12: Friend Breakups: Healing from Friendships, Gossip, and How to Know When to End a Friendship
Friendship breakups are really common, but often are filled with shame and can be left unhealed. Though these breakups are painful, friendships can be one of our greatest teachers and it’s important to take the time to heal and move through the grieving process.
In today’s episode, Amanda answers questions about the end of friendships, healing from gossip culture, and how to know when it’s time to end a friendship.
In this episode, you will learn about:
How to heal from friendship break ups
How to start identifying your friendship wounds
Suggestions for healing from the end of friendships
Journal suggestions for looking at friendships
The difference between “looking at” and “replaying memories”
Why it’s time to stop gossiping
How to know when it’s time to end a friendship or set a boundary
How the ending of friendships triggers the grieving process
Journal Prompts:
If you had a friendship recently end, why do you think it ended? What lessons can you gather from this experience?
Has a friendship breakup changed the way you think about yourself? Or has it changed the way you feel about yourself?
When you think about friendship, where do you feel it in your body? Do you feel anxious in your gut? Hot on your shoulders? Explore where this experience appears in your body.
Download the full list of FREE journal prompts!
Episode References:
Heartbreak Healing Jams Playlist on Apple Music
Looking to Connect with Your Intuition? Check out episode:
13: Learning to Trust Yourself & How to Connect to Your Intuition
Free Resource Corner
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:36 Teaching
9:42 Listener Question 1
24:07 Listener Question 2
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NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool called Otter. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Amanda Durocher (Intro) 0:00
Hey, before we get started, I just wanted to give you a heads up that this podcast discusses heavy topics as well as uses explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Welcome to New View Advice, a safe place for you to ask your most vulnerable questions about life, relationships, healing, and so much more. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I believe our fears and traumas are often what holds us back from living life to the fullest. Join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever is holding you back from being your best self. Let's get started.
Amanda Durocher (Teaching) 0:36
Hi, there beautiful souls. My name is Amanda and this is New View Advice. If you're new here, this is a podcast where I answer listener questions about relationships, healing, trauma, and so much more. For today's topic, I wanted to take time to discuss friendship breakups. So to me that's when friends leave our lives. So when friends tell us they no longer want to be friends with us. And sometimes friends bluntly say this and sometimes friends ghost us the way that friends leave our lives can be really similar to romantic partners. I don't think friendship breakups are talked about enough because I think that when friends don't want to be our friend anymore, it triggers the grieving process the same as a romantic breakup, I think can be just as hard. I think that the same feelings of shame, regret, replaying the relationship in your head, a feeling of being heartbroken is all there. And I think that there can be more shame with friendship breakups, one because it's not talked about as much in our society. And two, I also think that when friends come in and out of our lives, a lot of times it's not talked about. So a friend might just stop calling us or might just stop texting back, or might just kind of try and have us fizzle out of their lives. And we don't always get the same closure that we get with romantic breakups. So friendship breakups can be really, really challenging. I, for one have had more friends break my heart throughout the years than romantic partners. So this is a topic really near and dear to my heart. healing from friendships and betrayal and regret and shame and mistakes along the way, through friendships has been a huge part of my healing journey. And I'm so grateful for all the friendships I've had. But I've also experienced a lot of pain throughout these friendships. And they've been one of my greatest teachers. And for a long time, I felt a lot of shame around the friendships that ended and especially for the ones that I didn't quite understand why. But what I've learned through many of these friendships ending in my own life, is that when we're on the healing journey, it's inevitable that people will come into your life and that people will leave your life. So for me, as I've healed, and as I've grown as a person, I have had different friends who were perfect for where I was at. But when you choose to do an accelerated healing path, which to me, that just means that you're choosing to show up to it every day. Because if you show up to this practice, every day, I promise you, your life will start to transform. And you may not see it in a day or a week. But like three months from now, you'll see how much change you made in a short amount of time where other people in your life haven't changed at all. And for me, when I chose to start showing up to this practice, every day, my life started to change at an accelerated pace. So through that I was constantly evolving, but people in my life weren't doing the same work. And this meant that people were going to come in and out of my life. So along the healing journey, we're always going to have people come in and out of our lives. And friendships are such a great teacher. But for me, even before I started the healing journey, I had a lot of friends that came in and out of my life. And for me, this was a childhood wound. So to go a bit into my childhood wound around it. And I'm going to give this example before we start the episode so that if you're somebody who's had friends come in out of your life, you could maybe take a moment to think about if there's a