31. Outgrowing Friendships: Why Your Personal Growth Makes Things Feel Different

Lately, have your friendships felt… different? Maybe you’re wondering why you’re growing apart from people you used to feel so close to, or why certain friendships suddenly feel heavy, distant, or misaligned.

In this episode, we explore what’s really happening when your personal growth makes your friendships feel different, including:

• Why you may feel disconnected from certain friends
• How to know if you’re outgrowing old friendship dynamics
• Why healing can make friendships shift or fade
• What to do when you feel guilty for changing
• How to navigate friendship drift without self‑abandoning
• How to honor your growth without assuming you’re the problem
• Why adult friendships naturally evolve as your values evolve

If you’ve been searching things like:
“Why do friendships fade?”  
“How do I deal with outgrowing friends?”  
“Why does personal growth feel lonely?”  
... this episode will give you grounded, shame‑free clarity.

Your growth isn’t a failure, it's alignment.

The friendships that can hold the new you will keep unfolding alongside your growth. 

If you’re in a season where your growth is reshaping your friendships and you’re not sure what’s normal, what’s a red flag, or how to navigate the emotional fallout, I’d love to support you.

You can book a free 25‑minute Discovery Call here - we’ll map out what your growth is asking of you and the next step that will help you move forward with clarity and self‑trust.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Heal Thrive Prosper. I'm Andrea Tanase. And if survival mode made you forget who you are, I'm here to help you remember. After hitting rock bottom and rebuilding my life from the inside out, I now guide people like you, the cycle breakers, the strong ones, the overachievers, to unlearn harmful patterns, reclaim your worth, and build a love and life that feel like freedom, not survival. So grab your favorite snack and let's heal, thrive, and prosper together. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are going to be talking about friendships and specifically growing as a person as you navigate your friendships in adulthood. As time goes on, and if you are a person that is committed to growing consistently and always looking for ways to improve themselves, your relationships and specifically your friendships, they will shift. It is a guarantee. And it's not because you're doing something wrong, but you're no longer the same person who built that old dynamic. So this episode is going to explore how you honor your own evolution without guilt, without panic, and without self-blame. And shout out to my friend Sabrina. She had this idea. I've always wanted to talk about friendships in some type of way since I started this podcast. We are now 30 episodes in, which is actually a little crazy. This is episode 31. But all that to say, relationships are what I love to talk about, what I love to build, what I love to foster, and what I love to help other people navigate successfully. So let's get into it. Is that if you grow as a person, you will automatically lose all of the people in your life. There is that fear. And that fear keeps people attached to certain places, situations, and inevitably people that are actually holding them back and they're holding themselves back because they know deep down and even subconsciously, you can feel that if you grow, if you start doing different things, if you start adopting different mindsets, adopting different habits, you will no longer fit in with those people. Yes, you can lose people along the way. And if you're talking about friendships that you gained by convenience, by people you met because you worked in the same place, you went to the same school, maybe you grew up together, you were neighbors, or you were friends when you were in young adulthood, and now you're maybe in your late 20s or 30s or even 40s. You are going to lose a lot of those people. But I don't like to frame it that way. You're not losing them. It's a shift in the friendship. So when you start healing, setting boundaries or choosing yourself, or even just committing to being the best version of yourself, it can really feel like your friendships get a little shaky. And you'll find that this happens a lot when the friendships were based on your old identity and your old patterns. And a lot of times people will benefit from your patterns, your unhealthy patterns specifically, and they will stick around you because it serves them in that season of your life, of their life. But that shakeup is realignment. And so growth doesn't destroy friendships, it really just reveals which ones can meet the new version of you that's emerging. And I just want to put a disclaimer on this. If there is an unhealthy dynamic that is at the core of your friendship, it should be a loss. And it's okay to look at it as a loss. There are friendships that are not healthy, just like there are romantic relationships that are not healthy. It is okay to look at that as like, I lost that friend, I lost that connection, and it's actually a good thing. Even though there's grief attached to it, even though you can mourn it, you can have feelings of grief around it, you will be able to look back and see how beneficial it was that you disconnected from that dynamic. Busting that myth of just automatically losing everyone, if you're committed to growing, now we can go into the second part, which is why growth actually disrupts your old dynamics. So if you're committed to certain roles, like I said, if you're the fixer, if you're always available, if you're always putting people first, if you're the emotional sponge, if you're the unofficial therapist where people just dump their stuff on you and you realize that these patterns are not serving you, and you start shifting them, maybe start naming the needs that you used to silence, you maybe start needing things from a dynamic from a friendship, and you stop tolerating the old dynamics, things that used to be normal. Maybe your priorities shift, your emotional bandwidth is shifting. This will create friction. And it's not because you're too much or you're whatever people would want to label you as. But if the relationship was built on an older version of you, like I said, that dynamic is going to get disrupted. Now, two things can happen. You can naturally just drift away from a person and you know start spending less time around them and they're kind of okay with it, you're okay with it. Or you can consciously make the decision, okay, the trajectory that I'm going, I don't think this person is going to fit in this new chapter. I just don't see how their habits and their values and their priorities and our dynamic. I just don't think that's going to work out. And you can choose to end that connection consciously, or you can choose to place that friendship in a certain category. And this would be a whole nother episode, but I've done this as I've gotten older and now into my 30s. Is there are friends that are great in certain environments for you that are great at, you know, just catching up over a coffee or, you know, bouncing ideas off of them, or, you know, maybe sending each other reels or memes or YouTube videos and, you know, talking about things. But they might not be the friend that you want to travel with, or the friend that you invite to your bachelorette party, or the friend that, you know, you invite to your house, you know, spending like more than a few hours with them. And that is totally okay. And I am a big advocate of knowing the type of friendship it is and where its place is