Has this ever happened to you: let’s say you were friends with a person for many years, then the person behaved ugly towards you, and at one fine moment you... once, as if we saw someone else in the place of a friend we had known for a long time to the last hair. And the meanness is that you can no longer unsee this “other personality” in a person you have known for a long time. And then you grab your head with a quiet cry: “Where were my eyes?! Why didn’t I see this before? “Yes, it’s simple, - once upon a time you decided that this person is similar to you, similar to you in some very important ways, and that he will treat you well, and you gave him a “credit of trust”, as if “invested” in him are your hopes, that you can lean on him, and that he can too; you hoped that you and him would have a fruitful exchange in which he (s) would give something important to you, and you would give to him (her). But for some reason, your hopes at some point turned out to be a “castle in the air”, in which you invested unreasonably long and expensively, but suddenly it became clear to you that no one is going to return your investments to you in any form, that is, all this time you were "paying a mortgage for castles in the air." And you will not see the result of your investments - the realization of your hopes. If you wanted to have a reliable friend, for example, who would support you in difficult times, but the person turned out to be not like that, and you are shocked, well, the credit of trust was given to your illusion. The problem is that this same loan is issued to a person much earlier than you realize anything. You just “liked” the person, for some reason you trust him, for some reason you want to communicate with him, and he, this person, doesn’t mind either - this is how friendship begins. Sometimes, however, after some fairly short time this friendship ends. And you simply don’t have time to “spend” a lot of emotions and hopes on this person, so this is not a heavy loss for you, but if the friendship lasts a long time... and the emotional investment in it is significant, then the full weight of the experience of loss awaits us. What to do, you ask? First, let's decide what kind of “background” feelings this person evokes in you. If, for example, your friend regularly makes passive-aggressive comments about you or you experience discomfort during or after communicating with this person, then you need to remember that true friends support us and help us experience more positive emotions, and not the other way around. Next, you probably need to figure out if this person is toxic to you. There are several options for toxic friends: - those who constantly compete with you; - those who envy you; - those who regularly attack you; - those who “strangle” you and after communicating with whom you feel exhausted. Before you decide that your friendship with a person has come to an end, answer these questions: 1. How much are you ready to trust this person at the moment? 2. Does communicating with such a person help you value yourself? 3. Does such a person respect you and care about you? If you answered “no” to the last 3 questions, then your friendship is in question. And, if its end is inevitable, you will have to somehow go through several stages of loss: “denial”, “grief”, “sadness” and returning to a new life without this person. What should you do to avoid issuing a “credit of trust” to someone who will not appreciate you and who will not return it to you? The problem is that a person “invests” this very credit of trust in another involuntarily, as I said, without thinking or analyzing. Just like in love, you can conduct a small analysis of the existing relationship (friendship is also a relationship between people), and understand whether we are “going there” with this person. I will write about this next time. About how to understand that friendship is built on an equal exchange.