I always have lots of posts rattling around in my head. Sometimes it takes me a long time to get to them. Other times topics come to mind and I feel an urgency to write about them. This is one of those topics. This topic has come up in a few different ways including in correspondence with a friend. I feel compelled to write about this even though I never even considered broaching on my blog. My guess is that God means it for someone out there either today or at some point in the future.
The topic is friends who retreat when they are hurting.
Different people handle difficulties in different ways. Some people need to talk things out. Others busy themselves to avoid thinking about issues. Some people will surround themselves with people, feeling more secure with the multitudes. In each of these situations, the person is still fully engaged in the flow of normal life and those around her are minimally impacted by her choices.
There are others who retreat. And the more they are hurt or overwhelmed by life, the further they retreat. While they may talk to a select few in their lives about their pain or issues, they generally pull back from those around them as they seek to deal with whatever is bothering them.
- They may skip church some weeks because the thought of being around that many people is overwhelming.
- They may choose not to participate in family activities.
- They may miss Bible studies because they don’t have the emotional energy to attend and participate.
This can be confusing to the people around them, especially those whose natural bent is to think that if a person is hurting then they need their friends and, more specifically, the church.
A friend (we’ll call her Elizabeth) wrote to me recently asking for my insight about a situation with a friend (we’ll call her Jane) who had just kind of stopped communicating with her and then had written out of the blue after a number of years. Jane told Elizabeth that she had been going through some very hard times and had needed to take some time. It had nothing to do with Elizabeth at all. Jane still valued Elizabeth’s friendship. But she had gone through a period of retreating to cope with things going on in her life.
When I read Elizabeth’s letter, it made complete sense to me what Jane had done. It made sense to me because I am the same way. During some of my most difficult times in life I have had periods of retreat where I wanted no one except David and my parents. I didn’t love my friends and other family members any less. I wasn’t at odds with them. I simply had to retreat in the midst of the difficulty.
I suspect that this is hard for some people to understand and I’m not going to say it is necessarily the best way to handle things. But I do understand it and recognize it when it happens.
To the non-retreater, it might feel like your friend has dropped you. It is true that your friend could have moved on. But if there isn’t any reason to think that there is a problem between the two of you, it could simply be that your friend needs some time to pull away and deal with whatever is going on in her life.
So how can someone be a friend to someone who retreats? A few things come to mind.
First, accept that this is the way your friend copes. You don’t have to agree with it or completely understand it to still love and accept her.
Second, don’t pressure your friend to talk about it or try to shame her into engaging in normal life activities. This only adds to the stress with which she is already dealing. Be patient and give her time and space.
Third, encourage her in a way that lets her know you care about her as a friend but that doesn’t pressure her. Send her a card or a note that says you are thinking of her. Tell her you miss her and value her friendship. When she is feeling ready to reconnect again, she will be very happy to do so with you.
Fourth, and most importantly, pray for her. People who retreat only retreat when they are really hurting or going through substantial emotional and/or spiritual turmoil. Pray that the Lord will speak to her during this time and heal her in the midst of the situation.
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Becky– This may sound horribly insensitive, but the friend sounds simply flaky and self-centered to me.
Being all about *me* seems connected to being all about *now,* so forgetting she asked for space then being mad you weren’t present on her terms fits the profile.
Yes, it feels horrible to be yelled at, and it could play (or provoke) guilt wondering if you could have done more, but “anger is the fluid love bleeds when you cut it,” and I never noticed a seriously-bleeding person caring much who they bled on.
I’d pray special wisdom for whether to continue the relationship at all (depending on what it had been up till then), because there are those who are just takers forever and you have to buget for them. That is, you can only “support” so many.
(My get-it-all-out, record-keeping self would consider sending her copies of the dated communications and ask what her *real* problem was; ask her to define what she expected me to do, rather than what she thought I didn’t do. But I would only do *really* that if I knew the person well enough to guess seeing reality would straighter her out and restore the relationship.
Most self-/now-centered individuals are stuck in their own reality already, so having their reality challenged would be seen as a personal attack. So I don’t see it *really* working. Though it would’ve made me feel better…)
Must agree. That does NOT sound like ‘retreater’ behaviour.
I’ve had several relationships like that in the past. They are now ‘fringe friends’ as I just cannot handle all the drama.
Also, there is a rule I now have for situations with friends who want to yell at me. I will NOT let them call, stop over or send a letter that I plan to open UNLESS I am as emotionally involved in the issue as they seem to want to make me.
Example: A friend called me once and just FLEW into a tirade about how horribly a woman at church had treated her son. I was there. It did NOT happen AT ALL the way she was portraying the situation. But, I resolved NOT to talk to her about it, as it had happened a week early and it was obvious that ALL she had thought about for that entire week was this situation. I most assuredly had not given it a weeks worth of thought, an hour, maybe. So, all I said was that I realized how painful it must have been for her, but that I did not see the situation the way she saw it. I would say NO MORE than that.
She never came back to our church.
All that to say, she was NOT retreating in the sense of pulling back to heal. Those seeking to heal in peace and quiet tend to never blame other people for their retreating. They know it’s a thing THEY do. Looking to blame others isn’t a part of my retreating, anyway.
Even if I’ve been offended, and I have been, retreating is my choice. It doesn’t always feel like a choice, but it is. I’m not handcuffed here or anything.
Thank you all for the advice! It’s very helpful to see several different possible explanations.
I got this friend’s recent address from a mutual friend, and I plan to send her a hand-written letter, briefly explaining how I saw the situation different from her (“we thought we were giving you what you wanted”) and apologizing for the offense I unintentionally caused, and offering to renew the friendship if she is interested. She was one of my husband’s and my closest mutual friends in college, and we were close for several years, so I really do wish we were still friends. I am afraid she won’t be interested in the offer of friendship, as I hear from other mutual friends that she has bad mouthed my husband and me to others. But I will feel better having done what I can to make amends.
Chances are she needed/needs more from me than I can give, and that may have led to the blow up.
Thanks!