Office Ours: Friendship Breakups (Part 2: Ghosting, Slow Fades & the Breakup Talk)

I'm not going to bury the lead here. There is no one right way to end a friendship, but there is a wrong one. And that's exactly what we're talking about today on Two Peace On a Pod Office Hours in part two of our series on friendship breakups. So settle in and get comfortable because we are diving into even more stories, science, and secrets of friendship. I'm Dr. Miriam and this is Two Peace On a Pod Office Hours. Welcome to Two Peace On a Pod. It is time for part two of our office hour series on friendship breakups. And honestly, your reception to part one was incredible. It was actually quick moving. The post that we had shared in advance was some of our most shared posts yet and not only that, hearing from you in our Q&As, in the comments, you slid into our DMs. I received so many wonderful and beautiful emails from you about your experiences of friendship breakups, about your questions, about the stories, and the secrets that you have about friendships that you have loved and lost. And part of the reason why that was so incredibly moving and meaningful is not only because I'm always learning from you, but it also shows that we are in the process of changing conversations and in creating community. And that feels incredibly special. So if you have not yet listened to that first episode, pause right here right now as much as I want you to stay with me, go back and listen to it because it really does cover so much incredible and important groundwork. So you're going to want to tune into that because you'll learn things like why friendship breakups are so painful and why they actually hurt even more than romantic breakups for many of us. You'll learn the most common reasons why most friendships end and why it's so important to stop playing the blind game. And also why this experience feels so incredibly isolating even though it is so very common. And we also wrap that up with four of the friendship breakup myths that you need to stop believing in order not only to stop overthinking, but to move forward with more clarity. And that's exactly what we're going to be talking about today. How we can actually move forward and move the needle when it comes to friendship breakups. So in today's episode, we're getting into the five questions that you need to ask yourself before deciding if it is really time to end a friendship. We'll also go over the four ways that our friendships actually end. So how we can actually end our friendships. And I, yes, I will share the one strategy I basically never recommend. We'll talk a little bit about what closure really looks like after a friendship break up and whether you actually need it. And of course, we're going to talk a little bit about the coping piece, how you can cope when you are going through a friendship breakup. Regardless by the way, if you are the one who has ended the friendship or if this was something that you never saw coming and never wanted for yourself. Okay, so let's get started. And let me just say to kick things off, I want to talk a little bit about when we should actually end our friendships. Because this is one of the questions that I think is most important for us to be talking about. And also, it's one of the most important questions that we can ask ourselves. And this question is so important for a few key reasons. I mean, I get it. The decision of whether to end a friendship can feel so consequential. It feels like a very wavy decision because it is. And we talked a little bit about the ambivalence that can show up in last week's episode. And that's part of why it feels so wavy and so heavy and so loaded of a decision precisely because it is. We talked a bit about the ambivalence that can show up when you are going through a friendship break up or when you've gone through a friendship break up in last week's episode and how we can feel sad and hurt and potentially anxious. But we can also feel this profound sense of relief. And what's important to know is that that ambivalence can also show up well before a friendship ends. And sometimes that ambivalence is in fact the precise reason why a friendship ends or why it needs to come to an end. And we'll talk about that in a little bit on today's episode. But what I also want you to know is that sometimes because of that ambivalence, we find it difficult to trust our own judgment and to know if this is in fact what we really want. If it is the right decision to let go of a friend or to initiate the kinds of conversations that might lead to the ending of a friendship. We can also experience ambivalence though because we fear the repercussions and we might not be sure if it's worth the discomfort, if it's worth the hard conversation, if it's worth the potential fallout in our mutual friend group. We fear the social consequences not only in terms of disrupting the routine and the flow of a friend group. We fear the social consequences in terms of our social standing in that friend group or our reputation more broadly in terms of other people. We wonder what they might think of us if we have ended a friendship or depending on how we go about ending that friendship. And that includes our potential ex-friend as well when we fear the social judgment from them. There's one thing that I think we should talk about. And it's been really interesting to see the feedback from last week's episode because, as I said, we have heard from so many of you at your stories. We've heard some incredibly meaningful feedback about your response to the episode, about some of the conversations that you have had with former friends precisely because of that episode. And I will say this, there are some people out there who think that we should never end a friendship. And so the fact that we're even having this conversation is problematic because it pushes this narrative that we should not let go of friends. We should not initiate friendship breakups. I will say that the opposite is also true. The other end of the spectrum. That there are people who think that you should just leave a friendship anytime something is not working. And I want to talk about these two polarities, these two ends of the spectrum. Knowing full well that the majority of us falls somewhere in the middle. And regardless of where you fall, it's important to know that you may very well and will likely be confronted with the ending of a friendship, with a true friendship breakup. But I do want to talk about this very briefly. This idea that friendships can feel disposable or transactional because interestingly enough, we got a little bit of, I don't want to call it pushback, the little bit of feedback on some of our recent posts. We were talking about friendship breakups and demits that exist. And there is this understandable belief that for far too many of us, we have come to a place where we treat our friendships as being disposable, as being transactional in that when something isn't going right or isn't going well, the natural and appropriate thing to do is to just cut and run, to just cut ties and end that friendship. And there's never one right way to react to online comments or pushback. But my approach was, honestly to say a little bit of your right and so yes, you are right in that I do think this is a problem. But I will say I don't think that anything I have ever put out there or any of the conversations that the majority of us in our community are having are pushing this narrative where friendships should be disposable. There's so much nuance that exists when it comes to friendships and the healthiness and the quality of our friendships, when it comes to friendship breakups. And so I really just want everyone to be mindful of this that the goal is not to say we should just cut a friend loose when things are tough or when we're not in the position to invest in that friendship with intentionality or when we're going through conflict. The idea is not to encourage more disposable friendships or more of this transactional nature. The goal is really to be a little bit more intentional because what I