Susie Pettit: Warriors, Hello and welcome to the Love Your Life Show. I am so excited you’re here today because we have a guest on the show who is going to help us with friendships. Whether you have had some really fulfilling and amazing friendships through your life, or whether you have had sort of a mixed bag or maybe somewhere negative, maybe some bullying in your past or some female betrayal—um, raising my hand—um, what you are going to learn today and what she has to share will help you no matter where you are. She will help you sort of see how those past relationships might be impacting your present, whether it was a mean girl in middle school or some people pleasing or over the course of our lives, um, and also to help us really get like—teach us some friendship skills. We were not taught these things in school.

She wrote a book called Friendship Skills for NeuroDivergent Adults: A Guide for the Anxious, Uniquely Wired and Easily Distracted. Aren’t all of us easily distracted? I found so many helpful tips and tools in her book, and I have been doing this for decades, so I know this is going to be helpful for you too. Let me bring Caroline on the show and let’s go. Oh, I just have to say, fun fact is, I’m recording this afterwards and she is living like in the town, like two towns over from where I grew up. So I just had such fun talking to her too. So anyhow, you will hear that in this episode. Big love to you. Let’s go.

Hi, this is the Love Your Life Show with Susie Pettit, certified life and wellness coach. Join Susie as she helps you with your wellness and mindset so you can live a life you love. Let’s go Warriors.

Hello and welcome to the Love Your Life Show. Caroline, I’m so glad you could join us.

Caroline: I’m so glad I could too. And I’m glad that I got to, uh, you know, uh, be on the show with an American in Australia. Love it.

Susie Pettit: It’s so fun, listeners, because today we’re talking about friendship and adult friendship. And we just spent, I guess like ten, fifteen minutes talking about, um, all of our connections. We actually—she lives in the place near where I grew up. And so we just, we launched right into it. So I think it’ll be very good for us to have this conversation about friendships and, um, how we deal with them as adults.

You wrote a book which I am holding—if anyone’s watching the YouTube video—called *Friendship Skills for NeuroDivergent Adults: A Guide for the Anxious, Uniquely Wired and Easily Distracted*. And I, um, again, if listeners are looking, I have so many, uh, highlights and sticky notes and all sorts. This is a really great resource for people that I will have the links for them to purchase and get a copy for themselves. And I’m just excited to dive into all of it because a lot of us, you know, right now, they’re saying there’s a loneliness epidemic. I hear of a lot of people saying they—they don’t feel connected, possibly the friends they have or to the relationships they have. And a lot of what you speak of in here is—is it’s like skill building and stuff that we weren’t taught in school and can be really, really helpful. Um, so I guess, can we start there? What do you think, or what was your intent with the book, and what do you think is like the big benefit of this book for people?

Caroline: Well, I read every friendship book that comes out, you know, I own them all. These are like not even all the bookshelves in my house. I have a book buying problem. And I really felt like there wasn’t a book that spoke to people who have a hard time making friends, not just you got busy and it fell off your radar and you need to reboot, right? I felt like for people who might be ADHD, think that their ADHD, aren’t sure, are a little quirky, are a little, um, you know, uh, distracted, that there was nothing and that the advice in the books that are kind of like, “Hey, reset and go back to your baseline,” really didn’t apply because most of the people that I work with have struggled with friendship their whole lives, um, and so—and I also like books to be very like sticky, full of strategies. I like books to have, um, really, you know, actionable advice. Like it’s just a personality thing—like when books are vague, it kind of just really annoys me. I’m like, no, like, tell me seriously, tell me right, tell me what to do, tell me what to do.

And so I wanted to sort of, um, address friendship in a different way than had ever been done, right, because I just felt like we were missing a piece. And then I also wanted to give people not “you have to do it my way” prescriptive, but more like you get to choose your friendships, right? Some of us are over fifty, over forty, like we lived a certain way, now we get to choose our friendships. And I wanted to give people real strategies and some may not apply to you. And I always say, take what you want and leave the rest, right, I’m not saying you have to follow everything. I’m giving you options in case you can’t see yourself in certain, you know, certain chapters and you’re like, “Oh, well, that doesn’t relate to me, but this does.” Um, so that was really my intention was I just felt like we were missing something, um, writing a book is like a lot of work. So people will ask me to write certain books and I’m like, no, that exists, I’m not going to repeat the wheel just to, just to write a book and go on a publicity tour. I’m doing this when I feel like there’s a hole.

Susie Pettit: Mhm. Yeah. Well, and you got into it and I—I really do love that in here. Like you—you give—like I just opened to a random page that was like your get to know you questions: “Any plans this weekend? How do you know the host?” Like just—you actually give words for people to say, you know, like ask to boost the signal, um, and I know my listeners like that. I do a lot of work with boundaries and how to teach how to parent teens and like the actual words to say are so helpful, they’re going to get that in your book.

