How My Ex Best Friends Caused Me To Lose Trust In Everyone

Have you ever felt like your life was a revolving door of people floating in and out, as they please?

I do.

I have always had trust issues, commitment issues and even abandonment issues. Yes, I realize that many people have these issues, which is more common than not these days. However, I never understood why I suffered from these issues myself. I have always known that these issues did not stem from my home life – I have an amazing family, I have parents who would do anything to make sure I was happy, a brother who would go to the ends of the earth for me if I needed him to, my relatives are all amazing.

These issues were something that I never truly understood and they were beginning to take hold of my life, I needed to fix it – so how?

I had never taken the time to sit down and think about the root of these issues and when I finally did, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Although I have had some rocky relationships in the past, those were not the cause of my issues – my issues most likely cause the rockiness in those relationships.

The root of the problem, my friendships. That may sound odd, because should your friends be the ones to help you with your issues and not the ones to cause them? Well, not in my case. Clearly, I am not speaking to my current friendships; these people are still a part of my daily life, help me grow through the good and bad times. So I am speaking to the friendships that are no longer a part of my life, I guess you could call these my ex-friends.

They are not the ones that fall apart because of distance or outgrowing one another, they are not the friendships that were convenience based because you worked together, had mutual friends, etc. They are the type of friendships that end so brutally that you start to blame yourself for them walking out of your life without a valid reason or without explaining.

It is the friend I had known for just a few months but felt that “good friendship” kind of connection. I had entrusted her with my secrets and found out one day that she had letting those secrets slip to people that had no place knowing them. All of that trust, all of the confiding in one another – it was gone, so was our friendship.

It is the friend I have known for over a decade that asked me to be her maid of honor and then kicked me out of her wedding 12 days prior. This was after weeks of telling me that I was not meeting her standards as a MOH, but not telling me how I could help fix that. One day, she decided I was not good enough and she removed me, from not only her wedding party, but also her life.

The friend that I have known for over two decades. She lived with me and decided to call me one night to explain everything I had done wrong as a roommate. All of which were easy fixes, had she taken the time to communicate them to me. One day, she tells me she was moving out before our lease ends, but was going to do it slowly. I came home from a business trip to an empty home, bills being cut-off soon and dealing with yet another removal from someone’s life.

I could go on and on with examples, however these are all things that have happened since the beginning of 2017. I began to wonder, was it me? Was it something I was doing?

Was I not putting enough effort into my friendships? I expressed this to someone and he reminded me that I still had friends, amazing ones, in my life. Therefore, yes, I may have had some part of the blame in the situations – and I will take the blame for what I know I have done wrong, but I was not the awful friend that these people were making me out to be.

When you abandon someone, at the drop of a hat, you are not just removing that person from your life – you are causing doubt within themselves and an unfair viewpoint of themselves in your selfish, jaded way.

You are moving on with your life, while they wonder and obsess over what it was that they did wrong. You are leaving them with a hole in their hearts and nowhere to run with it, because you used to be the one they would run to with it.

When you dismiss someone from your life so easily, you cause them to start doubting their existing relationships. You cut deeper into the already fragile concept of putting trust in someone, you make it harder for them to form new friendships based on the experience of being dismissed to easily. You put them in a low, low spot and it makes it hard for them to turn to someone because they are not sure whom to trust.

Seeing as I am someone that feels as if they have been a revolving door of people floating in and out of my life constantly – I am here to remind you of this. People are fragile, even the ones who seem the strongest. When you treat someone like they are easily disposable to you – you do not know what you are doing to their hearts and most importantly, their minds.

You think cutting it off quickly and easily is the best way to do it. It is not. Take the time to have a closure conversation with them, letting them know your side of things and allowing them to explain their side of things. The worst thing you can do to someone is make them feel irrelevant in a world that already makes you question yourself, your actions and your heart on a daily basis.

Part of being a friend is being honest, so even if you plan on ending the friendship – simply removing yourself is not the way to do it.