Just For The Day
Just For The Day
#11 - August 21, 2025 - Friendships in Recovery
Jay and Diane share thoughts on the Narcotics Anonymous Daily Reader for August 21 - Friendships. They discuss how addictions tend to isolate us and how friendships formed in recovery tend to be deeper than regular, superficial friendships because they're founded on mutual vulnerability and honesty.
They discuss the work required to maintain friendships and how important your choice of friends in determining your future.
Question: How have your strongest friendships been forged and/or what do you do to maintain those friendships?
Jay and Diane's Just For The Day podcast is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Just for Today, any 12-Step program, or any other recovery-based product or organization. They should not replace your regular group or sponsor meetings.
The views expressed are solely those of the hosts and guests. Take what you like and leave the rest.
Welcome back to another episode of Just for the Day. I'm Jay and I'm a recovering addict.
Speaker 2:And I'm Diane and I'm codependent. Today is August 21st and Jay is on a work trip, so we are doing it a little different today. We're not in the same room.
Speaker 1:Distance recovery Interesting.
Speaker 2:Well, that's kind of what we're doing with our listeners, right, it's all distance recovery.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. So, uh, so, uh, oh, did you want to read the quote down at the top? Sorry, you kind of started it. Did you want to?
Speaker 2:Sure, I can do that. The topic is friendships and the quote did you want to? Yeah? I started and then you said it anyway. Yeah, go for it. I'm going to start reading the quote and Jay's going to just randomly start reading it with me. Our friendships become deep and we experience the warmth and caring which results from addicts sharing recovery and a new life.
Speaker 1:Most of us come to Narcotics Anonymous with few genuine friends, and most of us arrive without the slightest understanding of what it takes to build lasting friendships. Over time, though, we learn that friendships require work At one time or another. All friendships are challenging. Like any relationship, friendship is a learning process.
Speaker 2:Our friends love us enough to tell us the truth about ourselves. The old saying the truth will set you free, but first it will make you furious, seems especially true in friendship. This can make friendships awkward. We may find ourselves avoiding certain meetings rather than facing our friends. We have found, though, that friends speak out of concern for us. They want the best for us. Our friends accept us despite our shortcomings. They understand that we are still a work in progress.
Speaker 1:Friends are there for us when we're not there for ourselves. Friends help us gain valuable perspective on the events in our lives and our recovery. It is important that we actively cultivate friendships, for we have learned that we cannot recover alone.
Speaker 2:Just for today. I will be grateful for the friends I have. I will take an active part in my friendships.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what are your thoughts At the?
Speaker 2:very beginning. The first quote talks about friendships become deep, and I was thinking about we've talked before about how, in addiction, you start to lose your friendships- right.
Speaker 2:That it narrows down who you start to spend time with, people who are not judgmental of your addiction, people who also are participating in the same addiction. That's how it starts, is you start to exclude people that you don't feel comfortable around, and then you go a step further and then the people who are participating in the addiction. There's almost a competition of I don't want to share my drugs, so I don't want to hang out with these people anymore, and so we've talked about how the disease of alcoholism is a or narcotics anonymous, any addiction whatever your addiction is that it's a very isolating event, that it makes a progressively increasingly isolative experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, and so it's interesting that the quote here talks about coming into recovery. Our friendships become deep and we experience the warmth and caring because it's been so long for most people in addiction to have those kind of relationships and maybe they never did have those relationships right. And as we read that quote, I thought well, that makes sense, because in order to have a deep friendship with somebody, you have to be vulnerable, you have to be like, you become intimate with them. And what's more vulnerable and intimate than working a fourth step Right?
Speaker 2:As you as you start going through and you start learning about yourself. And now, in in a group meeting, you're able to share some of these insights that you're having with your sponsor or with other people who are working in treatment programs, and they're doing the same thing. And as you do it, you kind of start to see things and you start to relate to each other and you start to say, oh, your parents did that, so did mine, right, and oh, you had to deal with this, so did I, and. And so not only are you becoming more vulnerable, but you're with, like, people who had similar experiences, and they're also being vulnerable, and so, of course, your relationships are deeper, because you're both investigating and learning.
Speaker 2:Right and you have that similar background.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the things that. That is one of the things that I was pulling out and I'm going to highlight something you said that I think is one of the main reasons why those relationships become really deep and intimate. I really liked the second paragraph in the third, where it talks about our friends love us enough to tell us the truth about ourselves. And then it says later in the third paragraph friends are there for us when we're not there for ourselves. Friends help us gain valuable perspective on the events in our lives and our recovery.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I think happens is so. There's all sorts of different friends in life, and there are friends that are surface versus friends that are deep. Friends that are deep and those that can go the intimate distance are those that tell us the truth, even when it's hard, which means I'm offering them vulnerability by being honest with them about myself, and they're offering vulnerability by telling me how it really affects other people and them and not hiding it. And in so doing, doing, with us both being willing to go through the pain of that experience both the listener and the teller we develop an incredibly deep relationship. So, to your point, this is the process by which many of us, who never had any deep relationships and only surface relationships, gain our first set of deep friends.