One thing you just said about people having friendship struggles their whole life, um, I—I really resonate with that. I wouldn’t say that I thought that I had friendship troubles my whole life. Like I had friends, you know, when I look back to middle school and high school and elementary school, and we were talking about Cape Cod and, you know, walking around like going to the candy store or whatever, um, I had people that I would go with, but I would say that I, once I hit my twenties and onward, that I definitely had more friendship struggles in that it was like that maintaining of the friends, the creating new friends, um, second guessing whether, you know, I was doing the right or the wrong thing. And that is something that your book addresses again and is really helpful to just give some skills around that—it helped me feel like, oh, right, I’m not so alone in some self-awareness there again, of like, oh, this is interesting, this stuff can come up.

Caroline: Yeah. And I think part of that is like, there’s an infrastructure in elementary, middle, and high school, even if, you know—I mean, lots of people don’t find their people and struggle still, so I want to make sure people don’t think I’m saying, oh, it’s easy, because it’s not—but there is that infrastructure. And then sometimes there’s family, friends or people your neighbors with, especially, you know, the way you and I grew up, where, you know, our parents opened the door and said, “Get out, right, and come back when it’s dark.”

But I think when, um, when it comes to the twenties, then—then a lot of times people hit a stumbling block because there aren’t those funnels that help us sort of all come together, um, sometimes graduate school, but even that can be a wide array, a wide swath of people. And it can be people who are just coming, you know—um, I live outside of Boston, people come to Boston, they get their graduate degree and they leave, right, they’re not—they might be friends virtually, but they’re not maybe staying here. So I think that really makes sense for a lot of people. I also think that there are a lot of, um, a lot of people who were not necessarily satisfied with friendships and are kind of lonely in a crowd. And so I really wanted to speak to those folks too, because I feel like you deserve more. You deserve to sing with people. You deserve to be happy. And, you know, I think that is part of this loneliness epidemic. I think sometimes people are completely alone, but I think sometimes they’re also lonely in a crowd.

Susie Pettit: Yes. Yeah. Well, and—and yes, feeling lonely in a crowd and feeling like there—there’s something wrong with them. Like they’re the only one that’s feeling lonely in the crowd, um, or they’re, you know, or that they were friends with these people for grad school, but then now they’re not, and what’s wrong with them? Like sort of that inner turning of like, it’s my fault, it’s—and feeling alone is something that’s really interesting and something that your book helped with a lot, uh, for sure, and addresses this—this idea that we have different friends, different seasons for friends, different times for friends, and also sort of taking out that self-judgment. Can you talk a little about how anxiety or self-judgment can come up and undermine the connection and friendship possibility?

Caroline: Absolutely. I mean, I think that there’s definitely, um, the possibility that anxiety holds us back more than actually skills, right? So I think there’s, you know, different people and there’s different ways that we show up. I think there’s definitely people who struggle and need some skill building and they struggle with—with skill gaps. I also think that there’s a lot of people who are so anxious, you know, many times my clients will tell me about a social snafu. When they tell me the story, I’m like, this is not really a big deal. But they—they have made it in their mind this huge, huge event. And as a champion ruminator, I can so relate to this—I am not judging—but I think that anxiety colors the way we view our relationships. And it also colors how we view our skills, right?

And so I think anxiety—I have two whole chapters on anxiety, um, including discussing rejection and rejection sensitivity and really saying like, listen, I’m a super anxious person. I also have had a lot of rejection, you know, my—uh, having been bullied is like a matter of public record, you know, um, and so I’ve written about it a lot, so I get it. And that anxiety is something that we can learn to manage and we can manage it in friendship, um, but starting with sort of acknowledging, um, that we have to look at that lens and the story we’re telling ourselves and our self-talk, because sometimes our self-talk can be so brutal. You know, I would say to people like, “Would you say that to your friend?” and they’re like, “No,” and I said, “Well, why are you saying this to yourself?” And so I think anxiety is a huge factor. And—and again, in the world out there, I feel like it’s very under-discussed. I mean, I’ve read books on friendship where they do not address anxiety, even for one page. And I’m like, how are you writing for—all of my clients are anxious, you know.

Susie Pettit: That’s what I was going to say, that I feel like there are some, some big, um, misbeliefs or misconceptions with friendship that—that, that sort of support the anxiety or make the anxiety worse. And that one of them that I hear all the time is like everyone has the friends they need. And yet I’m talking to everyone who’s saying they want deeper friends. So I’m like, those two things don’t go together. Like, you can’t sit here and think everyone else already has the friends that they need, and then everyone I’m talking to is like, “I feel disconnected and want more friends,” so that—that would be definitely one of them.

