In this solo episode of the "Stronger in the Difficult Places" podcast, Dr. Zoe Shaw blends psychology, Christian faith, and her own brand of feminist perspective to explore how and why a friendship may need to end. She opens with a personal “win” (getting her eyebrows micro‑bladed) and a “fail” (being overwhelmed by communication), then moves into a prayer by Cole Arthur Riley that frames the episode’s spiritual focus. Dr. Shaw shares a childhood memory of outgrowing a friend named Amy, illustrating that the tension between attraction and harm has been present since early life. She argues that friendships should be evaluated through two primary lenses: (1) whether the relationship pulls you away from God, and (2) whether it pulls you away from your authentic self. Using anecdotes—including a recent conflict over reading Glennon Doyle’s book—she shows how differing worldviews can create spiritual drift. Practical guidance follows: she advises against abrupt cut‑offs, recommends healthy distancing, honest conversations that acknowledge change, and the creation of a “new normal” for the relationship (e.g., occasional check‑ins, limited social contact). Throughout, she emphasizes that fear of change keeps people stuck, and that courageous, truthful dialogue is essential for growth. The episode closes with a second quote from Riley about the beauty of impermanence, a call to subscribe, and encouragement for listeners to confront difficult relational shifts.
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This is not a podcast about being broken, although you may have been. This is a podcast about strength for women who find themselves in difficult relationships, including that sometimes difficult one with yourself. We'll look at your relationship through a lens of psychology, faith, and a little dash of my own kind of feminism. We're not fixing them. We're fixing you. And that changes everything. Welcome to Stronger in the Difficult Places. Save yourself, heal your relationships. Listen in. Hey there, welcome. I'm your host, Dr. Zoe, and I'm glad you're here. Today's topic is when a friendship needs to end. But first, my win and my fail, as I do every week. My win is that I got my eyebrows microbladed, but not really microbladed. It's permanent makeup, but But it's not completely permanent. Basically, they tattooed my eyebrows. It's the weirdest thing. My friend Kristen, thank you Kristen, she had it done and I loved her eyebrows and she suggested it to me. And so it's actually taken me a couple of months to get into this woman, but we had an appointment scheduled for November and then she called me at the last minute and she said, I can get you in at 1 o'clock, do you wanna go? And so I did and I got my eyebrows done. So far I'm loving it. I do usually use eyebrow pencil on my eyebrows, and so waking up with my eyebrows already done is a very nice perk. It's a 2-appointment procedure, so I just went in yesterday, got the first part done, and then in another 6 weeks I'm gonna go get it done again. It's gonna last for a couple of years. Weird, but I think pretty cool. Right now it's a win. And it feels a little Vain to get your eyebrows tattooed on, but the reality is I spend time, you know, most days putting makeup on, and now I don't have to do that. So that just saved like a few minutes from my day every day. So my fail. Whew, I am drowning in emails, texts, DMs, voicemails. My husband had surgery last week. He's doing great, but just taking that one day off I don't realize how close I am on the precipice of like falling over into overwhelm with my communication, but just, you know, one day of not doing that, I'm so far behind. So it doesn't feel good, but I'm, I'm just letting you guys know, if you've DM'd me, texted me, emailed me, number one, I love to hear from you. And number two, I'll be getting back to you very soon, but I am behind and it does feel like a fail, but I'm also giving myself grace. So onto the topic, when a friendship needs to end. I had written this down as a topic to do for an episode months and months ago, and for some reason it just came back to me. And so I'm hoping that someone out there needs to hear this. I'm going to start this episode with a prayer from Arthur Cole Riley. It's a prayer for those who have outgrown a friend. Dear God, it's difficult to allow for evolution in our friendships. I confess that I cling to others out of an insecurity of fear or familiarity, and I become resistant to imagining a future where I am not as close to someone as I once was. Please remind me that not all relationships need to persevere. Reveal to me the beauty in friends that are only near me for a season, and help me to release any guilt that tells me otherwise. Sometimes I'm clinging to someone who I've outgrown, not because of time, but because of pain. The wounds that they've made in me and I in them. Liberate me from the bonds which alienate me from myself. Help me to discern when a friendship should be fought for and when I should acknowledge the distinct paths our selfhoods are on and allow for a sacred release. Amen. By Cole Arthur Riley. You might be in this space now of wondering or knowing that a friendship needs to end. It's a, it's a painful place. I've been in this painful space in my life. I've had friends who I have loved dearly, but I either knew in the deepest part of my core that they were not good for me, or I could see that our lives were diverging in a way that would not hold the friendship together. My very first experience in letting go of a friend was when I was 9 years old. Her name was Amy, and