childhood wound that you need to heal around friendships. So for me, I realized friendships was such a deep wound for me. And I'm really passionate about healing up friendships, for a few reasons. So the main childhood wound I personally had around friendships, this is definitely not the same for everybody. Everybody has to kind of sit with and figure out if they have one of their own. But my childhood ruined around friendships was the two times I experienced rape in my life. I had a friend bring me into that situation. So when I was a young child, and I was raped by a friend's father, I held unconscious beliefs, that subconscious beliefs that it was, in a way my friend's fault, right that if I wasn't friends with her if I didn't have a best friend, that this never would have happened to me. Now we were both six years old. So in no way was this her fault. In no way was this my fault. But it doesn't mean that my six year old mind didn't believe that right? my six year old mind trying to figure out what happened to me, trying to cope. Trying to make language for such an extreme trauma, decided to believe that my friend who was also six was partially responsible for this. So this was very subconscious And then I ended up replaying out a very similar pattern in my teens. And when I was raped in my teens, I had a friend who brought me to that situation and who left me in that situation. And I blamed her. I blamed her for leaving me, I blamed her for creating that situation, I blamed her for leaving me there. And the truth is what that one too, is that she didn't know what was going to happen to me. We were both drinking, we were both 14, there's nothing she could have done. That's the truth. There's nothing she could have done. But I held on to these subconscious beliefs. So for me, those are two huge wounds that I was holding on to about friendships. And those were two lies I was telling myself. And those are two huge experiences that were keeping me from having friendships in my present day. And I share this example because I talk a lot about looking at your wounds, getting to your subconscious patterns, looking at your limited beliefs. So I give this example because those were two limited beliefs I had, right, those two experiences created the belief within me that friends are untrustworthy, they can't really trust a friend that your friends don't really have your back. Because what you'll find is if you have a wound, especially a childhood wound you need to heal, you will replay this over and over again. So I unfortunately replayed out the same wound twice, which is common for rape victims, unfortunately, but I also replayed this just by having untrustworthy friends. And then I also through this wound, I put walls around my heart. So I wasn't able to trust people. I wasn't willing to trust people, I could be sort of mean to some of my friends, or for a long time, I really attracted friends who were mean to me, I didn't feel worthy of love. I didn't feel worthy of friendships. One of my core wounds was unworthiness. Because of all the trauma I experienced in my childhood left me feeling unworthy as a human. If so many people could do such horrors to me, my mind my emotions, my body, I felt unworthy of being here, I felt unworthy of life. So along my healing journey, friendships has been such a teacher for me. So it's been really painful. But it's also been really healing. So I'm really passionate about friendships and about this topic, because I think that so many of us have friendship wounds. And like I said, Not everybody's wound is going to be my wound. I know mine's on the eXtreme Scale. But even if you had friends who bullied you, or you experienced bullying in your childhood, in middle school, in high school, that can be really damaging. I think that so many of us have wounds around friendships from childhood, and we continue to play them out throughout our lives. And I think that it's so important to heal this up to start looking at this and to really start being our vulnerable, authentic selves and friendships, it's time for us to stop gossiping about each other. And it's time for us to start communicating with our friends, to start opening up to our friends and when our friends hurt our feelings, to have conversations, I think a big pattern with friendships is that people will just leave your life or stop talking to you or stop calling you. And you'll just realize the friendships over which is why friendships can have so much shame around them, like endings of friendships and friendship, breakups can have so much shame around them, because there was no closure, because you don't know what you did. And so many of us, I was just talking to a friend about this the other day, so many of us in our heads come up with the worst case scenario and we blame ourselves for the ending of romantic relationships and friendship breakups that aren't true, right? We make up lies in our head because we are trying to figure out what we did wrong, so we don't do it again. But sometimes it's not our fault. Or sometimes we're just growing in different directions from people. And instead of judging ourselves through the end of friendships, we need to start loving ourselves to the end of friendships. And to also I just wanted to mention that anytime a relationship ends so with depth romantic breakups and friendship breakups, you go through the grieving process. And if you don't allow yourself to completely move through the grieving process, then you remain stuck and unhealed. So as I've mentioned in previous episodes, the grieving process is denial, bargaining, depression, anger and acceptance. And these stages come in ebbs and flows. They do not come in any particular order. And they come in layers. So sometimes you'll hear a one part and then you'll have to go through all those five stages again with another part of the relationship that you also need to heal. So I'm excited to talk about this topic. I think we've received some really great questions about friendships and about friendship breakups, and I think we can really dive deep today, so I'm looking forward to it. So let's jump on in.
