Friend Breakups: Saying Goodbye When You Can’t Say Goodbye

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Closure is something we all crave and all need. But there are times in life when a relationship ends suddenly—either because of death or circumstances—so what do we do then? We still crave some level of peace that doesn’t seem to be there.  

In my job at a counseling center in New York, I was recently editing what we call a monthly counseling toolkit, which teaches pastors and casual counselors best practices in bridging counseling skills and the Gospel. The topic was writing letters (that you don’t send) when there are things left unsaid with people who were no longer in your life. As I read, the words hit me hard. A friend-wound from a few years ago started to cause me incredible pain. I hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye. The ending had shocked and disoriented me. 

It started to hurt so much that I decided to start some counseling sessions because, as the tool said, it wasn’t just about writing letters, it was about saying what needed to be said out loud with someone else in the room. Here are some of the things that worked for me, not just in session, but in the past few years with this long, painful “ungoodbye,” where no goodbye could be said directly, though the need for one hovered all the same.

At first, tell a few you trust.

A lot of people had known us together. I told a few people the whole story and slowly told others who knew us together some of it. On the day that our friendship ended, I sobbed on the phone with another close friend and the next day, I cried again with my mom and my pastor’s wife. It’s okay that not everyone knows right away. Tell people when you’re ready. You do not want to relive the pain unnecessarily and you’re already in pain, so let those who know you most, carry you through the initial ending.

Grieve with God.

One of the most precious things about my relationship with Jesus is the ability to grieve with him. I can use my imagination to see him crying out in Gethsemane or weeping for death and loss or reading Psalms to see how God feels anguish too. And then, I can picture Jesus in the room with me meeting me where I am. 

With the loss of this friendship, I went through most of the stages of grief with him. There were other people who were close to that friend that I also had no closure with. As I spent time in corporate worship and private prayer, I would tell the others goodbye. I would tell them how I loved them and wished them the best. Sharing my sorrow and my need to tell them these things with Jesus, allowed my spirit to release them into his capable hands, even if I could no longer see them in the natural.

Wounds cloud your judgment some — that’s okay (at least in the short-term).

My dad is a chaplain, now a hospice chaplain but he worked in a hospital for a while, too. One thing he helped people do who just lost someone was to delay major decisions. A great loss rocks your world, rocks your body and your mind. Your wound can cloud your judgment. 

In my case, I felt very defensive. Another friend was writing a book and I helped write some of the chapters. She came back to me after reading what I had written that overlapped an area of my lost friendship and said, “I need to change some of this. You’re speaking from the loss.” 

At first, I fought back. Then I read what I had written a few days later and realized she was right. I had started to make generalizations about people because I wanted to protect myself from further pain. As long as you have other people to support you, clouded judgment in the short-term is okay. It’s where it stays clouded in the long-run where you probably need the most help. 

Sometimes we can look back at ourselves and laugh at how we reacted—I did with that book— but that’s usually a long way on the journey when things hurt less.

Make a place for sadness, anger, & fear.

When I read the toolkit, my anger was stirred up at what I saw as the injustice in how the friendship had ended. However, I’m like a lot of women, and when I’m angry, I start to feel it as tears.

This is where my counselor was most helpful. She had me write the letter about how the friendship ended and read it out loud to her. I cried my way through it and it felt at times as though I was back in that moment again.

There was deep sadness, yet as I said the words aloud, my facial expressions and body language spoke more of frustration than the tears let on. She and I talked about several of the points and then, toward the end of the session, she told me to write another letter and make it an angry letter.

So I did. It started out, “Dear Friend, this is my angry letter.” It was not as if I was going to send it or that the person would ever read it, so that opening helped me get past some of my reservations of how to start it. I dove in and said a lot of what I had felt but never had the chance to say, especially about those last moments.

Again, my counselor and I worked our way through certain points and she noted some areas where I surprised myself with what I wrote. They were moments of revelation because I could see certain things better in hindsight. A few days later, I felt strength and very little anger.

Surprisingly, it was the second letter that let me feel the most closure. I asked my counselor to define that word and she said, closure is release even though the loss may never truly go away. There will always be moments when it could come back up and we deal with it then, but how much it consumes us can heal. The next session, we talked about something else. The session after that, something else again. Release. Closure. 

Where I feel the most different after those exercises is with my level of fear. A few years after the shock, I recognized that I was really scared of losing the next friend or the next friend. Is that totally gone? No. But the angry letter, by allowing me to get protective of myself, helped me realize that I could keep those friends close, even though some of that scared me. Do it afraid, that’s one of my life principles.

Hope, not denial.

Another characteristic I love about God is that he is the king of reconciliation. I can hold hope of some form of restoration and reconciliation, even though I cannot imagine now how that would look. There is hope that God is not idle. He holds my friend. He holds me. He is working in their life. He is working in mine. But that hope is not denial.

I had to rebuild in the wake of the loss as if they are not coming back. I did a lot of that rebuilding very intentionally. I also recognized that the one I lost was irreplaceable. I was not looking for someone to take their place, I was looking for a new place for me.

On the whole, I believe I have found it. And I especially believe that I have said goodbye even though I couldn’t say it to them. Or maybe a better way to say what I said is the Spanish adios, meaning ‘to God’.