Letting Friends go is Hard Work!

Best friendships are valuable. They help us process stress, and laugh so hard we can’t stand up straight, they know us well enough to call us on our BS with a smile that recognizes our basic goodness. Sometimes, they may fade, but always, the embers glow hot. We can ebb and flow, but they’re there for us, with us, and we’re there for them, with them, through the years. We grow old together.

And yet—sometimes, we make like Thelma and Louise and drive off a cliff of The Best Friendship Flat Planet…a planet that we could have sworn was round.

What should I do?

So, I write this one not to share wisdom. I don’t have any, other than feeling that it was time to let go and feeling my sad heart since, and feeling that perhaps it is on me, though I have let go, to reach out once more.

I’ve been somewhat sad over this one for many months, months totaling two years, and the more I feel it out, perhaps much longer. We didn’t hang out on weekends or for dinners. The friendship may have been based, in the early days, on some notion that I was cool. But while I may be fun or happening, I’m vulnerable when you get to know me, and I’m not pretentious. I look to friends for counsel, and one must bear all to receive truly helpful counsel. And so, I do.

But, over time, baring all may equate to “not being seen as cool.” And then, from there, our “best friendship” found another crutch: doing an activity together.

And when that activity stopped a few years back, so did our friendship. Now, I know this friend was busy, overwhelmingly so, yet other friends see this friend, and I don’t. I reached out 1000 times with little things about this, or that, sports, or news, or thoughts…the usual friendship stuff. And I generally received a rather short, abbreviated, guttural response…if any. It becomes a running joke. Even if I sent a paltry two words, I’d get one back. If I sent one word, I’d get a shorter word back.

And so, at some point, I forced myself to snap that twig, make a break, and let go. Otherwise, I’d become like a cloying lover, not offering space.

And if you let go into space, and the bird loves you, it returns, right?

Nothing came back.

I’ve tried to let go of my friend, and I have, and that’s been tough work, so it feels hard to reach out one last time before letting go fully. And I really don’t want to let go fully. But I realize that it may have been rather hollow or based on things that weren’t actually friendship, for many years.

Oof. This one hit hard:

“If you’ve invested in your friendship and the other person [begins to] continuously lets you down, it may be time to accept that fact and move on. You will grieve and heal as we do in time.

And may just realize that the bond you thought you had, wasn’t a bond at all. It may have been for you, but not for them.”

It hits hard because it hits true.

Come to Terms With Yourself.

We all want to live a happy life.

We spend most of our lives chasing what’s better, bigger, and more promising. And that’s beautiful. At the end of the day, we’re all seeking the same thing, which makes us true heroes and winners.

However, we don’t always know how to be happy. The problem is that we want life to be easy. We want positive outcomes that are satisfactory and promising. We don’t want what’s tough. We don’t accept what’s tough because tough is scary. It turns our reality upside down and throws us off course. It threatens our happiness.

I’ve recently realized that the biggest threat isn’t life; it’s me. It’s what I think about life and what I expect from it. I have contributed to my problems and pain more than once, but now I know that if I want to live a happier, better life, there are some things I need to come to terms with.

There are things we need to accept, no matter how bad or dissatisfying they are. If we don’t, we will always be miserable. We will only be chasing an illusion—not true happiness.

Are you willing to accept these six things?

1. Not everyone is meant to stay in our life.

It’s natural to think that every person who comes into your life will stay. I think this has been the most demanding thing I have ever had to accept in my own life. I’ve learned the hard way that some people cross our paths and keep walking. Holding on to people will only hurt us more. So, appreciate the lessons and the connection, and find your purpose without them.

2. We don’t always get what we want.

What we want is different than what is meant and good for us. I know it’s hard to believe it or even think about it, but coming to terms with this truth can save us a lot of pain. The only thing we can do is take advantage of every single opportunity that comes our way. We should be grateful for what we have instead of wishing things were different.

3. You will make mistakes.

Making mistakes is inevitable; everyone, including you, will make them. The problem isn’t about making them, though. It’s about how we look at them. We tend to give ourselves such a tough time for making the wrong choices, and we must stop. Making mistakes is part of learning and growing. We can’t tell what’s right and wrong if we don’t go through both.

4. People won’t always do for you as you do for them.

Realizing that I can’t control other people’s loyalty and behavior has set me free and made me feel much better (and ultimately happier). When I treat someone a certain way, I don’t expect them to treat me the same. We have different characters, personalities, upbringings, and love languages, so it’s crazy to think someone will do for me as I do for them.

5. Things change.

Always. If we want life to get better, we must understand that life is constantly moving. I know how safe and predictable certainty is, but I also know how wonderful “the new” is. Walk with life, not against it, even if it feels scary or messy.

6. Yourself.

Do you accept yourself as you are? Do you often forgive yourself and practice positive self-talk? Do you believe in yourself? Are you kind to yourself? How do you deal with your inner critic? Before coming to terms with anything in life, we must come to terms with who we are. We must love ourselves unconditionally and become our own friend—not enemy.

What else would you add to this list? What do you need to come to terms with?

AUTHOR: ELYANE S. YOUSSEF

Rejection Trauma And Childhood Wounds.