don't want people to do is this pattern of the pattern of cutting and running too early. And so my goal in all of this is not to suggest that when a friendship is challenging or when there's conflict that we should necessarily just cut and run or to dispose of that relationship. Because what I don't want you to do is to make decisions based out of fear that lead you to cut and run too early or that lead you to be alone because you have cut yourself off from everyone or that leads to a friendship breakup where you don't have the chance to work on yourself or to cut off a friendship that could have otherwise been salvaged. And so when we're talking about that nuance and that decision-making matrix, what I really want you to pay attention to are five questions. Five questions that you can ask yourself when you're deciding is this a friendship worth saving or am I ready to let go. Now let me be very clear. This is not a Buzzfeed quiz moment here. I'm not going to make you tally up your points at the end. There isn't a very clear winner of an answer at the end as much again as we all want for that kind of clarity. But I do think that asking yourself these questions can actually bring that clarity. You'll have this inner sense of knowing of what your answers are to these questions. I really suspect that to be true. And together that will help you get to a place where you understand not only whether this is a friendship that is worth holding on to or not, but how you actually want to go about ending it. And that's what we're going to talk about next. So let's stick with this first. Here are the five questions that you want to ask yourself. If you're just whether or not to let go of a friendship. The first question is probably the most important. And it's really interesting because this is the one that we so often overlook. It's almost the easiest to answer. This is the yes or no question. The question is, have I communicated to my friend what is actually not working for me in our friendship? Have I made my needs exceptionally clear? You would not believe the number of times that I've sat down with someone in my therapy practice. And I've heard them open up about an ongoing challenge that they have had in their friendship for weeks, for months, for maybe even years or decades. And in talking through that challenge, I hear them say things like, "I have no choice but to end this friendship because I am at the end of my rope right now, and at which end I have nothing left." And it's so painful as they're opening up about this. They talk about feelings of never feeling chosen. They don't care about me because they never initiate, because this is a friend who consistently shows up late. They don't respect me or my time, because they never ask about me. And are these upsetting friendship experiences? Absolutely. The pain, the frustration, the discomfort that people are opening up about is very, very valid. But as we start to have these discussions, I find out that they haven't actually shared what's really bothering them with their friends. And the challenge is that this is a missed opportunity, because as much as we expect this to be true, it really is not the case that friends can read our minds. And what feels overly explicit and obvious to us as something that, again, is a violation of a friendship norm or is so obviously painful or unwanted or irritating, our friends don't always know. They don't necessarily have the same self-awareness that we wish they did in terms of their own behavior. And they also don't necessarily have that other oriented awareness of how we feel. Sometimes they might know it's bothersome or irritating, but they don't necessarily know the extent to which it bothers us. Or they know it's bothersome, they know it's an unwanted pattern, but they don't actually know what else would be helpful. And so the challenge is then that they worry about bringing it up, that it will rock the solid foundation of the friendship that they think is there, or that it will just lead to more uncertainty and more of a difficult conversation with no clear outcome. And so one of the big questions that we need to ask ourselves is, have I communicated what specifically bothers me? And part of the reason why this is so helpful is because when we do that, we empower ourselves. What is within my control? What is my role in this, right? And part of your role in a friendship is to be open about your feelings and needs and expectations. I'll just add one other thing to this, that necessity to be open about our needs and expectations and a friendship that goes both ways. We actually really want that unsurprisingly reciprocal honesty and candor and openness. The healthiest friendships are those where there can be this open exchange of feedback that's asking for needs and the receptiveness to receiving that. And so part of what I would also suggest is, as you are asking yourself this question and maybe working up the courage to try being a little bit more open in your friendship, what are you doing to also invite that openness and that feedback in return? And can you actually model a little bit of that for your friend and within your friendship to encourage that kind of reciprocity and openness? Question number two. Question number two is all about patterns because one of the helpful things to do is to adopt this long term approach or perspective on our friendship. And so when you are making the decision of whether or not to leave a friendship, it is really helpful to look at not only a particular moment in time but the overall arc and narrative of that friendship. We've talked about this before, how conflict is inevitable, that there are seasons to friendship, that friendships ebb and flow, and that none of that is inherently problematic. Again, it's necessary, it's expected, and in some cases, it's actually the thing that brings you closer together over time. And so the challenge is, if you are in a moment or a season of conflict or of distance or of disengagement, it is so easy to take that one data point and to make assumptions. Assumptions that this is necessarily a sign that your friendship is over, that there's no way to work through this, that that will go on for far too long. And I want you to remember that ups and downs are normal. There will be times necessarily when things feel a little bit more distant or when the balance is off or shifted. There will be moments when a friend says something hurtful, when we feel alienated or isolated, excluded, misunderstood. And so part of the challenge is making sense of that and processing that in the moment. Yes, of course, but also trying to understand, does this say anything about our friendship as a whole? And the best way to make those kinds of interpretations is by looking at the overall pattern and arc of your friendship. And if this is a friendship where these patterns have persisted for a long time, or if this is a friendship where there are these constant ups and downs and ebbs and flows of conflict. And the consistency isn't necessarily that the conflict is ever present but that it is ever repeating. If that is a pattern, then perhaps that is also a sign that something is just not working. The next question that I want you to ask yourself is related, but a little different. Because I want you to ask yourself, is this a pattern in my other relationships? Is this a pattern in my other relationships? Is what is not working in this particular friendship? Is that going on in my other friendships? Or even in my other relationships with my partners or my family members or even my coworkers? Because that starts to suggest that there might be something else at play. So for example, some of the themes that I see is that people consistently find themselves in friendships that lack emotional depth and that they see that same thing reflected in other relationships or that they find themselves in a friendship where they feel like they are constantly overextending themselves and catering to a friend's needs or doing a lot of the emotional labor in a friendship and supporting a friend but don't necessarily feel