How to get over a friendship breakup

To the brain, a breakup is a breakup. The feelings tied up in a friendship is profound, and the loss thereof can cause some people to wrestle through stages of grief.

Be honest with other people in your life about what you're going through.

With a romantic partner, you will usually have a breakup conversation. But the nature of a friendship makes it hard to make it final.

Diagnosing what went wrong and how is it affecting you can be helpful. Then try to get clarity from your friend to gain a sense of closure. If a friendship ended badly, you may have to accept that you won't get a final conversation. Try to stop rehashing what you should have said and done. If you did something wrong, you need to apologise.

Once you understand the impact of the breakup on your life, then you can treat it appropriately. It might mean talking through things with someone you trust or giving yourself space to grieve.

To help you move on, use the language of gratitude that puts the relationship in the past tense. "I'm so thankful they were in my life during that season."

A concern that comes with a friendship breakup is how it will affect your wider group of friends.

• Don't hide what's happening. When friend groups don't have healthy boundaries as part of their friend culture, it can happen that the whole group will fall away when one person falls out with another person in the group. If this happens, it means those friendships weren't healthy to start with.
• Maintaining healthy boundaries means that it is OK to connect differently with one another in a group.

The loss of a friend should not make you feel unworthy.

We often find our identity in our friends. When a friendship is over, we may lose that sense of belonging and acceptance. This is all the more reason to find a sense of self-worth that is innate.