“Nothing is personal” is easy to say, but our adult friendships can truly test our ability to hold on to that vital lesson from Don MIguel Ruiz. In this AMA Laura takes on two different questions from listeners about how we navigate adult friendships. How do things change when one friend gets sober? How do we navigate the reality that we can grow apart as friends, just as we can in a romantic relationship? How do our patterns in friendships mirror our patterns in family dynamics and in our love life? What do we even WANT from our adult relationships? We don’t talk about this enough and we were so glad when we saw these questions come in. As usual, the TMST community brings the good stuff and we love making this show with you! Show notes: Episode link: https://www.tmstpod.com/episodes/39-laura-mckowen-ask-me-anything Spotify playlist for this episode: Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST today so you can hear the uncut interviews, attend private events with Laura and help keep TMST ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Hey friends, it's Laura. And maybe I should say, Hey, y'all that feels like an appropriate greeting since I will be traveling to Austin this Thursday morning. So by the time this drops, I will be either in the air or already there. And I'm there because I'm moderating a panel on addiction at South by Southwest, which you may have heard me talk about in the last couple of episodes or on social media.
[00:00:35] The reason I'm telling you is, well, two reasons. One, if you're going to be in Austin this week for South by Southwest, come on by, we will be on the main stage on Friday at 11:30 and by Friday, I mean Friday, March 18th. So I would love to see you. We would [00:01:00] love to see you, Mikel will be there also our executive producer.
[00:01:05] And if you aren't there no big deal. We are going to air the entire thing next week, right here on the show. I'm so excited that we get to do that. And what you're going to hear is these three folks, all of whom come from different areas in the field of addiction, either having experienced it themselves or working inside of it, Wes Hurt is in long-term recovery.
[00:01:34] He is the founder of Clean Cause Water and he lives in Austin. You can find all about Wes and Clean Cause just Google it, Google Wes Hurt, which is a great name by the way. It's a very like either musician or actor, name, Hollywood name. Good job Wes’ parents and Jan Rader is another person on this panel.
[00:01:59] She [00:02:00] is a first responder, I believe the first female fire chief in West Virginia. She's right on the front lines of the opioid crisis and Grammy award winning singer songwriter, Jason Isbell. And thank you to the person who emailed me. And I think her name was Mary and told me it's pronounced Isbull instead of Isbell.
[00:02:24] It's spelled ISBELL. And I have been saying Isbell, for years, I looked up a YouTube video where he was on Saturday night or Trevor Noah’s show. And indeed it is Isbull. So I am very happy to hear that before I pronounced it incorrectly in front of hundreds of people and Jason.
[00:02:47] So again, you're going to get to hear this panel next week on the show. We're really excited to be able to do that. And I think that is the end of the announcements this week. If you happen to [00:03:00] be in Austin, for any reason, I will also be at an event hosted by Chris Marshall, my dear friend, Chris Marshall who runs Sans Bar in Austin.
[00:03:12] It's an alcohol-free bar. He's had it, I think since 2017, he's doing an event there on Saturday, the 19th from 12 to 4:00 PM. I will be there for a couple hours just hanging out, signing books. If you have a We are the Luckiest book, bring it. I will only have like five books in tow that I could give to people and sign.
[00:03:35] I can't bring that much with me, but I'm more than happy to sign yours if you want to show up or just show up, all alone and come out and have some NA drinks and hear live music. And I've heard there's going to be a comedian there and who knows. All right. So this week on this show, I am doing an AMA an Ask Me Anything where I [00:04:00] answer your questions.
[00:04:01] If you want to submit a question, please do go to our website at TMSTPOD.com and click on submit a question. You can do it either in a written form, so you can write it out and submit it anonymously or with your name, or you can voice it, which you have heard people's other people's voices come through on the AMA episodes in the past.
[00:04:28] I love when that happens. I love hearing other people's voices, but my own. So please submit a question. If you have them, we get amazing, amazing questions. These two today are on the topic of friendship. And I am so I actually really, really, I was excited to talk about this anyway, but I was really, really surprised at how much I had to say about this.
[00:04:56] And I think that sort of tracks with how [00:05:00] we look at friendship culturally. We don't talk about it as much as we do say romantic relationships, certainly or family dynamics, friendships just doesn't, they don't, we don't get that much airtime to talk about friendships. And yet it's a vital part of our lives.
[00:05:21] So I'm talking, I'm answering two letters, both from people who had gotten sober have gotten sober and noticed that their friendships have shifted, but they're coming from different vantage points and whether or not you're sober, you know, whether your friendships and relationships have been impacted. Sobriety yourself, you know, your own or other people's, it doesn't matter. This is really about navigating friendships when we change when other people change. And that's just part of, part of our life. As we know, you know, we, most of us have not had the same friends throughout the [00:06:00] course of our lives. I have maybe a very small handful of friends from childhood that I keep in touch with not even regularly as in monthly or even every six months, but when we get together, it's very much the same and we can pick up right up where we left off.
