Friendship Breakups Can Be Painful, so It’s Important to Grieve Them
Photo by Andrea Tummons via Unsplash
Breaking up is hard! While most of our attention is on romantic breakups, friendship divorce can be just as emotionally distressing and rock us to the core, pushing against the dam surrounding our self-worth, breaking our hearts, and leaving us confused, lonely, angry, hurt, powerless, and grieving.
While the vast majority of us have had friendships end, we sometimes struggle to understand or know how to best recover from the devastation. With partners, there’s usually a basic understanding of why the relationship is ending: infidelity, ongoing conflicts, different life paths, a loss of love, or irreconcilable differences. Yet when it comes to friendship breakups, I’ve noticed we rarely have the download on what happened, and in the immediate aftermath, it feels like the most important piece of information.
At our core, there is an evolutionary pull toward friendship for protection, safety, and support. Most of us know friendship is an invaluable asset in our lives and the research supports this: Healthy relationships are the strongest predictor of happiness in old age. Why is navigating a friendship breakup different than a relationship break up? How can you cope with a loss that didn’t have a clear end to it?
Friendship Breakups Hit Different
We rarely recognize that the risk of losing friendship is more likely to happen than breaking up with a partner, believing sometimes that once someone is a friend, they are always a friend. The reality is that data shows that friendships dissipate significantly across your life and that we all lose friends. Some estimates show that 70% of close friendships dissolve after 7 years – the most common reasons include arguments over money, moving away, general lifestyle changes, or losing touch, which I like to call “The Great Fizzle.”
The reality is that friendship – just like a romantic relationship – is a choice, one that requires mutual consent, investment, and agreement to continue. Once one person decides they no longer want to participate, the play is over. Unlike relationship breakups, in friendship breakups there are no divorce lawyers, splitting of assets, custody battles, moving out, or family and friends to intervene. Sometimes there’s just a blocked phone number and a slow drift. Then you’re left in the dark about understanding what happened, which can lead to an even longer, more confusing grieving period. So, how do we cope with the inevitable?
In the Beginning, Start With a HUG
In the immediate aftermath of a friendship breakup we can be inundated by emotions. Naturally, when we don’t understand, anticipate, or have information, our emotional brain fires up and tries to fill in the gaps. Think of this type of loss as cognitive dissonance, a state of internal conflict that creates confusion, pain, and discomfort without a clear origin of the conflict.
Our brain attempts to quell the emotional storm by creating stories to help provide grounding, a sense of certainty and understanding. I’ve seen this show up in a number of ways:
Filling in the gap with shame stories, the beliefs you have about what is wrong with you at the core, or a myriad of other unhelpful guesses and assessments.
Reviewing historic interactions, what you might have said or done, how the friend appeared to you, etc.
Reaching out to the friend with questions, demands, requests.
Processing and sharing your story with many other people in an effort to get an outside perspective, inviting in feedback about all the negative traits that make you a bad friend.
Sitting in denial, ignoring your own needs, feeding anger and seeking revenge, numbing out, or seeking solace in alternative ways.
To cope with this flood of emotions, I always recommend starting with a HUG – Honor your feelings, Unplug from the distractions, and Grieve the loss.
Honor Your Feelings
When we get lost in resentment and anger, hurt and self-loathing, we lead ourselves to the hazards of depression, isolation, shame, anxiety, denial, and stagnation. We don’t give ourselves the opportunity to take an honest look from a place of integrity, accountability, and understanding, nor towards a place of gratitude and acceptance.
Honor your feelings and experience. Name what you are feeling in the gigantic mix of emotions and what each emotion is connected to in the experience. For example, if you are feeling humiliated, is that connected to fears of how others will perceive you as a valued friend worth keeping, or maybe related to the rejection itself, or something else? Be clear about the details of what you experienced without inflating them. Know that trying to ignore your pain will only intensify it in the long run. Take care of your body and your daily needs. Respect your confusion and desire to better understand and recognize that as part of your emotional experience.
