Click or Clique?

Forming bonds with others is a perfectly healthy and natural life process. Friendships can have a major impact on your health and well-being, but it’s not always easy to build or maintain friendships. Understand the importance of friendships in your life and what you can do to develop and nurture friendships. Good friends are good for your health. Friends can help you celebrate good times and provide support during bad times. Friends prevent loneliness and give you a chance to offer needed companionship too.

Friends can also:

» Increase your sense of belonging and purpose.

» Boost your happiness and reduce your stress.

» Improve your self-confidence and

self-worth.

» Help you cope with traumas, such as divorce, serious illness, job loss or the death of a loved one.

» Encourage you to change or avoid unhealth lifestyle habits, such as excessive drinking or lack of exercise.

Friends also play a significant role in promoting your overall health. Adults with strong social support have a reduced risk of many significant health problems, including depression, high blood pressure and an unhealthy body mass index (BMI). Studies have even found that older adults with a rich social life are likely to live longer than their peers with fewer connections. Healthy friendships therefore mean that there must be a CLICK that occurs between persons. It must be one that exemplifies a genuine share interest that upholds positivity, that empowers and contributes to overall self-growth and development.

But then we have CLIQUES…. Cliques aren’t necessarily made up of people who click. These groups aren’t brought together by a genuine interest in each other. Instead, they are organized around power and popularity. Leaders of such groups often are charismatic and controlling. Members of the group rely on exclusivity and very strict internal codes to establish and maintain the idea that they are something special. They do everything together and have no tolerance for any member branching out to friends outside the group.

The secret that these groups don’t want anyone else to discover is that most of the members are terribly insecure. Lacking the self-esteem and confidence to be their own person, each instead relies on the membership in an exclusive club for her or his identity. The problem with this is that the group can easily take that identity away. It’s not unusual for a clique to turn on a member for some real or imagined challenge to either the values or the leadership of the group. No one wants to be that girl or that guy who is evicted from the group. Conformity to the whims of the leaders is the price paid for membership.

Additionally, it is worthwhile to note that some persons are a part of a clique, not out of mutual ‘like’ for each other, but sometimes it is due to a mutual ‘dislike’ of another person or thing. The merger in this case is not genuine and the motive, being toxic. can and may backfire against the members of the clique.

Takeway point:

Seek those friendships which are built on love and good intent. Remember a friendship is not about people who act true to your face…but rather it is about people who remain true behind your back.