S9.7 | Trusting God's Plan Through Friendship Breakups
In today's episode, we delve into the sensitive and often painful topic of friendship breakups. Carla opens up about her personal experiences with losing friends, the deep emotional scars it can leave, and how to navigate this challenging terrain. Drawing wisdom from scripture and her own journey, Carla shares seven crucial steps to help you heal, find new relationships, and trust in God's plan. Whether you've recently lost a friend or are contemplating a necessary separation for your wellbeing, this episode offers compassionate insights and practical advice. Plus, stay tuned for a special announcement about Carla's upcoming program aimed at helping you partner with God to reclaim what trauma has taken. Join us for this intimate and encouraging conversation
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Key Takeaways
Acknowledging Pain is Vital:
It's essential to validate your emotions and have compassion for yourself. Healing can only begin when you truly feel and acknowledge the pain of a friendship ending.
Avoid Rumination:
Stop replaying negative scenarios in your mind. Instead, thank God for the good times and release the rest to His sovereign care.
Seek God’s Revelation:
Pray for divine insights into the breakup. Ask God if it’s part of your personal growth or protection from potentially harmful relationships.
Trust God for New Relationships:
Have faith that God will provide new, fulfilling friendships. Stay open-hearted and allow yourself to trust again.
Connect With Carla:
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Resources:
5 Steps to Building Resiliency
Affirming Truths Facebook Community
5 Tips for Overcoming a Negative Body Image
Who You Say I Am Biblical Affirmation Cards
TRANSCRIPT
Carla Arges [00:00:08]:
Hey friends, welcome to affirming truths. I'm your friend and host, Carla Arges. This show is a safe place to share our struggles, grow in faith, and root our identity in Christ. My hope is that you will leave each episode feeling encouraged in your journey. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode.
Carla Arges [00:00:27]:
And it would mean the world to me if you would leave a review.
Carla Arges [00:00:30]:
I am so glad you're here. Let's get started. Hey friends, it's Carla here.
Carla Arges [00:00:40]:
Friends. I am so happy I get to call you guys friends, but I want to talk about friendships today. And more specifically, I want to talk about the messiness of friendship breakups, because those are hard. Oh man, do those pierce our hearts. And maybe this is something that you've experienced in your life or are currently experiencing. And I just want us to have open discussion on the pain that comes from a friendship breakup. You know, in proverbs 27 nine, it says, a sweet friendship refreshes the soul. Oh, yes, friendships are life giving.
Carla Arges [00:01:27]:
We are meant to do life in relationship. God is a triune God in relationship connected. When Jesus came, he had friendships. Yes, they were his disciples. But he says, I call you friends. He calls us friends. Friends is a God given gift. Friendship is a God given gift for us.
Carla Arges [00:01:52]:
But just like all gifts that God has given us, the enemy on this side of heaven uses them to hurt us, uses them to scar us, uses them to perhaps get us to turn away from God. In ecclesiastes 410, it says, if either of them falls down, one can help the other up, but pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. We need friends. We need relationship, we need community. But what do we do when a friendship fails? And I've experienced this in my life, I've experienced it in hard ways. I've experienced it in easier ways. I've experienced it when I was the one being broken up with. And more recently, I'm experiencing it on the other side where I'm having to navigate my way out of our friendship.
Carla Arges [00:02:56]:
And it's not easy, and either side hurts. I remember over Covid, losing a friend, and it was really hard. And I never got closure on it. I never got an explanation on it. This person just stopped talking to me, someone that I had done overnights with and gone out with. And, you know, in a very difficult season of my life, when I was unstable with my mental illness, like with confiding in them, and so to be completely cut off without any explanation and without really seeing it coming, I felt blindsided. And it hurt. A and I can tell you, as someone with borderline personality disorders, these hurts hurt even deeper.
Carla Arges [00:03:49]:
If you don't have borderline and you're feeling the pain of a friendship breakup, let me tell you, the borderline person feels it ten times as intense. It was intense. I remember when I was pregnant, and I had this friend, and she kind of cut me out. And I can understand I wasn't a good friend at that time. I was overcome with prenatal anxiety. I wouldn't necessarily answer her back. I canceled plans last minute. I wasn't being a good friend, and she grew tired of it and, you know, stopped talking to me.
Carla Arges [00:04:35]:
And that was hard. It was hard for me. It was hard to feel unwanted. It was hard to feel that I was too broken to maintain relationships. That's something I've always struggled with, is that it is hard for me in the natural to be a good friend. It's very hard. Friendship does not come easily for me. Going deep with someone, feeling connected to someone does not come easily for me.
