How to End Friendships

Friendships are vital for our overall health and well-being.  In fact, not only are healthy friendships good for our emotional and psychological well-being but they also improve our physical health, like our immune system.

Obvious Signs a Friendship Needs to End

However, destructive or even toxic friendships can wreak havoc on our lives.  And sometimes, friendships can be problematic in other ways.

Here are a few examples of why you might want to end your friendship:  

• Your friend is self-absorbed (unwilling to compromise, do things you want, ask how you’re doing, have a conversation & not just a monologue),
• exponentially more concerned with perceived slights than their own egregious behaviors, (more sensitive to what’s been done to them than their sensitivity to others)
• repeatedly betrays your trust (talking about you negatively behind your back, sharing information you’ve shared confidentially, is sexual with someone you’re involved with without your consent)
• is consistently breaking plans/commitments (more times than not),
• consistently doesn’t show up for important events to support you,
• blames you for everything,
• doesn’t take responsibility for their actions,
• constantly puts you down,
• or even makes you question your reality (i.e. gaslighting).

If it’s become clear, that despite your best efforts, your friendship needs to end, this is about prioritizing self-preservation.  It’s important not to jeopardize your emotional, physical or psychological health and well-being to remain in a toxic relationship of any kind.  

Less Obvious Signs a Friendship Needs to End

There are other less obvious signs a friendship may need to end, or at least be re-prioritized so that you spend less energy/time with them:

• Less convenient than other friendships
• Cost/benefit analysis consistently off
• Feels too one-sided too much of the time
• Desire to prioritize other friendships you find more consistently rewarding
• Too negative too much of the time, despite your efforts to shift and communicate your needs

As a licensed marriage and family therapist, I believe in the healing power of relationships.  We can be hurt and yet heal AND grow in relationships too. Relationships take work, are not perfect and at times require repairs and maintenance.

If you want to hear more about ways to improve your friendships, go to my last podcast in this series, at www.livingmorefully.com/improvingfriendships   

So, if you’ve done your due diligence in trying to improve your friendship or it’s just too toxic or something happened that’s so egregious AND you’re actually ready to end your friendship, how do you do it?

Assess Your Readiness to End Friendship

• Have you asserted your needs in consistent enough ways?
• Have you done due diligence in trying to better the friendship?  (putting more into the friendship yourself = time, energy, presence, positivity)
• Do you have other support systems in place?
• Have you imagined what it would be like without them in your life, realistically?
• How safe do you feel physically, sexually, psychologically, emotionally, and financially?
• • Create a safety plan if need to exit/leave and/or protect yourself
  • In extreme cases, temporary restraining order if needed and a safety plan
• Is there any other prep work you need to do beforehand?
• • Have social support from others
  • If safe to do so, contacting their social support if they have a history of self-harm

How to End Friendships

Various Methods: How to end depends on the context of your friendship and your own safety.

1. Slowly fading out:  most peripheral friendships that end, die out naturally over time. Having a non-dramatic and mutual withdrawal is where you spend less and less time together interacting.  You initiate less. You accept less invitations to talk or hang-out. Sometimes this happens without our intent where we get distracted by work or other priorities. We can’t be friends with everyone and only have so much time in our day, so we need to be somewhat selective in how we want to spend our time.
2. Break-up conversation:  for those who are more significant in our lives, or for those that aren’t able to slowly fade out, sometimes we need to end a friendship directly by communicating our intention to do so.  Like the concept of “conscious uncoupling” in primary romantic relationships, it’s important to do so in a clear but kind way. There’s no need to do a scorched-earth kind withdrawal. A little compassion, even if you’re hurt, betrayed or angry, can go a long way to creating a more compassionate world too.  Compassion doesn’t mean permitting someone to treat you poorly, rather it’s taking responsibility for what you own and not owning what someone else needs to take responsibility for. It’s being clear and setting firm boundaries.
3. Cold-turkey withdrawal:  when a friendship has gotten volatile, abusive or toxic, sometimes the best response is to cut off the friendship cold-turkey.  This can be about removing any access they had earlier to communicate with you (like blocking their phone number, de-friending, blocking or not following their social media).