The loss of a friendship can be devastating. Normalize the fact that sometimes friendships do end and that can actually be healthy. Here are some ways you can get over a friendship that has ended:
Give yourself space to grieve the loss
- Be honest with other people in your life about what you’re going through
- Try using the same language and self-care that you would during a breakup with a partner
- Feel the feelings the same way you would grieve over a romantic breakup
Assess the health and boundaries of your other friendships
- Make it a habit to take the pulse of your most important friendships regularly
- Debriefing your relationships, keeping tabs on one another, and saying “Hey, how are we doing?”
- These close relationships require maintenance
Remember that you still deserve friendship
- Losing that sense of belonging and acceptance is hard, but it is all the more reason to work on developing an unconditional sense of self-worth
- The overwhelming sense of emotion that we feel amidst a breakup sometimes can feel paralyzing. It can be very difficult to cope with
Get closure, if you can
With a romantic partner, there’s usually a breakup conversation, and you know that you’re either in the relationship or you’re not. But the very blurry nature of starting and ending friendships makes it hard to navigate to the end.
You can do your best to get clarity from your friend at this stage. You can think about why everything is settling the way that it is. That is not in an effort to change the other person’s mind, but just so that you have a sense of closure as you’re going into that loss.
Identify what you need to do to move on
- Once you have a proper diagnosis of the impact of the breakup on your life and on your mental and emotional state, then you can treat it properly
- This might mean talking through things with someone you trust, creating space for yourself to grieve some more, or removing things from your life that trigger memories you’re not quite ready to process yet
