You know your parents can drive you crazy. You’ve found out from experience that your relationship(s) can drive you crazy. Have you considered that another source of insanity and limitation in your world might be your friends?

“Friendship is the last bastion of our insanity that there will always be somebody there for us,” says Access Consciousness™ Founder and best-selling author Gary Douglas.

If you can’t trust your family to take care of you, you can’t trust your lover to take care of you, what have you got left? Your friends!

“People eradicate more awareness with friendships than they do with relationships or their families,” he observes.

Being with friends who are not necessarily your friends can be hard on your body as well, Douglas says. “When you’re with avaricious people you call your friends, you lock into your body everything you don’t want to see and your body hurts like hell cause your body wants you to know what’s going on.

“That’s why a lot of people have the idea that my dog is my best friend,” he observes wryly.

Friends can be an acronym, Douglas observes. It stands for Familiar Relationships (that) ¬Indicate (the) End of Need and Desire. It means someone who is familiar, the relationship with whom eliminates need and desire in your life…except that if you get to close to them and they don’t provide what you really want, then you have to reject them. In this reality, “this is what friends do to and for one another,” he says.

“I have definitely had a lot of friends who have sucker punched me,” he says. “I wasn’t willing to look at where they were coming from. I wanted to believe they had my best interests at heart.”

Even being the kind of person that doesn’t judge their friends can give you problems. When that’s the case, you tend to choose friends who appear to be receiving you, assuming they will contribute to you as well. If they require something of you, they have to judge you and push you away, ending your friendship. Whether you choose to continue the friendship or form new ones, you are forced into continual judgment to determine if they’re going to do it again.

Friends who cannot receive from you will always have to prove you’re wrong and have to go away. If they can’t receive what you have to offer, they have to reject you and take you out of the computation of their lives.

All of this occurs when we aren’t willing or able to look beyond our own judgment that someone is our friend. These are the places where you do not see what they’re doing, and then you’re surprised when it happens.

The cure for this, says Douglas, is to look at the person in front of you. Look at how they treat others in their lives. If they’re mean to others, eventually they will be mean to you, because that’s who they are. You can ask them what kind of people they find most irritating—because whatever that trait is, eventually you will end up personifying it and they will reject you too.

If you’re going to be a friend with someone, Douglas recommends being the kind of friend you would like to be, for yourself, without regard of whether they’ll reject or judge you or not. Even with liars and those who only want money from him, Douglas continues to be friends with them because he does it for himself, not for them.

One of the difficulties is that most people are unwilling and unable to be friends to themselves. “They’ve never been asked to trust themselves, see themselves, or believe in themselves,” he notes.

When you can be your own friend, you no longer need someone to listen to you because YOU listen to you. You no longer need someone to validate you because you value you.

Does this mean true friendship cannot exist? Not at all, says Douglas. He’s merely encouraging us to look with awareness at our friendships so we can create good ones worth having.

His definition of a good friend is someone who doesn’t judge, is willing to contribute to him, sees what his targets are in life and won’t give up theirs for him or expect him to give up his for them. His friends have a sense that there’s something greater that’s possible.

How do you get there? Douglas recommends asking your potential friend’s being and body energetically, “What secret do you have that if I knew it you think I would go away?” If you can have that and not have to go away, you can actually stay and be friends “in a totally different way.”

In true friendship you don’t have to judge any part of you as being so horrible and vile that it could not be received by your friend, and you don’t have to alter you in any way to have them accept you. You have allowance for yourself and allowance for your friend. This allows friendship to be created as a constant state of growing.

If you really function from everything being an interesting point of view, it’s hard to create a bad friendship, he notes.

The greatest friend you can have is one who is willing to look at the things they cannot change. That person will have your back because they’ve got their own back. They won’t stab you in the back. That person can be unique and great and someone you deserve to have as a friend.

Someone who is willing to expose themselves, willing to be the place in which they don’t fully receive or embrace something in themselves gives the gift to others of being willing to look in their own world.

The information in this article and much more was included in the telecall on Friendship that was part of the “Conversations in Consciousness” teleseries. It is now available on CDs and MP3s from the shop at www.accessconsciousness.com