And—and then, and then just also sort of this wounding that comes from maybe our being bullied or some, um, past wounding in our past. I know that I had, you know, wounding betrayal with my biological family, like my mom and my sister, so I had some like female, like, can I trust these women type stuff. And then that comes up in our adult friendship too. And we think back to your point that like, it’s easier to make friends often in middle school or high school, sometimes because you have repeated exposure, there’s vulnerability, you’re getting together because your parents are kicking you out of the house, or you’re all on the gymnastics team, that stuff. And so then we get older and we’re like, oh, it should be easy. Like making friends should be easy, it shouldn’t feel awkward. Yet it—that’s, that’s a fallacy, that’s a myth. Like, of course it’s going to feel awkward. Like you’re, you’re like dating, you know, you’re getting, you know, you see someone on, on the main street and you’re like, “Do you want to get a coffee sometime?” Of course, you’re going to feel like you’re going to throw up in your mouth—like it’s, it’s totally nerve wracking.

Caroline: Absolutely. And I think that—that friendship should be easy is a fallacy. And for the neurodivergent community, it’s actually so sad because so many people tell me like, “I’m broken, basically, because friendship is easy for everyone else.” And so one of the things I talk about in the first, like five pages of the book is like, it is not easy for anyone. It takes a lot of work. Some people are good at it, but they don’t have these skills magically—they learn these skills. I always with kids, I point to the—I used to go to my old publisher, my same publisher, but when they were in an old building and I took pictures of the hundreds of self-help books and I would show them to kids and I would say, “Look at this publisher, they’re the second biggest publisher in America, and they have books from floor to ceiling of self-help. All those people are trying to up their communication game, right?” It’s not called social skills because they’re business books, but it is social skills, right.

And so I—I think that the fallacy that friendship should be easy, I think the fallacy that you shouldn’t struggle, right, I think the—the idea that, um, you know, one of the things that sends me over the edge—I make videos about it—is when people say like, “Be the friend you want to be and like you’ll have friends.” Mhm. I have many clients who are lovely and they are lovely to other people. But it isn’t about that. It’s about finding your people and having repeated interactions with them, shared experiences, and then nurturing a relationship. So I think all that advice is just sort of damaging to—it’s kind of like the women can do it all advice from like the seventies and eighties—like, it’s not, I’m here to tell you it’s not possible, you can’t do it, yeah, right.

Susie Pettit: Well, because if we’re thinking it’s easy, and we’ve both said this, I just want to really highlight it for the listener to hear this. Because if we’re thinking it’s easy and it should feel different than it is, it leads to us thinking we’re the problem and that we’re, we’re at fault, we’re the problem, it’s our fault. And then that’s a sort of hopeless place. And then we aren’t then reaching, we’re just sort of like, well, it is what it is, I guess I won’t have friends or, you know, whatever. It just sort of leads this like self-fulfilling prophecy of like, you’re not the problem, but the way that you’re thinking about it is the problem. And so then, you know, it becomes you’re holding yourself back from that. Um, yes.

Another thing that’s interesting, and I see it come up with some of my clients is this: you know, when we were younger, say that we did have friendships when we were younger, we often had like the BFF, like the one friend that knew everything, met all of our needs. Like if she wanted, you know, if we wanted to walk to Concord bookstores, she’d go with us, and if we wanted to play field hockey in the backyard, she’d go—like she was just that, like one friend, and we could call her. And—and now when we don’t, like, have that, or we, we have this new person and we’re like putting the pressure on that it needs to be this BFF, that is just way too freaking much for this new relationship. And to see that maybe we have different types of friends for different arenas. Can you talk a little more? You—you sort of talk about—I don’t know if that’s the same thing as the social GPS, but just a different understanding that friends—like having a wider knowledge and expansion of our definition of what a friend is.

Caroline: No, I absolutely love that you brought this up, I think. I think that the one best friend who is sort of a, like a spouse who fulfills all our needs is sort of a Hollywood thing. I’m not saying that people don’t have it, but my experience is that sometimes they have it and then they don’t have something else, right? So maybe they don’t have a spouse they can lean on. I also think that if you don’t have it, you drop—tend to think there’s something wrong with me. Mhm.

And so one of the things I talk about in the book is that there are different friends for different times. There are friendships that will be closer during certain phases of your life. They can be different in other phases of your life. And that we too often, especially neurodivergent people, we assign the moniker of friendship to people who are really an acquaintance or an emerging friend, and that there are different levels of friendship. And then when they don’t—when they cancel coffee, um, or they don’t live up to this expectation of being everything, right, we feel so disappointed and we feel like we failed or we feel like the relationship failed, when in fact, we’re expecting them to be this, you know, almost partner, you know, for everything. And maybe that’s not what they’re capable of.

And I really try to say to people, think about what you want out of friendship. And I know so many people are like, “I want that one close friend,” but I often find with my clients that they’ll have something else and that they don’t want that. And that because they’re chasing this one friend, they’re very dissatisfied. And, you know, sometimes we have an emotional friend—I have friends who are great with emotional stuff. And then—but they’re not maybe the doer friend, the friend who’s like, “I’m up for anything, let’s, let’s get on a plane and let’s go somewhere.” Um, I have friends who don’t have that emotional register—like if I—if I needed to, if I was on the Titanic, they would get me the last seat, right? But if I want to talk about my feelings, they are not the go-to, right? And so I feel like that’s also something that comes up. And we have different phases of life and different needs.