[00:06:18] I moved from Boston to, or from Colorado to Boston. When I graduated from college, I don't have any childhood friends, geographically close to me. But in my adult life say when I moved to Boston until now, which has been over 20 years, I've had many different groups of friends. Periods of friendships, friendships that have come and gone because of different jobs, different relationships that my groups have changed as I got divorced, definitely when I got sober and I'm going to talk about that and it's just the way it goes.
[00:06:57] And yet we don't talk about how difficult it can be when friendships fall away. And I've experienced myself three relationships, three friendships that when they ended, it felt like a breakup, like a divorce of sorts. They were just really significant people in my life at the time two of them, you know, it's been a couple of decades or a little bit less, 15 to 20 years ago.
[00:07:30] So I've had a good amount of distance on those, but they were that that hurt a lot. It was really hard and the other one is more fresh, but I've got some thoughts about that too. So all that to say, I'm really happy to dig in this, dig into friendships today. And not as someone who has a bunch of answers ever, just like all the other episodes I do like this, but more to explore things that I've experienced and wondered about myself.
[00:07:59] I was [00:08:00] actually surprised at how much I had to say about this. I thought it would be just, you know, a page of notes and boop, boop, boop, a few, a few points. And I went on for pages and pages and pages. So as usual, this was helpful to me. Hopefully it's helpful to you. And of course, to the two people who wrote the letters for context, both of the letters I'm reading today came from women and are referencing friendships with other women.
[00:08:26] And while I'm sure some of what I'll talk about is universal. I can't really know, say the inner workings of male friendships among others. So, and as always a disclaimer, that I'm not a mental health clinician, a therapist, or anything of the sort, all my advice or commentary is based on my own experience and research, and it should not be taken as professional guidance.
[00:08:56] Okay. The first letter comes from A, I will just use her initial as I'm not sure if she wanted me to use her full name. This comes from A,
Hey Laura, can you please address loss of friendship when getting sober? I always hear about the sober person removing unsafe friendships after they've quit drinking, but I lost my best friend of over 10 years.
[00:09:23] She and I used to share life's issues over a glass or three of wine. Since I stopped drinking, our relationship started shifting my requests to get together one-on-one were met with vague excuses. Her language to be in texts changed once loving exchanges or now curt and dismissive a phone call where I would leave a concerned voicemail were returned with a text saying, “I got your voicemail, thank you for your message.” I finally decided to write her letter apologizing. If I had hurt her in any way, as it seemed over a period of several months, she hadn't wanted to get together. Her email reply was almost businesslike. And once again, dismissive, I find it impossible to dismiss the timing.
[00:10:16] It all started once I quit drinking for good. This is additionally compounded by the fact that our friendship was foundational to other close friend groups. Friends asked me about her as I was always her touchstone. And I have to admit that our friendship is broken. Help.
[00:10:36] All right. So first of all, A, I want to say, and I'm just, sorry, you're going through this. Like I said, it can be really painful and confusing and difficult when we feel like we're losing a friendship or when we have lost it, especially when the other person isn't acknowledging that there's anything going on.
[00:10:56] But I'm going to take apart your letter in pieces. [00:11:00] So you said at the top of the letter, that if that you've heard of sober people, removing quote unquote unsafe friendships after they quit drinking. And I think that's something important to clarify this part about unsafe. Um, sure. Yes. It may be the case that someone is actually unsafe.
[00:11:20] Meaning, they encourage the sober person to drink or aren't supportive of their sobriety and they feel the need to not share space with that person in order to protect their sobriety. You didn't specify whether your friend is sober. I got the gist that they aren't, but I'm just speaking about this in broad terms for anybody who might be either considering that they need to adjust their friendships and are feeling bad about it or guilty about it, or people who are on the receiving end of this and have felt the person who is getting sober, pulling away.
[00:12:00] There's a broad range of reasons why we might need to distance ourselves from friendships or any other relationships in early sobriety. It’s not necessarily about feeling unsafe. I really wanted to clarify that for some reason, I'm saying this again for people who might be on both sides of the equation.
[00:12:21] So a lot of time, the reason for distancing and early sobriety is honestly just that it takes up so much energy and focus to stay sober. And it's so raw. I know for me, I could not process much more than what was right in front of me and figuring out how to not drink right in the next moment. And it was like that for a good long while, like a year, two years.
