisible backpack, family, culture, history, hopes, fears. You don't have to like what's in it, but we can respect the weight. So, you know, you could try this before you leap in with an opinion or advice. You can ask the person or just yourself, do I jump in here to fix something or to listen? This fixing thing, this is a big, big one. may be a little bigger for men because we are really uncomfortable with feelings. Right. We have a very short menu of feelings. I agree. Particularly, you know, my wife has been telling me this for 40 years too.

17:54She'll tell me something. She's telling me something. And then first I get impatient, cut to the J's. And then I try to fix it. And she says, I'm not asking you to fix it. I don't want you to fix it. I just want you to listen to me. I don't need you to fix it. I'm not a child. I'm not broken. I just want to share my feelings. And in the sharing of my feelings, I empty the container. As opposed to me, who, for the most part, does not share any feelings. And so my container is full and stressed. and when we're holding that stuff you know you're with a friend and they say something and we immediately deploy our own all the stuff in our backpack we suddenly throw it at them in a hostile way so those are a few you say that friendship is the antidote to an increasingly uncivil world so can you talk about the 24-hour intent test and explain how that can help us rekindle connections?

19:01So I think, you know, I set this out for myself. I said, for one day, I'm going to assume good intentions in everything that my friend does, even the incredibly annoying stuff. I'm just going to assume it. I'm going to be aware. Oh, here's my bubble talking. That's annoying. My bubble only has two voices. It's on one side. It's this is good. This is bad. I like it. I agree with it. I don't agree with it. And the other side is like a color commentary. It's just, you know, it's like, and he's got the ball. He's running down the field.

19:39There's only two voices. So I'm not trying to put the lid on those voices. I will not, maybe I'll succeed someday, but I don't see it happening. I just want to hear it like it's the radio and override it. So I'm just going to say, whatever this is that this part of me says, that's really, I'm going to say, I hear myself and I'm going to assume they're coming from a good place. I love that because that can really change, especially in this time of so much division going on, that could really change the way that we respond to some of the conversations that are happening. Yeah. I mean, nobody, you know, again, as a filmmaker, I learned a long time ago that every story is a love story.

20:30We honor the other in a friendship. I let you have impact on me. I am willing to give up my position or modify my position. That doesn't mean every time. I'm not going to abandon my values. Right. But I am going to look at it. As we are entering Friendship Month, what is the one thing that you would like all our listeners to keep in mind about nurturing our existing friendships and building new ones? Oh, it's a really great question. There's so many things. I know. So you got to pick your favorite one. Here's what you do. you put down the phone you look at a friend you look him in the eye you're aware of all the thoughts all the narration all the judgments that are galloping through you don't climb on any of those horses you look him in the eye you just be with him your presence is the greatest gift you can give to another person without trying to fix them without trying to say i have an idea let me solve this for you, you preempt somebody's process.

21:39Plus, it violates at least the Cicero idea of what a friendship is. Suddenly, you have a hierarchy. This one's the knower, and this one's right. So unless somebody asks for help, they want your presence. I am with you. I will be here with you. Whatever you're going through, I'm here to be with you through it. Good stuff, difficult stuff, I will be with you. And before, this is my personal challenge, before I jump in, you know, I said, do you want me to listen or help? What's the objective here with this conversation? Exactly. That is a great way. Well, Barnett, this is a great time to talk to you.

22:26We're going to give our listeners information on how they can find you. We're going to tell them where they can get a free friendship field guide download and where they can discover your entire book. So thank you so much for sharing this with us. And I'm excited to have our listeners learn more about you. And I'm thrilled to make a new friend. Oh, so am I. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

22:54That was Barnett Bain talking about how we can become better friends. If you'd like to learn more about Barnett, follow him on social media, check out his book, How to Be a Friend in an Unfriendly World, or download his free friendship field guide. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Phelps reminding you to make every day a happy one.