To My Friend that is Struggling with Heartbreak

To My Friend that is Struggling with Heartbreak,

I see your pain. I see the broken pieces of your heart that you are so desperately trying to mend. I see you putting up barriers so that broken heart of yours does not hurt again. I may not have gone through the same experiences you have, but I’ve felt a broken heart and I’ve built my own walls too.

 Sometimes the people in our lives that we love the most are the ones that do the most damage to our hearts. We thought we could be vulnerable around them, share with them the things that we’d never tell anyone else. Then one day they break that trust. Our heart breaks. We mend it as best we can, we put up barriers, and then another someone comes along, and the cycle repeats itself. Round and round the merry-go-round of heart break we go till we say no more. Till we are convinced that everyone that ever gets close to us will eventually hurt us, thus there is no point in being close to anyone at all. Everyone must now be kept at a safe distance because our hearts cannot take another blow.

Am I somewhere in the ball park of what you’re feeling right now?

Let me tell you something about heartbreak though, as painful and horrible as it feels, it teaches you. It either teaches you how to weed out the unhealthy people in your life and find the good, or it 

teaches you to become bitter and see everyone as an enemy. 

If the latter is what your heart break has taught you, it is one way to keep you from heart ache. Yet it also keeps you from seeing the good in people and in life.

I’ll let you in on a secret though. There’s always that one random person. That one person who wasn’t the closest friend, but who didn’t completely fall out of touch, and they don’t seem to mind that you haven’t talked in a while. They don’t mind how you’ve treated them in the past. They don’t think you’re a terrible friend. They just want to know what you’ve been up to and how you’re doing. From personal experience, I can say that those kinds of random people, they are the good ones. And you will know they are the good ones, because they don’t share the red flag qualities of the people that have hurt you. Don’t get me wrong, they’re human and may say or do something stupid that may cause you grief, but they are going to be the kind of person who will recognize their mistake as long as you tell them that it hurt you.

You may think that I’m assuming things. That’s fair. But I’ve gone the route of viewing everyone as my enemy. All I ended up with was feeling more alone, and treating people in a way that made me feel worse. It took a lot of soul searching, but I learned that there are ways to preventing yourself from getting hurt without sacrificing the good relationships you have.

My answer was cutting out the negative people in my life. Now some of those people are my own family. And since I cannot avoid family forever, I set boundaries. I gave myself permission that if I sensed that an argument, guilt fest, or any other negative thing was going to start, I was allowed to leave. I didn’t have to sit and take it. Their behavior at that point did not warrant my attention and thus I didn’t have to give it to them.

Here is my advice. Give yourself time to grieve for the relationship you lost. Give yourself permission to set boundaries so you don’t get manipulated into the negative cycle again. Most importantly, give your good friends the opportunity to really be a friend.  In time, you will heal. Until then, know that I’m here for you.

Love,

Your friend.