[00:12:50] And as a result, I honestly let communication drop with people and I didn't even have the emotional energy or space to let them know why, like they knew I was getting sober, [00:13:00] but I didn't I have the willingness or desire to let them into my process. I didn't even know how to communicate my process.
[00:13:08] There were plenty of friends that would have absolutely wanted to be supportive, but they didn't know how, and I didn't know how to ask them for it. And so things just slid, right? Our friendships got put on the back burner and what I really needed at that time was just to make my circle very small and to build myself back up from the inside slowly.
[00:13:34] And that meant for me getting really quiet and focused. And it means that for a lot of other people too. So for people who may be experiencing this from other people, don't take it personally. That's going to be a theme for this whole show, by the way, not taking it personally. And for the folks who need to allow themselves the space and protection they need, please, please, please just give yourself that permission.
[00:14:02] So back to your letter A, when we go through something as big as getting sober, it causes this disruption in the force, it creates ripples. It's a disturbance to the way things are to the status quo and people react in a bunch of ways, which I'll get to in a minute, but it's really important to know that it's not about you.
[00:14:32] This is just a universal thing. What's happening with you in getting sober is just causing a ripple in your friend's experience and it's not for you to take responsibility for or fix it or own it. All right. So back to the specifics of your letter, it sounds like from what you said, a significant part of your relationship was based on drinking together, which is totally normal when we drink heavily or consistently, a lot of our relationships ended up centering around that it becomes the third thing. And it sounds like your friend may be distancing herself from you, but isn't communicating that. So I want to just offer some potential reasons why your friend might be distancing herself either consciously or unconsciously from you.
[00:15:31] These may be right or wrong. I honestly have no idea, but I'm just presenting them as ideas. Other than the idea it seems you have that you did something wrong. Okay. One possibility is that she feels complicit in you drinking and she feels guilty for contributing to it, by drinking with you all that time.
[00:15:54] And she doesn't know what to do with that. She might feel like the foundation of your conversations over the last 10 years, weren't quote unquote, real, because you had this problem or this thing growing in the background, this addiction that you may or may not have expressed to her throughout the years.
[00:16:21] And so she might feel a little betrayed by that, by the way. I'm not saying any of these things is real. I'm just offering possibilities. She might feel threatened by your sobriety because it's too much of a mirror for her. This is very common. She may not want to look at her own drinking or may not have anything to do with drinking, but just about telling the truth about some area of her life.
[00:16:48] And she's just not able, willing to do that right now. She might feel like she doesn't know how to connect with you or relate to you when you're not drinking together. And we often say like, oh, that's ridiculous. I'm still me, but you know what? We're not, we're different. And it's just, it's just true when we've always had wine as this lubricant, and then you don't have it.
[00:17:16] It's the absence is real and it takes some time and awkwardness and conversations to find the new normal. She might be resentful and angry at you for, as she sees it, you know, changing the terms of your relationship. She might think you believe you're better than people who drink. However, unfounded that is, she might feel judged is what I'm saying.
[00:17:44] And again, it might be totally unfounded, but it's something that some people feel and you know what, she might have other things going on entirely that you don't know about. So whether or not we know it, every relationship, friendships, all kinds of relationships, family, definitely, we have this silent agreement with the other person.
[00:18:12] We subconsciously agree on the rules of engagement, the behaviors, who plays which role, you know, I mean, you can look at any of your friends and you can pretty quickly identify what role you play. Maybe it's the same role across all your friendships? Maybe you're the go-to like helper. Maybe you're the good time person.
[00:18:41] The one who someone can always call for fun. Maybe it's you're the host. You're the one who hosts. Maybe you're the one who organizes. Maybe you're the one that leads the group. Maybe you're the one who offers all the humor. And so there's like these macro roles that we play, but there's also these individual relationship, unique relationship roles that we play.
[00:19:07] And the thing is when we break these agreements, it again, like I said, it causes a disturbance in the force. It really, really ripples all the way through, in ways that we don't realize and we don't intend, you know, we don't think, oh, I'm going to get sober and I'm going to, I want to blow up all my relationships.
[00:19:29] Like nobody wants that, but when we change the center of gravity changes and people start to feel things they may not have any clue how to process or understand and if your friend doesn't have the self-awareness or the tools or the support, or the willingness to figure it out through no fault of her own, it just might be where she is.
[00:19:54] Our default is always to make up the story, right? We make up a story that usually ends with us being at fault or them being at fault and us being good or bad than being good or bad. We make this dramatic story. And most of the times we have no idea what's actually real and what's really going. So all this to say, and this is something I've said in past AMA episodes probably because it's something that I have to go back to again and again, and again, is agreement number two in the four agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, which is nothing is personal, nothing is personal, nothing is personal means that we're all living in our own massive hallucination. We see three things through the lens of our own [00:21:00] perceptions and beliefs and experiences. And we tend to believe that the world is revolving around us and reacting to us because we are the center of our own drama. But the truth is that's not how it is. Everyone's at the center of their own hallucination, right? So your friend has an entirely different story going on and it may or may not have anything to do with you. It may consciously, she may consciously have something going on and a story she's telling herself about your friendship and you, or she may this be maybe so hidden from her consciousness.
