Friendships and relationship are just like flowers; if you don’t water them consistently, they die.
As species, it is essential to our survival to build authentic friendships and relationships with people and everything in our environment. We can spend years building friendships, but only a split second to destroy them. Instead, our biased thinking leads to friendship anxiety, seclusion, and life-long regrets of what if.
Daily I consult clients who feel angry, betrayed, and resentful towards someone they once spend a lot of time together. While some clients grief for years over losing a friend they love, others end up becoming vindictive and vicious.
Who you become as a result of a friendship breakup depends on who you are on the inside. Thus, it is wise to look on the inside for answers that may lead you to friendship or relationship breakthroughs.
Put, if not careful, your one-sided egoistical persona can get the best out of you and put you on a path to developing mental health issues, social isolation and profound loneliness.
The truth is, the ends of friendships can be just as challenging to handle as romantic breakups. The end of a friendship doesn’t mean you’ve become unlikable or unapproachable. It means the relationship wasn’t working.
Here is what you can do
Be cautious of friendships that are based on need and not on love.
Why?
Because once the needs disappear, you as a friend are out of the window. These kinds of relationships aren’t authentic, they won’t last, and you will waste a lot of energy, resources, and time to build fake friendships with people who may not have had the best intentions in the first instance.
Be aware of the red flags.
Often we ignore the signs that fake friends give us, brush them off, and end up justifying their destructive behaviours in the name of the love we have for them.
Sounds familiar?
When you do this, you become of disservice to them and yourself because you end up compromising the same things you uphold high on your hierarchy of values. The more you do this, the more you end up giving your power away, and the less worthy you become.
In actuality, sometimes people grow apart as their lives take them in different directions, and sometimes their interest no longer aligns with one another. And at other times, from fear of being judged and not wanting to address the real issue in their lives, they stop calling, engaging, and spending time with you.
Be honest with yourself.
The exact process happens for you too, and instead of addressing the 50% that you played a part in and did not confront them when those red flags showed up, you end up arguing, controlling and eventually withdrawing.
The truth is, you can’t always control what goes wrong in your friendships. You may find it difficult to understand how you had let this happen to your friendship. But remember, it takes two to tango. Be wary of friends who use excuses to cover up their lack of engagement, love and respect. Behaviours that only uncover the facades that show their true colours; you may have been blinded to see when things were okay.
Be conscious of what your authentic values are and listen to them.
In essence, it all comes down to values. If a friend has changed their behaviour towards you, it is because consciously or unconsciously, they have put you very low on their list of hierarchy of values. What this means is, you do not matter. They have something else more important than you.
When this happens, it is wise not to avoid the uncomfortable feeling of letting go. Instead, experience it to accept it and move on. Allow closure to come naturally.
After all, each of us is here to fulfil the most voids and the most parts of values.
To honour life is to listen to the unfakeable being’s voice trying to awaken you to continuously let go of dogmas, thoughts, and beliefs that restrict the flow of authentic relationships in your life.
Be mindful of what the finger pointing out speaks about you.
Friends who are blinded by their egoistical needs are those who focus on the one blame finger pointing out at others and forget to reflect on the three fingers point back at them. On the other hand, friends guided by their heart tend to look at all fingers with reflective awareness. If you want to learn more about what that is, read A Path to Wisdom, how to live a balanced, healthy and peaceful life. You will learn profound fresh new ways of knowing thyself and how to stop using excuses to justify your friends or other people’s behaviours. Instead, you will learn how to use your heart’s wisdom and love to guide you through any turbulence life throughs at you while maintaining authentic, deep, and life-long friendships.
Be concerned about your one-sided persona.
It’s not easy to know your friend’s true intentions, and you might not always manage to tame your dark side when conflict arises, but refusing to be with friends who offer you both a challenge and support will only make you be a victim of your circumstances and lose the friendships you worked very hard to build.
Learning how to embrace the challenge and the support to build authentic friendship and relationships with people will lead you to develop your psychology to attract life-long friends with people to make a stronger, more authentic, stable, and robust connection.
Those of you who are called to have an authentic, empowered and transformative relationship with yourself and others may want to start reading The Unfakeable Code® book. It will assist you in learning how to be okay with what is and attract your ideal friend, partner, job, business, client, etc. You now can use a five-step method to help you move from a state of judgment into a state of appreciation, gratitude, love, and lead authentically and live freely on your terms.
The question I leave you to ponder with is this:
Are you ready? Are you open to it?
With love and wisdom