Amanda Durocher (Listener Question) 9:42
Dear New View Advice, I'm struggling from a recent friend breakup. My best friend told me that she doesn't want to be friends anymore. I'm heartbroken and hurt. I find that I think about her all the time, but I feel shame over the end of our friendship. She told me that she didn't feel like we connected anymore, and that she needed space from me. She was To my closest friend, and I find myself confused, hurt and sad, I can see that I wasn't always the best friend. But I wish she had come to me sooner and told me how she was feeling before ending our friendship. I'm finding it hard to move on. Any advice? So I want to start this answer with that I'm really sorry that you are currently going through this and that your friendship with this friend has ended, and that you're having trouble moving on, and that you feel heartbroken. Your feelings are valid. Friendships are hard to lose. And especially close friends, it can be really hard when those friendships end, because we don't go into friendships thinking that they're going to ever end because we don't talk about friendships in that way. And some friendships do last forever. Some friendships don't. And it's a part of life. But I don't think it gets enough attention for how painful it truly is to lose friends. And how many emotions arise when friendships. And so I just want to honor you where you're at. I want to thank you for this question, because I think so many people can relate to this. So a few feelings you've mentioned that you have here are confusion, hurt, sadness,
Amanda Durocher (Answer) 11:08
I'm sure that what's also arising for you is rejection. You also mentioned shame, I think that as you go through the grieving process, you'll find that anger will arise because that's inevitable. Because as I've mentioned, that breaking up with friends, any loss of a person from our lives, initiate the grieving cycle. So what you're going through is real, and it's painful. And thank you for reaching out, because I don't want you to feel so alone on it. So many people go through this, but we don't talk about it. And there is shame around it. Because you guys might have mutual friends, so you can't really talk about it with them because you don't wanna be talking about people behind their backs. Or you don't want to force your old friends to take sides if you do have mutual friends. So it can get really complicated and it can feel really lonely. That's another emotion you may be feeling. So let's dive into this. First, I want you to start journaling about this breakup. And I want you to start looking at patterns that you play out in friendships. So how you're going to do this is you're going to just start journaling about this friend about if you received information about white ended journaling about that if you feel like that's true, just allow yourself to feel the feelings right anger, resentment may arise. Just allow those feelings to come across the page and to continue journaling about your role in the end of this friendship. And I want you to start seeing if you see patterns with this friendship and old friendships from your life, I want you to truly ask yourself how vulnerable you are in this friendship, I want you to also ask yourself how much time you spent talking about your other front. In this friendship, I find that a lot of the friendships that have ended in my life became very one sided. Throughout my life, I attract a lot of friends who were honestly pretty mean to me. They would bossed me around and tell me what to do, because I was so insecure. And I felt so unworthy that it felt nice to have somebody be a little mean to me, as messed up as that sounds. But that was a subconscious thing was that these people were, in some way protecting me. They were Mean Girls, but they were nice to me, but also mean to me, but they were meaner to other people. So it was like, Oh my god, do you accept me into your graces? Wow, thank you, when the truth is, they were really just kind of mean people. So those friendships had to end in my life. So I want you to take time to really reflect on this friendship. Okay, and I want you I don't know how old this friendship is. So I don't know if this is a friendship from childhood, from early adulthood from your 20s 30s. I'm not sure. But I want you to go back. And you can do this through meditation or through journaling. And I want you to start reflecting on all your friendships, all your friendships that have ended all the friendships you have, and I really want you to dig into this wound that is up right now. This is a real wound. And the worse you feel, the bigger the wound is, to be honest. So there could be a lot of healing here for you. If you decided to dive into this wound. I think that so many of us experienced bullying in our childhoods. And we also experienced wanting to fit in and adjusting who we truly are to fit into friendships. So sometimes the way we act in current friendships isn't the way we really are. Or it's not how we want to be in friendships. It's how we think we have to be in friendships. So I want you to start reflecting on how you are in friendships and the kind of friends you do want to attract into your life. So second thing you could do is start journaling about the kind of friends you do want to have. And maybe you want loyal friends, trustworthy friends, outgoing friends, introverted friends, maybe you want friends who just want to watch movies with you. Maybe you want friends who want to go out with you make a list of what you're looking for, because I don't want you to get jaded to friendships, because that can happen so often when friendships and we can close our hearts. We can put up walls around our heart because it's so painful when a friendship ends. So a way for you to keep your heart open is to continue to envision the friendships you really do want in your life, and you're going to get these by healing and by lucky At this old friendship and by taking the lessons from this friendship, and I'm really sorry, this happened, I think that there's probably ways you can heal. But there's also probably things you're putting on your plate that were not yours, your friend might have not been the best kind of friend either. And that's okay to start looking at this in a judgment free zone. So I want to explain the difference of looking at something and replaying a traumatic memory, a traumatic memory, if we're replaying it is us replaying it and reliving this traumatic moment. So say you and your friend had a fight, or