Korrel writes about the importance of investing in good friends versus bad ones. What is this friendship really costing you? Either way, reflecting on these important feelings from the past can help you reassess or reaffirm the energy you’ve been dedicating to this person. Of course, there are more positive reasons you might have continued to pursue a friendship, like having a shared history or the belief that someone may be capable of returning to the kind of friend they once were. It can be a theme that plays out throughout our lives.” Stress about abandonment and loneliness are bigger issues to address-and are often best tackled with the help of a therapist-but they’re important to consider when it comes to all relationships, including friendships. These kinds of feelings are pervasive in a lot of different areas of our lives-in relationships, the fear that you can’t do better than this person or in the workplace, a fear that you’re not worthy of a better job. “The fear of having no friends often keeps us tied to the very toxic ones. “Psychologically, there’s generally a reason why we’re staying in a relationship with someone who dims our light, and those things can be wide and varied,” Dr. Korrel agree that the relationship may be worth rethinking. If your answer to this question brings up feelings of fear, obligation, or loneliness, both Jackson and Dr. There are plenty of reasons to want to stay friends with someone, but not all of them are healthy. Why have you invested time and energy in this friendship? “The minute you start treating someone more like a ‘tier three’ friend-by not arranging your schedule to suit them, not entrusting them with the big things, and not expecting them to check in-you’re releasing them from those expectations while still acknowledging they hold value in your life,” Jackson says. We have expectations that they’ll call, that we can share our biggest things with them, and can expect them to come to our important events.” When a close friend continually lets you down by not showing up or reciprocating your care, you might feel less frustrated or hurt by their behavior if you rethink the tier that person sits on-and how close of a friend they consider you. “Often disappointment happens because we consider someone a ‘tier one’ friend. “Sometimes a friendship just needs recategorizing,” Jackson says. Instead, one solution could be shifting your expectations. According to Jackson, friendship breakups don’t necessarily have to involve cutting someone out of your life completely. If acknowledging something needs to change in a friendship is the first step toward a resolution, deciding exactly what that change looks like is the second. Is a friendship breakup really the only solution? In practice, this might mean opening the conversation with a question like “Are you in the middle of a particularly busy season right now?” rather than a complaint like “You don’t have time for me anymore.” 2. If you’re unsure how to frame these conversations, Jackson suggests viewing them as an invitation-for the friend to apologize, to change their behavior, to explain why a mistake was made-rather than an accusation, which is more likely to make them defensive and less likely to end in resolution. Even if a friend knows the mistake they’ve made (lost their temper, ruined your birthday, broken a promise), there’s no way for them to know exactly how these actions made you feel if you don’t share that. When someone in your life is behaving in an objectively terrible way, it’s easy to assume they know exactly what they’re doing. We often think friendship has to be fun, so we don’t like talking about it when it’s not,” Hannah Korrel, PhD, neuropsychologist and author of How to Break up with Friends, tells SELF. “The word ‘friend’ is often synonymous with the word ‘fun’. And not only are issues between friends uniquely difficult to navigate, they can also be hard to talk about and, as a result, get advice on. Because unlike romantic breakups, which are constantly discussed in TV shows, on social media, and in the celebrity news cycle, we’re often left in the dark when it comes to figuring out whether a friendship should end. These can range from obviously inexcusable behaviors-lying, stealing, emotional abuse-to problems that can be much harder to define, like feeling as though you’re always giving a friend more than they offer you in return, whether that’s attention, care, or something more tangible, like gifts or time.Įven when you can easily identify why a friend has rubbed you the wrong way, knowing where to draw the line and decide that enough is enough can be another difficult hurdle to cross. There are a lot of reasons you might want to end a friendship.
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