A long-term friendship in my life recently came to an end, and in spite of helping others through their own share of relationship breakups, I am still making sense of mine. This was someone who had been woven into my life for nearly 20 years. We had shared weddings, milestone birthdays, the birth of children, the deaths of loved ones, and countless ordinary moments and inside jokes that, over time, became what I felt was the fabric of a deep and stable friendship. So when this person ultimately decided to end the friendship, I not only lost a very close friend, who to me felt like family, but also a person who held a large part of my history, and hopes for a well lived future together throughout multiple phases of life.

friend-breakup-therapy-toronto — No one tells you how hard the ending of a friendship can be. Take for example, one of my favourite picture of ours in 2019, a time when our lives were likely more aligned.

As a therapist, the complexity of emotions didn’t surprise me: layers of anger, betrayal, and grief. What surprised me most was the many faces of grief itself. It felt layered: I was grieving the friendship, certainly, but I also the history we shared and the future I had assumed we would be part of together. In truth, there was something uniquely disorienting about losing a person who had witnessed so much of my life and whose presence had become part of the story I told myself about where I had been and who I was becoming. In short, it hurt like hell.

At our therapy clinic, we often sit with clients who are grieving the loss of important friendships. Again and again, we hear a similar sentiment: "I didn't expect it to hurt this much, or for so long." When a romantic relationship ends, we have a social script for that, and people can understand why you are grieving. But when a friendship ends, especially a long-term friendship, the loss is often minimized by others, and sometimes even by ourselves.

Researchers tell a very different story. Psychologically, friendship loss can be experienced as a profound form of grief. Studies often describe this as disenfranchised grief, a form of grief that is real and painful but not always socially recognized or validated (Doka, 1989). More recent research has found that friendship breakups are frequently associated with feelings of sadness, loneliness, reduced self-esteem, and a diminished sense of belonging, particularly when the friendship was emotionally significant or long-standing (Apostolou & Keramari, 2021). When seen from this perspective, grief makes complete sense. Close friendships often become important attachment relationships and sources of emotional support, identity, and belonging. When those bonds are disrupted, we are losing a relationship that helped us feel known, understood, and connected (even if we might not always have felt that way).

Why Losing a Close Friend Can Feel So Devastating

Attachment research has traditionally focused on parents and romantic partners, but studies have shown that close friendships can serve many of the same emotional functions (Hazan & Shaver, 1994; Fraley & Davis, 1997). These are the people we call when something wonderful happens. They are often the people we reach for when life falls apart. They become woven into how we regulate emotions, make sense of experiences, and understand ourselves.

Over time, close relationships become integrated into our sense of identity. Psychologists Aron and colleagues (1991) described this as the "inclusion of other in the self," meaning that important relationships become part of how we define who we are. This helps explain why the end of a close friendship can feel so destabilizing. In a more nuanced way, you are losing the version of yourself that existed in relationship with them, for better or for worse.

Why Personal Growth Sometimes Changes Friendships

All relationships develop unspoken patterns over time. There is the listener, the helper, the planner, the flexible one, the caretaker, the one who always reaches out first, or the one who rarely asks for much. These roles are not inherently problematic - in many ways, they help relationships function smoothly. But what happens when one person begins to grow beyond the role they have always played?

In my professional work, I often support high-functioning adults who have spent much of their lives being accommodating, capable, and highly attuned to the needs of others. Many learned early on that being helpful, flexible, and easy to be around was a reliable way to maintain connection and belonging. For those familiar with common adaptive responses to trauma, the fawning response will come to mind. On the contrary, therapy often invites people into a different way of relating. It asks them to notice their own needs, express their feelings (especially anger) more openly, set limits, and move away from patterns of over-functioning or fawning. Research further supports the notion that reciprocity and perceived fairness are central to relationship satisfaction and stability (Walster, Walster, & Berscheid, 1978; Clark & Mills, 2012). Plainly, most people want relationships that feel mutual. But when someone stops over-functioning, a relationship that has come to depend on that imbalance may struggle to adapt.

Family systems theory offers another lens for understanding this. Bowen (1978) proposed that relationships tend to organize themselves around a certain equilibrium. When one person changes, the system must reorganize. Some relationships are able to adapt and grow, while others are not. This is one of the most painful and least discussed aspects of personal growth. When you change longstanding relational patterns, your relationships will change too. Some relationships deepen, others become more mutual and authentic, and for others, they meet their end.

