How to cope with the end of a friendship: Your guide to healing and moving forward
- Phil McAuliffe
- 5 days ago
- 10 min read
The end of a friendship hurts.
This article gives you guidance, emotional support, and practical steps to process your feelings and build meaningful connections.
Hello my friend
The end of a friendship is tough. However it ends – a friend passed away, you had a falling out or you simply grew apart – losing a connection that was meaningful hurts.
If you’ve found this article because you’re working through the end of a friendship, we want to serve, support, challenge and inspire you as you navigate your way through this difficult time.
Two quick notices before you read further:
This is a longer read. I’ve written it this way because what you’re going through deserves more than a quick list of generic, AI-generated tips. It’s structured so you can pick it up and put it down as you need: explanations first, feelings next, and then ways to move forward. Go at your own pace and meet yourself where and how you are.
I’m not a psychologist, counsellor, therapist or licensed mental health professional. This advice comes from years of experience mentoring and coaching humans, and from my own life. What you’re about to read is general advice only.
Why friendships matter
Friendships are important and Dr Miriam Kirmayer explains why in this clip from episode 12 of the HUMANS:CONNECTING podcast (listen to the episode on Spotify or watch on YouTube).
Friendships are important and not treating them as such downplays their role in our social wellbeing.
For some, friends become a chosen family. People you rely on to support you and who you support. This is especially true if you don’t have a family, your family lives away from you, you’re estranged or your family has otherwise cut ties with you or you with them. While not the exclusive domain of the LGBTIQA+ community, for many in the rainbow communities, friends are our only family. Our families can disown us for not living in alignment with their collective beliefs and values.
With an appreciation of why friendships are so important to us, let’s move onto the next point.
Coping with emotional triggers after the end of a friendship
Revisiting past hurt
No matter our age, the end of a friendship can dredge up all sorts of emotions and thoughts from our past.
There are missteps and mistakes we made that hurt a friend, and there are those that hurt us. There are events when we felt abandoned, judged or excluded. There are times when we were unkind or betrayed confidences.
These events left scars. It is the reopening of those wounds that we can feel when a friendship ends at any age.
For me, the ending of a friendship as an adult many years ago dredged up all sorts of feelings that took me right back to a time when I was 12, when my then best friend broke up with me. He said that I was too clingy.
Years later, the ending of a friendship left me just as confused and ashamed as my 12-year-old self. I struggled with the thoughts and feelings that I was too much, and I needed to dial things down a few notches.
Adult-me was just as confused as 12-year-old me because I didn’t see it coming. I felt just as ashamed because I believed that I was not friend material. It felt like it was a confirmation that the only way that I would ever be friend material would be to seriously edit myself in the hope others were more comfortable with me in their presence.
Of course that was not true. I know that a friend would only ever want me to be who I am in the moment – whether that’s loud and gregarious or quiet and more sombre. A friend does not want to edit myself for their comfort.
While I know that, the feelings still hurt.
That applies to you.
Notice the triggers and the potential shame spiral. Remember Dr Brené Brown’s advice about shame: it thrives in secrecy and judgement, but shame cannot survive being spoken and being met with empathy.
Advice: Get the thoughts out of you, whether by writing them down or speaking them aloud. Then meet yourself with the same kindness and love you’d reserve for someone you love.
Feel all the feelings
Following from the point above, you’ll feel a whole range of feelings as you process the end of a friendship.
Irrespective of how the friendship ended, whether suddenly or gradually, there will be feelings.
Lots of feelings.
Feel them all.
You may initially feel numb. Allow yourself to be numb.
Feeling angry is normal. You’ve been hurt. Express that anger and let it out. A note on anger, we always need to allow it through us (read Dr Bessel van der Kolk’s, The Body Keeps The Score for why).
However, in allowing the anger to flow through us, it is never okay to hurt ourselves or others through our words or actions. Your anger is yours. Process it. Don’t spread it.
Hate can also be expected. You’re wounded, hurting and want it to stop. It’s tempting – and surprisingly easy – to make the person who’s no longer there for you the target of white-hot hatred. Remember: hate and love are two halves of the same coin. Hate is a form of caring.
Please be careful with hate. It can quickly turn into resentment. Resentment is seductive in that it helps us justify our words, thoughts and actions in the retelling and reliving of the events.
Resentment is toxic. In a quote variously attributed to Nelson Mandela, St Augustine and the Buddha: Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
Please don’t drink that emotional poison, no matter how good and morally superior it can make you feel.
You’ve possibly experienced apathy. A kind of nothing, where nothing excites or motivates you. You feel detached. Apathy is often a flimsy shield we use to protect ourselves from hurt. It can get you through some moments, but it is not a durable strategy.
Feel all the feelings. Allow them to be and allow them to pass through you.
Before we move on, I want to return to two emotions: anger and hate.
Anger is often fear in disguise. As my friend and mentor Mike Campbell says, anger is fear’s bodyguard. So accept and feel the fear too. There may be fear of being alone.
It can be easier to hate someone or something than sit with the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings underneath that hatred.
In reading these words, you may have felt all these already and reached a stage where you feel something beyond numbness, anger, hate and fear.
You want to move forward, and the way forward is to reckon with the feelings underneath: loneliness and grief.
Loneliness and grief after the end of a friendship
However the friendship ended, it’s normal to feel a sense of grief and loneliness. A connection that was important to you is not there anymore. A place and space where you felt you belonged is no longer available to you.
It may be tempting to say something like ‘Well, it’s not as if they were my spouse or a family member’ and to say or think this like ‘It was only…’ This denies reality: this friendship was important to you.