Carla Arges [00:05:08]:
And before, I used to think that that was some inherent flaw in me. Now I recognize that borderline creates a bit of a wall, that I may never feel connected in that sense that I want to feel, but that my feelings are not actually reflective of reality. And so I've learned to appreciate friendships and the evidence of what I see in them versus how I feel. My borderline feelings will lie to me. But what do you do when a friendship breaks up? I want to take you through seven things that I think will help you, and then we'll talk a little bit about what if you're the one having to break up with someone? What does that look like? Because I'm doing it right now, and I can't say I'm necessarily doing it well, but the first thing I want you to do when you are experiencing a friendship breakup is acknowledge your pain. Like, have compassion for yourself. It hurts. I think sometimes we want to be quick to brush it off or numb.
Carla Arges [00:06:24]:
Our brain doesn't like us to feel pain, so we'll kind of rationalize things. It will keep us busy. It won't let us sit with the pain. And one of the easiest ways to heal pain, and I say easy, but it's not that it's easy, but that it's straightforward. Instruction, is to feel the pain. It's not easy, but you can't heal what you don't feel. So acknowledge your pain. The second thing I want you to do is to know that you're not alone.
Carla Arges [00:06:59]:
Jesus, lost close friends. Look at Judas. Not only did he lose Judas as a friend, Judas outright betrayed him. Maybe your friendship break up comes with an outright betrayal that you feel backstabbed. You're not alone. Jesus knows what you're going through. Peter, one of his closest friends, denied him three times. How that must have broke Jesus heart.
Carla Arges [00:07:28]:
Jesus understands your pain. You are not alone. Sometimes the enemy wants us to believe that we're alone because when we think that we're alone, we'll isolate. When we think that we're alone, we'll pull away. You're not alone. Friendship breakups is actually a human experience, and it's a human experience Jesus had as a human. So know that you are in good company if you're in the midst of a friendship breakup. The third thing I want you to do is to avoid rumination, you know, playing scenarios over and over in your head.
Carla Arges [00:08:09]:
Why did she stop talking to me? Why isn't she returning my call? And we keep thinking about it and thinking about it, and we create stories and narratives in our head that actually keep us stuck in a cycle of pain and don't allow us to progress forward. So when you catch yourself ruminating on why or how or what, if I want you to stop yourself, I want you to thank God for what was in that friendship and then release it to him. Because we have to know that God is sovereign. When our mind tries to make sense of it, we have to bring it back into obedience in Christ. Christ knows what's good for us. If he is removing something from our life, he will make something good of that. God always turns pain into purpose. He never wastes it.
Carla Arges [00:09:05]:
The fourth thing I want you to do is talk about it in a safe place. Don't gossip about it. It's very different to gossip about the person that broke up with you and gossip about how they hurt you. I don't want you to gossip. But it's okay to share your pain, to share your burden in a safe place. Maybe you need to process it out loud with your husband. Maybe you need to process it out loud with a close friend. Maybe you even have to process it out loud with a pastor.
Carla Arges [00:09:35]:
When it's church friends that hurt us, it can often feel even like a deeper wound. So process it with your pastor. Talk about it in the safe place. And number five, ask God for revelation. Ask God for revelation. There are times in my life when friendships have ended and I've asked God for revelation, and I've seen that there was something in me that needed to grow I've also been shown in revelation, like I did with that friendship breakup that really hurt me over Covid, that God was actually protecting me, that that friendship was not serving a positive purpose in where God wanted to take me to. He was pruning me. Pruning hurts, but pruning allows us to grow and produce good fruit for the kingdom.
Carla Arges [00:10:30]:
To ask God for revelation. God, are you pruning someone out of my life, or did you have to prune me out of someone else's life? And what lesson do you want me to learn from that so I can be a better friend going forward? Number six, I want you to trust God for new relationships. You know, Jesus tells us how God knows the needs of the sparrows and he provides for them. God knows that you are in need of friendships because he created you with that need. So trust God to bring new friendships in your life, and that means being open. I know for a while after my Covid friendship breakup, my heart felt closed. It was hard to trust someone again. It was hard to want to go into relationship again, knowing that I might get hurt.
Carla Arges [00:11:28]:
But I had to trust God and open my heart again to relationship. And I'm so glad that I did because he has brought incredible people into my life. And what I love about God is. God is a God of multiplication. I lost one friend during COVID and I gained two friends. Well, more than that. But there's two in particular that I'm thinking of, two deep friendships. In return, God multiplied my loss for my benefit, and he always does that.
Carla Arges [00:12:05]:
I see time and time again when God has multiplied my loss for my benefit. Where one thing has been taken away, God has replaced it with two or three or four. You know, even a silly example of this is that for years now, I've been running a Bible study out of my home. This was one of the doorways God opened in my life to bring new friendships into my life. During this hurt I was going through. And because of my classes, right now I'm studying to become a certified integrated trauma practitioner. I've had to put that Bible study on pause, and it really hurt my heart not to gather with women and study the word like that was is so crucial to my walk, is to be arm in arm with women studying the word. And I am now involved in two virtual Bible studies, one that I'm leading and one that I get to be led through.