[00:21:45] So the point about nothing is personal though, is to remind us that we all see things through our own private hallucination and that we can't really know what's going on with other people, even the people that we're closest to, even if they tried to make us understand and, and help us to understand, we still can't know what it's like to be someone else.
[00:22:12] And so it's intended to ground us in this reality. That what we believe, what we perceive to be happening is often not what's happening and to stop trying to know that the suffering is in trying to know. And that doesn't mean you don't try to communicate and you don't, and I'm going to get to that.
[00:22:36] You don't ask for clarification, you don't work on clarifying things and you don't work on being honest and you know, hope for that from other people. That's not what I mean. They just throw your hands up and say, well, whatever nothing's personal, I'm not going to be bothered. It's not like that.
[00:22:53] It's not a tool to spiritually bypass feelings either. It's just to go, right. They are having their own experience. And I don't know what that is. I'm having my own experience. They don't know what my experience is and until we make an effort to communicate, we can't, I shouldn't assume because the assuming leads to a lot of suffering.
[00:23:20] You may think it's about your sobriety. You might be right. You may, it may be true that your friend is distancing herself since you're, since you made the decision to quit drinking for good. It may not be true. It's honestly, none of your business and what I mean by that is what Byron Katie says. We, the only thing that is our responsibility is our business.
[00:23:45] And when we are up in someone else's business, we're not taking care of ours. And again, that doesn't take away the fact that you have all these swirling feelings that you need to address, it doesn't mean you don't do anything. It just means this is a way to center yourself and ground yourself when you start to spin off.
[00:24:08] Because these things make us spin off. Okay. So let's get to the part about your friend, not seemingly not communicating with you about what's going on. Ideally people would be, your friend specifically would be kind enough and courageous enough to communicate and, and self-aware enough, frankly, to communicate with you clearly and honestly about what's going on.
[00:24:35] She would acknowledge what's going on. She would offer an explanation, unfortunately, she's not doing this. And it sounds like you have tried to ask in multiple ways. Many people, self included, up until I would say, well, even, still, even still in some cases, lack the courage or the skills or the willingness to be honest in this way, a lot of people just don't know how, because it's uncomfortable.
[00:25:11] It's hard too, this is a hard thing to say, Hey, I'm disappointed in you or, Hey, I'm frustrated or I feel rejected, or I feel like I'm being judged, whatever it is. Instead we evade and we hide and we pretend and what we really do is we make up stories. Like I was saying. So a story from my own life, I had a friend for a few years, several years in early sobriety, someone I thought was a genuine kind of soul friend, who I spent a ton of time with talking with, sharing space with, we visited each other's homes.
[00:25:58] We met each other's kids. We did work things together. We did personal things together. I mean, we spent hours and hours and hours talking on the phone and in real life, I genuinely believe this person was a very close friend and someone that I would stay close to for a really long time. And then suddenly I was informed that we were no longer friends and just like that, I was cut off, no texts.
[00:26:31] I was blocked, no texts, no calls, no emails, zero communication from that point forward. And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what happened. Arguing with this person in my head. I spent a lot of time, frankly, being really angry in addition to missing this person. When I would admit to myself that I missed them, it felt incredibly cruel.
[00:27:05] And it was actually pretty traumatizing at the time. Ultimately over the years and with some perspective and a lot of work and, you know, some therapy and time and more sobriety, I came to see that I shouldn't have been surprised that it went this way at all. Like we sometimes do in romantic relationships, I ignore or I'll speak for myself like I have I ignored this person's behavior with other people, I ignored the stories that they told me about their past friendships. I ignored the fact that they had no friends from their past. And I thought the way she treated me would be different than the way I saw her treat other people. In other words, I thought I was special, which is a big theme in my romantic relationships.
[00:28:10] So I started to see that I shouldn't have been so surprised at all and the circumstances or your friendship might be entirely different. But my point is I came to see that I had been acting out a pattern in this friendship that was old, that I had acted out in other friendships, and it looked something like this.
[00:28:33] I would become really close to someone really fast. And typically this person would be someone that I would put on a pedestal, who I thought was sort of one up for me. They could teach me, they were kind of an elder, always more wise, always more knowledgeable. I would take this like one down position.