Speaker 1:And the second component is it's actually incredibly helpful, because what better way to make progress than surrounding yourself with people who will tell you the truth? And I like how it describes that they are. It almost describes when it says here that they help us gain valuable perspective. They are a reflection back to us about what's going on, and the problem is that they're not telling the truth. They give us a distorted reflection, so they're not helping us. But if they're telling us the truth.
Speaker 1:they're giving us an accurate reflection that we can't see, so we can actually change it, and then we're free.
Speaker 2:So, friendship.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:It's very true. I also had the thought about that feedback, that our friends give us stuff that we don't necessarily want to hear, and I remember multiple friends of mine sharing feedback where I got super offended and I didn't want to hear it. And yet, looking back, those friends, I trusted them implicitly because I knew that they would tell me if something was wrong. And when we read about that it reminded me of a few years back. I think you were taking a management course and in that management course something that had come up was feedback giving your employees feedback right and we had talked about how it is more comfortable not to give feedback to somebody to tell them they're doing a bad job at their job, right.
Speaker 1:That's the easier route.
Speaker 2:It's easier to do that because then you're not having to deal with their feelings or consequences or whatever. And yet by not giving them that feedback and letting them know where they need to improve and what they're doing wrong, you're not being a friend to them and you're not being a good manager. You're debilitating them. You're letting them sink or swim on their own without saying, hey, can I throw you a life raft like, let's see what we can do. Let me identify a problem and you do with it what you want, but at least it's out there and you know that that's a problem.
Speaker 1:The book I read that talks about this is called Radical Candor and the words they chose to describe that. Person who doesn't share needed feedback out of not wanting to hurt the person's feeling is called someone who's being ruinously empathetic. Because they are trying, they are effectively ruining the person by telling them, by not telling them, the truth.
Speaker 2:They're sparing their feelings at the expense of their future, and so I love that. The thing that it focuses on here is that we can trust our friends to tell us the truth, that when they tell us the truth, it may hurt, it may make us furious, but that's how you know that they're a friend.
Speaker 1:If you've chosen those friends. There are friends out there that won't tell you the truth, and that's the point is choose wisely, right. There's that old adage that you show me your five closest friends and I'll show you your future, or you are the average of your closest five friends. You could choose any version of those. They could all be people who lie to you, and you'll end up becoming one of them. So, choose wisely who you invite into that inner circle.
Speaker 2:A lot of times that's how people get into their addictions, right Based on who they choose to hang out with and the people that they associate with, and where those people hang out and what those people do. And a lot of times we don't fall into our addiction by ourselves. Maybe we do, but maybe it's kind of fed or bred among the people that we spend our time with. But the same is true in recovery, that if you want to recover, then you need to leave those other friends behind, those superficial friends, those ones that got you into trouble, the whatever, and you need to gravitate towards these people that will honestly tell you what you need to know, what you need to hear, even if it hurts, because they love you, because they want what's best for you. Yeah, any other thoughts? On the friendship one, I love it.
Speaker 1:It love it. It's a quality. This is a quality reading it's very, very true, very applicable, and you know, it makes me think of the people in my life that I've left because they were honest with me, and that makes me sad. It makes me feel grateful for the people in my life that tell me the truth.
Speaker 2:I think there's one more thing that's jumping out at me right now, okay, I think there's one more thing that's jumping out at me right now, okay, that friendships require work and that at one time or another, all friendships are challenging. I have not I'm not historically great at keeping friends. I have friends for periods of time in my life, and then I move, or they move, or life circumstances change, and we don't end up maintaining that friendship. And now I have some friends that I could randomly call them after a couple of years and say, hey, it's been forever since we talked.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to call and check in how are things going, and we can have like an hour long conversation where we're catching up and and it's lovely, but I don't feel like I maintain friendships as well as you do, and I think that part of that is that I don't put in the work, and the work becomes harder as you get older and as your lives change and so-and-so gets married and so-and-so doesn't, and then these people start having kids and these people have infertility issues, and all these different barriers start to build in friendships, and it becomes really hard to maintain friendships. You have had the ability to do that, though. So do you have any suggestions for the listeners about some things that you have maybe implemented in your life, some ways that you're able to maintain these long lasting friendships?
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, but I'd like to hear from you first on why why, you feel like you haven't been able to maintain them. Give me your assessment of what's going on there that you feel like is preventing you from actually maintaining those friendships and different dynamics and different life circumstances.
Speaker 2:Those are all decent answers for why it's hard to maintain a friendship. And yet the main reason, obviously the underlying foundation behind all of them, is that I haven't prioritized those friendships.
Speaker 1:That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2:That other priorities have come up and I've let those friendships fall by the wayside.