she was everything that I was not. She was gregarious, rebellious, fun. She tempted me to do all kinds of 9-year-old bad things like disobey teachers, start food fights, and I loved how I felt when I was with her, but then I hated how I felt afterwards. Even at that young age, I recognized that Amy wasn't good for me. I remember praying that God would help me get Amy out of my life because she was just so tempting and fun. And the crazy thing is, he answered my prayer. I came to school one day and Amy was gone. I found out that she had been kicked out for bad behavior, and I went to a private school, so they could do that. And I often think back to that as the day that God proved himself to me. I know it sounds crazy, but when I start to wonder and doubt God, I always remember that he got rid of Amy for me. And no one can convince me that that was a coincidence. I know he answered my prayer. But I've also learned that in my adulthood that we can't fix everything by praying it away, can we? Why? Not because God isn't an amazing God, but because, well, a number of reasons that I will never understand as long as I am human and thinking with my human mind, but also because I know that then we don't grow. When our children are little, when my children were little, they would look at me and say, I want, and I gave it to them for a number of reasons, because they couldn't do it for themselves and because it taught them to trust me. But when my 9-year-old looks at me now and she says, I want, my answer is sometimes, great, go get it for yourself. I know that, you know, she needs to struggle through that in order to grow. Sometimes I'll tell her, God gave you 2 hands and 2 working feet. Or sometimes, depending on what it is, my answer is, wait, have patience. It's not time yet. Now, sometimes I do give her what she wants out of pure love and a desire to serve and nurture her, but not Not if I think it will stunt her growth. And I think God's like that too. I know he got Amy out of my life in order to show me, Zoe, I'm here, I'm real, and I listen to you. I love you and I can meet your needs. But to be honest with you, he hasn't answered what I feel to be more pressing issues in my adulthood because I needed to figure it out for myself in order to grow. I don't like that, but I know it's the truth. And sometimes in adulthood, I've had to let friendships go, and I've had to do the hard work of it. And so do you. And this hurts a lot, and we have to grieve this. And often we stay too long and we hurt longer than we have to because we don't want to hurt ourselves and we don't want to hurt the other. But in holding on, we cause more pain. If this speaks to you, if there's a friendship, a business relationship, a romantic relationship that you know is not feeding your soul, or even worse, is sucking the health From it, then this episode is for you. I'm not magically going to fix this for you, although I wish I could, kind of. But I know you need to. But I will speak to you, hoping that my words resonate with you and help to move you towards the change that you know you need to make. Change is scary, y'all, and that's one of the main reasons why we don't do it. Because this current evil, whatever's going on in our life, is known and it's manageable. We can live with it. We know we can because we've been doing it. But when we allow ourselves to step out into the scary, then that's when we're actually living. When we allow fear to hold us captive and paralyzed and stuck, we're dying. So first, let's talk about why. What are good reasons for ending a friendship? And I'm not going to spout off a ton of trite reasons or 5 steps to know you should end your friendship. I might've done that at some point before, Because you possess a deep knowing when something isn't working like it used to, when the ease isn't there, when there's more friction internally for you or between the two of you, when you've just grown differently. So, you know, but I am going to still give you 2 overarching reasons to end a friendship. The first is when the friendship is taking you away from your relationship with God. I had a close friend Who I also love dearly, and I still do, but she's agnostic at best, and she had a level of disdain for Christianity that seeped into our relationship. And please do not misconstrue what I'm saying. I have plenty of friends who are agnostics and atheists even. I have friends of different religions— Buddhism, Jewish, Sikh. I love to fellowship with others who think differently than I do and see the world differently than I do. I will break bread with you. I will stay at your home and invite you to mine. I will commune with you and learn from you. And teach you what I know if you're open. I will fight for your right to be who you are even, but you won't be my ride or die. You won't be my sister because that can sometimes lead me astray. At least I haven't had that as yet. And I don't like to ever say never because life continues to change and I continue to grow. So I'll never say never. But the closest experience I've had to that, I loved her so much. And I noticed that it pulled me away from God and I had to distance from that. I actually had a follower on Instagram challenge me, and this is about the whole concept of being close to people who are different or understanding differences. But I had a follower on Instagram challenge me when I put up a book called Untamed by Glennon Doyle, which I haven't read yet. I intend to, it's still on my nightstand, but I do know that it contains her journey towards her relationship with her now wife. And