It’s important to grieve, because there’s grief. It’s a cliché, but grief is love with nowhere to go. You have love to give, but you can’t give it to someone who was special to you.
In this sense, loneliness is also a normal, expected response. You can feel shut out, excluded, unseen, unheard. A person with whom you felt like you belonged, and the world that came with that, is not there.
While both grief and loneliness are terrible emotions and experiences, they do not diminish simply because we don’t like them. It can feel easier to hold on to hatred and anger than sit with grief and loneliness.
But grief and loneliness will come anyway. You may as well acknowledge them, feel them and allow them to move through you.
Go gently on yourself and those around you as you allow yourself to feel.
Find meaningful connection after a friendship ends
I always find it hopeful to know that we know the antidote to loneliness: meaningful connection.
Knowing what connection is meaningful to you is your way forward.
When you’re ready – or ready enough – you can start taking steps towards getting the meaningful connection you need.
Here are some ideas to support you.
Know your values
From my own experience, I know that part of the deep sense of loss felt after the end of a friendship comes having invested myself into the friendship.
It’s hard to know who I am if there’s not that relationship there to help me.
It’s always been helpful for me to come back to the basics: my values.
Knowing my values provides those stable foundations upon which I can rebuild the parts of me that feel broken.
Do you know your values? If you do, start there. If you don’t know your values, start here in this article.
Live your values
Knowing your values is only the start. Meaningful connection happens when you live your values.
It takes courage to live your values. People will notice. People close to you may comment. Some may disparage you, but most people will love seeing you be you.
You’re not doing this for other people. You’re doing this for you. You’re doing this so you get the meaningful connection that you need and deserve.
I’ve experienced this within myself and I’ve seen it in our work countless times. When you know your values and live your values, the connection you allow yourself to receive is the connection you need and deserve.
This is meaningful connection.
[Again, this article provides lots of great advice. Go and read it when you finish this article]
Act in integrity
Integrity is one of those words that gets bandied around so often that it’s taken as fact that we all know what it means. Here at HUMANS:CONNECTING, integrity is something we’re in when our words, thoughts and actions align with our values.
To put this another way, you must live your values.
Acting in integrity requires practice, but this practice builds confidence. Confidence is often what shatters when a friendship ends. Confidence is often what people who seek our support say they want to have before they can feel meaningfully connected. Living your values is how you build it.
While it does take courage to act in integrity, I rarely regret it. The times I regret my response usually come from not living in alignment with my values. I acted or spoke from fear, hurt, shame or ego rather than from the solid foundation of my values.
Action: know your values and then live them.
Know your connection needs.
What are your connection needs?
Knowing your connection needs means you can recentre during testing times like the end of an important friendship. While still processing the end of the friendship you can ensure you’re meeting your other connection needs.
If you don’t know your connection needs, you risk doing nothing, doing everything or guessing. This is exhausting, and combined with the grief and other emotions you’re feeling, the exhaustion can push you deeper into loneliness. For more on the link between tiredness and loneliness, read this article.
Knowing your connection needs lets you focus on meeting them at a time when many other emotions are present.
Practice
Connection is a practice. Living in integrity requires practice.
Life does not require perfection and mastery before attempting anything, just the commitment to keep in the practice.
Commit to the practice, not the perfection.
Take a step
Loneliness only ever shifts when we do connection.
The emphasis and odd wording there is important.
Too often, connect is used in a way that’s very passive and doesn’t fill our social batteries. Doing connection declares that this is something that requires activity.
So, do connection. This can seem overwhelming when you’re in the thick of the emotions after the end of a friendship.
The overwhelm can make it tough to do connection. It’s in this way that overwhelm can be a gateway to loneliness going from a temporary experience into something that persists and becomes chronic.
Take a single step toward connection. Simply do one thing each day that’s a deposit into your social account.
Start small if you need to, but it must be one thing that’s meaningful for you.
Moving forward and building hope
The end of a friendship is tough. Telling yourself that it is only a friendship denies the importance of friendship and invalidates the normal emotions you are feeling.
The thoughts and feelings will pass and soften over time, but only after you allow them to be and allow them to move through you.
Getting the meaningful connection you need offers a glimmer of hope during tough days.
Get more great advice and support
For more ideas and perspectives on social connection and the loneliness we experience when we feel disconnected, check out all our content at HUMANS:CONNECTING
Our blog articles and podcast episodes (listen and watch on YouTube) are full of wisdom, advice, and support for you and all the humans you love.
Closing invitation
If this article resonated with you, share it with someone who might need to hear it.
Send it directly, post it on your socials, or pass it along in your networks.
Connection Starter Course
Meaningful connection is the antidote to loneliness.
We understand that it’s tough to know what kind of connection is meaningful for you, so that’s why we created the Connection Starter Course: to help you explore what meaningful connection looks like for you.
The Connection Starter Course walks you through how you can feel connected to your authentic self, the people who matter most, and your wider community.
This understanding helps you develop your personal Connection Plan — your roadmap to becoming, and staying, meaningfully connected.
That’s where we’ll leave it for now
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Until next time, be awesomely you.
~ Phil
Important:
All views expressed above are the author’s and are intended to inform, support, challenge and inspire you to consider the issue of loneliness and increase awareness of the need for authentic connection with your self, with those most important to you and your communities as an antidote to loneliness. Unless otherwise declared, the author is not a licensed mental health professional and these words are not intended to be crisis support. If you’re in crisis, this page has some links for immediate support for where you may be in the world.
If you’re in crisis, please don’t wait. Get support now.
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