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By Hannah Van De Peer and Rachel Summer Small for Dailymail.Com
12:04 February 4, 2024, updated 12:31 February 4, 2024
A woman says ‘breaking up’ with her best friend of 11 years was much harder than any romantic breakup – and the process even left her in therapy.
Sabrina Kirberg, 31, had a decade-plus relationship with her now-ex-best friend until the friend ended up cheating on Sabrina after an argument.
The New York-based mental health counselor said she went through the “five stages of grief” and emphasized that it wasn’t as easy as “eating ice cream and spending time with your daughters,” as is the case with romantic breakups.
She eventually sought therapy to help her “grieve” the friendship and still thought about her friend every day.
‘Breaking up with a friend is like pain. You go through denial. “It’s a lot worse than a relationship breaking up,” Sabrina said.
“You think you’ll be fine and you just need to get over the rough patch, but then depression hits and you find yourself crying all the time.”
‘When it comes to a romantic relationship, you will be sad, you will have your ice cream and go out with your girls.
“But losing my best friend was like my support system was ripped away from me, all of a sudden.”
Sabrina met her former best friend at a running club when they were 16, she said.
They shared a number of ‘firsts’ together over the years, from coincidental first boyfriends to passing their driving tests at the same time and being able to hang out without parental supervision.
But as they got older, they started arguing a lot more, Sabrina said, and she felt left out when her friend started spending time with other people.
After Sabrina met her partner, Nathanial Baker, 29, said the two grew even more distant.
The couple had one last argument during which they fought over Nathanial.
Sabrina claimed the friend “decided to cheat on me, rather than talk to me about it,” after the fight.
“I reached out so many times to try to get her to talk to me to explain what was going on between us, and she never made the effort to do so,” he said.
“I think that hurts more than the ghosting or something, it’s just that I wasn’t enough for her to come over and talk to me about it.”
Sabrina reflected on the breakup: “There are a lot of things that triggered the breakup: there was a lot of bad words and anger.”
“I wish I could have read his mind,” he admitted. “She would have helped a lot.”
She is still coming to terms with the breakup of their friendship five years later and has gone through the five stages of grief to come to terms with it.
“She broke my heart, she completely destroyed it,” Sabrina said.
“I never imagined her out of my life. I imagined her being my maid of honor when I got married, I imagined her being the godmother of my children. I imagined growing old with her.
At first, she denied that the breakup was really happening, believing that the couple would reconcile as they had before.
But, as time passed without the friend receiving any words, she became angry and depressed, remembering that she “cried all the time.”
“All you do is reflect,” he admitted.
‘You go over the memories over and over again.
“I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the catalyst for our breakup: everything I could have done better.
‘I just got angry and ashamed of myself for seeing the red flags in the relationship and ignoring them, and why didn’t I end the friendship sooner?’
‘You enter into negotiations a lot when you are reliving memories, which is like the third stage of grief. I kept thinking, ‘If I had done things this way, they would have happened differently,’ and everything spirals out of control.’
Sabrina still thinks about her friend daily, but she has worked through her feelings in therapy.
“Years later, I still think about her every day,” he said.
‘But I think acceptance happens.
‘Therapy was the way I dealt with it: I learned to love myself so much that I don’t feel like I need another person to feel complete.
‘I just allowed myself to feel everything: anger, rage and sadness. I realized that the further you push it away, the longer it will stay.’