And often I think we’re searching for this BFF. And I think part of it for neurodivergent people is we didn’t have it as kids in many cases, and so we just—this is what we want. But the problem is when we always think the grass is greener, we—we don’t—we don’t also look at, okay, well, maybe I’m nurturing this friendship and maybe it will become that, but it’s not that yet, and then we lean too heavily on someone emotionally, and then we scare them away.

Susie Pettit: Yeah, yeah, there’s that dynamic for sure, um, you know, listeners thinking about it—like if you think of dating and it’s like you go into a first date and you like verbally, like dump all of your trauma on the person and it’s like, oh, that was a bit too much. You can see how that was a bit too much. But what I’m hearing from you is sort of the pressure you could put on some of these emerging friendships can get—can be too much for the friendship, and then also then when they cut out on the coffee—like you’ve made it bigger than it is, so the wound is bigger to you than it needs to be, which is interesting.

I—I think what we’re also speaking to is just this like maturity and this growing up too, of—of sort of understanding that humans are so nuanced and have so many needs that because I speak a lot of like how the, the marital relationship thinking that—that, you know, whether you’re, whether it’s a man or a woman, is that person is going, they are here to meet all your needs, like again, back to the Hollywood or the Disney, like, you know, Cinderella, they end at the wedding and it’s like, right, because they’re here and then they march off into the sunlight and everything’s fine and you never need anything else again. Versus maturing and understanding that people are going to give us different needs—like my husband’s going to meet some of my great needs in this way, but maybe Caroline helps me with my self-help book and we get together and we just, like, geek out over the greatest latest self-help book. And then I have Tracy, who will go walk with me, you know, for when I want to walk and then I—but it’s like understanding that that, that BFF maybe that we’re searching for is more that feeling of being known and accepted. And we can get that in our different areas if, if we have that inner confidence.

Caroline: Um, absolutely. And I think that we can have close friends, right? So for anyone listening who’s like, “Yeah, but I don’t have, you know, that person to lean on, and I do want them, even if they don’t lean on them in all arenas,” um, I’m not saying we can’t have a person to lean on, but I think the mythology around the best friend is as if we’re all running, you know, through the daisies and holding hands together, um, like the beginning of the Laura Ingalls Wilder, you know, *Little House on the Prairie* show. And I—I think that we have to nurture those relationships also, and we have to, um—and I’m not saying this hasn’t been a problem for some people where they are giving and other people are taking, um, oh my goodness.

Susie Pettit: Yes.

Caroline: You know, so I think that there’s—there’s definitely an opportunity to nurture them. I talk about how to nurture friendships, I talk about how to move from an acquaintance to a friend, I give you like really solid tips, and I talk about how do you stop giving so much if people are taking from you, mhm, um, because that is a problem. And a lot of people will say to me, “I don’t have reciprocity and that’s what I want, mhm.” Um, I also think though, you have to realize what stage of relationship you’re in because you might not have reciprocity yet if they’re an acquaintance, right? But I also have a whole chapter on red flags, because sometimes we don’t get reciprocity with someone and there’s a lot of red flags just like in dating, and we kind of don’t pay attention to them. I feel like my clients spend a lot of time on dating and their Hinge profile and all this stuff, and they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about, “Is this person a worthy friend to me? Like, are they worthy to be my friend?” Mhm, um, so I want people to think about that because some people, they don’t—you don’t—they don’t deserve you. They’re not, they’re not a good friend.

Susie Pettit: Right. Yeah, they’re not your want match, I call it—like, it’s like you have, you have certain like, or more like there are people who like peaches and there are people who don’t like peaches and you’re a peach and it’s like, they’re not your person for that, and it’s okay. They’re, they can go like their banana, but like you’re the peach. So look for the people that like the peaches and the people that light you up. I—I really I think that’s important, and that also is, is back to that maturity piece of understanding. Like, do we want people just so we can say that we have fourteen people on our, you know, call list or whatever, or do we want those people that really we feel that connection and deepness and are—and that we can work on building up.

And so another part of it then would be the, the maturity to have patience. That’s, you know, we spoke a bit about how I—I lived my whole five decades of my life in the United States and then moved to Australia, me and my husband, and, you know, it’s like, and he is Australian, but like I knew no one. And so I have been working on building friends. And it was something that I was very aware of that I wanted friends, I wanted friendships, and it is something I was, you know, used a lot of the skills in your book that I was deliberate, I recognized they’re in—in different stages.

