Toxic Friendships: A Third Alternative

We talked about two alternatives, dive deeper or walk away. There’s a third. I call this the lesson of the beard.

I grew my first beard during my last high school summer, shaved it off for senior year – I would have been suspended if I hadn’t – and grew it back in college, but I had a hard time settling on a beard style. I’d decide that beard wasn’t for me. I’d look at myself in the mirror in the morning, and the impulse would arise to get rid of the beard. And I’d shave it off.

It was after one of those shaves of the moment, that I realized the lesson of the beard. If I decided tomorrow that I still wanted to lose the beard, I could shave tomorrow. But if I shave today and decide tomorrow that I want that beard back, it’s going to take weeks before the new beard is more than a scraggle.

I sometimes apply the lesson of the beard to toxic friendships. When I put the board down,  I see two choices. I can dive deeper or I can walk away.  The toxic friendship is the beard. Walking away is shaving. I can always walk away tomorrow. I can try one more lunch and use the opportunity to understand what is triggering my pain. Will I break through to some new important awareness? Or is it just more pain? I can always walk away tomorrow?

I’ve put one board down, but have I now picked up another board. Am I finding another excuse for staying in a toxic relationship? How can I tell?

We want answers. We want to know. We want to be sure that we are doing the right thing. “Should I stay or should I go?” I’m channeling my inner Clash.

What if there are no right answers, only choices and consequences. I walked away from that lunch group, and a couple of years later, I let my private psychotherapy practice go. For a number of good reasons. Morri was born, my first child, and I was 55. My psychotherapy practice, small as it was, was a Saturday morning and evening thing. I gave it up to be a dad. And I gave it up also because my beginning work with people in the briefer, less expensive Zen interviews was challenging the “psychotherapeutic hour.”

I took another path, and I have no regrets about where that path took me, to a different kind of work with people living with mental illnesses and eventually to building our network of charter schools. But still I am curious. Had I stuck with that lunch group, where would that path have taken me? If I’d managed to befriend that demon, where would that have led?

Look to the left. Look to the right. Dive deeper? Walk away? Or hold off on walking away? One way or another, we take a step, we cross the street, and we find out where we are. And always, there’s another street to cross. Put the board down. Look both ways. We make choices. We bypass some demons in order to get to others. We do the work we do and leave some of our karma unsettled.