Have you ever spent time with someone and walked away feeling completely exhausted?
Maybe it’s a parent who criticizes everything you do. A sibling who makes every conversation about themselves. A friend who leaves you feeling misunderstood. Or a coworker who somehow manages to make you question your own competence.
You leave the interaction frustrated, anxious or emotionally drained. And sometimes, those feelings follow you for hours, even days.
At some point, you might wonder: Wouldn’t my life be easier if I just didn’t have to deal with this person anymore?
I recently watched a seminar featuring therapist Matthias Barker, and he offered a perspective on difficult relationships that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
Barker was discussing parental estrangement, particularly the growing conversation around adult children choosing to distance themselves from their parents.
He described a mother who might be overly critical, emotionally dismissive or simply difficult to be around. Her adult child feels tense during every interaction, constantly anticipating the next criticism or disappointment.
Eventually, the child decides the relationship is too stressful and considers cutting contact altogether.
But Barker posed an interesting question.
What if the problem isn’t simply that someone makes you feel stressed, but that you haven’t learned how to recover from the stress of being around them?
Now, I want to be careful here. There are absolutely relationships involving abuse, manipulation or repeated violations of boundaries where distancing yourself is necessary for your safety and well-being. Nobody should feel obligated to maintain a harmful relationship simply because they’re related to someone.
But not every uncomfortable relationship is an unsafe relationship. And not every difficult person needs to be removed from our lives.
Sometimes, the work isn’t about changing the other person. It’s about learning what to do with the emotions they bring out in us.
Psychologist James Gross, a leading researcher on emotional regulation, has spent decades studying how people manage emotional experiences. His research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that how we regulate emotions matters. Reframing how we interpret an experience can be more helpful than simply suppressing our emotional reactions.
In other words, feeling frustrated isn’t necessarily the problem. It’s what happens next that matters.
Think about the last time someone made you feel criticized or dismissed.
Did you spend the next three hours replaying the conversation? Did you mentally rehearse everything you wish you’d said? Did you carry that frustration home and unintentionally take it out on someone else?
I’ve certainly done all three.
And here’s where Barker’s perspective became particularly interesting to me.
He suggested that part of learning to recover from difficult relationships involves grieving the relationship you wish you had.
That’s a powerful concept.
Maybe you’ve spent years wishing your mother would be more encouraging. Maybe you desperately want your father to express affection. Maybe you wish your sibling would take an interest in your life or your friend would occasionally show up for you the way you show up for them.
And every time they don’t, you experience that disappointment all over again.
Family therapist and researcher Pauline Boss developed a concept called “ambiguous loss,” which describes grief that doesn’t have a clear ending. In her research, published in Family Relations and other peer-reviewed journals, Boss explains that we can experience profound loss even when someone is physically present in our lives.
Sometimes, we’re grieving someone who is sitting right across the dinner table.
We’re grieving the parent we needed. The friendship we imagined. The relationship we hoped would eventually become something different.
And because that person is still there, we don’t always recognize what we’re experiencing as grief.
Instead, it comes out as resentment, anxiety, frustration or an overwhelming desire to escape.
But what happens when we finally acknowledge that grief?
We can begin accepting people for who they actually are, rather than continually measuring them against who we wish they would become.
That doesn’t mean excusing poor behavior. It doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries or pretending hurtful words don’t matter.
It means recognizing that we may never receive the apology, affirmation, understanding or emotional connection we’ve been waiting for.
And we can grieve that reality without allowing it to consume us.
Practically, that might mean taking a walk after a difficult phone call instead of replaying every word. It might mean talking with a trusted friend or therapist, identifying what specifically triggered your reaction or setting limits on how much time you spend with someone.
It might also mean adjusting your expectations. Perhaps your parent isn’t the person you call for emotional encouragement, but they’re someone you can enjoy sharing a meal with. Perhaps a friendship looks different than you once imagined but still holds value.
And sometimes, after honest reflection, it may mean deciding that greater distance really is necessary. The goal isn’t to become so emotionally resilient that nothing bothers us. Nor is it to preserve every relationship at any cost.
It’s to develop enough emotional awareness and stability that our decisions about relationships come from clarity rather than simply a desire to escape discomfort.
Because we can’t control whether everyone in our lives makes us feel understood, appreciated or loved exactly the way we’d like.
But we can learn to understand our own reactions, acknowledge our disappointments and decide what kind of relationship is realistically possible.
And perhaps one of the most freeing parts of growing emotionally is realizing that we can grieve what a relationship isn’t while still appreciating whatever good remains in what it is.
Lauren Hall is president and CEO of family advocacy nonprofit First Things First. Email her at lauren@firstthings.org.