Some of your biggest trust issues may have nothing to do with who you dated. They may have started with who you called a friend. Episode 615 explores friendship wounds, betrayal, abandonment, exclusion, one-sided friendships, friendship grief, trust issues, outgrowing friends, and healing after a friendship ends. Learn how past friendships can affect new relationships and how to heal without closing yourself off to meaningful connections, Homegirl style.

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Hey, y'.

All.

You were listening to another episode of the Spiritual Homegirl podcast where we better self in spirit and make peace with the day through wisdom, education and practical, easy to follow tips.

I am your host, Maria, your spiritual homegirl who's also a mental professional.

And I was inspired by something that I saw a lot on threads in the last seven days and I wanted to talk about it.

And it's the friendship heartbreak, the friendship wound.

A lot of times people talk about how to.

There's a romantic partner that just devastated them.

But the, the friendship breakups, oh man, those hit a lot different.

And sometimes some of the deepest pain we feel in, in those types of relationships are not even romantic.

They're the platonic ones.

So it's not always a divorce.

It's not always some super big dramatic, like romantic anything.

Sometimes it really is a situation where somebody you thought was solid is not solid.

Somebody that you thought would be there for all the stages of your life, you realize they can' and they got to stay where they are.

And these are people that have seen us grow and evolve and go through all these different things in life.

And it's not necessarily an episode about bad friends.

And we can, we can talk about that later in another episode.

But this is just about what negative friend experiences can help us learn about how to move forward not just with ourselves, but with other people.

So a friendship wound can look like many things.

And everybody might have their own definition, but homegirl's definition, mine is basically when you get hurt emotionally and or spiritually in your friendship space, that continues to negatively impact how you show up socially.

So this impacts how you initiate connections, even if it's just networking now, you're scared to network or you don't really trust people or your communication is affected or something of that nature.

Even your protection might be a little bit of a over compensation for what you've gone through because it hurt.

You don't want to experience that again.

So that's what I consider a friendship wound or friendship heartbreak.

Now, in some cases, a friendship can survive it, sometimes it can't.

Now, one thing I will say is that there are people in the world that can have fallouts with their homegirls and get back cool again.

And there are some, like myself, where you got one good time to play with me and you done for good.

You might have played with me a tiny bit, might have gave you a pass.

And then you show me all the way to a weirdo and I'm like, nope, you gotta go.

So everybody is built differently.

That's why I said it's gonna look different.

There are some things that are forgivable, there are some that aren't.

Now, that being the friendship wound doesn't always have to be super extreme for it to be unforgivable either, or even forgivable.

Sometimes it's not a big display of betrayal, trauma.

Sometimes it's not somebody stealing from you.

Sometimes it's not somebody trying to, you know, sleep with your.

Your partner or take your partner or whatever.

It's not always somebody gossiping about you that you thought that was, you know, your closest friend or whatever.

It's not always that bad.

Sometimes it's little stuff that adds up.

Sometimes it's people being inconsistent.

You don't really know where they stand.

Sometimes it's people being in competition with you, whether you know it or not.

Sometimes it's people classifying jokes, but it's really shade because they want to humiliate you and try to humble you.

Sometimes it's people not reciprocating properly.

Sometimes it's people that act like you don't exist until it benefits them to act like you exist.

Sometimes it's people just leaving you where you at when you need them, or other times it's just excluding people.

There's different names for all of them.

But sometimes these things can teach us stuff.

So my question is, what does these.

What are these friendships?

Whether you're going through a current breakup now, or if you're going through a friendship heartbreak of the past that still hurts, what did it teach you to expect from the next friendship?

Does it teach you how to keep your business to yourself?

Does it keep you to keep your private, your news private until it's ready to share?

Does it teach you how to share good news because you had a friend that was a hater?

Does it teach you, like, show up a little bit differently for friends?

Show up more, show up less?

Does it teach you to feel like you don't need anybody to protect yourself from being hurt again?

I'll tell you what it.

It showed me.

It showed me to always expect people to be themselves.

My friendship circle is very small, but it teaches me to let people just be themselves.

Because no matter what is always going to show.

The mask always falls off.

It may not fall off when you want it, but when you need to see it, it's going to fall off.

And the tricky thing about friendship breakups is that unlike the romantic partnership breakup, sometimes you can see the writing on the wall with your romantic part of the Breakups.

But sometimes in the friendship breakups, that writing is an invisible ink.

So it's hard to see until you sit there in the dark and you're like, oh, my goodness, what is this on the wall?

