#109 - Quiet Quitting a Friendship: Withdrawing From Friends or Ending Friendships with Dr. Miriam Kirmayer

Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship

"Quiet quitting" is the latest term for withdrawing from a friendship, phasing out, or disengaging completely. In this episode with the insightful Dr. Miriam Kirmayer, a clinical psychologist in Montreal who specializes in friendship, we discuss why someone might choose the strategy of "quiet quitting" for fading away from a friend.

Let's say you know that a friendship has run its course, but the friend has done nothing wrong. How do we go about distancing from a friend or ending a friendship? How do we process it when we feel a friend withdrawing? How do we negotiate conflict or transitions that are going to come up in many friendships?

Meet Dr. Miriam Kirmayer:

Dr. Miriam Kirmayer is a clinical psychologist, leading friendship expert, and one of the most influential speakers on human connection and social support. Find free friendship resources on her site and follow her on Instagram and LinkedIn.

We discussed:

• Most people have been on both sides of the "quiet quitting" equation
• How quiet quitting differs from ghosting
• When quiet quitting is a good strategy and when it is not
• Why we are both strongly against using "quiet quitting" to test a friend
• Friends cannot read our minds!
• The struggle many people have to initiate plans, but respecting friends' strengths (and not expecting friends to do things exactly the way we do them)
• Quiet quitting has its place, but it can also be a sign of an inability to have a vulnerable or direct conversation because of a lack of practice or opportunity to do so.
• Downgrades in friendships vs. dissolutions
• How to avoid burning a bridge with friends (or old friends)
• "Quiet quitting works until it doesn't." You might have to be more direct at some point. We discussed some kind ways to do so.

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