And one of the main things that’s been surprising for me is the patience that’s needed that like I might be—certainly with ADD, I’m like, I want it now, you know, I want it now. I want to be able to like call whoever to coffee and to just be able to like, tell them about my empty nest heartbreak—like I want to do that now. And it’s like, okay, but if I—I call that random woman that I just randomly saw in the self-help section of the library and—and then I unload that—like it’s not there yet, like it’s just some patience, you can get there, um, and just again, recognizing that we’re not crazy and we’re not broken.

I guess another piece I wanted to speak to that in your book that I really liked and you addressed, was this masking and people pleasing, yeah, because that is something that I definitely did when I was younger, and I know my listeners did, and in younger, I mean, like in my twenties and thirties that I was more eager for those friends when we were picking up our kids at school and me to get into that people pleasing. So can you—or masking—can you talk a little bit about that and what, how you see that show up?

Caroline: Yeah. So masking is this concept that I suppress my neurodivergent traits and it can also be like, I’m camouflaging my true self, right? You don’t have to be neurodivergent—I’m camouflaging my true self to meet the desires of others, right, so that I’m more socially acceptable, um, and so it’s not, “I’m finding my people and I’m looking for, you know, I’m a peach and I’m looking for other peaches,” it’s that, “I am with all these people and I want to fit in so desperately. I don’t want to find belonging, I want to fit in.” And I, you know, try to make myself a banana. And so, um, a lot of people do it, a lot of women do it. I think somewhat we were conditioned societally not to say, “Who are my people? Who do I deserve?” but more like bend yourself into a pretzel and go with whoever is willing to take you.

Susie Pettit: Willing to take you.

Caroline: Willing to take you. And I think the worst thing in the world is being tolerated. And I think when you feel that, it makes you feel so icky, it makes you feel so bad, and I don’t want that for people. And that’s where it comes back to the pacing, right, mhm. Unmasking is a whole journey, it’s a whole process, um, and I have a chapter on it, mhm, but it’s also—it’s a journey, so it’s not something I want people to think, oh, I’m going to do this overnight, and if I can’t, oh, there’s something wrong with me, because you’ve for years, you’ve learned to suppress the things that you felt weren’t as socially acceptable.

Whether that’s being neurodivergent and fidgeting and stimming, or whether that’s, you know, as a woman—like I’m going to out myself right now, I don’t cook, people can come for me, I hate cooking, I’m terrible at it, I tried meal prep, I tried everything. And then one day I discovered like, there are meal services that will deliver to your house, why am I doing this to myself? I will have an extra client a week to pay for it, and I will do these meal services and—and they’re fairly—they’re better food than I would ever be able to make, by the way, um, and so I—I feel like that’s unmasking, right? That’s saying like, this is my true self. And I think the people pleasing has been something that so many of us did because we really wanted to be liked, mhm.

Susie Pettit: Oh for sure. I mean, that was me—like as a, you know, I’m dropping off my first grader and the mom is there with her blueberry muffins and she’s like, “I just spent the afternoon making blueberry muffins, it was so fun,” and I’m like, oh my gosh. And I’m pretending, oh, I’ll bring them next time—I don’t like make—I, there’s no part of me, you know, and then I’m making the blueberry muffins, I’m like, but I’m—it’s that pretending and I’m trying to fit in and—and and you spoke a bit about the conditioning in terms of being a woman and how we’re taught: like you need to just bend and camouflage and become this thing to fit in or to be accepted. That’s a lot of what we’re taught just in patriarchy or whatever the system is called, where it’s like, you are only valuable as a woman if you have a man. And so the lens is then on, like, what does the man want and what does the man need, and so then I’m going to shapeshift to become that.

And I for sure did that when I was younger: it’s like, oh, yeah, I do like baseball and I don’t like, you know, or like I do like, or I’ll do this. And that’s still to this day, I see that so often with women, neurodivergent or not, that we’re just like, what do they need me to be, and I’ll do that, or what makes them comfortable and I’ll pay more considering more the other people’s feelings than their own. And in that codependency lens can get—can get a lot, whereas friendship could be a place—and and I sort of argue, like, why not—could be a place to press that a bit and—and because when we’re people pleasing, I often call it people deceiving—like we’re lying, we’re not showing our true self. And then there’s a part of us—I know for me—that just felt it was almost like fearful, like, what if they find out that I don’t like baking the blueberry muffins and that I don’t like—

Caroline: I mean, I take heat for it, I won’t lie, I take heat in this town where a lot of women do enjoy making the blueberry muffins and mazel tov to them, that’s awesome, um, so, I mean, you know, I think that it’s very easy to figure out how we fall into this, mhm, but I do think friendship, you know, you—you deserve to have your people. You deserve to have someone who lights you up, not dims your light. And—and you know, around the cooking thing, I have friends who tease me about it and think I’m hysterical, right? Um, I—I, my microwave broke a few years ago, one of my friends was like, “Oh my God, like, that’s your only appliance that you need in your entire kitchen,” and I was like, “I know, I can’t function without it, right?” Um, I mean, you know, you can have—

Susie Pettit: See you, and then they still love you, that’s the part.