that same support in return. And does that say something about this particular friendship and dynamic? Yes, of course. But if you start to look at your other relationships, do you see similarities? Do you see that pattern showing up elsewhere? And if so, what is that trying to tell you? What can you learn from that? Because perhaps the decision isn't actually do I need to end this friendship? The bigger decision and question to be asking yourself is do I need to show up differently in my relationships? Period. Now this doesn't necessarily mean that you can't let go of a friend in that case but you might want to have a more honest conversation with yourself before deciding whether and how to let go of that friendship? Or the answer to that particular question of is this a pattern in my other relationships might also inform the kind of decisions you make about how to let go of that friendship but the kinds of conversations that you have. Question number four is a subjective one. This is not a yes or no answer, but it is one of the questions that's the most important. How do I feel about this friendship? How does this friendship make you feel? We talked a little bit in episode one of office hours about the realities of adult friendships and why our friendships are so deeply connected with our health and well-being. And if you're interested in that research, make sure that you go back and listen to that episode. But what I will say is this. Simply put, our friendships are so deeply connected to our health and well-being too. Again, every single aspect of our well-being and because of that, it's important that we make sure that we're investing not only in building and sustaining friendships but in building and sustaining quality connections. And so part of the answer to this question is this subjective experience of how do I feel? How do I feel when I'm with this friend? How do I feel after I've spent time with this friend? How do you feel when your phone rings and you look down and you see that it's them calling? How do you feel when you open up your inbox and you see that you have a few text messages from them that you haven't responded to? Those moments, those feelings are data points. And you can be in the business of venture research too. You can start to collect those data points and over time, take stock of how do I generally feel when I'm around this person? When I'm thinking of this person, do I feel uplifted, supported, excited, optimistic? Do I feel drained, overwhelmed, anxious, irritated, frustrated? Again, it isn't just about one moment in time or one emotional reaction. But on the whole, what is this friendship not only bringing out in you, but bringing up for you? There's all sorts of other questions that we'll get into in later episodes too, in terms of what actually makes for quality connections. But I do want to come back to this piece of conflict very briefly as well, because part of this is also a question of getting in touch, not only with your feelings, but also with your values. And so one of the related questions that can be helpful is to ask yourself, is this friendship? And perhaps the difficulties that are showing up in this relationship? The conflict, the disagreement, the distance, is that coming at the expense of your well-being or your values? or even your other relationships. And if you feel like staying in this friendship isn't only a compromise in terms of how you're acting, but also your internal moral compass, that can be challenging, and that can be assigned that it is absolutely time to let go. And then finally, the last question that I want you to ask yourself when you were deciding of whether or not to stay in a friendship is what is driving your decision to stay in that friendship? And the answers to this question can be very revealing and really interesting. So when I ask people this question, sometimes the response is to go to the things that you really appreciate about that person. I'm staying in this friendship because there's so much fun because I like how it feels to be around them because I like who I am when I'm around them because they make me laugh because they help me grow because I learn so much from their perspective on the world. Even if it may be different from mine, those are all very specific answers that I'm not here to judge, you know, the value of anyone's answer to this question. But to me, those are questions that say something about the other person and say something about you again, in terms of what your values are and what you're getting at at this relationship, not in a transactional way, but in a meaningful way. When we ask this question of what is driving your decision to stay in this relationship? And I start to hear things like, well, I've been friends with them for so long or they've gone through so much. I have to be friends with them. Or they've done so much for me. Or we have this mutual friend group and I don't want to fuck things up. All of that, to me, suggests obligation, not necessarily authentic connection. And I understand that friendships again are embedded in a larger social context and that yes, of course, there is complication that exists. And all of that will obviously factor into our decision making and make it a little bit more difficult to know how to proceed. But when your decision to stay in a friendship is rooted in obligation and not authentic connection or desire for authentic connection, that can exacerbate problems even before they have started. And so again, it ties back this idea of choice that the healthiest friendships and part of the reason why friendships are so healthy is because they should feel like a choice. And so when a friendship is rooted in obligation, we have lost touch with the voluntary aspect of that connection. And as a result, we are not as likely to reap all of the benefits that we have spoken about together. I'll just say this, that very often those decisions that are made from a place of obligation are actually rooted in fear. They are fear-based decisions. Fear about sure, losing a particular connection but also fear of what that might mean for you, about you, and in your life. And it makes sense that that fear shows up that this feels scary. But you don't necessarily have to let that dictate your decision about whether or not to end a friendship. Obligation is not always the same thing as being a loyal friend and forced loyalty can actually be self-betrayal. So to recap, the five questions that you need to be asking yourself when you were thinking about whether or not to end a friendship or the following. One, have I made my needs clear? Have I actually communicated what bothers me or what the problem is? Two, is this a pattern in this particular friendship? What does the long arc of the friendship look like? Three, is this a pattern in your other relationships as well? Is this showing up in other areas of your life that might suggest to you that the question you need to be asking yourself is not necessarily one that is specific to this friendship but relates to a bigger pattern in your life. Question number four, how do I feel about this friendship? That subjective sense of connection of well-being is important. And five, what is driving your decision about whether or not to stay in this friendship? And how does that piece of choice versus that felt sense of obligation show up for you? And these five questions, they aren't just helpful for understanding whether you actually want to end a friendship and getting clarity around that. They can also be helpful for deciding how you want to end a friendship. And so let's talk about that next part of it. (upbeat music) So let's actually talk about the different ways that we end our friendship. So no, we all love a good list around here. And so just to walk you through, there are four different ways that we primarily end our friendships. And these can be a little bit more passive and they can also be a little bit more active. And one of the things that you'll find, and you might have seen this in your own friendships or in other friendships around you, is that the active