How to Process a Friendship Breakup

Part 2 of the friendship series

Lately, I’ve been fascinated with the topic of friendship. What we often assume to be something we are all born natural experts in, maintaining good friendships is a skill many of us have to learn. And with that, we must also learn how to start and let go of friendships. But these lessons, unless sought after are hard to come across. Because in Western society, friendship is looked at as secondary to romantic relationships. We learn how to date, we learn how to handle a breakup, we learn how to be good partners. Yet friendship can often hold a more important role in our lives, good friends being there before and after partners, yet many go a lifetime never bringing these skills into conscious practice.

Not many things are certain in life. But one certainty is that we all go through friendship problems. We all experience the pain and loss of losing a close friend. And at the end of the day, no matter how many communication skills we’ve built and how much we’ve flexed our friendship muscles, we will still experience the grief of letting go of a friend. Because that’s what it means to be human.

Just last month I had not one, but an entire group of friends break up with me in a way that made me feel simultaneous relief, betrayal, grief, and like the ground was ripped from beneath my feet. It was my first time being broken up with by multiple people at once, but it’s not the first time I’ve felt these feelings over friendship. In these moments, it is easy to feel like we did something wrong, and shoulder 100% of the blame. It’s instinctual to jump into reactivity mode and want to scream our opinions and righteousness at those who caused us pain. It’s easy to want to fix things and jump into repair mode or to allow the ego to take over and tell ourselves we are better than them. Without knowing how to process a friendship ending, the mind will spiral over and over with thoughts, theories, and grief about what is wrong with us.

But in these moments of grief and pain, we must realize it’s not our feelings that are a problem. They are not a burden to be erased or fixed. We all go through this pain almost inevitably in our lives. We cannot choose to erase ourselves from the human experience or erase the feelings of grief that come with the loss of a person who is still alive. But what we can do, is choose to move through the feelings the best we can in a way that teaches us, rather than spiralling into past patterns of self-loathing and hate.

At the end of the day, we must reframe our feelings into something not to be erased or ignored as an inconvenience, but as a treasure chest of self-discovery waiting to be unlocked.