Get Some Help: Releasing What No Longer Serves You
Or, when did we become so quick to cancel our friends?
This post is in a response to a question from a paid subscriber. Each month paid subscribers can ask me anything and I’ll pick one question to answer. This month I’m replying to Emma who asked about being cancelled. Read the full question here.
“So here's a thing. I got cancelled by a friend in December. We didn't see eye to eye on something. It was very important she speak her truth. But me speaking my truth was me not getting what she said.. rather than saying how it made me feel. What triggered me was seeing them post saying something about letting go of what doesn't serve you. Like it was a therapeutic and spiritual release. When really it was plain old not wanting to be in the wrong, and take responsibility for having let a friend down.”
If you’ve been cancelled by a friend, or have cancelled one, I’d love to hear your take on this in the comments.
I’m trying to think about whether or not I have ever been cancelled by a friend. I’m sure I have but the exact time and circumstances aren’t coming to mind. I do however clearly remember one occasion where I upset a friend and how nearly being cancelled by her felt. We’d been on a panel together in front of an audience of about fifty people. She’d said something I disagreed with. Rather than just stating my alternative point, I dismissed what she’d said with an eye-roll sort of comment. I hadn’t meant to be hurtful, I’d been speaking off the cuff and had used a phrase that was well-worn in the household I grew up, forgetting how hurtful it had felt when someone used it against me.
She didn’t bring it up with me there and then - there wasn’t the time and I suspect she was feeling too hurt to really know what to say - instead she started to withdraw from our friendship. When we did spend time together she was cold and defensive. I felt edged-out and couldn’t understand what I had done. In turn I became frustrated and dismissive. The whole thing came to a head a few months later when she finally explained the hurt I’d caused. I was horrified at having upset her like that and apologised profusely. Did it mend the situation? Slightly. But the damage had been done and done by me. It was an important reminder that winning a debate is rarely worth losing a friend over.
And yet today, the defining narrative does seem to be that disagreement is the end of a relationship. Just yesterday TikTok served me a video of a young woman crying in her car because the man she’d been seeing for three months had suggested that maybe her belly would be smaller if she went to the gym. She’d gone quiet in response and then left as soon as possible. As far as she was concerned the relationship was over.
As someone who has had that conversation with pretty much every man I’ve ever met, let alone every man I’ve ever dated, I had a lot of sympathy for her. It is a horrible experience and very often a sign that the person you’re with doesn’t understand you enough to know which buttons not to press. But I also wanted to reach inside the video, give her a hug and then tell her to go back in there and talk to him. Explain how his comment had made her feel and what she’d rather he’d said or done instead. Listen to his response and see if in fact there was a middle ground where she could accept his apology and understand why he’d said it. This doesn’t mean I think she should have given him a second chance or that he was right to say that, not at all! But I do worry that perhaps we’ve forgotten how to have difficult conversations and the benefits they can bring.
Reading your post Emma, I wondered how you’d have liked this difficult conversation to go. I hear you saying your friend cancelled you rather than admit she’d let you down but what did you want from this conversation? Was it an apology or a promise she wouldn’t do the same again? What would those things have given you? Very often we want people to agree with us because it means we don’t have to look too closely at the relationship itself or what’s really going on for the other person in it.
If you had no side in this debate, what would you think of your friend’s response here? What more would you need to know from her to truly understand it? If her letting you down in the first place is an unusual experience then maybe there’s something going on for her that she feels is unheard. And if it’s a regular experience, how have long has it gone on before you said anything? How often have you let your own needs go in order to keep the peace? In my experience, that tends to make it even more painful when we finally speak up and aren’t heard.
Forcing yourself to have a difficult conversation can be a vomit-inducing experience. As someone who is generally thought of as a confident and sometimes confrontational person, I will happily run an emotional marathon to avoid one. But the problem with this is that the price of avoiding difficult conversations is isolation. It is impossible to be in relationship with other people - whether that’s friends, lovers or colleagues - and not have to occasionally put on your big-girl pants and tell them you need to talk. For when those moments happen, here is a structure that I like. It’s called COIN.
C - what is the context of the discussion you’re about to have? What does it relate to?
O - What have you observed? Be specific! If you find yourself saying things words like “always” or “never”, you’ve moved into the territory of blame. Pick one specific example and remind them of it.
I - What was the impact? How did this behaviour make you feel? We often run away from our feelings and go to the practicalities (“you weren’t here when you said you’d be and I had to wait in the rain for an hour!”). Feelings have so much power and are much harder to argue against (“when you weren’t here and I had to wait in the rain, I felt abandoned and uncared for”). They also get to the heart of why you’re having this conversation.
N - What do you want to happen next time? If the same situation were to happen again, what would you like the other person to do differently? Note, this is the point at which you’re bringing them into the conversation so they might want to negotiate. Perhaps you want them to acknowledge they were in the wrong, they might want to own part of it but not all of it. Remember, the aim of this discussion is not to win the debate, it’s to set out how they made you feel and try to find a way to move forward. Perhaps moving forward will mean moving away from each other but wouldn’t you rather know about that face to face than via a meme on social media?
If you’ve got some advice for Emma, do pop it in the comments below. And you can see her full question here.
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It’s interesting how people now refer to disagreements, distancing, and the possible end of a relationship as being “cancelled”, which no doubt heightens the sense of injustice about the event in question. What I’ve found over the years from hearing stories about friendship tensions and fallouts is that it’s rarely just the triggering event in question and there is often an established (often problematic) dynamic in the friendship that, when the conflict occurs, it upsets the apple cart. So, for instance, in this reader’s friendship, maybe it’s that she usually lets things slide or their friend is used to having the last word and being right. Or it could be that there are a number of issues that the triggering event is symbolic of. So to understand what went down will take being super honest with themselves about the nature of their friendship, including whether they were annoyed with their freind about more than that particular disappointment. In terms of restoration and repair, it’s also about moving away from the right vs wrong, winner vs loser mentalities because these tend to trigger shame rather than empathy. Only then will they have a chance at having a decent conversation about what occurred and move forward.
I love the idea of COIN - will use that!! Eurgh, I've had a few of those conversations recently and honestly it is so anxiety inducing. I've also learnt this year that it is better to have as I've called it a sticky situation for a month or two, than to feel and sit with that, for so much longer and in some cases when I've been cancelled it has been years. Thanks for bringing light to this.