endings tend to be those that have shown up in the face of a major catalyst or event. Things like that betrayal or a major change that necessitates some type of a drastic proactive shift. So here are the four different ways that we end our friendships. The first is distancing. We can also call this a little bit of the slow fade kind of like what we talked about in last week's episode. And it's not just an experience that we have about how our friendships end or why they come to an end. It's also a strategy. So distancing is the gradual process of withdrawing your effort and energy and attention and in some ways intention from your friendship. So distancing is actually one of the most common ways that we end our friendships. And this was one of the strategies that we found that emerging adults used to end their friendships. This was a study that we published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. And that same finding that this is a strategy that people are using to end their friendships. That was also found in a followup paper in 2023 published in personality and individual differences by other authors. And this gradual termination strategy does seem to be the most common way that we end our friendships. What's also interesting is that not only is this a strategy that is the most common way that people end their friendships very often if you ask people how they think they should end their friendships. This is the strategy that is often endorsed in response to, for example, hypothetical friendship situations. It's also a strategy by the way that's been associated with the personality trait of agreeableness. And speaking of agreement, overall men and women are mostly in agreement in terms of this being the strategy that is most helpful to use or to employ when you are looking to end a friendship. And so some of the things that you'll see when people are kind of leaning into this distancing strategy is as I said before. They are not necessarily calling as often or initiating plans as often or they're turning down the opportunity to see their friends more regularly. They're distancing by not necessarily being as present, right? Or opening up as much or being as disclosing. And so that gradual withdrawing of time, of energy, and of intimacy, that can be done in part as a signal to kind of let a friend know, hey, I'm looking to distance myself from you, maybe even to end the friendship. And sometimes it's not done as a signal, it's sometimes an outright strategy. And the hope is that over time, both of you will get on board, you'll both recognize what's going on. And the friendship will just become less and less close over time. Now, there's another somewhat related type of strategy, but it is different. This is another strategy that we found in that same paper back from 2021 in the journal of social and personal relationships. And this is a strategy that we called compartmentalizing. compartmentalizing. And this is a bit of a different strategy because it's not necessarily a strategy that's done where you're withdrawing that energy and attention and effort. It's almost like you are now placing certain boundaries or borders around this friendship that you are fitting this friendship into a specific box. And maybe some of the other boxes that used to be ticked off in this friendship are no longer applicable. And so what this might mean is you are setting certain limits around the friendship. For example, no longer are you willing to do certain activities together. Maybe you don't see each other in certain contexts. Maybe you don't see each other in group settings, but you will see each other one-on-one or vice versa. Or maybe this is a friend that you are now only willing to socialize with at work, but not on the weekends. This can also look like setting limits or compartmentalizing aspects of what actually gets discussed in your friendship. So maybe you are still spending time together, but you now just don't see this person as somebody that you, for example, talk about your relationships with. Maybe this is a friend where you're happy to connect about your work-related goals, your hobbies, your interests. But the relationship piece just feels like any time you have those conversations that creates conflict or discomfort. And so you're better off not sharing that part of your life with them. What's interesting is that in some of the work that we've done compartmentalizing, yes, maybe a strategy that people are using to end their friendships, but it, in some cases, can actually be a friendship-sparing strategy where the thinking is, well, if I can set certain limits around this friendship, then maybe I can preserve and hold on to the parts of it that are working. And so in some ways, this is a bit of a mental problem. shift that absolutely is associated with a behavioral shift in terms of how we show up. But the goals that lead to that mental or behavioral shift may differ. And so I just want to kind of invite you if this is something that you are thinking of doing or if you're in the process of compartmentalizing or if you notice that this is showing up in one of your other friendships, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are on a path to a friendship breakup or dissolution. In some ways, this actually might be the downgrade that we discussed in last week's episode. Okay. Now we get to the option that absolutely can feel like the scariest in large part because it is the most vulnerable and also the bravest and also the one that can feel the strangest. And that's precisely because it is so in opposition to a lot of the beliefs that we have about our friendships. This is the direct Frank discussion. The breakup talk. Now again, this is one of the biggest points of differentiation between a friendship breakup and a romantic breakup because in the context of our romantic breakup, wow, do we expect this to happen, right? Again, we want that conversation as painful as it may be. We certainly expect that conversation to happen. And frankly, we judge people when they don't initiate those kinds of conversations, when they do a little bit more of that slow, gradual distancing or they're being a little bit cagey with the information that they're sharing and they're being hot and cold. That is not something that we aspire to in our relationships. That's not something we appreciate in other people. And yet in our friendships, having the Frank honest talk can feel so very strange because we don't necessarily expect that. We don't see that as normative. And what I will say is I get that this is uncomfortable and it's uncomfortable precisely because we don't see this as a real option. And because we don't see it as a real option, we don't have these discussions. And because we don't have these discussions, we don't learn that they can, in fact, be quite healing and helpful. And so people just tend to avoid it and this whole belief that we shouldn't do it then gets strengthened over time. What I will say is I have seen many cases where when two friends are able to come together, come to the table over a cup of coffee and they can openly discuss the ending of their friendship. Yes, this might be uncomfortable. Yes, it can certainly be painful, but again, it can be so helpful. People avoid this because they don't want the discomfort. They don't know what to say or do. They don't want to hurt their friend. And again, there's this belief that they shouldn't do it that it's weird or strange or inappropriate. And there is again my favorite word, a very interesting paradox here. The reality is most people don't do this. This is not the most common way that we end our friendships. However, when I've asked people, when I've asked groups of people about how they would like their friendships to end, a significant percentage of people report that they actually would like this discussion. And so we are doing it in our friendships, but there's a part of us that hopes and expects other people to do this or that other people will do this alongside us. And I can understand why this does feel appealing. It can feel appealing for so many reasons. It