The Coexistence of Grief and Growth

Recently, when I was talking with my own therapist about the end of this friendship, she said something that has stayed with me ever since. After a big wave of my seemingly never ending tears and hot fury, she said, “I'm so sorry you're going through this. And I’m so very glad." Her words were disorienting and took me a good few moments to fully absorb. How could someone be sorry and glad at the same time? Didn’t she see how overcome with emotion I was? But the longer I sat with it, the more I understood what she meant. Sometimes the very thing we are grieving is also evidence of our growth. A relationship may change because we have learned to take up more space, ask for reciprocity, express disappointment and frustration, or stopped abandoning ourselves to preserve connection. The loss itself can represent a seismic shift in how we newly understand ourselves as worthy and a greater awareness what we need out of close relationships. Of course, this clarity does not erase the grief and anger that still comes to visit me. There are still parts of me that wish this story had unfolded differently. I wish we could have found a way to grow alongside our different paths of adulthood. I wish there had been more room for curiosity, space for hard conversations, and ultimately, repair. Those wishes are part of my web of feelings. At the same time, I can see that this experience reflects something important about my own expansion as a person. I am learning to take up more space, to express my needs more clearly, and to stop abandoning myself in order to preserve connection.

Learning to Accept Other People's Limits

In therapy, we often focus on learning to recognize our own human limits. We learn that over-giving is not sustainable, that we cannot always be the flexible one, and that healthy relationships require honesty, reciprocity, and self-respect. However, learning to accept the limitations and boundaries of others is equally as important. In my journey, it’s meant accepting that another person's capacity, priorities, emotional availability, or way of relating may be different from my own. It’s meant working towards accepting that even when we are willing to have difficult conversations and renegotiate a relationship, the other person may not be willing or able to do the same. When we stop over-functioning and stop managing the relationship by ourselves, we begin to see the relationship more clearly. Sometimes what we discover is painful. We may realize that the relationship cannot offer the depth, mutuality, flexibility, or emotional engagement we need. That realization does not necessarily make anyone a villain. What it does offer is an opportunity to refocus on our own needs, and to instead move toward more satisfying relationships.

Depth, Hope, and the Relationships That Can Meet Us There

Connection and joy through reciprocal friendship as an adult — A recent photo of me on a friend group trip this spring. The joy of connection and community is brightly displayed on my smiling face.

After many personal therapy sessions, chats with friends over dinner, and late night discussions with my partner, I’ve come to realize my need for depth in close relationships. Not necessarily more time together or more intensity, but more room for vulnerability, more curiosity about one another's inner worlds, and a certain capacity to stay present in the harder and more complicated parts of life. This was echoed in a recent meditation class, with an instructor I deeply respect. She said that the more willing we are to meet the depths of ourselves, the more likely we are to attract people who can meet us in that depth. I find that idea hopeful. While it does not erase the grief, it offers meaning to the experience. The loss itself was not in vain - it highlighted parts of myself that I’m now more willing to prioritize through relationship with others.

For me, part of this work is staying gently open to the possibility that this decades long friendship may one day find a different place in our lives if both of us are able to meet each other in a way that feels honest and reciprocal. And also staying open to new and existing relationships that can meet me with the depth, flexibility, and quality of communication that I know I need. And perhaps that is where hope lives too: in trusting that as we all continue meeting ourselves with honesty in how we really feel, and the courage to express it, we create space for connections that can meet us there too.

References

Apostolou, M., & Keramari, A. (2021). Why people terminate friendships and why friendship termination is upsetting. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 7(4), 347–358.

Aron, A., Aron, E. N., & Smollan, D. (1991). Inclusion of other in the self scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(4), 596–612.

Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson.

Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (2012). A theory of communal and exchange relationships. In P. A. M. Van Lange, A. W. Kruglanski, & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (pp. 232–250). Sage.

Doka, K. J. (1989). Disenfranchised grief: Recognizing hidden sorrow. Lexington Books.

Fraley, R. C., & Davis, K. E. (1997). Attachment formation and transfer in young adults' close friendships and romantic relationships. Personal Relationships, 4(2), 131–144.

Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1994). Attachment as an organizational framework for research on close relationships. Psychological Inquiry, 5(1), 1–22.

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.

Walster, E., Walster, G. W., & Berscheid, E. (1978). Equity: Theory and research. Allyn & Bacon.