Healing from broken friendship trauma

I hesitated before using the word “trauma” in this post. I don’t like buzz words. “Inflection point,” “top of mind,” and “holding space” all make me roll my eyes. The trauma specialist and author Bessl Van Der Kolk, author of New York Times Bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, has said that the word trauma is being overused and we need to be thoughtful about its definition. Maybe so, but until we come up with a standard, I define trauma as one of my mentors does: “past bad stuff.” I like the looseness of this term, and contrast it with the specific criteria that comprise post-traumatic stress disorder.

Anyhow, I invoke the term trauma because over the years I’ve noticed a trend in which many patients have described friendship “breakups” that left them feeling hurt, confused, grief-stricken, and ashamed. I have learned to pay attention to these painful experiences, instead of dismissing them as insignificant, and have found that targeting them with EMDR can be very healing.

Friendships can be very intense, even though culturally we tend to focus more on romantic and familial relationships. Conflict is inevitable in any relationship. At some point, two people’s needs will end up diverging or conflicting. Rupture and repair are normal, healthy parts of relationships. In order to have close, fulfilling relationships, we need to learn how to manage conflict. Not resolve it, because sometimes that isn’t possible.

In the past when patients have targeted friendship trauma, they’ve been able to forgive themselves for making mistakes (e.g., getting too absorbed in a new romantic relationship and neglecting the friendship) or to appreciate that the end of the friendship was necessary because the other person wasn’t healthy to be close to anymore. What makes an experience traumatic is the story we tell ourselves about it. Our goal is to come to an understanding of what happened that is not shaming or blaming, but self-compassionate and/or empathetic. You may resolve to learn from the experience by developing a skill you lacked (e.g., being more assertive, containing your anger more effectively, setting firmer boundaries).