can feel interesting and important for so many reasons. So the friends who have been able to come together and to do this, I mean, I've seen this give people a chance to have more clarity. So first of all, reduce some of the uncertainty that makes friendship break up so very hard. Again, we spoke about this last week to get a better understanding of why a friendship has ending, what happened, what led you here to make a plan going forward in terms of will you talk again? Is this the first of several discussions? Is this the very last discussion that you're going to have? Are you perhaps open to rekindling your connection down the road? Are you going to see each other in some context, like again, in a group setting or at certain events? Will you message each other on your birthdays? Is that something that you're open to? Having those kinds of check-ins in that friendship breakup discussion can be helpful because they reduce the uncertainty and give you a little bit more confidence about how you're moving forward. They also give people a chance to express gratitude to have a moment of closeness even when you have felt so distant and will likely feel even more distant. And that gratitude, that chance to share, here's what I appreciate about you, here's what I have appreciated about our friendship. Again, that's the healing part. That's the part that can be so helpful and help us to feel and appreciate that nuance, that things can be both good and bad and hard and healing. It's an outlet for feelings and conversations that otherwise might not be said, might not be heard by anyone else. If you're not talking to this one friend about all of the deep emotions that you are feeling and the concerns and the fears and the feelings that you have, well, very often, we don't turn to anyone else. Ultimately, though, it really is a chance for us to grow. And this is part of the reason why this can also be so helpful and why there's a part of me that absolutely wants to recommend this as a very, very valuable option, valuable choice and strategy. Because when we can sit down with a friend, again, a cross from a friend over a cup of coffee or the beverage of your choice, and we can have a discussion about what happened, it is a chance to grow, to learn a different perspective and to recognize, wow, the story that I was telling myself is actually not their experience and how interesting that people, two people who are having the same relationship had very different relationship experiences as a chance to have some of your assumptions challenged beliefs that you have about what your friend has thought about you, has thought about your friendship, a chance to clarify some of the past and self-critical thoughts that you have. It's also a chance to hear as painful as it can be about what you can actually do to grow and change. It's a chance to ask for feedback, to demonstrate that you are still receptive to feedback, to ask what could I have done to be a better friend to you? What do you think I need to know moving forward about friendships that I have coming into my life next? And above all, no matter what happens, no matter how that conversation goes, it is a chance for you to practice being communicative, being honest about your feelings, about your wants and about your needs. And so I can understand why even though this open, honest breakup discussion doesn't happen all that often, there is a part of us that still wants for it, that yearns for it. And why there are so many people who say, even though I'm not doing this, I wish someone else would. Is this perhaps a little bit of virtue signaling? Sure. There can be a bit of that too, right? It feels like the most mature decision, the mature option if we can say, "Oh yeah, absolutely, I'd sit down and have a very difficult painful discussion." But maybe there's something to that. And you know what, let me just sit with that piece of maturity for a second because I want to have some real talk about the real talk option because even though we tend to avoid this, and sometimes for good reason, there can also come a time where even if we try and do everything in our power to avoid having the honest breakup talk, our hand can feel forced or we find ourselves there having to have it anyway. And so what I have seen time and time again is that when someone chooses to end their friendship, they start off with that gradual distancing approach or their compartmentalizing and they're withdrawing their effort and then they're not sharing certain aspects of their life with their friend and they're hoping of course that the friend will pick up on this and understand and agree to this. And yet, sometimes it's just not clear. And friends are left wondering, "Well, what's going on? Are you mad at me? How many of us have heard that question in our relationships before, right? Are you mad at me? What's going on? Do you care about me still?" Or friends understand what's happening, but they are very motivated to maintain this friendship and so what you end up seeing is one person is gradually withdrawing and the other person is trying over and over and over again to stay close and it becomes a bit of cat and mouse type of a chase. Not only that, certainly attachment styles can play a role in this and that itself should be an entirely different episode or we can really get into that. It can be a really difficult dynamic where when we thought this was the kindest way to approach a friendship breakup by distancing ourselves and we were hoping to avoid the hard conversation and we were hoping that everything would just be clear and everyone would be on board, we can find ourselves in a situation where ultimately we actually need to have that frank discussion. We need to have that discussion because a friend keeps asking for clarity because we don't want to keep fielding those requests to hang out and we've already checked out or because we're just now at a point where we are looking to move on and we want to process our feelings and focus our energy elsewhere. Even if again you were doing everything in your power to avoid it, you might end up here and that might not be such a bad thing. Yes, these can be difficult but they can also be very different. They can be brief and they can be a shared acknowledgement of the ending. They can be lengthy drawn out discussions and incredibly tearful. They can be uncomfortable, unsurprisingly. They can also be comforting. Okay. Now I said and teased this at the start of the episode that there is no right way to end a friendship but there is a wrong way and would you like to take a guess at what that is? In all of the experience and the research that I have done, I will say this, that the least effective or recommended strategy for ending a friendship is ghosting. And there are some very key reasons why this is so very scary. Now, across all definitions, what is clear is ghosting is the act of just cutting off communication entirely. Now, that can, in some circumstances, be a little bit gradual, but typically we tend to think of this as being this cutting off of communication that happens quite abruptly or even unexpectedly. It's a very drastic change to an existing relationship. And ghosting as an interpersonal strategy often can happen with respect to online communication. It's like technology mediated, but it can also happen offline in terms of just not picking up the phone in terms of ignoring someone in social settings where you would otherwise connect. And what's very clear is even though ghosting is most often associated with dating and romantic relationships, it absolutely can occur in our friendships as well. And really, it's a form of social ostracism. I mean, it does not feel good to be ignored. It does not feel good to be excluded. It doesn't feel good to be unfollowed or blocked or left on red. In terms of why we do it, there are some reasons. And those reasons tend to get repeated. Now, I'm repeating myself when I say this, you've heard me say this before. Part of the reason why ghosting happens in the context of friendship breakups is because we don't know how to have the difficult