Caroline: They still love me. And they understand too, that I am going to always make the choice to have like career and kids, and there’s only twenty four hours in a day, right? So but I think that’s also part of why I have a lot in the book on what fills your connection cup, right, what fills you up, and then what do you want? Who are your people? What—what interests do you have? What makes you light up and feel energized? Who are the people who see you and make you feel that way so that you can start from there? And that gives you the opportunity to look at the people pleasing and say, “I’m going to—I’m not going to pretend, I’m not going to shapeshift.”

I’m going to tell people like—I—so outing myself again, I live near nature, I don’t hike, I barely go outside, like there’s things that go wrong with my house that I don’t even notice because I basically don’t—I’m not a nature person, right, um, if you wanted to spend every afternoon hiking, you’re—that’s great, but I’m not your people, right, I’m not your people. And so I think that—that, you know, instead of spending your time doing things you don’t want, you have the opportunity for a reset and to do the things you do want. And there are people out there—now, are they going to be in my very small town? Maybe not, right, maybe I’ll have to travel, maybe I’ll have to do virtual things, mhm, um, maybe—maybe not, it depends. But I think we have this fear and then the fear, which I get, but it robs us of that connection, and then everything feels very, like, lonely in a crowd.

Susie Pettit: Well, and if we’re back in this BFF model, it’s like, oh, maybe I—like maybe there isn’t that exact match in your small town that all the things line up that you both love hiking and you both love. But if we’re more in that wide range of like, oh, she’s my hiking friend, or I’m definitely not your hiking friend, and we can have that expansive way of looking at it and way of being, really is interesting. And I think, again, this comes back to maturity and that we—you said something, you know, we need to know what we want in a friend, um, that’s something I wasn’t paying any attention to, I wasn’t programmed to pay attention to, I was just like, it doesn’t matter what you want, fit in, put the mask on, be the good girl, sit quiet, you know, do the thing. And now, in midlife and beyond, it’s like, oh, wait a minute—like I am a person, I’m not just—I’m not just going to be this little people pleasing robot. I don’t like, in your case, hiking or cooking or I, you know, I whatever the thing is, and to have the confidence to—to show that in a way that isn’t overly pressure full of the relationship right away, you know, your book really speaks to that, that it’s like bringing your true self, having the belief that there are people out there that will love your peachiness and you gotta find them and—

Caroline: You gotta find them.

Susie Pettit: Yeah, but they’re not going to know to love your peachiness if you’re always showing up as a banana, because that’s— feel empty and lonely in relationships, and I’m like, why? Oh, because I’m not letting them in. If I let them in, then I’m not feeling so empty and lonely like they’re, you know, why am I feeling empty and lonely? Because we’re talking about hiking and baking, because I haven’t told them that I don’t like hiking and baking, and it’s like, well, that makes sense, but that’s not, you know, let’s see if this relationship has the potential to grow type space, really.

Caroline: Yeah. And I think like, you know, adapting is important, right? Sometimes someone asks you to do something you’re not into and it’s their one time thing—I’m not going to not go to someone’s, you know, raising money for cancer road race, even though I loathe running, right, I—I’m going to go because you’re my friend and you’re doing something great, um, that’s adapting, but there’s

Susie Pettit: There’s a difference between like self abandonment and like, um, what is compromise, you know, compromise in relationships, yeah.

Caroline: And, but I think also, you know, people are fearful: will there be people out there? Well, there’s—if you look on the internet, there’s a group or a thing for everything, you know, and it is a different day when we were growing up in the eighties and nineties, you really—it was really much harder to find that out, now because of Google and because of whatever we can find out, you know, I have clients who meet people through like, you know, photography of birds in a hiking club, right? Like, right, there’s like three layers down and there’s groups and they can find those groups and they can find those people, and then you have an instant shared language. So you and I clicked right away because we both know the area—I grew up in a certain area, I know all the things you know, and oh my—

Susie Pettit: Oh my God, she wears Vineyard Vines, you guys, like—

Caroline: I do, and my kids do, we all do, my husband, it’s like his uniform, I don’t think he’d know how to wear anything else, um, but like, you know, if I—if I go to a group that is, you know, people who love to photograph and hike and—and, you know, look at certain ornithological things, we instantly have something to talk about. It’s not as awkward, we have a shared language, we have something to build on, uh, animals—animals are one of the greatest ways to meet people, people, you know, volunteering somewhere you meet people, you kind of filter out people who are selfish because, you know, you’re talking about people who are volunteering to help animals.