say you replay the phone call where she ended this friendship, that is replaying it if you feel the feelings and you get caught up in the emotions of what that moment was, and you keep replaying it, and there's shame there and regret, that is replaying it. You're replaying the scene of it. So say you were to look at this phone call, look at this breakup, you almost look at yourself outside of yourself. So you bring in a third presence awareness. And you see this phone call, and you see both ends of it. And you look at it from a new perspective. So you take yourself out of it a bit. And you see yourself and your friend as let's say, your two characters in a story. And you watch this play out. And in that moment of taking yourself out of it a little bit by looking at it, new insights may drop in, you may start to see things that you weren't able to see before. And if you can't do that, in your mind's eye, that's why I suggest journaling, because I think that once we get into a flow state with journaling, that third presence, awareness can really drop in, because you already mentioned that you can see that you weren't the best friend, right. So you're already bringing in that awareness that you're seeing that you might have done some things that weren't great, and that you want to change in friendships moving forward. So I can see you already have that awareness. So I just want you to keep utilizing that keep using that judgment free. And when you find that there are things you wish you hadn't done hadn't said or you wish you had gave your friend more attention, you had been a kinder person and less gossipy. Whatever it is, just bring love to yourself in those moments. So when you start having regrets, or you start seeing how you might have not been the best friend, then I want you to tell yourself, you love yourself. And I want you to forgive yourself. And as I mentioned a lot, hop opponent Ono is one of my favorite prayers for this. So you say I forgive myself, I'm so sorry, I played this out. I'm also so sorry, I held on to this, I'm so sorry, self, I can see that I can do better going forward. But I'm loving myself right now. And then you're gonna say I love yourself. And then thank you for showing me this. So I forgive you. I'm sorry, I love you. Thank you. And I would just repeat that over and over again, I've used that a couple times this week, I had some really painful memories arise this week. And I had to process those. And in those moments, I just brought in that forgiveness layer, I just repeated those four phrases, I didn't even try to overly analyze it. I just said those phrases over and over again. And I could feel a sense of calm washing over me because I was giving myself words of affirmation instead of judgment. It's transformational. It's really helpful. That's a tool that's really helped me. So I highly recommend it. So I would say since you said that this person said they needed space that you might have one more time you can reach out. But I wouldn't rush to reaching out, I would take time to reflect to really see why they ended this friendship with you. And to ask yourself, if you're interested in this friendship moving forward, it might be too painful to put yourself through it again. But you could reach out one more time and tell your friend what you learned how you're sorry, and how you would like to repair this, and how you're going to change moving forward. And if your friend is responsive, great. And if they're not, then I would let it go and respect that. But I have had friends who come back in my life and apologize and an apology. And really them seeing what they did can be transformational. Sometimes we just want to feel seen and heard. So you're going to have to evaluate that for yourself. I have no idea the circumstances of the ending of this friendship, but you want to take the time first to heal and to see if this friendships even worth it going forward. And if you're interested in doing that, or putting yourself through that, again, because you might realize this friend was flaky or wasn't nice to you anyways, so you might realize you don't want it going forward. But I just wanted to offer that if you do heal, and you do see how your actions ended this friendship, and you're willing to take responsibility for that, that you could apologize and see if this friend is interested in being friends moving forward. Another thing I wanted to say that can happen in friendships is I watched this video about divorces and how it looks like people move on so quickly. And I think this applies to friendships as well. So say you have two friends and friend one starts to see that they don't really want to be friends with friend too. Well, before they say anything to friend too, they might start to grieve this friendship before it's over. Right? So they start going through the stages of grief first. So they're accepting that that's friendships going to have to add. They might be bargaining with themselves like oh, maybe I'll say maybe this person will change and then they might get a little Sad once they realize it's not going to change, and then they decide to end the friendship. So this friend might look like they've already moved on and like they don't care. But the truth is, sometimes people will grieve relationships while they're in relationship before they end it, they'll go through the stages of grief. So if it looks like your friend was unaffected, and moved on, I just offer that to you, as a little aside, that everybody goes through the stages of grieving, some people just do it in the relationship first. And I just want to assure you that you're wonderful, you're beautiful, you're loving, you're caring, and that you just might have a little growing up to do in friendships. And that's okay. It's part of life. It's a growing process. And I sure know that every time a friendship ended in my own life, I really sat with it. And I looked at it and I tried to do better in friendships going forward. And it didn't mean that all my friendships going forward, were perfect. But at a certain point in my life, I realized that friends were coming in and out of my life, and I didn't want that anymore. And how I was going to stop that was to be a better friend was to show up better was to not be gossipy was to be the nicest friend possible. I am my friends biggest supporters, I hope they all know that. I hope they feel that in their hearts, I love all my friends, I show up as a loving friend. And I also started showing up more vulnerably I think that some people have