Carla Arges [00:13:06]:
And it's incredible, and it's with a whole other group of women. And God just multiplies what gets taken away. God gives better, God gives better. And I want you to remember that, to trust God for newer relationships. He provides and he multiplies. The last thing I want you to do in all of this is take care of yourself. To take care of yourself. It can be easy when we have that sting of a friendship breakup, to fall into depression and to fall into old habits that don't serve us.
Carla Arges [00:13:47]:
I want you to take care of yourself. I want you to get moving. I want you not to forsake your bible study. Go out and get a walk. Give yourself compassion and loving care. How would you treat a friend going through a friendship heartbreak? How would you encourage her? I want you to be that own voice to yourself. Friendship breakups hurt, but there is nothing that God can't restore, and I don't mean restore in the sense of necessarily restoring the exact relationship that was broken up. Sometimes God prunes it for a reason and it's meant to be out of your life for good.
Carla Arges [00:14:33]:
But God will restore the aspect of friendship in your life by bringing new people in. He is a good God. So acknowledge your pain. Know that you're not alone. Avoid rumination. Thank God for what the friendship was and release it to him. Talk about it in a safe place. Ask God for revelation.
Carla Arges [00:14:58]:
Were you the one that needed to be pruned out of someone else's life and you have reflection and growth you need to do there? Or is God protecting you from something and pruning someone out of your life so that you could be more effective for the kingdom? Right. Ask God for that revelation. He will. He will show it to you. Trust God to provide new relationships and be open hearted with that and take care of yourself. Friendship breakups hurt. Now I am on the other side and I don't know if I would call it a friendship breakup, but I'm in a place where I need to prune someone out of my life. And not that there was ever a deep, deep friendship, but there was friendship.
Carla Arges [00:15:46]:
And I recognize that at this stage of where I'm at, this friendship is not good for me. I need to have space away from this person. And so I'm trying to manage it in a gracious way, in a loving way. I don't know if I'm necessarily doing it well. I don't think it's necessary for me to sit down with this person and say, I don't want to be your friend anymore. I don't actually think that would be productive and that may come off more hurtful. And so I'm just choosing to opt out of interaction, that is unavoidable. And I say that unavoidable because we have similar circles and we're bound to see each other at certain places.
Carla Arges [00:16:40]:
So definitely don't want to create bad blood, don't want to create hurt feelings. But where there is nothing, the requirement of interaction by outside sources, I am opting out to protect my peace. I have a boundary to protect my peace. And boundaries are biblical, and so that person can't coexist in my boundary. And all right, then I bless and release them. I bless and release them for my life. I don't have to have a big conversation about it. I don't have to make it a big deal.
Carla Arges [00:17:19]:
I can just choose my level of interaction. And so if you're seeing that there's someone in your life that perhaps God wants to prune out or someone in your life that crosses your boundaries, I want you to know that while it can be hard and it can cause pain and it can be upsetting that friendship breakups are sometimes necessary. Whether you're being broken up with and it hurts, if God's allowing it, it's probably necessary for you. For some aspect of learning and development and growing and sanctification. Friendship breakups are necessary sometimes. And so how can we thank God for what was I release it to him, and with hopeful expectation, look to what he will bring us. My affirmation for you today is I am worthy of healthy friendships and trust God to provide in beautiful ways. Philippians 419 says, and my God will supply all your needs according to his riches and glory in Christ Jesus.
Carla Arges [00:18:36]:
You have a need for friendship. You have a need for community. God will provide for that need as you allow your heart to be open. And as you say, God, I am willing to go where you want me to go to meet the people you want me to meet. Let me know on Instagram in my DM's if you've gone through a friendship breakup and how you handled it and how you saw God show up in it, because I'm sure that he did. I would love to hear your story. So make sure you're following me at carlaarges, Carla Arjes on Instagram and share your story with me. And let's be encouraged one another in our walk through friendship breakups, knowing that we always, always have a friend in Jesus.
Carla Arges [00:19:26]:
Okay, before I go, I have to remind you guys that I am launching a new program in September called reclaim your power. It is partnering with God to take back what trauma stole from us in all areas of our life so that we can walk and in a purpose driven way, for the glory of God. I want you to get on the waitlist. You'll get more details about the program on the waitlist. You'll get a discounted rate, early registration, all the good stuff. The link for that is in the show notes and in the show description. It's also always online on Instagram in my bio. So make sure you get on the waitlist and take part in this incredible twelve week journey with me.
Carla Arges [00:20:10]:
I'll talk to you later.
Carla Arges [00:20:18]:
Thanks for joining me today. I hope we're already friends on social media, but if we're not, come find me on Instagram, arlahrges or at affirming truth. Can't wait to see you back here next week. Bye, friends.