Research indicates that most people tend to accept and agree with new people and information when they are similar to what we have recorded as being positive on mental 'tapes' from our previous experiences.   

People or information that do not 'fit' into our previous experiences tend to be viewed with some degree of apprehension or suspicion.   This behavior makes it most difficult for us to be truly "open-minded" when faced with new/different people or situations.   

Wellness psychology encourages us to learn new ways of learning emotional and behavioral views when approaching different people and situations.

People like to be with people they perceive as being similar to themselves in beliefs, values and behaviors.Are we being dishonest when we choose not to disclose certain information about ourselves to our family and friends so as to maintain personal privacy?Can we understand and accept what others need to know about us within an honest relationship?  Can too much shared information be harmful to our relationships? 

Can we respect the boundaries others choose for themselves?We tend to be emotionally healthy when we accept that our decisions about privacy tend to be honest and respectful of ourselves and others. 

One of the most significant decisions that each of us makes during our life journey is how and to what degree we want to share our inner self with individuals with whom we have created various types of relationships.  

Humans do choose many types of personal secrets which can vary throughout our life journey.  The individual criteria you and I select for being open and/or closed to others with various aspects of our emotional nudity tends to be a significant factor for our facade that we share with others and for our personal mental health.

One of the major choices we each make in developing positive mental health for ourselves is discovering various ways to understand and assign responsibility for various mental blame games.   When we decide to assign some degree of blame for our thoughts, feelings and behaviors we can choose to place responsibility for them entirely on ourselves or on some continuum to the other extreme of placing blame entirely on other people and situations.  

Reality indicates that most of the responsibility for our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are healthyfully located at some point between the two extremes.  Mental health encourages us to seek to understand the specific ways we assign the responsibility for our personal life choices.

Friend Print processes were developed for those persons who seek information to better answer the introspective question of "Who Am I?".  Friend Prints are structured to better understand the value of psychological exercising in developing and maintaining ones personal mental health.  

Using an initial list of five persons that a listener calls friend,  one is encouraged to create their own Friend Print beginning with 25+ categories of description. Having this completed Friend Print allows an individual to see visually in a single place some characteristics of their friendship circle.

Seeking and understanding our individual friendship circles can be a powerful contributor to our personal mental health system.

One analogy which can be useful is comparing our behavior in a book store with what one might do in  their individual Friend Store whether shopping for a book or a friend.   Another possibility to consider is what we each write on our personal billboard as we offer ourselves to others as bringing value into a friendship.  

If we are fortunate with our friendships we encourage ourselves and others to adapt to the life changes that are taking place within ourselves and others.  Much of our emotional life is finding healthy ways to handle the frequent changes that we and others make with our daily choices. 

Making healthy changes in self tends to be one of the most difficult challenges we humans have.   Some may choose to change their friends or seek new friends as our life path varies.    We can build historical friends of many years if we accept that "we do not have to change friends when we accept that our current friends are also changing - just like us." 

As humans we tend to believe that how we see the choices of living and relating to other people tend to be correct and good.   Persons who have a different viewpoint from ours may be seen as misinformed, untruthful or ignorant.   We may be called to correct the errors of other viewpoints with our family and friends by imposing our specific beliefs and values.  We can easily believe that we are helping another person when we impose the opportunity to see 'the truth' as we see it.  

Wellness Psychology's foundation of personal power is that each of us has many individual life choices.  In so many ways the type of life path we choose for ourselves is a result of the internal and external relationship choices we make. 

Structuring the personal 'spices' we bring into our life both internally and externally can allow better understanding of our relations with self and others. Comparing and contrasting our relationship choices with the daily spices we make for food preferences can provide valuable insight into our personal emotions, values, beliefs and behavior.  

Many individuals can verbalize that they do have the personal power to frame and reframe their own attitudes, feelings and behaviors.   The human challenge seems to come in making the decision to IMPLEMENT their personal choices.   

Without taking action, words remain words.  Possibilities remain possibilities.  Can we support and encourage ourselves along with family and friends to implement actions to reframe our/their attitudes, feelings and behaviors that tend to bring us and them more happiness?