Unplug From the Distractions
Give yourself the space that you need to process the pain and hurt by reducing your workload (if you can) or skipping an event if you’re not feeling up for it. You can set up as much or as little time as you want to process this experience, and try to stick with it. If you can give yourself 10 minutes a day to think about the breakup and process it, carve that time out. If thoughts come up outside of that time, jot them down and come back to them at your designated time. Try not to do this before bed — thinking about a major stressor before bed can rob you of restoration.
Grieve the Loss
Do what you do when someone dies: honor the loss, acknowledge how valuable and important the friendship or person was in your life, cry, and gather your support system. When someone dies, we may yell to the sky, “WHY?” We experience the abandonment and pain that comes with that experience.
That suffering teaches us that the truth is, life doesn’t always make sense, and isn’t always fair or equitable. Our hearts are often misunderstood or not fed in the ways we deserve, and accepting this is one of the biggest challenges (and payoffs) of grief.
Remind yourself that one person’s rejection of you isn’t proof that you are a bad or unlovable person. Instead of focusing on the “why” in the immediate aftermath, try to save your understanding of the why for when you have the intellectual capacity to think with a clear head. The truth is, we will likely never fully understand the “truth” of why or have clarity we are seeking. Having some explanation, understanding, or reasons will not resolve the pain. We will learn to grow around the pain, and, in the immediate aftermath of a loss, we need comfort and care, validation and support.
After the Dust Settles
In Japan, there’s a practice called kintsukuroi, where potters repair broken vases with gold, as the cracks and breaks are seen as an integral part of the object’s history which is to be honored. Once you are able to mitigate the tidal wave of emotions and your sense of wholeness feels a bit more intact, you can begin to pour gold into yourself.
Once our prefrontal cortex is back on-line after the amygdala storm, we can use that to our advantage, if we choose to do so. Here are some considerations of the acceptance process to keep in mind:
Reframe the story.
Absent the story from another, offer yourself a story that is helpful, self-compassionate and acknowledges that you have a piece, but not the whole pie as to why the relationship ended. When we don’t know someone else’s story, we sometimes neglect to acknowledge that others have their own histories, worries, values, hang-ups, needs (often not expressed), and can forget that it’s not all about us.Learning to reframe and build a story that is helpful to us not only helps with the grieving process, it can help us to retain our will to continue to apply ourselves to new relationships, replenish our trust and faith in seeking new friendships, and may be a growth opportunity to take stock of how we engage in friendship.
Look at the facts.
Hold a mirror up and ask yourself if you have any areas for improvement when it comes to friendship. Did you invest in the friendship equally in terms of time, energy, money? Were you honest about your own needs and value those in the relationship? What were conflicts you might have ignored or not addressed? Did you take the time to download enough with the person on how the friendship was going, taking stock of how the other person was feeling/connecting to you? If you were not honest about your feedback in this relationship, how would you like to address future relationships?Be mindful of unhelpful narratives.
We can be tempted to tell ourselves absolutes in order to justify actions or cope with painful experiences. Some unhelpful narratives can be easy to see when you observe absolute language (language that idealizes or devalues a relationship).For example, you might say a person was never a true friend because a true friend would never do this. You might say, I don’t owe that person anything because they were “toxic”. When you combine a justification with an overgeneralization, you disempower yourself from having an honest relationship with yourself and narrow your own opportunities for growth.
Instead, try shifting to both/and language. For example, I both cared about this person and enjoyed many times with them, and they also hurt me.
Manage your expectations for the future.
Not all friendships last a lifetime. Some are in our lives for a day, a week, a few months, a few years, and some a few decades. We never know how long we will have with someone and to place an expectation on yourself that if you were a good friend or lovable, that all people should stick by you forever, is wholly unrealistic.I also suggest that my clients don’t wait until the end of a friendship to review the relationship. Try and touch base with your friends and see how things are going between you both instead of assuming that all is well.
Focus on gratitude.
Not all of us have been blessed with meaningful relationships in our lives. Whether the person was in your life for a short season or a decade, you are in pain because it mattered to you. Focus on the blessing of having loving feelings, connection, beautiful memories and cherished moments.
Invest in the relationships you do have and invest in yourself. We can use endings as an opportunity for growth and to create room for new people in our lives, rather than learning to give up. We can take away the many blessings of each person we have come into contact with and how they have helped to shape who we are today.
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