conversation. We don't think that we should. It's hard to come up with better alternatives sometimes. There's also a part of this though that absolutely reflects our desire for ease. We want to avoid uncomfortable conversations. We want to avoid discomfort, usually our own. There's also sometimes this idea that it can feel like the most appropriate way to reject someone, especially when you're connecting online, which again, doesn't make it any less hurtful. The one exception to this that I will say is there are certain situations in any type of relationship where ghosting is a direct response to safety concerns or violations. And that is a very different conversation. And it's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is this deliberate strategy that gets employed in the context of a difficult relationship, often because we want to avoid discomfort. So as I'm talking about this, I'm going to imagine that you are thinking of and imagining the person who has been ghosted, the ghosty. And if we think for a second together about what that person might feel, maybe you have felt some of these feelings if you have been ghosted by a friend before. The person who has been ghosted will often report a number of difficult feelings, feelings like anxiety, uncertainty, fear, guilt, even shame. Unsurprisingly, there's also things like sadness or depression. It can reduce our self-esteem. We can start to blame ourselves. There's this overall sense of disillusionment. But here's what I want you to know because guess what? It turns out the person doing the ghosting, the ghoster also experiences difficult emotions and guess what those emotions are. Anxiety, uncertainty, fear, guilt, shame, very often it is the same emotions, the very same emotions that both the ghoster and the ghosty are feeling. And so even though we think that this is a strategy that will reduce discomfort, that is very often not the case. Not only that, despite ghosters' intentions to kind of avoid and ignore the people that they are ghosting, ghosters report that those people are often reaching out for connection and/or closure. So it isn't the case that you ghost someone and that is the end of those connections or the attempt at connection. That can itself be this ongoing process, this drawn out process. And so it doesn't work as well as we think that it does or as well as we think that it might. And not only that, even when it does work, what we know from research is that ghosters will often acknowledge regret that they wish they would have taken a different approach, that they actually wish they would have been more direct to avoid causing harm. And so isn't that so interesting that we often avoid the direct conversations because we don't want to cause harm. And yet it's the decision to withdraw that actually causes the most harm. And so part of the reason why that actually might be happening, I just want to add this where ghosties are often attempting to reach out for connection and/or closure is that there is a bit of a mindset difference here. This was research from YAP and colleagues in 2021, where ghosties were actually more likely to perceive the ghosting as temporary compared to ghosters themselves who saw the ghosting to be more of a permanent strategy. And so again, our interpretation of what's going on there was a little bit different. People who are being ghosted might think, oh, this is happening, but it's again signaling or it's temporary. It's a phase. It's a strategy even. Whereas ghosters are employing this as a direct way to end a friendship and try to cut off all ties. And so again, to me, that just highlights what I said before that I'm not here to tell you how you should end your friendship. I don't know. I don't know what your friendship involves. I don't know the circumstances of your friendship breakup. I don't know how you answered those five questions. I don't know what you have tried. I am just here to give you the information about the different ways that you can end your friendship. The different ways that people are ending their friendships. And to let you know that even when you choose one of these strategies and decide that that is the right one for you, that there may come a time where you need to pivot and you need to try something different that you might try the distancing. You might try that slow fade. You might try the compartmentalizing and you might need the frank discussion and you might end up having a frank discussion anyway. Okay. Now before we end today's episode, I want to talk a little bit about the coping piece of it all. Now we can have a whole episode entirely on coping with friendship breakups and changes and challenges. And you know what? We probably will. But I do want to leave you with three practical tools that you can start using today. And ultimately what I want you to know is also this that coping isn't just one thing. There are of course many different strategies, but there are also different ways that we can think about coping because coping is ultimately really a mix of our thought patterns. There's a cognitive piece to it, how we think. There's a behavioral piece, how we act. And then there's also a social piece of how we reconnect. And so I want to leave you with something in each of those categories. Let's talk about the cognitive piece first. The first layer of coping is how you think about and interpret what happened or what is happening. We talked a little bit about this in last week's episode, so the unhelpful beliefs that come up. What I want to talk about today is also the feelings that come up because one of the most helpful things that you can do for yourself when you are navigating a friendship breakup, no matter what point you're at in that journey or what side you are on, it is so important to work to be in touch with your feelings and to work to just identify and label what's coming up for you without judging it. And in fact, there's some really interesting research that helps us to understand that the process of identifying an emotion correctly and being able to say, "This is grief. This is anger. I feel confused. I feel relieved that process of labeling it correctly is actually one of the most powerful tools that we have for reducing the intensity of that emotion. Emotions wash over us like waves. And when we can identify them for what they are, the intensity of that emotional experience and emotional wave ends up being far less overwhelming. We also want to not only identify our emotions and our thoughts, we want to start with self-compassion. So we want to recognize, like we were talking about last week, that there isn't only one person to blame. There isn't always a villain that you probably are not the sole cause of what happened. And part of also bringing in that self-compassion piece is normalizing the experience. So normalizing that friendship breakups happen. Even if it feels rare and isolating in the moment, this happens. This is more common than you think. Normalize your emotions. It makes sense that you feel that anger, that confusion, that grief, that relief. And so once you can start to be honest with yourself about what your experience is, the thoughts that you are having, the emotions that you are feeling, again, that in and of itself, it sounds so simple. And yet we don't really take the time to do that. We try and just push through or we try and minimize our feelings and say, "I shouldn't feel that. I don't have a right to feel that. I'm feeling that too intensely. We judge ourselves. And that actually just keeps us stuck in those feelings of loneliness, of disconnection, of anxiety, longer." So identify your emotional experience, be honest with yourself, and work to have compassion for whatever it is that you feel. Now, the second tool that I want to give you is about reframing our thought patterns, because this is really important, not all thoughts are facts. And this is especially true when you're going through difficult times where our feelings feel very intense, our experiences, including our thoughts end up feeling factual. And so just to give you a quick summary of