How to recover a lost relationship.

I recently had a massive falling out with a good friend – somebody really important to me. We had argued before, but had always managed to find an understanding and reconciliation through conversation; but this time was different.

This time things were said that crossed a line and a chasm opened up between us and it looked very much like the end of our friendship. When my anger subsided, I knew I wanted to try and save the friendship, but could I?

“The first question I thought I needed an answer to was, “does she want to save the friendship?”. ”

This turned out to be the wrong question, as did many of the questions I asked in the first days after our argument.

Equally wrong was my assumption that, if she only understood why she was wrong, she would apologise and I would forgive her (because I’m a compassionate guy, right?). I started to list the reasons she was wrong… oh boy! How much do you think that helped?

“Does she want to save the friendship?” was the wrong question because learning what you can from a breakdown in a relationship has to be independent of the other person. You can’t control what they’re going through or what they want any outcome to be.

When we’re locked in anger, pain and grief, we often don’t know what we want an outcome to be. If you feel the work is only worthwhile if it gets you what you want, you’re missing the point – you need to understand you first and, in this case, I didn’t understand what had happened and why I had reacted as I had.

It doesn’t matter what caused the fight. The trigger was pretty innocuous; it was how we reacted to it that did the damage. In retrospect, it was how I reacted to it that caused the really catastrophic damage.

I’m making an important point as early as possible and that is the need to accept that, as certain as you are of your rightness in the middle of an argument, you may not actually be right.

As I’ll go on to explain, it also probably doesn’t matter if you are right, but first you need to accept that you may not be and this is because of the simple truth that, in any argument, there are three sides: your side, the other person’s side and the truth.

Many of us don’t fully appreciate the difference between a fact and an opinion. I expressed my opinions as if they were facts and, where they don’t fit with my world view, I frequently treat facts as if they were merely opinions.

There’s a more central point about my lazy use of language and concepts in my own life and the cognitive dissonance I (and many of us) suffer from when we’re convinced of our rightness when all we have, in reality, is strong opinions.

In this instance, what I took to be my friend’s irrational refusal to grant a simple request, lead me down the path of an irrational response. My opinion about her motivations and options landed in my psyche with the weight of facts.

Because I’m a lawyer and a man and we’re trained from day one to win arguments, to win fights. We’re also entitled to be deferred to, aren’t we, men?

One of the ways to win arguments is by proving the other side’s arguments are wrong. We lawyers are paid to be right – or at least, to prove others wrong. This pervaded my personal as well as my professional life and, with the benefit of hindsight, probably cost me many relationships and, almost certainly, my marriage.

What threatened to end my friendship was my certainty that I was right alongside my doing what I had done before, which was to point out why she was wrong. So wrong that it took me four pages to explain every way in which she was wrong and invite her to apologise.

In the past, this had “worked” because we got past the argument and our friendship survived and thrived. What I had no idea of was that, every time I did this, I planted a seed of resentment and distrust that grew a little every time it happened.

Not only that, but I only recently realised that, over the years, she probably wasn’t wrong as many times as I had asserted; she just didn’t feel the issue was worth arguing about. In other words, she put our friendship above being right.

So, the big bust up occurred when not only was I spectacularly wrong, I was also germinating the large and oft planted seeds of resentment and mistrust that I had sewn over many years.

She fired back in epic fashion. Days of silence and refusal to engage culminated in a five page rebuttal of every point I’d made. I had calmed down by this point, convinced of my rightness, but no longer caring that much because I just wanted my friend back so we could get on as normal.

So I was shocked, firstly that that was how she had chosen to respond, but also by the content. The anger, resentment, scorn and ridicule that dripped from every paragraph tore into me. The lawyer in me went into overdrive. I thought I was being so generous by conceding those points she was “right” about as I started noting what she was wrong about in her rebuttal… You can probably tell where this is headed.

My fingers pounded the keyboard in an indignant rage buoyed up by how reasonable I was being in giving her the win on her “good points”. I was typing my precious relationship out of existence when I just stopped. I slumped back in my chair and started to pull in deep breaths as I fought off a sense of impending doom. What was I doing?

I am on a journey of discovery. I have begun to learn certain spiritual practices and some are bedding in. What I didn’t realise at the time this was all happening was that I was in that self-congratulatory phase of feeling slightly superior to everyone else.

“I ‘knew’ she was wrong, which is a whole different league to ‘believing’ that she was wrong. Consequently, in my justified (in my head) indignation, I went about berating her with all the reasons she was wrong, acting irrationally and needed to adjust her behaviour. How did I think this would work out well for me?”

I was awake, I was meditating, I had a gratitude practice, I said Metta for people for goodness sake. I was trying to be a better person today than I was yesterday… so why was this terrible thing happening to me if I was clearly such a good person, or, at least a better person than most other people?

Was my spiritual practice just another way of winning? Was I a sham?

I tried to access my compassion, but couldn’t find it. Where was it? Well, as it turns out, under a pile of conditioning, old thinking, habit, anger and arrogance; that’s where!

