Welcome to Episode 9 of The Rise Room! Today, I’m diving into one of the quietest heartbreaks we experience, the end of a friendship. We talk about romantic breakups all the time, but the grief of losing someone who once felt like home? That’s a conversation most people carry alone.

In this episode, I’m breaking down why friendship breakups hurt so deeply, how they impact your mental and emotional wellbeing, and what it truly takes to rise after someone you love becomes someone you used to know.

This one’s for anyone replaying old conversations, missing old versions of themselves, or wondering why the end of a friendship still echoes years later.

Friendship breakups activate real grief responses in the brain, similar to romantic heartbreak.

Emotional intimacy in friendships means losing a friend is not losing “just a person,” but losing shared identity, daily connection, and a piece of your history.

Signs a friendship breakup is affecting you: replaying moments, struggling to trust new people, feeling ashamed for caring “too much,” grieving who you were with them.

I share my own experience with friendship loss, how it shifted my identity and how long it took to stop blaming myself for the end of something that mattered.

Here are scholarly sources you can reference for the research on words and mental health discussed in this episode:

Auerbach, R. P., Admon, R., & Pizzagalli, D. A. (2014). Adolescent loss of friendships and its impact on neural responses to social rejection. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 123(3), 662–678.

Badenes-Ribera, L., Fabris, M. A., Gastaldi, F. G. M., & Longobardi, C. (2019). Social pain and the brain: Neural responses to social exclusion. Social Neuroscience, 14(2), 156–168.

Bos, A. E. R., Snippe, E., de Wit, J., & Schuengel, C. (2021). Friendship quality and mental health: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 87, 102038.

Chopik, W. J. (2017). The benefits of social connection: Loneliness predicts mortality and health outcomes. Psychology and Aging, 32(2), 186–198.

Eisenberger, N. I., & Lieberman, M. D. (2004). Why rejection hurts: A common neural alarm system for physical and social pain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(7), 294–300.