[00:28:55] I would become kind of this messy child, you know, the student. And I would put this person on a pedestal. So they and they could do no wrong. And I would come to believe that I needed them. And I wanted to say like, all of this stuff is subconscious. I didn't realize it until later. And so I would, you know, even when they did things that I didn't like, or when they treated me like shit, I ignored, I ignored it because I had them up on this pedestal and like they knew better.
[00:29:32] I stuffed it when I was angry. I ignored red flags but I myself was also dishonest because I couldn't accept the reality of them. Maybe not being this person that I wanted them to be or need, thought that I needed them to be. And essentially I would say that things were okay. You know, even when they weren't really okay with me, I confused this intimacy with the sort of control they had over.
[00:30:04] And again, I, your friendships might be different. I'm just using this to illustrate a point of a pattern. So what I saw and what was primarily pointed out to me by others first, and then what I came to see myself, was that what happened in this type of relationship, including this relationship with this person, is that when I continued to grow over the years, as I did, I grew out of being the messy broken child.
[00:30:35] And that would just wasn't, that was untenable for that person. It was too much of a threat say for me to be a full person, the power dynamic was disrupted and it didn't work anymore. So I'm boiling something, you know, complicated into just a few sentences, but I invite you to look at any patterns that are in this friendship that may be indicative of patterns from your past, not just friendships, either, could be romantic relationships.
[00:31:14] It could be relationships stemming from your family, your parents, even siblings, for me, this type of relationship, mimicked relationship dynamics that I had with my dad. And I repeated it many times often with men, but also with women in friendships. And there may be something there for you that you could get curious about.
[00:31:37] So sort of elevate yourself up into the 30,000 foot view of this friendship. And is it indicative of, of dynamics in past relationships that maybe didn't work out that were painful or difficult for? You may say maybe something there maybe. Okay. So, so debrief, the two things I've covered so far is nothing is personal.
[00:32:08] And then get curious about patterns. The third point I want to make is about owning our part. So we cannot force people to communicate with us. Obviously we can't force them to explain themselves. You've tried to get your friend to talk, either directly or maybe passively aggressively. I'm not sure but you can't force her to do it.
[00:32:36] It sounds like you've made, you you've tried, what we can do though. Because we can't change other people or get them to do anything is, as they say in AA, clean up our side of the street, we can own our part. So in all my friendships where things have gone south, I've had to consider and not just friendships, all relationships I've had to consider what my part was, the way I did this for me was going through therapy, reading a lot about attachment styles and psychology and going through the 12 steps.
[00:33:18] And what I identified was that, well, the details always varied. There were two themes, primary themes with me in relationships that didn't work out. And I don't mean the typical sort of look, we need to normalize the fact that not all relationships, most relationships are not meant to last a lifetime, people come and go, and that's perfectly normal.
[00:33:50] It's healthy people come into our lives for all kinds of reasons. I think of some of the friends that I had at certain work jobs and how close I [00:34:00] was to them and how meaningful and formative and important those relationships were, how much they made my life and defined periods of my life. And yet I don't talk to those people anymore.
[00:34:17] And it doesn't mean that they did anything wrong, or I did anything wrong or that something went wrong. It's just the way things go. And that's perfectly. Totally. Okay. So some people I've never had a problem with with that, with letting things go in that way. And, and the fact that people come and go, but some people do, some people take responsibility for it, or they think that they messed up or that all relationships should last.
[00:34:41] And if they don't, that's a problem. I'm not talking about those types of relationships. What I'm talking about is the relationships that go sour, or you still have some kind of resentment. You've got a story about them that pokes at you. [00:35:00] You know, that there's bad blood, right? Bad feelings in relationships in mind that went that way there were these themes. One was what I just said. I would put people on pedestals and there would be, an inequity in the power dynamic where I would put them up there as a sort of teacher or a God, if you will. And then, and they would have me as like this messy student type of person, one down. And when I outgrew that role or they somehow failed me. It would break things up and it wouldn't work. And what that also meant was that in these types of relationships, I would be dishonest. If this person, I wouldn't tell them how I actually felt. Right? I wouldn't tell them that I [00:36:00] didn't like things that we're doing.
[00:36:01] I would ignore my own anger, things like that. So get curious about what your own patterns might be in relationships like this. I'm guessing it's not your first relationship that has gone this way. Maybe it is, maybe not. But get curious about those patterns. And then we get to the part about keeping your side of the street clean.
[00:36:28] Because this is what we get to do in sobriety. And this is what makes the difference and frees us from all of this sort of mental gymnastics and emotional turmoil that we go through around trying to control other people and the nature of things. So go through some kind of process, either with a therapist, maybe the 12 steps, maybe a coach, maybe group sobriety group. Maybe even just talking with a trusted friend or a mentor about not just this relationship, but your past relationships and with the goal of getting really clear about what your part might be.
