Friendships can make or break your college career. The people you build these friendships with can positively or negatively affect your mental health. While a healthy friendship can foster a support system that aids you toward success, an unhealthy friendship can destroy your mental health and result in a bleak college life.
Throughout my college career, I’ve been in friend groups that have uplifted my self-esteem and health while others have brought me down. In this article, I will cover a friend group that led to unhealthy friendships and how I overcame them.
The Freshman Group
Attending a school six hours away from home was both exhilarating and nerve-wracking. Despite my enthusiasm about starting a new life as a college student, I was nervous that I would be unable to make friends. From my perspective, everyone had already established friend groups during move-in day, and I was left with no one to hang out with.
By my third day of living on campus, I had met a group of friends who had adopted me into their friend group. When you gain your first friend group in college, you tend to view their words and actions with rose-colored glasses. I unintentionally ignored all the red flags that some people in the groups displayed. This resulted in us unknowingly fostering an unhealthy friendship.
With the increasing toxicity and uprising in people starting drama between others, I felt myself getting caught up in the drama. It reached a point where, instead of focusing on my studies, I spent countless nights thinking and talking with people about all the drama occurring. After repeating this cycle for weeks, I realized I needed to change my outlook.
Take A Step Back
Taking a step back and dissociating myself from the drama was the first step in recovering my mental health. Doing so allowed me to re-evaluate the situation and consider what was and wasn’t worth worrying about. After re-evaluating the drama and assessing where I stood in the drama, I had an easier time figuring out what steps I needed to take to better my situation.
Setting clear boundaries is vital when you decide to take a step back. Having clear communication with your friends and what you need from them is how I was able to set the necessary boundaries. Being upfront with my feelings is probably the best thing I could have done for myself.
Find New Activities
When you’re caught up in drama, it’s easy to turn it into your life. Having drama be the revolving thing in your life can and did result in me becoming disinterested in everything that made me who I am. I stopped writing, attending events, and striving for academic and personal success; I stopped everything to focus my life on drama.
After realizing this, when I took a step back from everything, I sought out activities to do and events I could attend. I slowly began to enjoy what made me happy and felt more like myself than ever before.
While self-care days are essential to recovering your mental health, social interaction is still crucial to recovering your mental health. Because I spent all my free time with my freshman friend group, I noticed that I unintentionally neglected my friends outside of this friend group. I took it upon myself to build a stronger friendship with them, reconnect with old friends, and create new friendships.
I gradually improved my mental health by regaining my interest and building new bonds.
End Toxic Friendships
Sometimes, stepping back and reconnecting yourself with loved interests and new friends isn’t enough. In my case, I realized that I needed to end my friendship with certain people in the friend group. While this may sound saddening and impossible to do, more often than not, it is necessary for recovering your mental health.
I will admit it was difficult for me to end the toxic friendships I was in. Because I was so afraid of being alone in college, I put myself in an uncomfortable situation of playing neutral and being friends with both sides of the broken friend group. This in itself is a form of unhealthy behavior.
However, after weeks of playing neutral and being a yes-man to all my friends, I realized that I couldn’t continue being friends with everyone. There are many ways to end friendships; for me, the best way to end my friendships was gradually distancing myself to the point where we became nothing more than strangers.
Because I was never inherently mean to anyone and never succumbed to the toxicity my ex-friends stooped to, I was able to end the friendship on neutral terms. I cannot stress enough how important it is to never stoop to anyone’s level. As a result of keeping my morals, stepping back, and assessing the situation, I was able to fully recover my mental health.
Although everyone has a different situation regarding their role in friend drama, I hope reading my experience has given you insight and helped you know what to do when you are caught up in drama.
What are some ways you find helpful in avoiding getting emotionally caught up in drama? Let us know, @HerCampusSJSU.