this follower on Instagram DM'd me and she said, how could you read that book? And I don't remember the actual words, but the insinuation was that because I'm a Christian, I shouldn't read a book about someone who has now come out as a lesbian. And my answer was, how could I not? Was it okay to read Glennon Doyle's previous book, Love Warrior, where she was a doting wife dealing with her husband's infidelity and praying in the church? How could I not want to understand her experience now? Am I to put my head in the sand and say that others' experiences don't count or matter? How can I know what I know to be true if I don't know the other? And how can I say I love if I don't know what I'm loving? So I don't only stay in my bubble with people who are like me. That was a big divergence, but I always want to understand the other. I can't be an effective practitioner if I'm judging, or if I do not understand or seek to understand the human experience. And the human experience is varied and it's nuanced. People become who they are because of a variety of internal and external experiences that matter. And I want to know about them and I want to honor them as well. But I also must protect my psyche by being very careful about who is in my inner circle. You know the saying that you become like the 5 people closest to you? I, I believe that on one level, although I don't necessarily fully believe it, or I would be just like my 8. 15, 17, and 20-year-olds. And I don't think that I am, but maybe they're like me. I don't know. I hope. But you get the point. And so sometimes, despite your love for a friend, if you notice that they are leading you away from God, it might be time to end the friendship. This is necessary self-care and spiritual maintenance. The second reason: when the friendship is taking you away from yourself. Now this can happen in a number of ways. Maybe your life has changed and you don't have time for the friendship in the way that you used to. Although it's usually not about time and distance because to be honest with you, I find that a true rich friendship can withstand those constraints. I have them in my life and I'm thankful for them. And so it's probably that one or both of you has grown in a direction that's no longer serving the relationship. And friendships can't necessarily withstand this one. And it's not a bad thing. It's a life thing. When this happens, staying in a friendship that no longer fits becomes a constant drip, creating a slow erosion of the person that you want to be. Once again, you don't need to check a box because I identified the thing. You know. You know deep inside, you know. So how do you do it? How do you let go of something that may have spanned years of your life, maybe a relationship that you thought would always stay the same? First, don't burn bridges. I am not a believer in cutting people off. I'm a believer in distancing in the healthiest way. There are some extreme cases, but cutting people out of your life should be the exception, a last resort, not the first, second, or third step. And to be honest with you, it's harder to take the route of distance, and it may require many conversations that wouldn't need to be had if you simply ended the friendship. But I don't think this is the mature way to handle ending relationships. If the other person needs space from you though, by all means, honor that and give them that space, but you don't need to be the one initiating that. The cutoff, I mean. Instead, and this is the hard part, you need to have an honest conversation acknowledging the differences in your relationship now compared to before. If you've changed, acknowledge that as well. Own it. Believe me, if you felt it, she has too on some level or another. And sometimes acknowledgement, just speaking the truth of what is between you, is the only thing that needs to happen. Then as you distance, there isn't any wondering and things left unsaid. And I'm not sure that when you own it or acknowledge it that you have to quantify what type of relationship will now exist between the two of you. I don't think that's the answer. It's more about shifting and allowing your relationship to have a new normal. Maybe it's getting lunch a few times a year and catching up over email or texts. Maybe it is not seeing each other at all anymore, and that's something you're going to have to figure out. Or maybe it's just, you know, seeing each other socially, running into each other at events. And my hope for you is that you can keep it real and not avoid her, but be open to the new status of your relationship. And this, my friend, takes time. I know. For both of you, but it's the grown-up way. The grown-up way is to acknowledge, to speak the truth, and to let it sit between the two of you and figure out a new normal. And sometimes being a grown-up sucks. So today I am holding space for you to contemplate your relationships. Does something need to shift? Does a relationship need to change? And if it does, then I implore you not to wait, not to put it off until a better time that will never come. Love yourself by having the hard conversations. You can do it, my friend. And I'm going to close with more words from Cole Riley. Not all people are meant for you in all seasons. There is beauty in impermanence. Allow for sacred goodbyes. Thank you for listening to Stronger in the Difficult Places. We talk about those difficult things here. Please subscribe, follow, leave a review. Episodes go out every Tuesday. Hit me up on social. I love to hear from you, even if it takes me a minute to get back. And have a strong week.