[00:37:21] And this is hard, you know, it's like we have to really look at ourselves and look up close. Without putting any rose colored glasses on and saying, Hmm, what are the parts of me that may not be so pretty that are a little dysfunctional or a lot dysfunctional. And by the way, there's no rush to this. I don't know how long it sounds like it's been going on with your friend for several months.
[00:37:49] I don't know how long you've been sober for, but this is stuff that can't be done overnight. It's a process and it takes time and reflection and allow for that. You can't get to the conclusion right away. Because you also have to process all the things that come up when you go through this, the anger, the grief, the frustration, and it may mean that what you realize is that you owe your friend an amends. And I'm not saying that you do, I'm not saying that you did anything quote, unquote wrong, but we always, there's always a part that we play in our relationships. It may mean it may mean that you do this amends in writing. It may mean that you do it in person. It may mean that you don't do it directly to them at all.
[00:38:41] Maybe you write a letter, but you use this insight to inform your other relationships so long as you think that, you know, you believe that it's all about them or that it's all about you. We, we stay stuck and please, please, please hear that this is a process. This is not like, okay now today, when you're listening to this, write out a letter, figure out what to do, go to them and for, you know, try to force some situation.
[00:39:10] This is a process, a months or years long process. The point of doing this though, is you do it so that you get to be free, you don't do it so that they are different. So they treat you different so that they come back or that they go away forever, or that they will finally see how good your intentions are, how wonderful you are, how worthy you are.
[00:39:40] It's not for any of that. You do it so you can be free and honest and clear. All right, there's this last part that you put in about explaining your what's going on with your friendship, to these other friends. And I get that it's awkward. People are going to you because they think you're so close and you don't have an answer because you haven't talked to her and as awkward as it might be to say, you know what?
[00:40:11] I'm not sure how she is. Honestly, we haven't talked recently and it may lead to some wayward glances and hopes for more information, you don't have to offer anything else. It's just the truth, you know, you don't, I sensed in your sentence that you maybe feel bad or you feel that you failed somehow, like admitting that this cause you used the word broken, that this relationship is broken.
[00:40:48] Kind of like when people say, you know, my marriage is broken, I don't ever really look at it that way. I look at relationships as always being in some kind of process or season, we go through periods of being very close and connected and you know, where communication is very tight and we might be talking all the time and then we might go through periods where it's not quite like that.
[00:41:10] And it doesn't, it's not a statement on either person's goodness. It's just a fact of life. And then the last thing I want to say, which I sort of alluded to in the last point, but just to underscore it more will be revealed. I don't know how far along in sobriety you are, but from my perspective on friendships now that I have been sober for awhile is nearly all of my relationships changed when I got divorced, which was two years before I got sober.
[00:41:47] So I had a little practice with the divorce, and then I got a lot of practice with sobriety and these like big shifts in relationships. And there was this time in early sobriety where it was kind of this like barren desert, like [00:42:00] tumbleweeds rolling through where none of my old friendships were as they used to be, but I hadn't established new ones yet either.
[00:42:11] And it was really difficult but over time, and of course, I thought I'm never going to have any friends again, all my friends are gone, but what happened is over time and I'm talking years, some of those friendships, those old friendships came back into the fold and they were better. They were different.
[00:42:40] We silently or explicitly renegotiated the terms of our relationship and went through some awkwardness. And we found a new way of being some friendships [00:43:00] just fell off completely and they never came back. And I accepted that eventually is just being okay. So again, I want to normalize this fluctuation of intensity, intimacy and frequency of communications in long-term relationships.
[00:43:15] It's, it's completely normal. And for all types of relationships, marriages, friendships, parent, child relationships. I don't have a single long-term relationship, which is say five years or more that hasn't gone through periods of talking less talking much more feeling, very connected, and then maybe disconnected being annoyed at each other.
[00:43:38] One person being busy, the other person being busy and so on. And so we have to allow for that and learn that annoying lesson of not taking it personally or as a statement of our worth. It's hard, but it is the only way to sanity. I will say. I don't know. It sounds like the email that you wrote to your friend was about apologizing if you had hurt her and you don't know that you'd hurt her, what I'm, what I'm getting at is I wonder if there has been a clear communication with no expectation on your end of how she returns it, but just to clear communication of what you're experiencing and an invitation, not a demand, but an invitation for her to consider it and respond if she wishes, if she feels compelled to do so. If you haven't and only, you know, this, if you haven't had that type of communication, be it in a email and a voicemail, it's probably worth doing, that might be your version now of keeping your side of the [00:45:00] street clean. And then the rest of this work can happen over. So last point on that again is more will be revealed always.
