Losing Your Friends: Vacancies of the Heart

By Frosty Wooldridge

Along life’s highway, you will befriend countless people from school, work, sports and church.  Each person offers you different degrees of friendship.  Some casual, some close and a few become best friends.

(Celebrate life, your life energies, your life joys, your life daily. Friends may come and go. You choose your path and you celebrate along the way. Yes, that’s a 1957 Chevy convertible ready to celebrate with you.)  Photography by Frosty Wooldridge 

Gym-rat friends encourage you.  Work friends give you fits, starts and frustrations.  They may test your patience.  Deep friends support your humanity.  A spouse offers you intimate friendship that fulfills your spirit.  Others at church may offer you a weekly hug or share a class with you.  School friends come and go as fast as the classes you share with them.

Each friend offers you a connection to the world in various emotional, intellectual and physical degrees. Each teaches a lesson whether good or otherwise.

One of the items we never expect in our young lives: the sudden loss of a dear friend via an argument.  A spouse that doesn’t like you around his or her mate—that most often happens when wives or girlfriends don’t like a guy’s buddies.  A jealous friend who tries to undermine you at work or school!  A colleague who takes credit for your creative efforts!  A spouse who distances him or herself from you! A spouse who divorces you!  A best friend who uses his or her knowledge of your most intimate feelings and betrays you! 

Once you fall into “love” with a friend, the world sparkles with song and dance.  When you fall in love with a lady or man, everything in the world jumps with joy.  Your cells catch fire with passion. You feel secure in your journey.  A best friend must be a miracle of the universe because he or she provides you with fellowship, expression and acceptance.

However, life guarantees you several traumas along your path:  friendship betrayal, loss of a spouse through divorce or death or accident, loss of a best friend via their change of heart and many other different combinations.

If you carry a deep heart, you face pain. If you enjoy a nonchalant personality, losing a friend may not bother you.  Another one comes along at any time.  Depending on your sense of yourself and your personal confidence in the world, you may react to loss of a spouse, friend or acquaintance in varying gradations.

No one told you about the misery you might feel with the loss of a spouse or friend.  Such devastating events create vacancies in your heart.  You cry, mourn and suffer great emotional pain from your loss.

You may wonder why others aren’t bothered.  Since I live a “deep heart” life, I have been torn to pieces over divorce and loss of several best friends.  I suffered weeks and months of anguish, anxiety and torment at losing my friends.

No matter what, you face unresolved hurt.  Some friends don’t blink at the loss of your friendship. Others walk away from you in anger or some reason you may not understand.  It’s a complicated matter of the heart.

Since you must heal and move along your life path, you may want to employ several different methods for alleviating your heartache.

Once you lose a spouse or best friend, you mourn their passage out of your life for whatever time you need to “cry” or express your grief.  That may be weeks or months.  The best way to express—cry, cry, cry.  If you cannot do anything about the loss, the sooner you decide to get down the road, the better.

Big key: forgive them; forgive yourself.  Celebrate their journey and cherish yours.

Sometimes friends outgrow you or you outgrow them.  We must trust ourselves to lose a best friend and step out into the unknown with a sense of “high vibrational frequency” that attracts other persons into our lives.

Some ideas you may employ:

• When you lose a friend for whatever the reason, you must grieve for whatever time you need.  Often, your anguish and thoughts of that person keep rolling around your head like a clothes dryer on “high heat”.  If you continue thinking about that person, you will burn up your clothes and in this case your emotions.  You must decide to change thoughts.
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• Therefore, whenever a thought of a lost friend or spouse keeps rotating around in your mind, you choose to consciously start singing your favorite song or thinking about your favorite movie or whatever works for you.  You keep doing that until your mind creates a new thinking groove on a healthy topic.  It works because I have used it.
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• You can write your pain on paper to get it out of your head if that’s comfortable for you.  As you focus on things that make you feel good, you move toward emotional renewal.

In the end, those people destined to thrive with you arrive organically through your renewal of your own life.  Those that caused pain or anguish fall away into the past.  Give yourself permission to live in joy, grow in happiness and thrive with friends and situations that accent your well-being.

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