Speaker 1:So yeah, the reason why the geographical shift and moving away and all of those things don't work is because they just impose barriers on the natural points of contact. You know you make friends with people at church and it's easy because you see them at church, so there's a natural point of persistent contact. You know there's psychological data that suggests those things and people you see more often you automatically become more positive towards because they're just more familiar, and so you know there's this when you move away, you don't see them as often.
Speaker 1:You don't see them at work, you don't see them. You don't have reasons to get together with your kids, you're not seeing them at public events. I have had to make a concerted effort to create the events that'll force my friends and I to interact. I played D&D, for example, with a friend of mine for well, 10, 11 years, maybe 12 years, in the same group. We've been together for that long. You really gain some valuable relationships and you miss them when you don't see them, and so I prioritize to sometimes your frustration, right, sometimes, when we're spending time as a family and I may want to play a board game with some buddies online. Uh, that's how you, that's how you keep the connection, and and and it's also a small thing, and D&D is its own kind of recovery group.
Speaker 2:You're all very vulnerable with each other and digging deep into your psycho, your psych, youth.
Speaker 1:And expressing elements of yourself. You don't get to anywhere else other than a fantasy world. So yeah, but there's also intentional touch points, like I'll call. There are friends of mine that I make sure I call them on Christmas there are friends of mine that I make sure you know when I remember their birthdays. I don't often remember their birthdays, but when I do, you know I reach out, or that I reach out a couple times a year just to say hi there are friends of mine that reach out a couple times a year and say, hey, can we do a video call on Sunday?
Speaker 1:Great, and that's just touching base. That's just maintaining the friendship and I'm grateful for that. So it's a matter of effort.
Speaker 1:It's a matter of priority, I think you called it. But again, choose wisely, right. I have. There have been friends in my life who I used to spend a lot of time with that I really liked that I've intentionally moved away from because I noticed where they were going and I could tell that they were stuck in a place that I didn't want to be stuck in anymore. And it hurt me to step away, but I did because I know I need to level up in a different area and they're not going to help me. So that's just the way it is, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we tend to gravitate towards people that we want to emulate, right People that we want to be like them. And so it has been sad over the years where we make good friendships. And then Jay and I have this we're just constantly progressing, we're constantly refining ourselves, we're constantly identifying issues in our marriage or issues with ourselves that we're like oh yeah, I guess I haven't really tackled this specific thing, and then we're constantly working on it. My family it's a running joke for them that I'm constantly. It's the self-improvement thing.
Speaker 1:She's constantly reinventing or refinding herself on Facebook.
Speaker 2:That's right, that's what they say, and so that's hard when the people that we're around may not be that type of people, right? And so we spend so much time with them and then we find, oh, they go to work and then they'll come and hang out with us every once in a while, but they often are just going home and watching TV and they're not really doing anything in their life.
Speaker 1:They're talking about the same things. They're spending time doing the same things. Nothing has changed.
Speaker 2:They're not heading towards any exterior or internal goals, that are, they're still venting about the same thing they were venting about three years ago and that's hard for us, and so I think a lot of the friendships that we have kind of let die off, that's kind of what we've left behind, and so sometimes I think friendships are there for convenience and for time, a season. But I love that when we're talking about these deep friendships, when we're talking about these friendships that we can find in recovery, it's interesting because we've moved into a different country, we've moved across the continent, and yet when I go home it's the people in recovery that I want to see. See, because those people immediately welcomed me with open arms, because those people never gossiped about me, because those people let my voice be heard, because they did all these things for me that previous relationships hadn't done and made me feel special, made me feel connected, and I cherish those friendships. So, even though I'm far away and I don't see them as often, I think that the friendships we make in recovery recovery and you and I went out recently with another couple in recovery and they were saying the same thing that they there's.
Speaker 2:It's hard to meet people and make new friends. As an adult, it used to be that you'd make friends at work and nowadays there's all these. There's a lot more barriers to making friends and dating and whatever at work. So there's a lot more barriers to making friends and dating and whatever at work, right, yeah, so so it's harder to find people to be friends with, but when you do say they're your neighbors or whatever, it tends to be a very superficial relationship compared to what you get in recovery, and so a lot of people that come into recovery, this becomes, becomes their new social structure. This becomes where they spend most of their time and who they spend most of their time with, because of the depth of these relationships.
Speaker 1:And that's how they recover. That's how it works. You're connecting to people who are living and enjoying life without the use of drugs, People who have faith in you.
Speaker 2:you know so yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing it. It might be hard initially to make those friendships to, to change the nature of your friendships when you come into recovery, but it's totally worthwhile to have the depth of those friendships that we get there. What else do you want to say?
Speaker 1:Nothing else. This is a great reading. We covered the content.
Speaker 2:I think so. So just for today, be grateful for the friends you have. Take an active part in your friendships.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining us.