in your life, making this decision to consciously audit where your friendships are. And if you're maybe asking too much out of a certain dynamic or relying on one dynamic too much, people will fall into the narrative of like, oh my goodness, if this person, if I start spending less time with them, I'm abandoning them, I'm gonna come off as selfish, I'm I'm the problem, maybe I'm changing, and they're gonna think that I, you know, whatever, switched up on them or I'm I'm not a good friend anymore. Maybe I'm gonna be lonely. Some of these things might be true. And I'm going to be honest with you and tell you that some people will tell you that you're selfish, some people will feel abandoned, some people will look at you as the problem, and some people will see your change as a threat to them, and you might feel lonely. All of these things could happen. But if you don't address your friendships and the dynamics and you let things keep going and you keep letting misaligned friendships keep going, then it is going to cause you to be in a state of discomfort, in a state of misalignment, and you're going to always feel like there's something wrong. Because if your compatibility changed with that person, and maybe they're fine in one environment, but not in the environment that you had them in before, not in the dynamic that you had them in before, you are going to suffer. And sometimes it will come at the cost of your growth. It will come at the cost of the things that you actually want out of life, the things that you're working on. You holding on to that dynamic in a specific way can hold you back. And that is also uncomfortable. Yes, it's uncomfortable for people to think that, to feel like they're being abandoned, to call you selfish, to look at you as a problem, but it will also be a problem if you're not honoring yourself, your needs, what you want, and how you feel. And so here is the next part is how do you honor your growth without apologizing for it, without feeling like you're doing something wrong? So there's gonna be a point where you feel that shift. And you might think, I'm trying to show up more honestly, and just something here feels misaligned. I am trying to stop drinking, and I just realized that this friend, our friendship is really based on environments where we drink, and that's what we do together. We go out, we take shots, and we stay in and we get wine drunk or whatever. And that you no longer want to do that. You need to pinpoint what that shift is, what you're trying to do, and what is not aligned anymore in that friendship. And at this point, it doesn't mean that that person cannot be in your life anymore, and you just need to automatically just cut them off. No, you just need to know what it is that you're feeling, what isn't adding up, and what do you need? How do you need to move forward? And what do you need from that dynamic? In that example where I said that you have a friend that all you do when you get together is drink, you can simply sit down with the friend and tell them, hey, I no longer want to drink anymore in the capacity that I'm doing it in, whatever the case may be. And you see how that's received. The person might be like, that's totally fine. Let's go to the drive-in movie theater, let's go to get coffee Saturday morning, let's go to the farmer's market and meet up there. Or they really want to just keep drinking and keep going out. And that's what they want to do. And they can keep doing that with somebody else, and that's completely fine. And that's where you get to decide, and that's where they get to decide because you've been honest about what you need, what you want moving forward. You don't need to overexplain it. Your growth doesn't require a dissertation. I had to tell myself this one because I feel like I've always had to overexplain when I'm shifting into a new chapter of my life. And as I get older, the new chapters come quicker and quicker. Like things are happening really fast. And it's all good things, but it's all things that do have an effect on my personal relationships. I keep an open line of communication and you need to let people decide for themselves and you need to let people react how they're going to react and see is it going to work? Can the friendship survive or not? And uh listen closely because this is very important. If you have to keep shrinking yourself to keep a friendship, it's not a friendship, it is not a true friendship. If you have to minimize your needs, your opinions, how you feel, if you're always bending over backwards, constantly going out of your way, and it's not reciprocated. Like I said, that is not a healthy relationship, that is not a healthy friendship, and you don't need to be in that dynamic. And so here's the reframe friendship is not static. A lot of times it's seasonal. So friendships have growth seasons, maintenance seasons, distance seasons, and completion seasons, the season where you decide or it naturally happens that you drift apart and the dynamic is no longer going to continue. And I'm mostly talking to myself because I want you to know that this is not a moral failure. Things ending is not necessarily the worst thing in the world and a terrible thing, although how you feel about it is valid in that moment. But your growth moves you into a new season and your friendships can and should reorganize around that if they are healthy friendships. So here is a personal reflection for you if you're listening and wondering, okay, how does this apply to me? How can I take a look at my friendships and see where everybody fits, if they even fit at all? So ask yourself, who am I becoming and which friendships support that version of me that I'm actually trying to become? Where am I still performing roles and an old identity that no longer fits me? Which friendships feel lighter when I'm actually honest? Think about who's giving you those positive responses, who is understanding, who is compassionate, and which friendships only work when I'm abandoning myself and my needs and what I want and how I feel. I also have an experiment for you. If you want to try this, I call it the one honest sentence experiment. Choose one friend in your life and tell them one sentence that reflects your growth somewhere that you're making a change. An example is I'm trying to be more honest about my capacity. This is a huge one for me because I'm always overcommitting. Another example of this is I'm practicing to speak up sooner and make my opinion known, right? I'm learning to put my opinion out there. I'm learning that it's okay to tell people what I what I want. This is you, tell that to a friend this week. I'm learning to open up and be okay with people knowing how I feel about something. And then observe and don't judge how a friend responds, but just observe. Observe. Don't jump to an immediate conclusion because one answer to a question does not constitute a pattern or making a rash decision on their role in your life. Please do not do that. But the response can tell you whether the friendship can grow with you. And that is a big indicator of how you can move forward. As we close, if you're in a season where your growth is reshaping your friendships and you're not sure what's normal or what's a red flag, I help people navigate exactly that. You can book a discovery call with me and we'll map out what your growth is asking of you and how to move forward through this season without guilt. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you hit follow on whatever platform you're listening on so that you can get notified when the next episode comes out. Thank you, and I'll see you next time.