On 'pruning' friends

What happens when you realise that you’ve grown and or want to grow in a direction your friends cannot support? Or worse still in a direction that they actively object to, one which threatens their psychological 'safety'? How can you even consider such a thing without seeming impossibly arrogant? I’ve had friends who I’ve enjoyed taking drugs with but when I’ve stopped enjoying it and needed to stop was it possible to maintain a friendship with those people, people with whom I’d lived and enjoyed so many adventures had years of friendship with? The honest answer is no, not really. As any addict will tell you, if you sit in a barbershop long enough you’ll get a haircut -whether that's what you went in there for or not; that's what you’ll come out with. What about more subtle ways of growing- what about becoming more real- being more in tune with your true self, becoming less of a people pleaser, no longer being content to smooth things over and ignore the pain caused by the fault lines? The thing about that stuff is that you either get it or you don't and if one part of a friendship starts to see those fault lines, to spot their own half of a codependent relationship when the other doesn’t or can't the friendship can’t last or at least can't be very deep. In the end you can try to surgically remove it as cleanly as possible or you can have an almighty storm which rips the old branch off but it has to go. I read somewhere recently that obstetricians are realising that if you let a woman tear naturally during childbirth it actually heals faster and better than an episiotomy, and when you think about a tear versus a cut it makes sense. Maybe the same is true of friendships or relationships where one party is growing in a different direction or is growing whilst the other party is stuck, even if the stuckness is temporary (and I've certainly had prolonged periods of stuckness in my life!) Either way whether you need to cut or tear the end of a friendship hurts. Facing the ways in which you’ve compromised yourself in order to maintain an unhealthy relationship is painful though ultimately essential if you’re to keep growing and in the end whats the point of living if not to grow!