May 26, 2021: I recently wrote a blog about friends and family and why the division is happening.
You can read that original (first) blog here: Family and Friends – Why we are losing them?
I have lost more than my fair share of people over the last year or so. I was already losing people in droves because of the healing journey I have been on in the last four years, however, the mass exodus over the last year or so has been more than a little startling!
Because I grew up with a very dysfunctional family, eliminating toxic people from my life has become something I am very proficient at. That does not mean that the friends that might not have been serving my best and highest good were among those that were eliminated. We all have people around us to show us where we need to grow. They hold up mirrors for us to see what we need to improve within ourselves and our cells.
I had a best friend for over thirty years, until recently. And really, it wasn’t recently. It was one of those slow demise experiences, where you can tell the friendship is diminishing and your attempts to rescue it are like trying to hold a slippery, flapping fish. You can see and feel it sliding away and yet, your best attempts at repair are falling on deaf ears.
My friend works in radio and television. She has broken glass ceilings for women in the market she works in over the last twenty-five years. She was mostly in the radio world, and only recently branched into television in the last few years.
As this pandemic began, I began posting about how the media is twisting everything, how they are telling you untruths. She began blasting her opinion all over my posts. Long winded threads to prove her point. I recognized the filters they went through, so I chose to not respond. I eventually got tired of it and 'unfollowed' her to change my algorithms. That worked until the day she blasted another post and I had enough. I unfriended her without a word.
Please keep in mind we had not spoken in the background in any meaningful way in months, and all I was doing was making my Facebook a place I still liked to be in. I don’t know where people got the idea that if you are unfriended on Facebook that you are no longer friends in real life. It is kind of a superficial premise in my mind. If this friend called me today and said she needed me, I would still be here to listen.
I thought all was good until I received THE LETTER. What letter you ask? I got a breakup letter! Set up in such a way to blindside and hurt, to be received in time for my husband’s and my wedding anniversary, to ensure that the message was clearly received.
Why am I telling you about this? Because this letter was full of the reasons this world is in the place it is right now.
She spoke her truth from a place of victimhood. She did not take one bit of personal responsibility. She told me that by posting about mainstream media the way I did, I lumped her in with the sheep. She went on to chastise me for not speaking to her about unfriending her, for not reaching out to apologize for the things I have posted. She accused me of saying things I did not say. And never once did she reach out to me over the months to discuss any of this, even with more than thirty years of friendship in place. I will say I did not either. I recognized that this friendship was changing and not supporting me, so I allowed it to die peacefully, and with love.
Our society does not know how to communicate with one another anymore. We run other people’s thoughts and actions through our own filters, perceptions and perspectives and call it the Truth. We do not ask anyone anymore. We instantly choose offended over having a polite (or not so polite) conversation to clear the air. We assume things from what we see, instead of asking.
Had she asked me, there could have been a very different conversation had, possibly clearing the air and continuing on with a friendship with better boundaries. Instead, we have a dead-in-the-water friendship with very little hope of reconciliation.
We have been taught to not trust ourselves. We have been shown time and again that telling the Truth gets people in trouble. We have been taught in school that if we cannot handle our feelings that there is a “safe space on campus” to process those feelings. We have bubble wrapped and coddled and cajoled humans to the point where they all need bubble wrap to process anything. We have taught people to not acknowledge how they feel, to not show their true emotions.
Our Collective Trauma is showing in this pandemic. Personal experience in my own family and from working with clients has shown me that the bulk of this trauma comes from World War 2 and the Great Depression. Trauma that has been passed on by generations of traumatized people who do not know how to process their emotions. Trauma that has been passed on genetically and energetically needs to be discovered, processed, and released. I have spent time healing this trauma in my family and I’ll be damned if I am going to allow the trauma that was passed to me, and the trauma that is occurring now, to pass down through my family.
Teach your people to have personal responsibility by modeling it. Have healthy boundaries for yourself and others. The way to create this New Earth is to Be the Change you wish to see.
By: Extremely American Journalist & Contributor (Canada) Wende Fahey