[00:45:13] All right. The second question comes from D that's the initial D not the name Dee. And it goes like this. I met my best friend about seven years ago and we were instantly drawn to each other. We bonded over drinking. It was our thing. We drank lots, we laughed lots and we got really messy together.
[00:45:38] And honestly, at the time I loved it. I even asked her to be my maid of honor, three years after we met, since then I've found sobriety. I found meditation. I've started to work towards them, big, scary dreams. And I'm making strides that I'm extremely proud of. I'm starting to feel like a brand new version of myself, and I'm a thrilled.
[00:46:01] The only problem is that I feel like I've outgrown my best friend. Our relationship just isn't the same. She's been respectful of my sobriety, but the spark is gone also, now that we don't drink together, there are things that I've started to notice about her personality that I just do not enjoy.
[00:46:21] I've started to make room for sober friends and other people in my life. But when I mentioned that I've gone to a play or a dinner where spent any time with someone, she doesn't know, she gets jealous and I feel kind of cornered into explaining why I didn't ask her first. I've been trying to distance myself, but when she senses it, she becomes very upset and she has even cried saying I'm the only one who loves her until I am forced to apologize for taking space.
[00:46:50] I just don't know what to do. I guess my question is how do you break up with a best friend? Okay, so this is sort of the same question, but from another side, so D, much of what I said, and as a response to the last question is might be helpful. So take from any of that, what you will, if it is, I have two points that I want to make to you.
[00:47:24] So first I want to point out if you don't see it, that way, that someone telling you that you're the only person who loves them is not healthy behavior. It's manipulative trying to guilt people into paying attention. Isn't the best tactic, just in case you didn't know that it sounds like you do, but. I'm not sure.
[00:47:53] So there are two points I want to make about this question. Like I said, in addition to what I said before, the first one is clear is kind, this is a statement that comes from Brene Brown's work. I think of it all the time when I'm feeling wimpy about being honest, what we are told, especially as women, is that we're supposed to be nice.
[00:48:20] So clear is kind, does not mean clear is nice. Being nice is often being dishonest. Frankly, being nice, gets us into all kinds of trouble. It's often dishonest. It's people pleasing, it's dancing around the truth and sometimes gaslighting someone by telling them that whatever they're experiencing or noticing or telling you about isn't true when it is like maybe what your friend is doing. Your friend is clearly feeling a shift in you. She's bringing that shift up. Maybe not in the best, [00:49:00] most productive ways or ways that you like, but she's doing it. And it sounds like you've said you'd needed space, which is fair, but it's not the whole truth.
[00:49:11] So I, I think clear is kind is the directive that I would advise you take or consider because the whole truth is what people need. Not every detail. Okay. I'm going to get into specifics. Like kindness means kindness. Kindness means that you don't say things that are unnecessary like you don't need to tell your friend that either are parts of her personality that you're just not digging anymore.
[00:49:44] You don't need to tell your friend that you feel like you're outgrowing her cause that's shitty but there are ways that you can be clear. And the reason clear is kind, even when it's not nice, which most of the time it's not nice, [00:50:00] is because it's honest and honesty always, always moves us in the direction of love for everybody.
[00:50:08] Even when it doesn't seem like that. Even when it hurts, even when it changes things, even when it means breaking up with your best friend, because no one wants to be friends with someone who is doing it because they feel like they have to. And past history is never a good enough reason to stay friends with someone alone.
[00:50:30] Obligation friendship out of obligation sucks for everybody. So honestly lets the other person know what's really going on and it honesty means the other person has the facts and they can operate with dignity and make decisions for themselves with all the information, not just the information you think they should have and honesty lets the other person know that they aren't crazy.
[00:50:57] What typically happens. I've done this. I'm sure we've all done. This what happens in cases like these is one friend tries to disappear into the bushes like Homer Simpson, they just back away slowly let more time lapse in between texts or forget to call back or accidentally leave them out of some kind of plan and they just kind of hope the other friend will catch the drift and start to leave them alone. But what usually happens is the other person doesn't leave them alone. They don't leave us alone. They bring it up or they make stories in their head because they're forced to, and then the friend who's trying to disappear, acts like the other person is being annoying and needy as a way to justify their receding into the bushes.
[00:51:56] Like Homer Simpson. It's like the guy who's cheating on his girlfriend and the girlfriend suspects it. And then the guy accuses her. She confronts him and the guy accuses her of being crazy and paranoid and controlling as if to imply, you know, she's not a great partner in the first place and he's somehow pushing, she's pushing him to go outside of the relationship.
