How To Heal From a Friendship Breakup #AskATherapist

How To Heal From a Friendship Breakup #AskATherapist //

Have you and a friend broken up and now you're left wondering how to heal from a friendship breakup? Ending a friendship or losing a best friend can be really hard. Watch this video for my best tips on surviving a friendship breakup or getting over a friend breakup.

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[paradisecityable]

I feel like friendship breakups is more devastating than a romantic breakup

[zee-tglc]

the way she passes by me as if we’re strangers now makes me so sad

[glaciergirlv]

Speaking as someone who has literally talked herself down from more than one suicide attempt by reminding herself of her friends, losing a friend is devastating.

[jeansapphire]

What hurts even more is that they made me realize I'm the problem so I apologized to them without even getting an apology from them.

[aelfrey]

I have repeatedly lost best friends throughout my life, and navigating whether i'm the common denominator or i'm just attracted to souls that aren't healthy for me is really hard

[ambmae]

My realization was that my friend had never been a good friend. We were besties from age 11-22 and in-between the good there were multiple instances of betrayal. Having grown up with a culture of being "Christlike" and forgiving 70x7 times I always felt like I had to keep enduring bad behavior. I wish I could go back and tell younger me that I could still be Christlike without subjecting myself to all that crap. Now, I'm so careful to allow my kids space to let go of unkind friends.

[Gibbon]

Recently lost a close friend. Trust really can be impossible to repair once it's been shattered.

I'm sad I lost them. its true what you say -- you can forgive someone and atill cut them out. I'm just sad that they've made up a villainous version of me that's going to live in their head long after I've moved on.

[lisam]

I had a very close friend who had been through so much with me. We were friends, our husbands were friends, we would do things together as friends, as couples, as families (with kids) and it was wonderful. When she and her husband decided to get a divorce, she basically divorced me as well. She sent me a short letter telling me that she was divorcing her husband and I never heard from her again. I can logically understand her needing a clean start in her life, but emotionally it still hurts to this day that I was just dropped like that.

[Lina_TheAnimeArtist]

You know this hurts on so many levels... so about the last close friend I had (a friendship of 8 years) when things ended between us, the thing I was mostly in awe of was how easy, quickly, and irrevocably such bonds could be broken. Like one day it happened and that was it. This was 4 years ago, and even though I got to meet a bunch of new people; it just never felt the same, like inside of me, I just couldn't emotionally invest in any more human being the way I did with that one. Like a switch has been turned off internally and eternally after that...

[LenaKridle]

This was a perfectly timed episode. I lost two friendships, and I've been looking for a way to grieve and go through the losses. This really helped alot, Thank You.

[ericpellizzari]

Standing up for myself is what caused the issue.

[kimmontenegro]

I've come to the hard realization that many that I thought were friends were acquaintances at best. Reframing this reality made the 'break up' more of a learning experience. Still painful but moving forward, will not consider anyone who does not put in mutual effort, a friend.

[nuttypurrfessor]

I had a friend breakup recently and it hurt like hell but I knew it was time for both of us to move on :( there was no betrayal, things ended amicably, we still wish each other the best on our way, we just are leading completely different lives now and need to focus on our own stuff. If you're in the same boat, I know it's hard, but you can let go.

[kristainmccluskey]

Losing my friends has hurt more than ending romantic relationships

[cheshiredeimos]

I was my best friend's rock through a cascade of hardships, psychological, emotional, and financial. Last year I found out I was sick, really sick. And when I told my friend, she ghosted me. Logically I knew it wasn't personal, she was dealing with yet another episode of anxiety, perhaps even caused by my illness. But also logically I was tired of being the rock when just this once i needed someone to lean on.
I'm healthy now, and I don't hate my friend, but there is no trust. I'm open to working on it, but my condition is that she has to put in the effort. She has to call, she has to make plans. I can't do all the work to maintain our friendship.

[trinaq]

Thanks so much for these tips. It's hard to move past a friendship breakup, especially if you have a lot of fond memories, but sometimes people grow and evolve, and aren't as close as they used to be.

[PandaTheGreen]

During the pandemic I became insanely close to someone I only knew superficially before that. We definitely became best friends and shared pretty much everything. When life returned to normal I barely heard anything from her and realised she never really cared, she probably was just bored and moved on as soon as she had other things to do or people to hang out with

[lybbilabeau]

Question to piggy back on this episode: what if the reason for your “friend breakup” is something that you did (or the other person perceived that you did) but they refused to explain to you what they were upset with so there really wasn’t any way for you to take ownership and apologize?

[bdflatlander]

I recently ended a friendship that lasted over 40 years after multiple acts of betrayal on their part.

It got to the point where his word meant nothing to me anymore and I couldn’t trust anything he said. Not a good basis for a friendship anymore.

I have zero interest in trying to resurrect this friendship. It is now officially in the past and that’s where it will stay.

[bitchenboutique]

He “dumped” me first. He didn’t speak to me for a year. Then he showed up again and I was thrilled to have him back. After a couple months of him using my shoulder to cry on while he dealt with a breakup, he stopped speaking to me again. I recognized the weird pattern of “punishment” and I decided it was time for me to set a strong boundary. It made him rageful, which only cemented my belief that I made the right decision.

I miss what we had. When we weren’t a toxic mess, we were great. He brought a lot of joy into my life and I thought I did the same for him. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. The way he was talking that last day, I was just the worst… but that made no sense. It was either true or he was saying it to hurt me, and either way it was over.

One thing I can say that was very helpful for me that might help others, to jump off of what you said about mourning the loss… during the year when he wasn’t speaking to me, I believed it was over forever and I didn’t know WHY. He was just GONE. And it hurt terribly. But I had also lost my mother the year before and losing her didn’t hurt as bad as losing him did… because I had mourned the loss of her and wasn’t trying to fix it or make sense of it. So I decided to think of him as dead, in the sense that he was just as “gone” as she was, and I found a guided grief meditation and sat by myself for a couple hours and it basically took me through a virtual funeral for him. It walked me through the process of grieving him, and when it was over, I felt so much lighter. Not only from the endorphins from that good cry, but because I had thanked him for everything he had given me and all the ways my life was better because I had known him, and I let him go.

It might take a few tries, but it’s really helpful!