Oh, oh, this already was on a time clock and I didn't realize it.

And sometimes that can hurt because we'll ignore some of the red flags because we love our friends and we want to do right Mom.

We want to continue building and we didn't been down for so long.

You know, it's other foolishness that leads us to getting hurt.

Sometimes it's like that.

Or sometimes for some people, they used to their friends.

Look, sometimes people are friends of folks that don't like them.

It happens.

Not all the time, but sometimes you'll pick that one weirdo and you'll pick and be like, yeah, you're gonna be my friend.

Not realizing that chick don't like you the whole time I done been there.

I know what that's like.

And that's not a fun feeling when you realize, wow, you really didn't like me like that at all.

Now the blessing is that my friend group of.

Of recent, they have been so dope to where we are aligned in the sense where we're different, but we support each other the way we want to be supported.

And I know I talked about this in episode 613 and 6 14, but Inglew Willis, shout out to Ingle Willis doing amazing things in politics.

She interviewed on my show eight years ago, and she said something along the lines of, me and my friends been kicking around the same 50.

We don't even know who owes who.

And I took that as a beautiful metaphor to explain that when you just locked in with each other as friends, as sisters or whatever other, y' all have such a strong bond.

Nobody's keeping tally or score or anything like that.

You just show up.

Y' all didn't show up for each other for so many years and so many times.

It's nothing at this point.

And what I mean by it's nothing is that it ain't nothing worth notating.

Like, that's just how y'.

All.

That's just yalls friendship DNA.

It's just you just built like that to just show up for your friends.

So with my current friend group, that's how we are.

We speak each other's names in rooms we're not in.

We put each other on opportunities.

We love our friends out loud and in person.

We do that because that's just how we operate as Friends.

And unfortunately, some friends groups ain't like that.

Sometimes there's people that watch you live your whole life and share all the positive news and don't say nothing publicly, but they'll be like, oh, hey, I seen you doing your thing.

And it's like, you see me doing my thing, and you.

You're not gonna say nothing.

You just gonna watch.

Some people are like that, and some people say, well, I don't care.

I'm gonna do my thing anyway.

And that's fine.

Yeah.

But do you want your friends to just act like you don't exist until they feel like you're existing and they want to reach out?

It just depends.

Again, like I said, everybody has their own definitions.

And some friend groups align more with where people are in life.

There are some people who like how my friends and I operate, and they'd be like, yeah, I might want a friend group like that.

And there's some that's like, nah, y' all might be a little too, you know, sometimes I ain't got time to be supporting y' all all the time.

Some people are like that.

So I'm not saying my example to be something to model.

I'm just saying it works for us.

And I'm glad that I'm here, and I'm glad that they're there.

So the interesting thing about this friend group is that what we don't do is that we don't let our old friendship breakups interfere with how we treat each other.

I don't let my.

The few homegirls I've had to cut off in my adult life.

I don't let my experiences with them interfere with how I interact with my current friend group.

I just don't do that.

And my question to you is, if you've had your friendship breakup or if you're currently going through a friendship breakup, are you showing up in these newer or these unharmed friendship dynamics as if they've done things in your previous friendship breakups?

Because if you are treating them as if they've done something wrong and they haven't, you might need to sit with while you're doing that and get some healing for it, because it's not fair to people that are solid that's doing right by you to be treated as if they should be suspicious or that they're not.

And sometimes friendship wounds will do that.

Sometimes you'll be questioning a tone, or you'll be questioning what somebody said or.

Or you'll be questioning how they view you, all because of something that somebody else did that they ain't even done.

And also, as we know, if you need to get clarification, get it if you need it.

Cuz sometimes people will show you enough, you'll be like, o, you ain't got to worry about me.

Or, you know, it's like, oh, you got one good time to show me you're a weirdo and I'm cool on you.

Like, I've seen the preview.

I don't want to see the rest.

And sometimes that's okay.

But let's go into a little bit of a nuance, right?

Sometimes we have friendship breakups, and we are not always innocent either.

Sometimes we do something that kind of makes it worse and we have a part to play.

Now, I'm not saying that in that case you deserve harm because nobody deserves harm to be caused to them, right?

At all.

But what I'm saying is that sometimes we do things that kind of contributes to the fallout.

Sometimes we avoid the conversation, Sometimes we expect somebody to read our mind, and vice versa.

Sometimes you might see some suspect stuff out of somebody.