some of the unhappiness, helpful beliefs that can happen, we call these thought traps and there are essentially ways of thinking, different patterns that keep us stuck and can exacerbate again a lot of those difficult feelings that you are having. So there are different types of thought traps that we fall into. Sometimes there's the overgeneralizing thought trap. So you might be thinking to yourself, this always happens to me. I never connect with good people. People always leave me. There's the personalizing. This was all my fault. There can be the labeling piece too, layered on top of that that we've spoken about. I'm a bad friend. I'm not worthy. There's also this tendency that we have to predict the future. I'll never have another friendship like this. This was my one shot at having a best friend. Nobody will ever see me in the way that they did. And there can also be this all or nothing thinking and thought trap. It ended badly and so they obviously never cared about me in the first place. It was never a good friendship. So these are just a few of the examples of the thoughts and related thought traps that come up over and over again in the context of friendship breakups. And I want to give you those as examples so that the tools that I share next make sense. Now the tool is this. There are two questions that I want you to ask yourself. And I want you to be very intentional about how you ask it. I don't want you to do it in a cursory way. If you can relate to any of these thoughts or if you notice other unhelpful thoughts that are coming up. You have a pen and a piece of paper. I want you to write out those thoughts. And next what I want you to do is to ask yourself how true is this thought? How factual is this? And then ask yourself what evidence do I have for this? And actually go through the process of writing out what evidence do you have for this? So this is always happening to me. Friends always leave me. Maybe you have had more than one friendship break up. And so some of the evidence in that column might be, well, this has happened before and here it is happening again. The next thing that you do though is equally important because what you are going to do now is you are going to write out what contradictory evidence do you have. What evidence do you have that does not support that thought? And maybe this is a good chance for you to write down all of the names of friends that you have in your life who are still in your life. And so there's a few reasons why we actually use the two different columns. The first is when you're coming up with the evidence that supports the thought, that helps you to realize that these unhelpful beliefs come from somewhere. They're rooted in past experience. It makes sense that there's a part of you that feels this or that fears this. And you want to validate that part of you. But importantly, you want to make sure that you are expanding the horizon and expanding your worldview and searching for that contradictory evidence. What else is true? And once you've done that, you want to come up with the alternative thought. And so if we're taking that first example again, if this always happens to me, the alternative thought, the goal isn't to be overly positive and to kind of engage in toxic positivity. So the replacement thought isn't going to be, oh, I will have all of my friends forever nobody ever leaves me. That's clearly not true, given your experience. That's not going to feel validating. But the alternative thought might sound something like, well, I've lost two friends and I have other connections in my life. That might also help you with some of that predicting of the future. It is possible to have good friends. It's possible to make good friends. It's possible to hold on to good friends. The next thing that you can do is to consider, well, what are you going to do with this information? What do you want to do with your friendship breakup? Sometimes not just a matter of identifying your feelings or thinking differently. There can also be active, actual exercises that you do that help you to process, to cope and to move forward. And so one of my very favorite strategies that I will do with clients is to encourage them to write letters that you don't send, letters that you never intend to send. And in fact, that's a very important part of this process that when you are sitting down to write a letter in this kind of an environment, the goal has to be that you full well believe that you are not sending this letter. Have there been cases where someone sends this to a friend? Yes, maybe. But I don't want you to think that that is the case, that that's what it's for, or that that is even an option that is available to you. Yet, when you sit down to write this letter, the goal is simply for you to have an outlet and a container to process your experience and to get out your emotions and experiences. Not only to get them out in terms of identifying them, but to actually get them out of your brain, out of your body. This is why the act of writing is so helpful because it allows us to create a little bit of distance, and so we don't feel as stuck or as fused with our feelings and our thoughts. And so if you sit down to write this letter, this letter that you do not send, this is a letter that you will write down to your friend. It helps you process what is not said, what maybe never said or heard, and it also creates that emotional closure even without contact. And so if you are going to do this, I want to just leave you with three of my favorite journaling prompts here. So again, go ahead and pull out a piece of paper, grab your phone, and write these down. The three prompts are the following. One, what part of your friendship or of this breakup has been the most challenging? What part of your friendship, what part of this distance, what part of this breakup has been the most challenging? What do you want known? What do you want heard? What parts of this do you want seen? Next, I want you to write down what do you appreciate most about this friendship? And this one is really important because it helps you not only to have a moment of, I want to almost say gratitude and appreciation for the connection that you had. It also is a little bit of what keeps you from closing yourself off to future connections to recognize that even when things are hard, even when things have ended and maybe even ended badly, that there was a part of this friendship that just made sense to you, that just fit with your life. It can also again be a little bit of a compass about what you do appreciate value in friends and who you want to connect with more going forward. And then the third piece is what are you learning from this experience? What did this experience teach you? What did this friend teach you? What is this friendship teach you? And maybe even what has your breakup taught you? What would you like to bring with you into your future friendships and connections or even mindset? Maybe you again are learning more about what you value and appreciate in friends. Maybe you are learning more about your role in conflict and how you show up in your friendships and how you can be a better friend. Maybe you're learning more about how important it is for you to be a little bit more honest up front with your needs, with your expectations. Maybe you are learning about what balance and reciprocity really looks like in a friendship. It doesn't matter what the lessons are and the lessons themselves can be endless. It's about being intentional about taking the time to reflect on those lessons and to recognize that there is valuable information to be gained even in incredibly difficult moments. And that we can actually create our own clarity about what it means, what it represents and what it has the potential to do in our lives, even if we have a lot of uncertainty about the circumstances surrounding a breakup or uncertainty about how our friend is feeling or how they're still feeling. The other behavioral piece that I'll just call out here is that coping isn't only internal. It's also relational and this is really important because