a really hard time with vulnerability. And if you have a friend who's starting to heal, or starting to self care, they're gonna look for a little bit deeper friendships, and some people just aren't able to go there. But if you're writing into me on this podcast, and I know you want to be vulnerable, and you want to be authentic, and you want to heal, so I just offer to you to really look at this friendship and to take as many nuggets from it as possible and to love yourself through this process and to offer yourself self care. So I recommend that you, as I said, journal, maybe start to meditate, and start spending time with yourself, start loving yourself, because the more you love yourself, the better friends you'll be. The first step is really self love. Because if you don't love yourself, people will sense that and we attract people at the level we're at. So the amount of self hatred we have for ourselves is pretty equal to the amount of self hatred that we attract to people in our lives. But the more we love ourselves, we raise the bar. And if people can't meet us at that bar of new self love, then oftentimes those friendships have to end or they have to change and they have to evolve and grow with us. So I just really want you to lean into that self love. And that could look like adding a creativity practice in your life, journaling, writing, writing, poetry, singing, dancing, coloring, to start to bring that creative energy and allow that to flow that can be really vulnerable. And for people have trouble with vulnerability, start with creativity with yourself. A lot of us stop ourselves from even accessing our own creativity for ourselves. And that's such a huge first step is being able to be vulnerable with ourselves. So creativity, make sure that in your friendships, you're being a loving, supporting person. If you find that you're being pretty negative about life, about yourself about your job, then start to add a gratitude practice in your life. So less 10 things you're grateful for every morning or every evening, you'll notice that that gratitude starts to transform your life and that you want to look at the positives in life rather than the negative blast self care practice I would recommend for you is to take time to sit with yourself and feel these feelings. So if you're really feeling hurt one day, allow yourself to move. So dance out those feelings I find dance such a beautiful way I'll link my heartbreak playlist here, which is for romantic partnerships because unfortunately, there's not a lot of songs about friend breakups, but those songs will capture the emotions, your feelings. So just allow yourself to move and allow yourself to feel these feelings through dance through creativity through watching a movie. And if you're feeling sad, put on a sad movie if you want permission to cry. But those Pixar movies always make me cry. So just take some time for yourself as you're grieving this friendship, no need to jump into new friendships if you don't feel ready yet, and you're going to be okay. But your feelings are real and allow yourself to move through them and heal the end of this friendship because if you heal it, then moving forward, you're going to be able to be a better friend and friendships moving forward. So I hope some of that helps. I'm sending you all my love.
Amanda Durocher (Listener Question) 24:07
Dear New View Advice, I got myself in trouble with some friends and I don't know what to do. I told one friend what another friend said about her and let's just say the whole thing blew up in my face. I messed up and should not have gossiped about my friend. But my one friend and I were confiding in each other about this other friend. And I thought that what I said would be kept in confidence with all the back and forth. Now both friends are mad at me. And I think our friendships may be over. I'm so upset with myself for talking behind my friends back and ruining these friendships.Any advice on how to handle this?
Amanda Durocher (Answer) 24:38
Thank you for writing in. This is a tough lesson you're going through and I have so much empathy for you. But I'm also going to offer you some tough love throughout this answer because there's a lot of growing you can do from this and I want you to grow from this experience. And I can totally relate. I found myself in a situation actually similar to this a few years ago. Go. And I'm going to talk you through what I did, and how it ended up being a tremendous growth opportunity, tremendously healing for me, and how I utilized and practice self love throughout the process. First, I want to talk about how talking about people behind their backs, gossiping, even if you don't think you're saying mean things, talking about people behind their backs is not being a good friend. This is so normal in our society, there are so many people who bond over talking about people and spending most of their time together, talking about what other people are doing. But if you want to be a good friend, and you want to show people, you're a good friend, you got to stop, you've got to stop this habit. This was a tough one for me to cut in my 20s. Because when I was growing up, it was so normal that you talk about people. And that's kind of how you bond right? Like everybody hates the same person, or everybody finds the same person annoying. And then that's something to bond over. It was also just so normal. I saw friends do it. I saw classmates do it. I saw teachers even do it. I saw so many people's parents do it. So if your parent does it, why would you think there's any problem with it? The reason we don't want to talk behind people's backs. I mean, I'm sure you know this, because you just got hit with a huge lesson about why you don't want to talk behind people's backs. But what I want to talk about is what I have seen in our society. And what I've witnessed recently is how mean we are to one another, and talking behind somebody's back and saying mean things, even if this person makes you upset, is not healthy. And it's not a good thing. It's one of the reasons I recommend therapy. Because if you need to work through something about someone, a therapist is a great third party person, do not use your best friend, do not use your mom, a therapist can really help you. And it's not talking behind somebody's back if you're trying to heal through it. So many of our friends and our parents will be like, yeah, that person's so mean or like, Oh my god, I can't believe they did that. And they'll back us up on our anger, where I want you to find a therapist or somebody who's gonna help you look at, yes, this person might not be perfect. But how can this be a healing opportunity? How can this be a learning opportunity? How is how they're acting, not actually a reflection of you? And how can you respond in a healthy way? I really think that when we talk about people, we want to bring back in what we learned when we were children, we want to bring back in the golden rule. So do
