when friendship fades
| the fall outs of pain | a series |
oh hey friends.
over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be sharing some thoughts with you about the fall outs of pain. Some of these posts will be for free, some will be behind the paywall. we’ll round the series out with talking about the good, beautiful, life-giving things that grow in and in spite of our pain. I hope you feel seen in the hard stuff I talk about and I hope you can borrow some of my hope that things can (and will!) get better.
I’ve never had a friendship “breakup.” The only person I’ve ever had any kind of “falling out” with is now my closest friend in the world, but I do know the grief of loving someone and thinking they’re going to be in your life forever and then things just … change. Making friends and getting close to people hasn’t been easy for me, but the people I’m close to, I tend to stay close to. But there are a couple of things that I can pinpoint that have caused people I love dearly to pull away or for the friendship to run its course, so they say.
The issues that have affected my relationships more than anything else are theologies around mental health and suffering and the response to those things. (One day I’ll write a post about the other thing - how people drift away when your theology becomes something they can no longer tolerate, but that’s still a deep pain point for me.)
I’ve found that it’s nearly impossible to maintain deep friendships with people who have a simplistic idea of suffering. When their compassion has a cap and their tolerance has a threshold, when they’re critical and suspicious, when they offer you compassion privately, but publicly speak harshly and definitively about what suffering means and why it happens. Or vise versa - when they’re compassionate publicly and privately critical. These are things that make relationships confusing, distant, and distrusting.
A harsh approach to suffering is exhausting on the person who is suffering. It reminds me of what Jesus said about the Pharisees :
“They tie up heavy loads that are hard to carry and put them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves aren’t willing to lift a finger to move them.” - Matthew 23:4
If someone believes that optimal mental health can be achieved through prayer, fasting, a heart surrendered and satisfied in Christ, or simply changing your thought patterns and “taking every thought captive,” they’re tying up heavy loads and putting them on people who are already weighed down. They fill people who are already struggling with shame. If they believe suffering is something that’s brought on by a lack faith or overcome by a stronger one, their beliefs require that they view people who are hurting in a critical way. Instead of offering shelter, they push people into the cold, blaming them for their circumstances and putting the responsibility of healing on their personal spiritual fortitude.
Jesus was a man of many sorrows, deeply acquainted with suffering. His grief and fear so potent that his sweat turned into blood - something that’s only documented as happening to soldiers in battle.1 If Jesus didn’t bypass his own pain, why do we require that of others?
When you’re actively fighting for your life, it isn’t safe for you to engage with people who hold harsh views of pain and suffering. It could actually, literally, be a threat to your life. When I’m in the deepest parts of my winter depression and someone tells me that my issue is my heart, my attitude, my laziness, my discontentment, or my lack of attention to Christ, I don’t get angry like I would with a little more vitamin d in my body, I just sink further into defeat.
Those messages are messages of death and shame. They’re dangerous. And I don’t think I can overstate that. Sad and scared people need light, joy, compassion, empathy, hope, company, and maybe a plane ticket to somewhere sunny. They don’t need someone to raise the spiritual bar and demand they reach it. They don’t need to pull themselves up by some theological bootstrap. They don’t need a whip on their back. These things cause harm. Every. Time. People in pain need comfort and love. Everything else can wait.
When a person can’t offer compassion and presence without heavy spiritual demands, their relationships with people who have relationships with pain will suffer, wither, and die.
And that has been my story.
The harsher people are in their response to pain, the more I have pulled away. Not because I don’t love them or want them in my life, but because it’s no longer safe for me to have them in my life the way I would like. When you know how dark dark can get, you know how good it is when that darkness has been filled with light. When you’re living in the light, you hold on to it, protect it, and do everything you can to keep the darkness away.
It isn’t about having cold, selfish boundaries. It’s about protecting your life. And not just your physical life, but the parts of your life that touch other lives. I need to be well for so many lives other than my own and for that reason, I guard my heart and my mind fiercely, but not unkindly.
There is grief in that. But there’s freedom in it too.
For me, the doors to friendship are always open, even if it’s just a crack. But I treat my mental health, my pain, and my PTSD, as chronic diseases, even when they’re in remission. I don’t live in fear, but I don’t open the doors that can lead to the dark overtaking the light if I can help it.
Suffering changes you forever.
It changes the way you move, the way you see the world, the pace at which you live, the depth and width of your relationships, the way you wake up every day, the way you go to sleep, the way you respond to benign events, the way you respond to massive ones, and the way you engage with the world around you. Huge parts of you die and new parts grow in place of and over that death. You walk hand in hand with life and death. You stop trying to make everything make sense and you joyfully and peacefully live in the tension of “I don’t know.” You take some things more seriously and stop taking a whole lot of things seriously. You cry more easily and laugh more freely. The scope of your life looks different because you are different.
After pain, you’re born again into a new life and sometimes that new life comes with the loss of people you loved in the previous one. The love remains, even if the relationship changes. It’s ok to honor who those people were to you while also letting them go. It’s not cruel, unkind, or un Christ-like. It just … is.
Protect your heart and your mind.
You’ll find the people who make room for your pain and celebrate with you when you find the light.
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No matter what, I’m glad you’re here.
I wrote about this phenomenon, called hematidrosis, and its connection to what the Bible teaches us about God’s relationship to our grief and suffering, in Even if He Doesn’t.
I will always be in awe of the gift of writing God gave you. I am so blessed to read any word you let the world read.
Thank you for this post!
What an amazing post. My experiences as a Christian with over 40 years in the Church could have had me write every word of this. Thank you!