I could feel a fiery line on the left side of my chest, the burning heat rising just below my collarbone. The fire had taken over my body where my heart belonged. Below it, my stomach sank into a hollow blackness.

My body was now divided into two, and where the flesh in the middle should be, I could no longer find my skin, only the dense sensation of bones.

It was happening again: the anxiety, the disconnection from myself, the panic, the shame, the pain. Before pulling away from the curb, his last words were, “I’d love to see you again.”

In the weeks of getting to know one another, our rhythm was back-and-forth banter: fun, intelligent, flirty exchanges with instant, enthusiastic, charming, and amusing replies. I thought we couldn’t get enough of one another (I thought) as I dashed off another round of communication with a smile on my face.

No response.

I busied myself: with dishes, other texts, scrolling Facebook, responding to emails, posting to Instagram, phone calls, cleaning, and sleeping.

Silence.

I talked myself out of assigning meaning to nothing. Yet, opening the text screen over coffee the following day, nothing became something. I was being ghosted, and I would never hear from him again. I could feel the familiar sensations of anxiety taking over, blooming into a panic. Thoughts ran faster, and with the pitch of my voice rising, I disconnected from my body, now the holder of unbearable pain. Pain that couldn’t be acknowledged, even as I felt cleaved in half.

Connections are about entering a vulnerable space, presenting our hearts to nurture and foster a relationship that might blossom. What happens when they abruptly go away? How do we grieve someone when we aren’t allowed to grieve? When isn’t their loss considered “real?”

Where connections fulfill us, trauma shutters us. We have socially defined boxes of what is acceptable to feel sad or upset about, and the end of a relationship that’s not yet been determined is not one of them; it is not honored as a process or even seen as an event. We are told we cannot feel.

We hold no space for being ghosted by an editor, a lover, or a friend. It’s a non-event to be blocked on Facebook, especially by someone we didn’t even know we had wronged. We are to feel nothing.

We laugh, attune, connect, and share space, food, time, and texts. We hold hopes for the future and share the confidences of the past. Yet when we are ghosted or sent texts that abruptly say, “This isn’t working out, good luck!” we are expected to ignore it. To meet someone else, have a glass of wine, dance it off, go shopping, work out, stay busy, move on to other opportunities and people—never mention this time, this connection, or this person again. We are to block and delete. Turn off the emotions and close the open space.

It’s reinforced so often by others that we strengthen it to ourselves—saying mantras in the mirror to shut off our feelings, working on our “mindset,” and attempting to “stay positive”—rather than sitting in our feelings about being shut down, rejected, or ghosted.

I felt like I might break in half, as I told myself I was “overreacting,” feeling “too much,” and being “ridiculous.” I believed they would go away if I could keep and suppress the feelings. Instead, with a lack of self-compassion swirling through my veins, the pain became visceral, lighting up the same pain receptors as if I were suffering a physical injury. My body burned, the back of my neck searing with heat, a column of pain that proceeded down to my mid-back. The feelings felt familiar, having been with me since my youth. My childhood was not one of emotional wealth. Our emotions would be muted and restrained rather than held, heard, and honored.

Not being seen, heard, and held for who we are is a trauma. My parents loved me but did not have the capacity, the skillsets, or the cultural support to honor their children’s emotions by looking us in the eye, acknowledging our feelings, or attaching words to the sensations in our bodies. It’s just not how things were done then.

Instead, if noises were attached to our emotions, we were silenced or sent away lest it bothered my father’s ears. I learned to hold the feelings in my body—not let them leak out. I wanted to be loved, and being loved meant I could never be “too much.”

Trauma isn’t about what happened; it’s how we learn to respond to it.

As children, we develop coping mechanisms where we cannot acknowledge, discuss or feel pain. The only way to not feel what we cannot process is to close off, shut off, disconnect, and pretend. In this, we choose acceptance over authenticity.

The culture was now acting as my father—my grief was bothering its ears.

I chose the exact coping mechanism; this wasn’t to earn my parents’ approval but that of my friends and date and to adhere to what was socially expected of me. Rejection trauma is an unseen and undiscussed phenomenon. It triggers coping mechanisms from our past, and we shame ourselves for having human responses to inhumane things.

It hurts. The trauma of rejection can suck it.

We are not alone in our feelings. Our bodies and hearts are in pain, and our feelings of rejection, sadness, and grief are genuine and legitimate. We can feel the fire in our chest, the pit in our stomach, and the grief bloom within. We can hold these in our body, express them from our soul and feel ourselves soften into the experience of pain.

We can share our pain with friends who can hear it and have an emotional outlet to feel safe and processed. We can talk about our pain in terms of our feelings and not what someone did to cause them. We can develop the skillset to know how to process our emotions. We can feel what we weren’t allowed to think as children. We can normalize grief for the loss of insignificant things, invisible things, ghosting, and abandonment.

We can feel it, name it and own it. We need to feel it, no matter what we learn to do as children or what we are told by our friends or repeat to ourselves as mantras. May our traumas disappear faster than our ghosts.

AUTHOR: JANIS ISAMAN