unto others as you would have them do unto you. Right? I don't know where along the way we lost to this. But I remember learning this as a child, when you talk behind somebody's back and you're gossiping, you're acting in a way that you wouldn't want them to treat you want to, you're putting out negative energy. And you don't want to do that you want to put out love positive vibes, or one of my favorite Instagram posts I've seen is where it's this long line. And a little teeny tiny section of it is what you know about somebody. And then the big part of the line, which is like 90% of the line is what you don't know about someone, right? So when we are talking behind people's backs, we are making judgments, and we don't really know what's going on with them. And even if they hurt our feelings, we need to learn how to communicate to them like adult that they hurt our feelings, and not go behind their backs and then hurt their feelings. It's so important to stop gossiping, it's not good for you. It's not good for the other people. It's not good for anybody. And I know this can be a really hard lesson. And I know it's so ingrained in the way we interact with each other that you might be like, Well, sometimes it's okay. No, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. That's my advice to you. So I had to learn this too. Because when I was growing up, everybody I knew just talk shit about each other. It was pretty awful, honestly. And everybody's mom's talk shit. And then I went to college, and everybody still continued to talk shit about each other. I remember my mom was always like, girls get so much nicer in college. When I went to college, no one was nicer. It's completely untrue. And I noticed in my adulthood, people were still acting like they were in high school and talking about each other. And I got hit with this karmic lesson in my 20s, where one friend pissed me off. So I told another friend what she said, and it blew up in my face as well. It didn't go over well, it did not make me look good. I looked like a bitch, to be honest. And I had to sit with that. And I had been on my healing journey. So I had to decide, do I want to continue being this type of person? Or am I ready to look at this and why I repeated something I shouldn't have. Why I talked behind a friend's back. And if that's the type of friend I want to be going forward, so you said that you feel a lot of shame and regret over this. So I'm going to assume you don't want to be this kind of friend going forward. And I think that the nicer we are, that the more loving we are towards our friends that we find better things to talk about. Me and my friends talk about our dreams and we talk about our healing journeys. We don't spend our time talking about other people. And that is so much more fulfilling and the more we do that The more I trust my friends, and the more vulnerable I can be in my friendships. So what I had to do when I went through a similar experience was I had to start sitting with myself and asking myself where that pattern came from. So some questions I asked myself, where, what? Why did I repeat what my friend said? Why did I gossip? And for me, the answer was, I wanted to feel closer to this other friend, the friend I gossiped about had kind of annoyed me. So I was letting out some steam, letting out some anger. And three, this was a program I had picked up from my childhood. So I had to do healing around all three of those. And I had to forgive myself forgiving yourself for being a gossip is so important, because it's so important to release yourself from this, right? This is a societal program. This is taught to us as children, so many people pick this up when they are kids. So it's a hard habit to ditch. And that's not your fault. This world has normalized talking about people behind their backs. I mean, we see people in the news, we see celebrities, we see, politicians talk really horribly about each other. And it's up to you and I, if we want to continue repeating that type of pattern. But I promise that if you decide to keep talking about people and being a gossip, that you are going to attract people who will treat you the way that you treat them. So you're going to attract friends who you can't trust, you're going to attract brands who talk about you behind your back, you're not the only one, you just might not know what they're saying about you. So if you want to attract loving friends, beautiful friendships, authentic friendships, trustworthy friendships, then you want to heal this wound and you want to forgive yourself for falling into the societal program that would have a separate ourselves from each other. Right? It's a way to like look at somebody and be like, that person is different than me. And what instead we have to start doing is realizing that we're all human. We're all going through this humanity journey together. And it's hard to navigate. There's so many negative things out there, there's so many external influences. And we're all really looking for the love of each other and the love of self. So the more you heal, the more compassion you'll be able to bring to your friendships and to other people in your life. So first, I started asking myself questions, and for me, a lot of it went back to childhood said, Look, really look at the people in your life. And if your parents were gossipy, if your siblings were gossipy, if your friends from childhood are gossipy, we're gossipy. When did you start to be a gossip? When do you first remember being bullied? When do you first remember bullying, because that's what it is. If you're talking about somebody behind their back and saying mean things, you're being a bully, and it's easy to be a bully when we don't love ourselves. So you want to start loving yourself. And by looking at these patterns, healing this up, you're going to start loving yourself, I promise. And by looking at it, when you look at something, you're not judging it, you're just bringing awareness to it. So awareness is almost like a third present. So you're going to look at why you talked about this friend, why you created