Stepping Out of Isolation: Practical Steps in Making Friends
/Dan Hitz is the director of Reconciliation Ministries of Michigan, Inc. He is a Licensed Professional Counselor specializing in helping men and women overcome sexual brokenness, sexual abuse recovery, and trauma. This article is a companion article to last month’s newsletter, Stepping Out of Isolation: Learning from the Relationships of Jesus. More articles and testimonies of overcomers are available on the Reconciliation Ministries website at https://recmin.org/newsletter-archives.
“So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.”
John 13:34-35 NLT
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It may be embarrassing to admit as an adult that we have trouble making friends; however, research shows that three in five adults feel lonely. [1] As a therapist, I’m often amazed as I have people telling me how lonely they are and how they wish they had a group of friends. I often wonder what would happen if all these people who are lonely would actually communicate with one another. Could that solve the loneliness problem? The truth is that loneliness can be like a rip tide sometimes. We can get stuck in its current and before we know it, we’re swept out into a deeper sea of isolation. It’s time for us to learn how to interact with others in a rewarding manner. A recovery friend and I have mentioned to each other that we are learning things in our 50s and 60s that we should have learned when we were twelve. There is no shame in learning life lessons later in our adulthood. Transformation in Christ is a lifelong process.
It can be helpful to understand what things in your life contributed to your difficulty in making friends. Childhood wounds, frequent moves and school changes, betrayal, and significant life challenges can cause us to put up emotional walls, or simply quit trying to build lasting friendships. Other times the challenges of life can cause us to become distracted or inward focused and we drift away from our social circles at a time when we need them the most. Before we know it, years have gone by and we realize that we’ve developed a pattern of isolation. We may interact with a few people at work or church, but afterwards we go back to our own homes where we can feel the mixed emotions of craving isolation, despairing the loneliness, and wishing we had someone to hang out with.
When we realize that we’ve built up a pattern of isolation, it’s important to recognize what contributed to those patterns and seek healing. We may need to reach out to a Christian caregiver or a support group to work through some of the wounds and our reactions to them that contributed to the isolation. We may need someone to coach and encourage us to begin taking small steps to reconnect with others. It may be challenging at first, but as you stick with it, the enjoyment will come. Your support team can hold you accountable and recommend some achievable next steps in improving your social interaction.
It is important to understand who we really are in Christ. Often, we hold back in developing friendships because of a false perception of who we are and a negative self-image. We can be over concerned with how we think others see us. We might feel shame because of mistakes we’ve made in the past that we’re still trying to overcome. Maybe we’re still trying to recover from a crisis that we’ve gone through. The best thing we can do is understand our true identity in Christ, embrace our true identity, and interact with others through that identity in humility. Start by sitting in the quiet and listening to the “noise in your heart”. What do you tell yourself about yourself when you’re alone? What are the negative labels that you wear? As you recognize your negative inner thoughts, ask the Lord to show you His opinion of you – how He defines you. That is who you really are in Christ. The truth is that none of us are perfect. We’re all in process, but Jesus Christ is the one who truly defines us. We need to learn to relate to others based on His definition of us.
As you do begin to work on developing relationships, recognize that no one person is able to complete you. Only Jesus Christ can do that. Our friends are those people who walk with us in our lives and help us grow socially, spiritually, and emotionally. Resist the urge to seek after that “one special friend” who is all that we need. That can lead to an “emotional dependency”, where we try to gain our fulfillment and sense of value from gaining attention and affirmation from another. [2] If you find yourself being pulled to one specific person for fulfillment and feeling jealous if that person is talking to others, quiet your heart to see if you are trying to pull them into a void in your heart. Check in with your caregiver or support group. Seek the Lord to heal the deeper needs in your heart and ask Him to help you interact with others from a place of wholeness. Remember, our friends are intended for fellowship, not to be the answer for our emotional needs. As we develop a variety of healthy friendships with a variety of people, our lives will naturally become more fulfilled.
It’s also important to balance recovery conversations with fun interactions, especially if we’re building friendships with people that we’ve met in recovery circles. Healing from the emotional wounds that contributed to your isolation and developing new friendships are two different processes. Those processes may cross paths at times, but it is important to build your new relationships on healthy relational patterns. Avoid focusing on your emotional brokenness in the hopes that others will fix you and become friends in the process. Avoid the temptation to highlight your personal brokenness as a means of gaining sympathy and attention. Exploring our brokenness should be part of our healing process. It is best for our relational development that we focus on common goals and interests. As you begin to increase your social circle, you may find that there are a few people that are a part of both processes, but most friendships will be focused on positive activities and interests. Even with those whom you can share your heart, be sure that the majority of your friendships are focused on encouraging activities and topics. Your emotional healing is best explored in your support groups and therapy sessions.
