Grieving When a Friendship Ends
Having a friendship end, but both people are still living, is one of those losses that nobody really talks about. No one sends you flowers because you lost touch with someone who used to be really important in your life over the years. No one brings you dinner when a fight over politics means you’re not friends any longer. No one sends a card when a friend suddenly stops texting or calling, and you don’t know what you’ve done. It can be such a real and painful loss, but also so lonely when it goes unacknowledged. We call this type of loss disenfranchised grief.
This is a real loss
Friendships are some of our most important and valued human relationships. Friendships can give us not only companionship, but also identity, belonging, and history. Sometimes we are closer with friends than with family members. So when a friendship ends, whether through a slow fade, a dramatic falling out, or a one-sided goodbye, it is a true loss. So, it makes sense that this is something we grieve. If the person you’re grieving is still living, others often don’t recognize that loss.
Why it can feel so complicated
We often don’t publicly announce the end of a friendship, and so we are less likely to receive support from other people. There’s no funeral, no outreach. It’s the end of something significant, but there’s no tangible marker.
Other people may not understand the significance of the loss. They may not understand the depth of your relationship or the history you share. They may have no idea of the hurt you are feeling. So they’ll suggest that it would be easy to make new friends, problem solved. But you know that friends aren’t easily interchangeable.
There may be more to your grief than just the loss of your friend as a person. You may also be grieving who you were in that friendship, the loss of shared memories, or the loss of who they were in the role they played in your friendship. When the person you’d normally go to to talk about the loss is the very person you’ve lost, it can feel like a gut punch.
There can be a lot of conflicting and complicated emotions that go along with this sort of loss. You may feel angry at yourself or your friend for how things ended. You may feel guilt for the part you played in the relationship’s demise. You may feel relief (and then guilt for feeling relieved) when you’ve finally made the tough decision to cut ties with a friend who you can’t have in your life any longer. All of this can accompany the expected sadness of grief. This is all normal, but it can feel messy and difficult.
How this kind of grief shows up
The grief of losing a friend can show up in many ways. Usually, we miss their companionship and conversations. You think of them on their birthday or on yours, and you remember the times you shared together. You can grieve the loss of inside jokes that only the two of you understand. You might find yourself trying to avoid places you used to frequent together or places where you might run into them again. You can find yourself emotional when you think, “I’ve got to tell them this!” and then realize that you can’t, or you see something that might have been the perfect gift or a reminder of them. You might feel left out when you hear about major life events for them that don’t include you anymore or when the friend group coalesces around them instead of you. These are all things that are perfectly normal to experience and feel a full array of emotions about. You’re not overreacting to have feelings here.
Some ideas to help
It sounds simple, but it can really help to name what you’re feeling as grief. After naming it, talk to someone about it, whether that’s to a family member, another friend, or a professional. Sometimes we feel embarrassed or ashamed about friendships that have gone awry, so we tend to keep these losses to ourselves. Grief needs a witness, and this type of grief is no exception.
Let yourself feel your emotions with no rush to get over it. It can be tempting to think, “I only knew her for a few years, and we weren’t family, so I’m probably overreacting.” Pushing down our true emotions is never helpful, and grief, especially, will keep tapping you on the shoulder to remind you it’s there if you don’t give it space to heal.
Honor what the friendship meant to you, even if it ended badly. This could look like journaling or writing a letter you’ll never send. It could be a playlist of songs or a photo album. This is very individual and can be as simple or as involved as you would like.
Release the pressure to keep analyzing what went wrong. Especially when friendships end abruptly, our natural instinct is to make sense of what happened. Sometimes it is clear, and other times we are left with more questions than answers. It can take a lot of forgiveness, both of our former friend and of ourselves.
It can be helpful to learn what we can from our relationships so we can be honest with ourselves and make amends if possible, or change going forward. But sometimes a friendship ends, and there’s no clear direction on what you could or should have done differently. That can be a painful reality to face, but sometimes we have to learn to accept it so we don’t torture ourselves trying to find answers that will never surface. If you need help working toward this, consider working with a grief specialist like me. The link to set up a free consultation is HERE.
Grieving a friendship is painful, and can feel messy when the relationship ends in an unresolved way. Remember that even if your former friend hurt you and you can never feel the same way about them, grieving a friendship is an act of honoring how much it mattered.
