Jason Wasser introduces the concentric circles model for relationships: intimate partners, best friends, good friends, and acquaintances. He explains how one client over-invested in acquaintances as if they were intimate contacts, draining energy and causing confusion about what they wanted.
Chapters
I want to make sure that what I shared with you tonight is not only something about where I almost screwed up and messed up my career permanently in the span of 15 seconds, but I also want you to be able to walk away with some tangible, teachable moment. So a few years ago, I was seeing a young professional, and we were talking about boundaries, about dating and friends, and trying to figure out how this person can attract the right person into their life. And they were telling me all the different stories about they went out with this person and it didn't work out, and they went out with a different person, and what they felt that they had to give them as far as their time, as far as their energy, as far as sometimes their body, in order to get the other person to commit to them. Sometimes they gave too much without the lack of receiving everything in return. So the teachable moment of the thing that I want to share with you before I tell you how I almost screwed up and I thought my career was over is kind of what I was working with this person on. Concentric circles in our life that we're not really aware of, that which when we're talking to certain people, when we have certain people in our life, we have certain boundaries that should or should not exist around certain people. So we have the people that are closest to us, what I call the intimate people. Those are the people that get the most time, energy, and space from you. They're gonna give to you, you're gonna give back to them. It's a very reciprocal relationship. The next category after that would be your best friends and/or your family. People are a little bit outside of that. They may not be people, people you see all all the time, the people that you're closest to, that you know you have that trust bond with. And the next thing is your good friends that you may see at events, you may go out with them in a group, but you're not necessarily going to hang out with them one-on-one. And then you have your social acquaintances, the people you see at events, you say, "Hi, how are you?" and you move on with your day. The problem is, is most of us, and this person I was working with, was making the people that were the acquaintances in the same level of relationship they were as their close intimate best friends and their intimate family members. And they were giving them that, and that energy exchange, and they were losing a lot in their own life about what to get, what they wanted out of. So a lot of times, as we're going through our different experiences, as we're going through life, we have to figure out who belongs to us