this drama, and you're gonna look at the three of you from an outsider perspective and ask questions about it. So it's not replaying what you said over and over again, in a shame spiral. replaying something is a trauma response, looking at something is bringing awareness and healing to it. And for me, with my friendship that ended like this, it was a lot more questions than I thought that I had to ask healing up gossiping and healing up talking about people and how I projected onto others was not an overnight fix. It was really interesting to see that I had been playing out a similar pattern for years and was unconscious of it. Once I became aware of how gossipy I was, how gossipy other people in my life were and how much people in my life wanted me to talk about other people, and you want to start bringing awareness and you want to start healing this and it's not gonna happen overnight. So you want to be patient with yourself. And I want to advise you to think about if you have any interest in re patching any of these friendships. To be honest, it sounds like the three of you are playing out a pretty unhealthy dynamic, the three of you aren't very nice to each other. And I want you to reflect on if these are good friends you want to keep in your life or if you're ready to grieve these and go through the grieving process and let these go. If you think that they are worth keeping, then I advise you, as I did in the previous question, to forgive yourself to take responsibility for your actions and to apologize to really apologize for your actions. After you do healing. Don't do it from a defensive place. Do it from a place where you've taken time to reflect on the situation. Don't put blame on them. Even if they weren't the nicest people take responsibility for what you did. You chose to react in an immature way. So take responsibility for your immaturity and your irresponsibility. It's hard. But I promise you that it's a great lesson. And if you really heal it, you're going to be a better person on the other side of it. So if you decide to reach out I recommend doing that first And then you can decide if these friendships are worth keeping or if you're ready to let them go. So the key to this is, like I said, looking at where your gossiping comes from, it could be societal, it could be familial, it could be your other friends, you could find that you were gossiped about. So you started gossiping, just look at it, and look at it and your other friendships, and really start to heal those starts to make other interests with people, right? Like, do you have the same hobbies? Do you have the same interest in music? What are your dreams? What are your aspirations? Can you be your friends biggest cheerleader instead of your friends biggest enemy, if you want good friends, then you want to start acting like a good friend. So you're gonna attract those friendships, when you're a better friend. And by doing that, you're gonna learn to love yourself, because gossiping, is also a red flag to me that there's some self love that needs to happen there because you don't feel good enough. So you're feeling better about yourself by talking about somebody else's flaws. Because people who fully love themselves do not talk about other people, because all they feel is compassion towards other people, because they've healed up their own insecurities. And they can love and see in other people, their humanity and the struggles they may be going through, and they're compassionate. So as I always mentioned, including meditation in your life, starting to sit with your inner child, I'm gonna guess you have a really wounded inner child here, I recommend listening to my back to basics episode, I talked about forgiveness and inner children and self love in that, and that's gonna be really helpful for you as you start to journey down this healing journey. And this is a tough lesson. And since you wrote to me on my podcast, I'm assuming you want to do the healing work. So many people would just continue to play out this pattern over and over again and play victim. But instead, I want you to take ownership of this and responsibility. And that's adulting, being an adult is taking responsibility for your actions. So it doesn't matter what these other two people did. What matters is what you did. And you did something that wasn't very nice. You said mean things about somebody behind their back, that's not nice. Do you want to be a not nice person? Or do you want to be a good friend, and I think you want to be a good friend. So as I said, it's starting to heal this starting to look at this, and starting to really forgive yourself and release yourself of the shame you feel. Because the truth is, in that moment, when you talk to somebody back, you didn't know better. So forgive yourself for that, but do better going forward. That's really all we can do is forgive ourselves for our past and choose to be better people moving forward. And we may not be perfect every time. But as long as we start to bring awareness and self love, we will do better. And it's a journey. It's not a race. And it's a hard lesson to learn, I had to learn it as well. But I promise that you'll have more fulfilling friendships, once you stop talking about people, once you love yourself more. And once you bring in that real healing to that inner child, because that inner child, they don't feel good enough. And that inner child is going to need you to love them, so that you can allow other people to love you. But we can only allow other people to love us as much as we love ourselves. So it's so important to heal this. And I promise you that you will attract some amazing friendships that you are very worthy of, once you heal this up. I hope that helps. And it's a hard lesson, but you're worthy of healing. You'll feel so much better on the other side of this. And you're just going to love yourself more as you heal from this. Thank you for this question, sending you all my love.
Amanda Durocher (Listener Question) 38:18
Dear New View Advice, I find myself in a friendship that I don't think is serving me any longer. But how do I know for sure. We've been friends for a long time. But I found that the older I get, and the more I grow, she's just stays the same. She's negative and just wants to talk about people. And I find myself bored and staying quiet when I'm with her. I love her. And I wish things were different. But I find it so hard to hang out with her at this point. I find myself often getting annoyed anytime she wants to talk. What should I do?