All those kind of things help you filter to your people, and now you have an instant connection. And yeah, you still have to grow, you still have to nurture, it still takes time, but it’s not as awkward. And I think it helps with the shape shifting because it’s easier to sort of out yourself and be your true self and be your peachiness if you are like, oh, I’m with other people who really want to kayak every weekend or play pickleball or, you know, go and play, you know, certain, you know, play mahjong, right, yeah, because I’m with those people and they’re looking for that connection. They’re not looking for me to be a person who does another thing that I don’t do.

Susie Pettit: Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s as we age, it’s we just get more and more knowledge of ourselves and then need a little more and more trust of ourselves that—that, that like breaking this pattern that we’re the problem and more like, no, they’re out there, I’m lovable in my peachiness, I just need to find people that like peaches and—and stepping into that confidence. Can I say one thing before we end up on—because you speak about rejection sensitivity and that is something that is big with ADHD, it’s also big for those of us who have been raised to think that we’re only valuable if this person likes us, you know, that sort of thing.

Caroline: Absolutely.

Susie Pettit: What are some tips you have to help people, not, you know, or with rejection sensitivity, because it shows up big time?

Caroline: One thing is like, check the source, right? So, so many times people will tell me stories where they—they have a perceived rejection because rejection sensitivity isn’t that you actually have been rejected, it’s that you have perceived rejection, mhm, and I’m like listening to the story and I’m like, “Do you even like this person?” and my client is like, “No,” and I’m like, “Do you respect them?” and they’re like, “No,” and I’m like, “So whether they rejected you or not, why do we care about their opinion, right, you know?” Or like, they’ll mention someone and I’m like, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, we talked about this person three weeks ago, you loathe them, right? Why, if they, you know, said something rude, is it the injury of the rudeness, is it that it touched another button and triggered you, or is it just, you know, is it just this—I’ve been raised to care what other people think way too much, um, so that’s one thing.”

Susie Pettit: I really like that like—

Caroline: We’re—

Susie Pettit: —so concerned what they’re thinking about us, what are we thinking about them?

Caroline: Right, like there’s certain people who like with the cooking who have opinions of me, I’m like, I don’t care what you think, right? I think, you know, I think that you should not do X and Y, so great, we’re even, right? I didn’t think you should have kegs for your kids after the prom, when the principal begged us not to do things like that, so the fact that you don’t like it—

Susie Pettit: Right?

Caroline: Yeah, right, like, oh—

Susie Pettit: Well, the more secure we feel in our peachiness, the less their input is going to be like, right? Someone saying to me that I should be cooking, I’m like, yeah, that’s not how I think about it.

Caroline: And by the way, though, this is not Caroline circa nineteen ninety seven, this is not Caroline, you know, earlier Caroline—like that Caroline would absolutely have cared, yeah, um, the other thing I think is that, um, we—we slip into rumination with rejection sensitivity—like we go into rumination really quickly and there’s—there’s a pattern interrupt to interrupt rumination: do something else, exercise, something else.

But one of the greatest hacks I personally, as a ruminator, have ever been given, um, is from Doctor Ned Hallowell, and, you know, he’s a personal friend of mine, I worked for him. And when I was ruminating and I was selling the book and, you know, you’re waiting, you get rejections, you get, you know, people who don’t write you back, you, you know, whatever, and he’s—he said, “You have to do something that’s as strong a distraction, as strong a pull, a strong, a dopamine pull as this feeling of rejection, as this feeling of—of rumination.” And he was like, “What would be a strong—” and I’m like, “There’s only one thing: to write the book, right?” and he’s like, “Then start writing the book.”

This for me was game changing—like as a ruminator of all the things in my life that have ever been told to me, because people are like, “Take a bubble bath,” I’m like, well, then I would just be wet—

Susie Pettit: In the bubble bath, and, “Why did I say that thing,” right, over and—

Caroline: —over again, I’m just wet thinking those thoughts, right? But this really, you know, have this, you know, Jessica McCabe calls it a buddy project, right, so, you know, you’re—you’re feeling this rumination, you’re feeling this pull, someone says something to you, someone has a party without you, someone looks at you a certain way—I say challenge the story, but also come up with something that’s as equally as powerful, because part of this is that the rumination is so powerful, um, and then the last one I really want to share that I think is so good because I’m a ruminator, so I understand, is don’t ask why questions. This I found in the research that I did, um, why questions can—you can’t have an answer, “Why did my boss say this? Why did this person—”

Susie Pettit: Ask them to yourself, right? Yeah, right.

Caroline: Don’t ask why questions to yourself, sorry, I should have been clear about that—like don’t, because you can’t know. I can’t know why this person doesn’t like my peachiness, mhm, right, I can’t— I can’t, I—

Susie Pettit: I can make up—

Caroline: —stories, right? Right, but I don’t know, so don’t—those why questions also, our brain pays attention to the bad more than the good, right? And so our brain loves those why questions because then we can just go around and around in a loop. And I think some of rejection sensitivity is really that we are flooded with this feeling, and then we kind of don’t know how to challenge it. So that’s why I talk about rumination, because I think that’s what happens next and we’re like, oh my gosh, that person looked at me funny, or they said this to me, or they didn’t invite me, and then we like start spinning into rumination and we have to end that cycle, right?

