Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of relationship. Over the past few years, some long term friendships ended for me, and truthfully, in each case, it came as a relief. However, mixed with relief came a lot of other feelings — especially guilt and sadness. I felt like I had failed in some way. In some cases, these feelings have lingered for years.
I’d like to think of myself as a loyal friend. I tend to go out of my way to “be nice”, and as a result, I sometimes put off confrontation and don’t assert my own needs and feelings right away. For me, this is mostly true of my relationships with women. We women are socialized to be “nice”. We are supposed to be understanding, supposed to be supportive. But sometimes there comes a time when there simply has to be a parting of the ways. Things have just become too difficult, too strange, too toxic.
So what is really going on beneath the surface of friendship and relationship on an energetic level?
I believe that when we meet a new friend or lover, the vibrations of our energy bodies literally “synch up.” We feel this emotionally as a kind of commonality or familiarity. Indeed, the word “familiar” literally means a feeling of “family.” Of course, in the case of our actual families, we live or have lived together, share genetic material, even sleep with each other. This automatically guarantees an intrinsic “synch” between our vibrational energy bodies (to learn more about these bodies, read Active Consciousness). Indeed, perhaps the very notion of a “best friend forever” comes from a yearning to recreate family bonds, especially our bonds with our parents. Perhaps the yearning for a friend of this kind becomes especially strong if our relationship with our parents was less than ideal. Unfortunately, projecting parental need onto a friend can also be a recipe for disaster.
In the early days of a relationship, our sense of “synching” up with someone might simply be a projection — we believe something about the other person that may not actually be true. We are synching with an idea, not with the person.
With time, however, the truth of who another person is energetically will be palpably felt by us. That’s because we are energy beings too. If a relationship is just not meant to be, we’ll experience an internal sense of grating discomfort of some kind. If, on the other hand, things are going well, things deepen and synch up even more.
Over time, of course, people change. If the result of these changes causes two people not to “mesh” anymore, one or both of them will begin to feel it. They might stick with things out of habit, “old times sake”, loyalty, or responsibility. But they will know or at least feel that things just aren’t the same.
Of course, sometimes that’s okay. We might occasionally see a friend we have nothing in common with anymore — indeed, that kind of friendship has its own rewards. But if the disconnect with an old friend is energetically palpable, we will also realize that we don’t really want to spend extended periods of time with them. In fact, if we want to maintain a friendship with them, we know that we shouldn’t do so, for the sake of the friendship.
Family, of course, has its own issues. If we’ve really shared a lot of time with someone, that relationship can also take on the quality of family. In such cases, past history and even genetics creates energetic links and “synching” that will remain with us. Even if we’re not “feeling it” with a family member anymore, we may choose to remain connected out of responsibility or the comfort of a familiar face. Or we might sense that doing so is part of our spiritual and evolutionary growth.
In other cases, however, we just know that our true path is to leave that grating energetic sensation with a person behind and move on. When that time comes, perhaps it is best to do so without self-recrimination.
Ending a relationship is never easy. Sometimes, life simply takes care of the problem for us — when the other person decides to move away geographically. Other times, however, maybe it’s best to acknowledge that the purpose of a relationship has now run its course. Hopefully, both parties will agree to move forward and wish each other well as each person continues on with their life journey.
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