It is natural to take it personally when someone disconnects from you, especially if they don’t tell you why. At the same time, it is also important to realize that people’s decision to disconnect often has nothing to do with you. It is often entirely about them. One of the most common things I have witnessed, is a need to sever connection that is rooted in the personal individuation process. That is, someone has gone through their life as a people pleaser, as a co-dependent, as someone whose experience of the self is confusingly intertwined with others, and they need to push someone away in order to finally feel separate. They need to claim their stake as an individuated entity, but they don’t know how to do it non-reactively. So they abruptly terminate a personal connection, in order to establish a new way of being. Quite often, they do this with someone who is peripheral to their primary co-dependencies, because they are not ready to live without those. They pick a friend or a secondary figure, as their first stepping out. In these situations, you are merely a relational symbology, a figure that had to go in order for them to finally feel like a boundaried, empowered person. This is not to say that it won’t hurt, but it is to say that it was never about you. - Jeff Brown