You try to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Then when they show you a second time in a worse way, you're like, ah, not only am I resentful to you for showing me this and wasting my time in this bun, now I'm resenting myself because I should have left when I seen you act stupid the first time.

Sometimes it's like that.

Or sometimes you got caught talking about somebody that you shouldn't have been running your mouth about, and then it's in your friend group, and then they're like, yo, what's going on with this?

Like, I thought we was all cool.

It's.

It's what, three people?

Or, you know, usually this happens in groups of three or more.

You know, one person running their mouth about the other person.

The other person find out, they're like, what's up?

And you're like, oh, I didn't realize.

So sometimes it's like that.

I would say we and August will never above my own advice, but sometimes we play a part in these things, or we expect the dynamic to say the same.

Even though life is changing and growing us in different directions, sometimes we are expecting more out of a person that they have to give.

And instead of being empathetic to what they're going through and being like, hey, this my girl.

She going through it.

She'll be back.

I go ahead and give her some time.

We become demanding and expect them to accommodate us even through their capacity being exceeded and that's not fair either.

And then there's also a difference between harm and seasons, too.

Because sometimes the friendship has no villain.

Sometimes isn't you, sometimes isn't them.

Sometimes it is just the seasons change.

The girl you used to go to the club with Sunday through Saturday in college might not be the home girl you going to be cool with at age 30.

Doesn't mean she's a bad person, doesn't make you a better person.

It just means that y' all are not aligned.

She might still want to go party at 30 years old Saturday through Sunday, whatever.

She could do that.

And if that's not what you want to do, that's fine.

You don't have to hang with her as much.

Doesn't make her a bad person.

Like I said, it doesn't make you a bad person either.

Sometimes it's hard to get up with the homegirl that has two or three kids in her adult life because she's a mom, she got the kids take care of.

She may not be able to beat you for happy hour or just give up a random Saturday to go do something with you because she might need to have somebody watch the kids or she might have something that her children are doing.

Doesn't mean that she's a terrible friend.

It means that she has a family that she has to take care of.

So sometimes you might not be able to get up with her unless you either play in advance or you go see her or she comes see you, or vice versa sometimes.

She might not be able to show up all the time.

Now, there are some that can shout out to y', all, we just saying.

Also, it could be work friends.

You might be cool people at work when y' all worked at that spot and then y' all got transferred to a different location or you work at a different company and y' all don't talk as much.

Seasons change.

Y' all are just in a different season.

There's still love there.

Or y' all might have been going through something together that was similar in your own lives.

And once y' all overcame it, y' all moved on.

And I don't like the word trauma bonding or that phrase trauma bonding, because it's used incorrectly.

That's not an example of trauma bonding, by the way.

Like, if y' all were going through breakups, that doesn't mean y' all bonded, because y' all had a breakup in y' all separate lives and y' all bonded.

That's not a trauma bond.

God, I had to get that out Cuz I can't stand that.

Or even give.

It could be an older identity of who you used to be.

Sometimes you was a.

You were a version of yourself before you got healing or before you gained knowledge or before you got wisdom.

And y' all were cool being blissfully ignorant, and y' all was cool doing the fools that y' all used to do and.

But maybe one of y' all grows up and you're like, you know what?

I'm ready to slow down my life and do something a little different, or I'm ready to grow and evolve into something different.

It doesn't mean the homegirl that was out with you doing dirt or whatever doesn't make her a bad person, doesn't make you a better person, and vice versa.

It just means that y' all grew in different directions.

Is she still on the.

On the mess that she was on five, 10 years ago, and she want to be on that now?

That's her choice.

And you have a choice to continue on and move forward with your life in a different direction.

Doesn't mean that you should hate her.

And vice versa just means y' all on different pages, and that's okay.

So for those that are going through this type of grief, I want to ask you, are you grieving what the friendship was?

Are you grieving what you expected?

Are you actually grieving the actual feeling of separation distance?

And I. I do want to do something about jealousy too, because jealousy is also one.

Even though it is.

It's very painfully obvious when somebody jealous of you.

Not everyone who fails to support you is secretly jealous.

And I talked about this on episodes 613 and 6 14.

But also, every disappointment that you have doesn't have to be brought to them either.

Again, if that's you, where you have to get everything out, I ain't saying you shouldn't do it.

Do what works best for you.

But I just know for me, there are some that are jealous and they're gonna show you, and there are some that aren't.

But there's.

It's also just worth just paying attention to sometimes.

Like I said, the friendship one will have you on high alert, even if unnecessarily.

