Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Healing from Friendship Breakups

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Welcome back to another Language of Love Bite!  Today, I want to share something deeply personal and universally relatable – the often-overlooked pain of friendship breakups. I totally get how losing a friend can feel just like you've lost a member of your family, and with everything going on with the pandemic, those feelings are even more intense. I'm opening up about my own experiences with losing friends and I'm right here with you, guiding you through those complex emotions. We're going to talk about how to pick yourself up and build that resilience to move forward. It's all about looking inward, reflecting on the friendships we've had, and being brave enough to make new connections. But here's a heads up – trying to get closure from that former friend might not be the best move. It can actually set you back on your healing journey. So, let's navigate this together and find our way to a place of peace and new beginnings.  I talk about: Friendship breakups and grief that can bring  Impact of pandemic on friendship breakups Complex emotions during the grieving process Navigating loss with grace and resilience Guidance on navigating the aftermath of friendship breakups Importance of self-reflection and identifying valued qualities in friendships Accessing new, more aligned connections to emerge Practical advice and support for individuals navigating friendship breakups Have you experienced the pain of loss and found it difficult to cope and heal? If so, I invite you to visit my website and explore the resources available, including a grief course that may help you navigate through your journey of healing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the last 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Welcome to the Language of Love Bites, where I tackle your most asked questions and requested topics. These episodes are designed to be fun, quick and to the point. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Listen, friend breakups don't just happen in early childhood, middle school and adolescence. They can happen at any time. It's certainly true that we go through ages and phases in our relationships and some relationships just kind of peter away as we move on to new interests or meet new people. But there are those friendships that have many of them been

your ride or die that end and often end in a really painful way. And I have found certainly since the pandemic that this has been especially present for many people. And there are lots of reasons for that. I write about a lot of them in my book, You're Not Crazy, You're Just Ascending, because there's a mass awakening happening right now and people's entire worldview is changing. what's important to them is changing, and how they want to move and live in the world is changing. And when that happens, well, the good news is that our vibration increases, our healing increases, but very often we are no longer a vibrational match for people that have always been part of our lives. And what will happen as a result is sometimes they'll just

drift away, but very often there's some big upheaval or big drama or big breakup. I consider myself a pretty good friend and a pretty conscious friend, and I have had those happen over the past couple of years as well in the ways I least expected it and with people I least imagined it with, people that I've been friends with for 30 or 40 years or longer. And it's a loss, and it must be mourned, okay? That's really one I want to hit home to you most of all, that we think friends aren't the same as family. Well, they really are in many ways, especially if they were a really important friend and someone who was really close to you or someone who you share a lot of history with. There is a grieving process that you have to go through, which often brings

up anger and guilt and shame and frustration and abandonment and loss. And all of those feelings need to be honored, okay? And it can feel infuriating sometimes or angering or you feel like it's unjustified or you feel like you've been mistreated. And there is a time and a place for resolution of that, right? So if this friend is someone who really mistreated you, either in the friendship or through the breakup or made accusations of you that really aren't fair or characterized you in ways or did things to you that were really horrible. Obviously, it's very natural to want justice, just like if a partner, a romantic partner, did those things to you. Most of us have no idea how to move through loss. There's no roadmap to follow when you're trying

to navigate grief. And I realized this when I lost my son three years ago. As a therapist who understood grief, a whole new level of pain opened up to me when I lost my 16-year-old son. And since then, I have been building resources that have allowed me to navigate through loss, not only in a healthy way, but in a way that has transformed me for the better. We can move through the most terrible loss with grace. And that's why I have created the course, Good Grief, Healing from Loss with Love. You can find it on my website, drlauraberman.com,

right there on the homepage, as well as free resources letting you know how to support others who are going through loss. None of us has to do this alone. But the question to ask yourself is to what, end, right? And what are you looking for? And this is true for romantic breakups too. What is your intention and what are you really wanting? Okay. So if your intention is just to speak your truth and to get it out, fine. Write a letter, write a book if you want to, you know,

about it, get it out, but you don't necessarily have to send it to them or say it to them, right? Because that really is determined by the second question. What are you really wanting? Okay. Because the one, your friendship broke up for a reason, probably because more of them than you, if you're interested in this video, right? That's been your experience of it. So very often I find what we want out of speaking our truth is for that other person to hear us, for them to believe us, for them to say they're sorry, for them to forgive us, for them to ask our forgiveness, whatever it is. If you are wanting anything out of that other person from your completion or clarification, don't do it, okay? Because you're not going to get it. You broke up for a reason.

So if you think you're going to write them a letter and they're going to give you the response you want rather than another defensive tome of why you're a horrible human being or whatever it is, you're going to be sorely disappointed and you're just prolonging the trauma of the breakup. So that doesn't mean you can't write it all down. I have actually done that. I've written it all down and then I just filed it away because I know there's no point in sending it because this person isn't in a place. Maybe one day they will be, but they aren't in a place where they can hear me or really

understand what's coming from my heart. And then begins the grieving process. Okay, so you have to give yourself grace with that. You have to allow yourself to honor the loss. It is like a death. Friendships are so important to us and in our society have, in my opinion, are way too overlooked. As someone who doesn't have, has very few living family members left and am estranged from the few that I had, my friends are my family in every sense of the word. And I'm so lucky to have them. And some of these friends, which were very old friendships who have gone by the wayside,

it was a tremendous loss. It was like a death of a family member. And we have to allow ourselves to go through the grieving process. It's just important to go through the grieving process, allow yourself the grace to be sad and to heal and to move the emotions of loss without having to make it different and most of all to remember that almost always and this is the law of the universe when we let something go it is making room for something new to come in there is learning there there is expansion there and so the law part of the healing once you get over the initial grief of the loss is going to come from, okay, what was it that worked for me in this friendship that I would like to recreate with someone else? Maybe it's the play, the humor,

the mutual understanding, the shared interest, the inside jokes, the person was there for me when I needed them, whatever it was, right? What were those qualities that that friend had? And what were the qualities that you want moving forward that maybe they didn't have? Honesty, integrity, consistency clarity sanity you know whatever it is shared interest whatever it is put that on the list as well because now even though it's been a painful loss to lose that friend there is room for a new higher frequency more aligned friendship to come in so if you want to learn how to make amazing soul friends make sure you watch my video on that topic i went to the doctor said i'm crazy for your love

wrote me a prescription but there's no cure for