Amanda Durocher (Answer) 38:46
Thank you for this question. I think that this is very common. And it happens to many people. And I think a lot of people can relate to this question. So thank you for writing in. So as I always say, I'm unable to give you the answer of what you should do. But I hope that through the conversation we have through this question that you'll get some clarity. And you'll be given the tools that you need to ask yourself what is best for you. This is going to be something you need to trust your gut on. But we're going to talk about a few different possibilities of different ways to approach this situation. So one, I want you to ask yourself how you show up in this friendship. So a lot of us on the healing journey start to change. And we have friends in our life that we see aren't changing. But we continue to show up as our old self in these old friendships, and then we judge these friends for not changing. But the truth is we haven't changed in that friendship either. So I found when I went sober, I thought I might have to give up some friendships because I felt like we had been connecting for a while and this and that. But when I was sober, taking away alcohol took away my crutch in friendships. So I had to start showing up differently. I was challenged to be more myself more often. What I noticed was by starting to show up fully as myself and allowing myself to be seen as the new version of myself as the self loving, self caring, empowered version of myself, some of these friendships did have to end. And it became very clear, when I was showing up as myself, I had no question. But then others changed with my changes. So some of my friends were able to open up to me more fully, they were able to talk about their hopes and dreams, they were able to change with beam. And these were friends, I didn't think were going to be able to change with me, but they did when I gave them the opportunity to. So instead of just ending the friendship, assuming they wouldn't change with me, I decided to show up as myself and allow that to show if this friendship should change. So I did that with some of my friendships. And I was really surprised, by the friendships that opened up more became more vulnerable, more trusting more supportive, because I allowed them to. So that's one option you have here, but I don't know the background of your relationship. So to this relationship could be kind of abusive, you could really have no interest in being friends with this person, this person could have for years, really abused your friendship, and you're finally seeing that and you do need to cut it up, that's a gut decision, you're gonna know that. And you may have given chances before, right, so what I described, you might be showing up as your fullest self, and you might be feeling like this person does not serve you, and that they don't like the new version of you. They're unsupportive, they're always negative, that can be really hard to be around. And as we're on our healing journey, we find that the people we hang out with really affect our energy. And we want to raise the bar high, we do not want to meet people at a low bar. So if you're finding that you're being your fullest self, your true authentic self, and these people are unsupportive of you, then you might want to end this friendship. And if you're going to end the friendship, I do recommend having a conversation. The conversations hard, but you should say something instead of boundary, instead of ghosting. This person becoming an adult is learning to communicate. I can say that I've tried to play some boundaries, or I've tried to have tough conversations with friends. And sometimes they go well, sometimes they don't go well. So it's a hard situation to end friendships. Because it can feel more complicated than a breakup because you only have one romantic partner. Well, most of us do. But you can have so many friends. So it can feel so questionable to end friendships, but you really got to trust your gut and your intuition on this one, this person could also just not be where you're at anymore. And that's okay. It's okay for people to leave our lives. Right, we're human, we're changing, and it's okay for other people not to change. It's part of life, and not everybody's gonna meet us where we're at. And that's okay. Sometimes people are here to serve us in our life right now, but not for always. And that's okay, we have to let go of the judgment and the fears around really respecting ourselves and our needs. Friendships can also play out childhood patterns. So when we heal up that childhood pattern, we may not need anybody to reflect that anymore. So that person could stop reflecting that and they could change with you. Or maybe they still keep being unsupportive, or they keep being gossipy or they keep being mean to you. And that might be a friendship that you need to end and that's okay. So I mentioned this in the first question, but I feel like you're already going through the grieving process. And I think that happens for a lot of people who are in friendships as they start grieving the end of that friendship before the friendship ends. So I just want you to honor the feelings you're feeling this friendship was real, I want you to honor the fact that it did serve you at a time. So I think a lot of us can be like, how did I even add up here? How did I even have a friend like this, this person treats me like shit, and just honor that that person was there for you at a time when they served you and look at that, and honor that. And thank this person in a meditation, you don't have to thank them out loud. But just respect yourself, respect your boundaries, friendships, our place, we have to set boundaries. So that's a third thing you may need to do, you may just need to set a boundary. Like if your friend talks about negative people, you might just have to say, I don't talk about people, I don't want to have this conversation, and then see if you guys can meet on another level. Okay, because sometimes we just have to communicate our wants and needs. And people will respond, right? If you say, I don't want to talk about people, and your friend respects this, maybe they're frightened to hear. If you say that, and your friend continues to do it, or they get mad at you. Or maybe they stop being friends with you. Then that's really telling too I had a friend I tried to set a boundary with and she ended our friendship because I just tried to set a boundary. I didn't try to end the friendship. I just was trying to set a boundary. So that surprised me. But that was really telling. And I was like, Okay, I don't deserve a friend who can't respect my boundaries. But I had to heal that feel that
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