So before you automatically just rush to, just say, this is what you own in terms of something that's unspoken, that's unconfirmed, that you suspect.

Let them show you.

Yeah, I know we talk about intuition all the time.

Sometimes people intuition be wrong.

You know how many people have told me, girl, I was wrong about you?

I know, I know.

I'm actually real cool.

If you're not cool with me, something wrong with you.

Because I'll be out the way.

I'm out the way and I'll hype everybody up.

And I fool everybody.

So I don't.

Like I'm that kind of person.

Like, I show love because showing love doesn't hurt me any.

I want people to be happy.

I like people living their lives.

I want people being successful and being joyful and being the best they can be, having all the love they can get, having all the success, financial abundance, all the good things, right?

All the good health, all the smiles.

I want that for everybody.

Even the people I don't fool with, just do it away from me.

But in terms of people being jealous, they gonna show you.

But just let people show you.

Just let them show you.

For me, I'm usually never wrong.

Not because I'm just letting my intuition dictate things, but it's because I usually see things and I can discern it right away.

And speaking of discernment, there's a difference between discernment and then just being completely closed off and then also stand on business.

So discerning behavior basically in this situation is just paying attention.

You're just being mindful of what's going on.

You're just observing and seeing if that's something you want to deal with or not.

Because it takes two or more to be friends.

So you can just look at how people move and be like, yeah, I don't fool with that.

For whatever reason, you got the right to change your mind.

Some people do, some people don't.

But, you know, you can say, hey, I pay attention to this.

This is what it is.

And then saying on the business is more like, okay, I fool with you a little bit, but you move it in a way that I don't like.

Or you're moving in a way that's not going to be conducive for us to build a friendship.

So let me go ahead and let you know that that's not it.

So that if you want to continue to build, then we can build.

And then, you know, the.

The super duper castle walls, just having the walls up and just not fooling with anybody, just being like, well, I don't need nobody.

Nobody gets to get close to me.

Now, I'm not saying this.

I'm not.

I'm not trying to speak for everybody, because there are some people that I do know that move like this, but they engage in a way that's less invested with others, so they're like, hey, you know what?

The deepest, darkest secrets belong to me.

My dreams, my aspirations, my hopes, my pain, that still belongs to me.

I'm not gonna let people in on that.

But I can still smile and have a drink with you, or I can go to dinner with you, go to events with you, or I can, you know, hang out with you and things like that.

There are some people that are like that.

I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about people that are closed off and have zero social interaction.

And this is going to be an unpopular opinion.

But I believe that there's some social interaction that we all need to just feel good.

I mean, I don't mean that you have to start performing like a clown to get people to like you.

But I don't believe we were meant to do life a hundred percent by ourselves in these silos of just isolation.

I just don't think that.

And I think from a mental health perspective, I don't think that's good people's mental health either.

I don't think it's good for people to just be alone 247 all the time.

Nobody to talk to, nobody to just say, hey, how you doing?

Or nobody to just say, hey, what, you want to go get some, some dinner?

Or hey, have you eaten today?

Or how are you doing?

Like, it's.

I don't think that's healthy.

That's just me.

You can agree or disagree, it doesn't matter.

But to me, I just don't think that as humans, we were meant to just not have any social interaction at all, even at bare minimum.

But some questions I have for you to wrap up this episode.

Do you have a friendship wound?

Do you have a friendship heartbreak?

Who was it?

How they hurt you?

What exactly was the injury there?

What exactly was the hurt?

Did they try to throw shade and crack it and say it was jokes?

Did they say that?

You know, oh, I, you know, I, I was just joking.

But you do.

It didn't feel right in your heart.

It made you feel bad.

Did they purposely exclude you out of things?

Did they act like you didn't exist until.

Until other people saw that they were moving a little funny so they started kind of fooling with you because of that?

Did they flake on you when they said it's going to do something for you and they never did it?

Did you expect them to be there for you during a rough moment and they weren't there?

Did they go out there where they humiliate you and you maybe regret even letting Them get close to you or maybe not even handling it in the moment the way you wanted to?

Is it something they did that you wish you would have just disconnected from sooner?

To not even give them the opportunity to hurt you twice?

Is some of that heartbreak belonging to you for your decision making, to let them back in, to be more forgiving, to be more graceful, only to be hurt again?

Because that also is valid.

And after we figure that out, did it warp or change your perspective about what friendship is afterwards?

Did you start protecting yourself?

How?

And is that working for you?

Is it over Correction for something you should have did in the past?

