Welcome to the Living with Empathy Podcast: a podcast that gets us thinking about how we feel towards ourselves and others. I’m your host, Miriam Otero.

 

















<figure class="
sqs-block-image-figure
intrinsic
">
















</figure>









 

Hi everyone! Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s a bit more on the painful side that nearly everyone I know has gone through at one point or another. Many of us can probably look back to the first time this happened, usually around middle school or high school, but for some reason, it hurts much more as an adult.

What am I talking about?

Going through a friendship breakup.

Now, this episode is really focused on friendships that end on not so good terms. Sure, we’ve all had friendships that naturally fade over time. You get busy, they get busy, and before you know it, you’re catching up for the first time in 10 years at a mutual friend’s wedding. Here, I’ll be talking about those friendships that sound more like a Taylor Swift song. Even if there isn’t necessarily bad blood between you, there’s tension and there’s no way to mend the friendship for the foreseeable future. 

Like I said, I know plenty of people who have personally gone through this. In fact, I went through one of these myself with the only person in my life I ever considered a best friend. Don’t get me wrong, I have many dear friends and a great support system, but that sisterly bond that I have with my younger sisters was only matched by this friend. She was like the older sister I never had.  

And it never occurred to me that there would come a time where we wouldn’t be friends anymore and yet, here we are. It’s been long enough now to where the many years that have passed between then and now have healed the wounds, as cliché as that sounds, but it’s also helped me to look back on everything through a more objective lens. 

There’s a saying that goes: 

“People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.”

And as corny as it may sound, this saying gave me a framework for how to mourn the loss of my friendship, learn and grow from it, and get to a place where I feel nothing but gratitude for the time that we had. So today, I’m going to share that four step framework with you. 

How to Get Over a Friend Breakup

Step 1: Give yourself time to grieve.

As with any loss, it’s important to give yourself the time you need to mourn it. We all have different ways of coping with this. I know for me personally, in the past this looked like shrugging it off as “everything happens for a reason” and then prioritizing more positive things in my life. Very Captain America in Avengers Endgame to look at the bright side of things and say it’s ok. 

When I went through my own friendship breakup, I had several major shifts going on at once, so I just focused on dealing with those and on staying as present as possible. So I never quite came to terms with my friendship ending until about eight months later. And it took me another year after THAT to fully dive into the feelings of it and release what was left. 

This is going to look different for everyone, but just allowing the feelings to come up and dealing with them in healthy ways, helps to slowly clear away the sadness of it. Most of the time, the sadness we feel is from the space that person leaves behind and the person we felt like when we were with them. 

You don’t need to rush the process of trying to fill that space with someone new. Give yourself the time to acknowledge what it is you miss about the friendship. Cry if you need to. Sitting with the emotions to work through them is always a good place to start.

Step 2: What was your contribution to the finale?

One of the most helpful action steps in any process is empowering ourselves. In this situation, it’s empowering yourself with the knowledge of what your contribution was to the ending of this relationship. This doesn’t mean finding something to blame yourself for, but taking an honest evaluation of how things played out and what your role in it was.

In my own situation, it came down to a lack of understanding and compassion on my part. It’s as simple as that. The dynamic we had throughout our decade long friendship was a sister-like bond, but we had never weathered any of life’s greatest challenges together. 

She always looked out for me and I was always there for her, but in her moment of greatest need, I didn’t understand the type of support and compassion that she needed. I was in denial of this for the first year after we stopped talking, but in the second year when the feelings had faded, I finally understood. 

How did I get there? Well, part of it is just getting past that denial stage.

In the denial stage, you’re still clinging on to what was and sometimes, the anger of it all falling apart. We can fall into the trap of the blame game, pointing fingers at what the other person did wrong, to try to feel above the drama. 

Once that fades and  you start getting to more of a place of love and missing that person, you naturally start to question what went wrong and that’s when you’re more willing to take an honest look at your role in it. Shame often plays a role in us not wanting to take stock of where we messed up, but if you’re willing to look shame in the face, the answer that you seek will be right there in front of you.

Step 3: Is there anything to learn from it?

Whenever there are still difficult feelings around a situation, it’s hard to look at it as a lesson, but every challenge in life is. What can you take from this moment in order to grow into a more well-rounded human being? Was this situation one you find yourself in regularly or was it your first time confronting this type of thing?

I learned that you never really know what your perspective is on something until you’re put into that situation. I learned that there are times when being the straightforward friend who just tells it like it is doesn’t have to be the only card I play when a friend needs some advice. Yeah, I finally learned the hard way what people have been saying about Sagittarius’s not having a filter. 

Sometimes support means being there to listen or being a shoulder to cry on and that it’s still enough. It’s supporting your friend how they need to be supported and not the way you think is best.

Step 4: Expressing Gratitude

When you finally get to a place where you’ve worked through the shame, have taken ownership of your role in the situation, and can honestly say you learned something about your interactions with others from it, then you can arrive at a place of gratitude. 

Gratitude means asking yourself: How was my life made better from having had this person in my life? Even though you two aren’t friends anymore, the love that you had for that person doesn’t have to go away. You can still wish them well and send them good thoughts. It means remembering the good that came from your friendship and knowing how much you’ve grown because of it. 

A couple of years ago, I found myself on a weeklong backpacking trip in the American Southwest desert with some quiet time out on top of a mesa. And as I sat there, I pulled out a notebook and wrote my friend a letter that I never ended up sending. 

In it, I thanked her for the years of friendship she had given me. I’d never known what it meant to have a best friend until I met her. 

The first time we met, she was confident, assertive, and she spoke her mind. She was intelligent and well-read, in a way that was worldly and cool. She drank tons of coffee, smoked cigarettes, marched to the beat of her own drum, and was unapologetic about it. We couldn’t have been more different, yet the kinship we shared said otherwise. We could spend hours at a coffee shop, laughing until we cried and almost peed.

She modeled what I had always hoped I’d be some day and when our friendship was over, I was sad to not have her in my life anymore. 

But years later, I also realized something else: I finally became that which she exemplified so well. 

“People come int