Susie Pettit: Yeah, because if we’re just feeling the rejection sensitivity, like for me, if I’m like, oh, that just is a little sensitive because it doesn’t feel good to get rejected—like if I fact check the fears and I’m like, oh yeah, I know you were rejected, and I’m like, okay, it feels a little icky, it passes, and I just like—but if—but it would lead to that rumination for sure. And I—I love what you say: don’t ask the whys. I say answer the questions your brain asks you—like because I always think of my brain, certainly with ADHD, as like, like a computer, and all these windows are open on my browser and it’s like—it’s. And so when I have a why—every time I ask a why question, it’s like I open a new window and it’s just spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning. So I just have to answer it: like, why did I say that? Oh, let me think of why I said that, oh, I said that because of this, oh, okay, well, why did they do that, and you just freaking come up with something because we don’t know, but our brain—that often helps me.

But I—I really, I really appreciate this book. This is an amazing book, an amazing resource. I—I, I want everyone to go get a copy—it is super helpful. And this show is called the Love Your Life Show. And if we have a listener out there who was really feeling like disconnected from friendships or really is like, “I want friends and I want—” you know, what—what are maybe one or two takeaways you would whisper in her ear or get her started on her journey?

Caroline: Well, first of all, it’s never too late, right? I have clients who are sixty, seventy, like it’s never too late, I don’t believe in that. I, I, you know, I believe in, in trying, um, new things, and—and I think that a lot of times, especially too, if you had, you know, you, you were conditioned or you were raised a certain way, now it’s a new day, right? So you don’t have to live that way anymore.

And the other thing I would say is that there are people out there for everyone, I truly believe that—I have never had a client who was willing to try things who did not make friends, right? I have never—I’ve never run into the roadblock of there’s just nobody for this person. I think the roadblock that I run into is, um, it’s uncomfortable and it’s a little awkward, and we have to leave our comfort zone a little bit, and—and for those people too, you can do this by degrees, right? You can, you can just buy the book, you can read the book, you can read a chapter, you can do one of the exercises that doesn’t feel too uncomfortable, you know, you don’t have to go, you know, from zero to sixty and sort of say, oh, I’m, I’m—I’ve never done any of this, and now I’m going to do everything. You can—you can pace yourself and you can, you know, put your toe in the water and dip your toe, and—and make this a slow process if—if the anxiety is so overwhelming to you.

**Susie Pettit:** Yeah, yeah, thank you, those are wonderful takeaways. I think it’s—it feels warm hearted and loving, and it is—it’s never too late, and, um, yeah, there are people out there for all of us. And I’ve definitely, I’ve lived that here in—in a pretty small town here, I’ve found just a plethora of people, and it’s just we have to keep getting out there. And you definitely give the tools in the book. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, I’m so grateful. And I will send listeners your way, and, um, aside from getting the book and if they just want to hear more from you, where would they—where’s the best place for them to reach out?

Caroline: Um, at @authorcarolinem is my, um, Instagram, YouTube channel, everything flows from there if they even forget and they just want to Google like, “friendship skills for neurodivergent adults.” Everything comes up right in the magical way of the Google, um, and—um, it is available in Australia and the audiobook is available in Australia, whereas *Why Will No One Play with Me?*—my audiobook was never fully available in Australia, which was so annoying to me. So I actually switched UK publishers for this book solely because I was like, people want audiobooks, you know, and this is—this is not something I want, I want people to have what they need.

Susie Pettit: Yeah. Well, and I’d be remiss not to mention you also wrote another book, *Why Will No One Play with Me?*, where you focused on children struggling to make friends. And so many of my clients are moms who live, you know, all over the world, but a lot in the US, so they could get that audible too. So I will put those links in the show notes. And I thank you so much for taking your time and coming on and, um, also reminiscing with me about my—my childhood, so thank you.

Caroline: No problem, thank you, thank you for having me.

Susie Pettit: Hi, Warriors, it’s me again. What a fun conversation that was, right? And I wanted to hop on here at the end and just say, hey, one of the best ways to do the things that we were talking about—getting around like minded people, having repeated exposure, going through things at similar times—is to join the Love Your Life School, and luck has it, it is open right now. It is not open all the time, but it’s open now and it really is—it’s so fun to see people in there forming friendships, and then they make plans to get together outside of the school. I’ve had someone from New York visit people from Washington, D.C.—it’s like, it’s just a cool, cool, cool environment.

And if you’re looking for a place to meet other people that are like you—I mean, you are amazing, you’re listening to the end of this podcast, that tells me you’re interested in self-development and being your best you. There’s a whole group of those people in the Love Your Life School, and we’d love to have you in there. All right, take care of you, just wanted to hop on here with a final little hug.