there is such an emphasis right now on self-care and how important it is to take care of ourselves before we can connect with others. Right? Well, we also heal in relation to others. And so sometimes doing the very hard, scary thing, like reaching out to friends and opening up about what's tough or working to make new friends in the context of a friendship breakup, sometimes that is the very thing that actually allows us to heal. Because what's true is, yes, absolutely, we can challenge our thoughts and our beliefs and our mindset with some of those, we call them cognitive reframing exercises, like what I was suggesting before, where I was encouraging you to question how true is this, how helpful is this. But the reality is, sometimes we don't just challenge our beliefs by thinking harder. We do it by living more. And our thoughts just need a little bit of extra time to catch up. And so sometimes if the belief is, I'll never have a close friend like that again. The most effective way to learn that that is not true is to go out and to build a friendship. Or if you have the thought of, I'll never be able to trust again. Sometimes the only way that those thoughts will change is by doing everything that you can to collect, to live, to remember to savor the contradictory evidence. And by the way, if you are relating to any of this, and if you're having trouble with any of this, if you're want to learn more about the thinking piece, if you want to learn more about your thoughts, your feelings, your behaviors, and how all of those interact and intersect, this is also where therapy can be helpful. And that too, by the way, is very much relational. It's the relationship that you build with a therapist. And so that's just a little PSA that all throughout there. but the value of friends. therapy because do we go to therapy when we are going through a breakup and find that hard? Absolutely. But are we encouraged to even think about therapy as an option for when we're going through friendship breakups? Not as much. And yet again, it can be so helpful and that is one of the most common reasons why clients will often seek out friendship therapies because they are going through a friendship breakup. Okay, look, we are running out of time for our hour of office hours. Hour of office hours. She sells, she sells seashells. Will they leave that in? Who knows? So I want to just call this out and know full well that this will probably be another follow-up episode because the topic of keeping the door open and rekindling a friendship, that is something that is absolutely also worth talking about. And so I'm just curious to know, let me know if you want me to tackle this on a future deep dive office hour episode. And don't forget, you can actually always reach out to send in your questions, to send in your stories, to send in your ideas for future episodes or guests. We can be penthouse too. You don't only have to write the letters to your ex-friend. Make sure that you send over your stories, your questions, your ideas. And one of the next big things we have on the schedule is a Q&A episode where I'm going to get into all of your questions about friendship. So just keep that in mind that you can email us at anytime. Hello at the two p's on a pod.com. You can always of course slide into our DMs. Yes, our team will write back. And very exciting, you can give us a call at 615 pod line. That's 615 pod line, 615 7 635 4 6 3. So let that be one of your next steps too. And you know what, before we wrap, I want to leave you with a final thought and an actual next connection step. So if there's one thing that I hope you're taking away from this episode and from this series, it's this friendship breakups are rarely clean endings. At least not in the way that we hope we're expecting to be. They're often part of a much longer story of how we are all ever learning to connect, to change the grow, to care. They're certainly not a verdict on who you are. They're often more of a reflection of timing, of needs, of capacity, and maybe even your capacity for change. And even when a friendship feels over, it doesn't actually stop mattering in your life. Because this is a really interesting truth and a friendly reminder that we don't just move on from friendship endings, we integrate them. No matter what the circumstances were surrounding your friendship breakup, no matter what side you're on, no matter what strategies you tried and used to end a friendship, no matter how you cope, it might never feel like that part of your life is fully over. Because our friendships and our ex-friendships, they can show up in unexpected ways, at unexpected moments, in how we are setting boundaries and what we tolerate in how we choose our people and in how we understand ourselves. And so instead of asking what did I do wrong or what does this say about me, why do you try asking something a little different this week? Why you'd ask yourself questions like what did this friendship give me at that time in my life and what did it teach me about what I need from connection? And where is it still showing up in the way that I show up in my friendships now? And if you want a small next step that is concrete, if you want to make this next connection step so very real, write a few lines to yourself, be your own penpal about one friendship that has changed or ended. The goal isn't to solve it, to fix it, just to try and understand it a little differently using some of the questions and the prompts that we talked about today. Because sometimes closure isn't something that we receive from someone else. It's something that we create when we make meaning of our own story. And we are all constantly in the process of making meaning. And maybe that's the real shift here that we all need to make. It's not focusing on what ended or what's in the past. It's recognizing what is still unfolding because of it. The patterns that we have changed, the ones that we need to let go of, and the people that we have gone on to meet and connect with, because of a relationship, because of a friendship that we have let go. And I don't know, I think that's part of the real beauty of friendships, that the lessons that we learned, the memories that we carry, the ways that we grow because of it, that even when all that ends, it's never really over in the way that we think or fear it might be. And that, my friends, was our time together in office hours. And that is the second part of our series on friendship breakups. I'm, as always, so glad that we got to spend this time together. And I hope that this is exactly the thing that will inspire you to invest in your friendships and the people who matter most. I will be back here with you next week for another episode of Two Peace on a Pod. I will say this. You are going to love love next week's friends and conversation. I cannot wait to share that. And in the meantime, let's make sure that we stay connected. So follow the show on your favorite podcast platform. Connect with me at the Two Peace on a Pod and add Miriam Kermire across social channels. And of course, make sure that you share today's episode with a friend. Or you know what? I'll just say this. Tag us. Tag us online. Let us know that you've listened to this episode to this series. And we'll reshare so that we can let people know that they are not alone. Until then, until our next catch up, until you slide into our DMs, take care of yourself and the people in your pod. And I will see you back here next week. Two Peace on a Pod is hosted by Dr. Miriam Kermire, executive produced by Zoe Travis, Matthew Hoffman, Tatya Kaminsky, and Dr. Miriam Kermire, produced and edited by podcast nation, producers Madison Britt and Alicia Peneer, audio engineer Miles Carter, original music by Sarah Walk, created by Zoe Travis and Matthew Hoffman. Two Peace on a Pod is recorded in Montreal and Los Angeles. Today's program contains information that is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This program is not a substitute for psychological or medical advice. Please sick out your own support and research as needed. Take care, friends.