[00:52:19] One example. The way you break up with a friend is by being honest with them. There's no easier, softer way. And I'm not sure if, you know, for sure that you don't want her in your life at all, but either way I would go about it by saying something along these lines, in your own words, acknowledge that what they're sensing about your need for space and that you have pulled away is real cause doing anything else is gaslighting them.
[00:52:57] And it's really mean and unfair, acknowledge that the changes that are happening in oh, no. Sorry. Acknowledge that. The changes you're experiencing. Sorry, Paul, scratch that out. Let's start again.
[00:53:16] Acknowledge the changes that you're experiencing because of sobriety, you know, just, Hey, I mean she knows, say. I am changing and all these ways that are new to me. And part of that is just finding myself, wanting to spend my time in different ways. And it seems like our desires and I mean, keep it in your own experience as much as you can, but my desires are different than they used to be.
[00:53:52] And that's at odds with a lot of my friendships, including yours, again, no need to say or outgrowing them, not that you would, or that you realize you don't like parts of their personality, just that this is what's going on with you. And it's a surprise to you too. And, but be honest, own it and acknowledge that it might be painful or confusing to her.
[00:54:17] And that you're truly sorry for your part in that. And then this is the important part. Set the terms of your relationship as you would like them to be not as a demand, but as a boundary of sorts. So this includes things like whether or not you're available to spend time and whether or not you are available to communicate with her.
[00:54:46] If so, what that might look like, like maybe you don't want to, maybe you don't want to have any communication or spend time. You should be clear about that as hard as it might be, but maybe you're open to doing certain things like going to coffee, going to lunch. I don't know what it is, but communicate that.
[00:55:08] And again, not as a request, but just as a, this is what I would like or be open to. And I don’t know if that sounds good to you, but that's, this is where I am, right. So, what I would do is write this out first, always, and then talk with them one-on-one, don't send it as an email. Don't text it. It's not fair and run what you're going to say by an objective wise, third party, not someone that has any skin in the game on whether you're friends with this person or not.
[00:55:37] She may not understand it. She may hate it. She may be very hurt, but that can't dictate whether or not you were honest with her, your job. Our job is always to be honest, our job is not to try to protect people from their own process or try to control their process, which is what I do your job is to communicate honestly, with respect for both of you.
[00:56:05] And my guess is down the line. She may come to appreciate the honesty you offered because it's so damn rare. You know, how many people have ghosted us and receded into the bushes like Homer Simpson, or just let things die off in this really wimpy way. I know I've done it. And I, and I genuinely regret those situations.
[00:56:28] In some cases I have made amends for them in some cases I can't. So my guess is even if she felt, feels hurt or rejected or ashamed at the time, she will appreciate the honesty. It's so much better than what is offered in most relationships. And look, you've been close friends for seven years. You know, this is, this is a dignified way to exit a relationship.
[00:56:56] And I'll leave with this last line and this sort of applies to everything. I kept thinking about this line as I was writing the notes for this episode. And it's this it's from real quick. And I think about it all the time. I think about it in my relationship with my boyfriend. I think about it in friendships.
[00:57:15] I think about it with my daughter. And it is I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people that each protects the solitude of the other. I'll read it again. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people that each protects the solitude of the other. So when you are truly close with someone, when you're truly connected and intimate, and I don't mean the most intimate relationship you have, this type of respect for someone can exist, even in a casual friendship. You want to protect their solitude and the dignity of their process.
[00:58:17] Sometimes this goes against your personal interest, what you want. Sometimes it even means a relationship as you know, can't be, but this is what it means to respect someone and to care for them. And it's something that I aspire to in my relationships. I miss wildly sometimes I have messed up, but it's a good north star to protect the solitude of the other.
[00:58:56] What does that mean, to look at each person as a spiritual being who is going through a process that you know nothing about. And that really, it might be connected to you in your process, but it's not about you and your process and that the highest form of respect and love is to allow them the dignity of that.
[00:59:31] It's so easy when we think of it like this, for me, it's so easy to breathe around all the stories and the dramas and the pains and the misgivings that take place in relationships. It's so easy to breathe around them and give them space and see them as we are assignments that we. We get assignments in the form of other people and our intertwining and our appearances and roles.
[01:00:12] We play in the place of other people's lives. And they're them. And ours are these beautiful dances that we get to do. Most of them don't last forever, but to protect the solitude of the other means that we take our self-interest out of it. And we really appreciate it. That what serves each individual best also serves the whole, even if it's not what we want, even if we don't want our friendships to go away, we don't want our relationships. We don't to go away. We don't want our kids to go off and graduate and go to college. We don't want them to let go of us. We don't want things to change.
[01:01:08] So I'll leave you with that. I hope some of this has been helpful once again. Thank you for submitting your questions and trust me with them. I really, really love digging into these answers. It helps me. Until next time. Bye.
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