Expatriates : Friendships

Now, you just shush while I powder your nose just a little bit.

:: Think of covert bullying as behavior that makes someone feel like they are not welcome in a social situation and manipulating behavior as a way for the aggressor to get what they want.::

Heather, The Helpful Counselor 

Some weeks ago on the NFAB Facebook page, I posted a photograph that prompted one of the users to ask, "Did you know all your friends before moving to Mexico?"  Like a bag of powdered doughnuts, Mexico keeps offering me the precious and the plentiful.  I am feeling especially grateful for the kindness of strangers - the lovely women and men who share their lives with me in Mexico.  In fact, I think you will sense that I am pretty much love gushing over them.  Coupled with my attachments in Austin, my tribe is my rebozo.  We carry and cradle one another into a lovely woven wrap, offering the finest in artisan love.  

If contrast had not appeared on the scene, I would not know the extent of my tribe’s scarcity, nor how much I benefit from their loving ways.    Through my work in the States in schools, I was exposed to relational aggression on a daily basis.  There is a continuum, and though I had witnessed two young women beating the crap out of one another, what I generally observed were the more subtle forms of bullying that are meant to isolate a peer from the social circle.  Bullies are, as a rule, not subtle and yet because we are so acclimated to lower levels of violence; it takes a trained observer to pick-up on these cues.  The individual being pushed from the nest will have the most difficulty convincing others' of what they are experiencing.  The bully's friends, and they do have friends, with their utterly different experience, don't see it at all. 

There is a bevy of literature on relational aggression so I won't recap what you can research for yourselves.  What I do want to capture is my gratitude for having a very deep bond with those that share their lives with me.  Their common and variegated threads create the coziest of places to simply be alive.  Here is a short list of their resiliency skills, using the convenient outline offered in The Four Agreements:

• They Trust Themselves

The magic that underlies this skill is that no one is a threat.   When a transgression takes place, they don't freak out, perseverate nor attempt to tackle the knotted.  They are so solid in their own integrity that they do not need to defend nor reject.  Their rebozo, like the Dao, is the mesh that enfolds, allowing nothing to slip through, in or out, the most opened sections of the weave.  No one, tribe or otherwise, is ever forsaken.   Mistakes in perception, behavior and choices are allowable because there are no mistakes, only opportunities to grow.

•  They Ask Questions

They break the mirrors of themselves.  Some of the richest lessons are offered by those who have led different lives.  There is no assumption that their own understanding is the ruler to measure others lives.  Each new person or relationship that is revisited, offers them an opportunity to give and receive. The physical nearness of the other matters not.  The expectation of a long term alliance matters not.  What most concerns them is that each moment of an interaction is fully alive.  In those moments, they correct assumptions being made about them, by themselves or the other.

•   They Are Impeccable With Their Word

They use the word to elevate themselves and others.  The words that flow from their lips are confined to their love of their own lives and the celebration of the smallest achievements of those around them.  They are seekers of the deeper parts of themselves, still growing and always leaning towards loving in each moment.  They embrace relationship.  They are comfortable that their own standard of conduct is applicable to themselves alone.  They have no need to influence the alliances of others. 

• They Do Their Best

Every moment there is an opportunity to do it right.  The tribe is filled with fierce beauty, unafraid of their own shadows or the ones that lurk in doorways.   

Even when we have been separated for a thousand years, I knew my friends in Mexico, because my friends in Texas trained me well!

Create the life you want!

The Broad

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