How do you deal with an ending friendship! It is a divorce of some kind. Strangely, it is a topic that is rarely discussed as a major life transition or loss. Despite that we don’t seek therapy or coaching for it. Often even other friends or people we love, do not acknowledge it, and the support we get may be a little lukewarm for some of us.
So how do we survive and deal with an ending friendship?
How to deal with an ending friendship?
Transcript:
Friendship divorce. It’s super interesting that people go to NLP training or coaching or whatever for the relationship that is the significant other they’re divorcing. People seek therapy and coaching for their relationship with their children. God knows people seek coaching and therapy with the relationship they once had with their parents. Maybe still have with their parents. And one thing that people very rarely seek coaching or treatment for is friendship.
The loss of a friend, either through death, or the friendship ending in a fight, or a friendship ending like any relationship. It’s run its course, growing apart, all those different things.
And it’s interesting to me how this friendship loss is a frequent discussion in the NLP training courses that I do around the world, regardless if it’s here in Mexico or LA or Miami and San Diego, Boston, Bali, or Amsterdam. All the places I typically train people, they mention this all the time, but people won’t pay to see someone.
There’s this barrier. We speak of love and this great relationship when we have a friend. My sister, my brother, you know, my brother from another mother, my sister from another mother, my soul friend. You hear all these words, but when our friendships end, we are not getting the help we need.
We may Google for books and stuff like that. But what would happen if we did treat our friendship loss like a huge life event? I’m not talking of friend of one year. I have lost friends on several occasions after ten years. And often, those relationships had a lot of love and gratitude. It just ran its course. And I sometimes saw that first, and sometimes I didn’t. And it’s hard. So treat the friendship loss like any important relationship loss. Yeah. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be sad.
You also need to approach it like any relationship ending, which means there are two ways of dealing with it.
You can deal with it like a pessimist or a victim, which means it affects all areas of my life. It affects all other friends. I expected this friendship to be for life. I am now hurt. I am now this, I am now that. You can also approach it in a different way, which is like how an optimist or a survivor codes, which means the friendship ends, but there is life after the friendship.
After the sadness and the hurt is over, and honoring that for yourself, is to go: :”Okay. what is it that I’ve learned in this relationship? What can I take into my other existing relationships and the friends I have yet to meet. What are my values in that? What is it that I want? What is it that I appreciate in a friend?
What is it in my new friend, 2.0 version, that I will now build with my other friends or the new friends I’m seeking? What is that going to be like? And to stop for a moment to honor this loss. So that you can have a mutual and joyful friendship with positive emotions, and when people share positive emotions, there is a synergy that allows the positive emotions to be more positive.
And so what is it that you are going to seek? And honor it like that. And why not? You could seek a coach for this loss. And people should talk in an NLP training about how they lost an important friend to them. It may relate to topics like grief and guilt and all those different things, and it can fire the inner child in us.
And, honor it that way that I would say. See you around. Hi from Mexico.
Resources
Books
Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes – William Bridges
Videos
NLP training | Fighting with Friends