Learn to speak from a heart of compassion and strength, rather than from a place of passivity or aggression. [2] Many of us have learned false ways of relating due to our past mistreatment. If we were smushed emotionally, we may have settled into a place of passivity and false compliance. When asked by a friend what we want to do on a given Saturday, we may be afraid to mention that we want to go on a photography excursion and just say, “I don’t know. Why don’t you decide.” If our nature is more aggressive, we may have learned to plow our way through others to get our own way. We may not even bother to ask our friends what they want to do this Saturday. We may just tell them we’re going to play mini-golf even if we know they’d rather go on a photo shoot. Learning to relate with compassion and strength means that we can verbalize that we’d like to go on a photo shoot even if we know our friend would rather go golfing, and then come to a compromise. Or, we can learn to lay down our desire to play miniature golf and join our friend on the photo shoot of a special event that only occurs that weekend. Learning to relate out of compassion and strength means that we’ll develop deeper, truer relationships.
Where do we start looking for potential friends and start developing friendships? First, resist the urge to go too deep, too fast. Deep friendships take a long time to develop. In last month’s newsletter, we looked at Jesus’ pattern of relationships as an example of the relationships that we can develop in our own lives. Jesus had the multitudes, the 70 (large group of disciples), the 12 (primary disciples), the 3 (Peter, James, and John), and the one (John, the disciple whom Jesus loved). The numbers aren’t specific, but they help us have a reference to work with. Each of His relational groups progressed to a deeper level of interaction and emotional intimacy. Using that as our pattern, we can start by learning to engage with our “multitudes”. Be kind to the cashier at the store. If the greeter at Wal-Mart actually greets you with a smile, thank her and tell her that she is doing a good job. These types of interactions won’t result in a lasting friendship or a deep conversation, but they will help pull you out of your isolation and help you focus on others.
Next, you can begin to engage more with your “70”. Make a goal of saying hello to a new person at your church, or someone that you pass in the hallway at your workplace. What do you talk about? Try to find a commonality. Was there a specific aspect of the sermon that touched your heart? Are they working on a project that you find interesting? As you have that brief interaction with them, you can see if they share a particular interest or insight of their own and ask a follow up question about it. These types of conversation may last only a few minutes, but you are continuing to learn to step outside yourself and connect to others. It may take some practice to press through the few seconds of awkward silence after the initial hello, but keep working at it. You can also work to develop a sense to know when your brief conversation has naturally concluded and wish them a pleasant day.
After learning to interact with your “70”, you can then work towards developing deeper relationships within your “12”. Join a small group at church or find a community group for a special interest that you have. In a church small group, you will have the opportunity to share more of your heart with a group of people that will likely share more of your values and interests than the larger groups. You can work to develop a deeper emotional connection through the openness and honesty that is a part of healthy church small groups. Your connections in a community special interest group probably won’t be as emotionally based as your conversations in the church small groups, but you’ll find others who share your common interests. You’ll also learn who in your group of “12” is the easiest for you to connect with, and start taking some steps to begin forming your group of “3”.
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You can invite the members of your small group that you seem to interact with the easiest to get together for dinner, an outing, or a fellowship night at your home. Through the increased interaction, you can begin to share a few more personal details about your hopes, your vision, and your life. As you do, you can see how they respond to your information. Do they actually listen and ask follow up questions? Do they offer to share more of their own personal information? Healthy relationships involved a two-way conversation with balanced listening and speaking on both sides. If they respond properly, and you continue to feel comfortable in the relationship, continue to progress slowly and seek another opportunity for interaction as a part of your group of “3”. It’s okay if things don’t seem to progress from the “12” to the “3”. Not everyone will make the transition. As you grow in your friendships, you’ll realize that there are some friends who are simply entertainment friends, and others with whom you can have much deeper conversations. We need both groups of friends.
Remember, healthy friendships take a long time to develop. Don’t get discouraged. Learn to enjoy each stage of relationship development. As you grow in the development of your “3”, you may eventually find yourself developing a deeper relationship with a “1”. You may find that you’ve developed a deep bond with one or two special friends with whom you can share the most personal information and enjoy leisure activities easily. This isn’t necessarily a romantic relationship. It may be a David and Jonathan or a Ruth and Naomi relationship. Healthy same-sex friendships help each other grow towards spiritual and emotional maturity. For those who are called to marriage, the goal is for the spouse to be our “1”; however, we may also have a same-gender friend who is a close second.
It bears repeating that healthy relationships take a long time to develop. Relationships also ebb and flow as life circumstances change. Transitioning to a new church or a new job may change the frequency that we interact with our old groups of “12” or “3”. That’s okay. Resist the urge to sink back into isolation. If the frequency of interaction does change, we can continue to hold those friends as precious even as we work to develop new friendships. As we grow in our relational interactions, we can also celebrate the growth of our friends. It is healthy and appropriate to have multiple friend groups, including multiple groups of three. That makes us richer people and increases our overall social and emotional health. Be patient with yourself, and take the time to recognize that progress you’ve made. Continue to be kind to your multitude, and reach out to your 70, your 12, and your three.
1. Rameer, Venessa Mae. US Loneliness Statistics 2025: Are Americans Lonely. Science of People. January 27, 2025. Retrieved on 3/2/2025 from https://www.scienceofpeople.com/loneliness-statistics/.
2. Thanks to Jeff Simunds of Tower of Light Ministries for sharing his YWAM DTS teaching notes on relationships.
© 2025 Reconciliation Ministries of Michigan, Inc. This article may be reproduced and distributed as long as no fee is charged and credit is given.