I stopped typing because all I could see at that moment was my beautiful and goodhearted friend sobbing in anger and frustration and lost connection that I had caused. I felt my chest tighten as I realised how far away I had pushed her.

Honesty without kindness, humour and goodheartedness can be just mean - Pema Chodron “When Things Fall Apart”

I left my computer and went for walk and then I sat on my sofa and grabbed my copy of “When Things Fall Apart” by Pema Chodron that always sits there and opened it at a random page and there, underlined by me in red some weeks before was “Honesty without kindness, humour and goodheartedness can be just mean.”

I thought I had understood and absorbed the wisdom of this, but, when anger blinded me and the lawyer chimp mind was ascendant, it was clear that I hadn’t.

It took a random act of hesitation and search to be reminded of what I thought was embedded and automatic. A real “universe had my back” moment (even though I still struggle with that idea – the subject of a future blog!).

As I sat contemplating these words, two things struck me: First, I recognised that my honesty had been mean. Very mean! Second, I was wrong about what I had been honest about.

Whilst there were assumptions in my friend’s rebuttal that were incorrect, the overarching message screaming from the pages of correct and incorrect points was the pain I had caused my friend; the gross breach of trust I had perpetrated, the agony of someone whose vulnerability had been turned against them. Betrayal.

I suddenly didn’t want to be right about any of it. I felt shame wash over me and guilt and regret storm in and bring me to my knees.

I needed a new response if I was going to save this friendship. I thought about it for a while. Meditated to get clear and access my compassion. Said Metta for myself.

It’s important to point out here that I dismissed my shame and embraced my guilt by doing these exercises – I needed to get past “I am an asshole” to “I did an asshole thing, but I am still a good person.”

From that place of love and respect for myself, I could get a clear and helpful answer to the important question, “what can I do to put the situation right?”.

That is where guilt helps and delivers, where shame just beats us down.
I deleted my draft rebuttal of my friend’s rebuttal and started again. I knew she wouldn’t answer my calls and it would have been creepy and threatening for me to turn up at her home, so I started a new letter.

I held up my hands and apologised. I admitted I was wrong. I acknowledged that I had caused her pain, caused her to feel unsafe, caused her to feel unloved.

I asked to be forgiven for betraying her trust, for reacting from anger and entitlement rather than love and compassion.

I did not mention one word about where her interpretation of what happened was incorrect. I did not say one word about the mean things she had said to me from a place of pain and frustration because I had brought those cruel words on myself.

I deserved her anger and I had lost my right to push back against it.

I set no deadlines and made no ultimatums. I drew no line in the sand. I just stood in my wholeness with my arms open hoping she would cross the abyss between us and embrace me again. I made myself vulnerable without any expectation that she would respond to that.

You see, I had come to understand that confessing my fault and apologising was what she deserved regardless of how she chose to react to it. Her reaction was not in my control. What was in my control was what my attitude towards the whole situation was and what I said about it.

I realised that I didn’t need to be right at the cost of a friendship. I also realised that, even if I had been right (I wasn’t, just to be clear!), it wouldn’t have mattered.

If I had tried to solve the problem from the same consciousness that had created it, I would not have solved it. Even if I had been right and had managed to argue her around this time, the legacy of pain and betrayal would have manifested down the line more catastrophically.

I had to make myself vulnerable rather than cloak myself in being right. I had to crack open to stand a chance. I had to face what Elizabeth Lesser calls “the great loneliness” in her amazing book “Broken Open.”

Did it work? Before I answer that, let me say that, even if it didn’t, the learning and change brought about by the lessons I have learned are worth the pain of transformation – that time shrouded in silk alone.

So, did it work? Well, sort of. Time will tell. We have reconnected, but our relationship is different. Different, but good. It has to be different because we are different people than we were before the breakdown in our old relationship.

“…like the loneliness a caterpillar endures when she wraps herself in a silky shroud and begins the long transformation from chrysalis to butterfly. It seems that we too must go through such a time, when life as we have known it is over – when being a caterpillar feels somehow false and yet we don’t know who we are supposed to become. All we know is that something bigger is calling us to change. And though we must make the journey alone, and even if suffering is our only companion, soon enough we will become a butterfly, soon enough we will taste the rapture of being alive.”

Trust needs to be rebuilt, boundaries re-established. She needs to get to know the new me and decide whether this is a person she wants to be friends with and, if so, what the nature of that friendship is. We are currently circling each other working these things out.

The good news is that we are doing this from a place of respect, love and compassion. We are communicating clearly and honestly. We are untangling aspects of our dependency on each other that did not serve us. We are re-aligning both individually and as friends.

I have committed to therapy.

I am actively addressing my anger issues. We are working out something that works for both of us. I’m optimistic that what will emerge will be better than what we burned in the fire of that awful argument.

To borrow one further idea from Elizabeth Lesser, we have both been through a Phoenix Process (read “Broken Open”, it’s amazing!) and both risen stronger, wiser and more wholehearted.

Ian