Friends Forever. Or Maybe Not?

I was panicking. I looked around and noticed that my friendships were changing, and some were falling away completely.

There was tension, distance and conflict happening with a few of my friends. Not coincidentally, it was a time in my life when there was a lot of upset, tension, conflict (and growth) happening inside of me as well. I was changing. Following a dark night of the soul that seemed to drag on forever, I looked around and navigating friendship felt different, some bonds deepening but others feeling harder somehow.

And this really scared me.

The first time I heard “Friends come into your life for a reason, for a season or for a lifetime,” I remember it actually frightened me. Wait, friendships don’t last FOREVER?

But staying in a relationship at any cost is an unconscious value many empaths and echoists hold. If constantly being attuned to the needs of others was a way you survived, this translates into the idea that friendship is for a lifetime—NO MATTER WHAT.

For my clients who are healing their echoism (you can read about the concept of echoism here if you need a refresher), they find that sometimes friendships they once deeply depended on start to feel less supportive and don’t seem to flow the way they used to. They worry this implies something bad—that they are inherently bad or selfish or that it’s unfair to have different needs than the ones they started out with in the relationship.  

Empaths and echoists know this experience well. There is often a pattern of abandoning self in order to care for others. In fact, we tend to prioritize others and accommodate them. We contort ourselves to protect our attachment with them, no matter what.

That is until we start to allow our Self to be felt and expressed more and more. Some friendships will deepen when this happens. And some stop working.

The deepening may come naturally or it might be the result of some difficult conversations with a friend where you feel the bond dissipating. And still others just might not be able to hang with you where you are at this particular moment in your life.

If you identify as a recovering echoist, and you’re noticing that friendships are changing and falling away, it might be because you are growing more of a Self. This can be very frightening. It can feel like, to be with others I must have no Self, and to have a Self, means I’ll have to be all alone.  

So, the end of a friendship might feel like confirmation of this destructive core belief. But a friend who cannot tolerate you having a Self is a friend that might be here for just a season. Or perhaps the reason they came along was to teach you something about changing patterns that are no longer serving you. In the space that is created after your time together has passed, new friendships—ones where you both get to take up space, have needs, and a Self—are possible. 

I promise those friends will come. And they are very excited to meet you.