Do you have standards for your friendships now?

Because believe it or not, a lot of people don't have standards for their friendships.

Now, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, and I'm not shaming anybody that doesn't.

But a lot of times we just find out things about our social interactions through experience and wisdom.

Sometimes.

It's not always just so black and white where it's like, all right, moving forward, you got to have this, this, this, and this.

Now, we'll do it for romantic relationships out of a breakup, and we'll be like, all right, I don't want a partner that do this, that, and the other, or a partner who does this.

So it just is what it is.

But do you have standards, standard operating procedures to a degree, about your friendships?

Do you know what you want your friends to be?

Do you know how you want them to act?

Do you want, like, do you have that?

Do you want friends that are more communicative?

Are you a person that expects your friends to show up for you?

Have you properly assessed people in your circle to see if they match your standard?

And I'm not saying you got to get off of here and cut your friends off.

The old spiritual homegirl said you not moving to my center, so I gotta cut you loose.

No, what I'm saying is that can you still build something impactful and.

And of emotional and spiritual safety, even knowing that y' all move differently with each other?

Because sometimes having friends of different personality types is a good thing.

The personality is not the issue.

Usually it's the character that be the issue.

If I'm an extrovert and my homegirl is an introvert, as long as she not moving foul or shady, we good.

So personality is not really the issue.

It's the character that people should look at, at least in my opinion.

That's just my belief.

But is there somebody in your current friendship that's Paying for something that they didn't do because of your old wound showing up.

So I wanted you to sit with some of these things because sometimes these things happen and we don't quite realize it.

And then my other question, my last question is, can you repair the friendship wound?

And if you can't, are you willing to get the help to heal from it if it's interrupting your life?

Because believe it or not, betrayal, trauma, or the wrong friendship breakup can be deeply hurtful to where we might have to go talk to somebody to over.

Like to just.

Just get over it slowly but surely to offload some of those feelings.

I always tell people, if you can't handle it by yourself, you might need to figure out, can my support my friend group or things like that, or people I trust, can they help me through this?

Now, I'm not saying make them therapists because that's not fair to them, but can they kind of give you some love and some reassurance or something that can help you kind of see a little bit clearly on it?

Or do you need to go professional and go talk to somebody, peer support, or even an actual licensed therapist to help you start really processing this and digging deep?

Because for some, that friendship won't start it in middle school, high school, college, and now you're probably in your 30s, 40s, or 50s.

Like, dang, this one thing hurt me a little deeper than I thought.

And it's actually informed how I made my bonds moving forward with every woman or man or whoever I came in contact with to build friendships with.

It's like that.

Not just saying.

That's how it goes sometimes for people.

So I'm just asking, as your homegirl who loves you and wants to see you in, are you willing to get help to heal from that so that you can move forward and build more aligned and healthier bonds?

You know, we can honor the things that we no longer have in our lives.

We can honor the friendships that we used to have.

We can grieve the fact that they don't exist.

We can give the respect to the lessons.

We can cherish the memories that we shared.

But we can also move on and not let that negatively impact our live of the future.

That's the moral I want you to take from that.

So that's today's episode.

Y' all know I can't do any podcast episode without thanking you all for listening.

So thank you for listening, Boo.

It's been 10 years of me doing that same tagline.

I really appreciate y'.

All.

That's not something I just do as a part of a little script or whatever.

No.

I make it a point to do my weekly note of gratitude every episode because I really am grateful for your for your support.

And it's cool to beat with align people because everybody's online and tell somebody recently, hey, I'm not for everybody.

And I might not even be for y' all at times going back to seasons, right?

I said before my episode, I think that was 6:12.

Sometimes people are here for whatever they need and they move on with their life, and that's okay.

So for those that are still here, whether you are day zero from the very beginning, 10 years ago, whether you just got here today, whether you've been in and out over the years, whether you came at year five, whatever it is, I'm grateful that you're here and I really appreciate that.

So also, don't forget to sign up for my email list.

Click the second link in my show notes if you want me to speak and give some homegirl education and wisdom for your workplace, your school, your university, your community, whatever it is, hit your girl up [email protected] we can talk about what you want to do, check out those budgets, and we can get to work.

So with that being said, y', all, I will catch you on the next episode.

So this has been another episode of the Spiritual Homegirl Podcast.

My name is Maria, your spiritual homegirl.

And remember, boo, friends, trust the journey.

Trust yourself.

And whatever you do, do it with love, okay?

Love, y'.

All.

Peace.