Friendships change over time because we humans are always changing. We both are and are not the same people we were one year ago, 10 years ago, or 50 years ago. Our friendships remind us of who we are and who we used to be. They also let us imagine who we could be.

When people change important parts of themselves, such as their moral commitments, political beliefs, religious convictions, or life-orienting activities, their friendships may change as well. They may need to recalibrate friendships and determine if, where, and how they fit into a person’s life. This can be very disorienting.

The “friends” who undermine and sabotage

Early in recovery from addiction, our friendship circles may undergo a seismic shift. If most of our friends had been our drinking or using buddies, being around them may elicit an avalanche of powerful and conflicting emotions on our part. The setup can also release some bad behavior by our friends, unfortunately.

Some of these friends may be unsupportive, while others actively sabotage efforts to be sober. Some will take your decision to reduce or stop as a judgment about them. They may even accuse you of making judgments about their use. Others will perceive your efforts at sobriety as a threat to them, especially if you have been using in the same way. You potentially disrupt their self-perception that they don’t have a problem.

Nothing will be able to convince these people that you are doing something for your own sake with no negative judgment about them. Some will actively make it harder for you not to use, or they will encourage you to use with them. As Epictetus (50-138 CE) counsels

Above all, keep a close watch on this—that you are never so tied to your former acquaintances and friends that you are pulled down to their level. If you don’t, you’ll be ruined… You must choose whether to be loved by these friends and remain the same person, or to become a better person at the cost of those friends…if you try to have it both ways you will neither make progress nor keep what you once had.

Manipulation and sabotage are quick routes to ruin. Anyone who uses those tools is not a friend.

Other friends may just toss you in the recycling bin and let you rattle around with all the empties. Your decision not to use makes you less fun or useful to them.

There is a pattern undergirding all these responses. Friends who care more about what they get out of a relationship rather than the other person are not good friends. They may not be friends at all because they make everything about them. There is no reciprocal goodwill, which is a minimal requirement for friendship.

We are not always prepared to grieve friendships and face the disorientation that follows from losing them. This is especially true with long-term friends; so much of our histories are woven together. We may not even know who we are without them.

People who have fewer friendships in their lives may also find these losses disorienting or even intolerable. We may tell ourselves, If I leave this friendship, I will be totally alone. I don’t know how to make friends. The fear of loneliness may be the reason people stay in friendships that are so asymmetrical, unsatisfying, and risky.

Cultivating friends who help us become better people

There are positive shifts in our friendships early in recovery as well. We may discover that some of the people who had put some distance between us never fully went away. We may realize that some of the friends we had pruned from our lives are open to reconnecting when they see that we are trying to live very differently. In both cases, we need to practice patience.

People can have goodwill towards you but not throw their arms wide open. Friendships are based on trust, and our addictions may have corroded a lot of it. Friendships require work and maintenance.

Friendships, according to Aristotle (384-322 BCE), are activities that take time and effort to cultivate and then tend. The best kind of friendship is when the two people have the same sort of moral character and commitment to becoming better people. We become better people, according to Aristotle, in the presence of our friends. They provide us with opportunities to develop our moral character by cultivating moral virtues such as trust, generosity, courage, humility, honesty, and self-respect.

The right sort of friend always has our best interests front and center; there are no hidden agendas. They want what is best for us for our own sake and not for any benefit they may derive. They have a commitment to our moral growth, which manifests itself in several ways. Good friends:

• Act as moral mirrors to us. They reflect our actions and our character back to us. We may see ourselves most clearly in how our friends see us.
• Encourage us to pursue what makes us better people and avoid what would harm our character.
• Offer us assistance when we stumble and help us figure out why that happened.
• Teach us how to love ourselves. For Aristotle, self-love and the love for a friend are deeply and fundamentally connected. They are models for each other. What we should love in our friend is their moral character, which is what we should love about ourselves.
• Are our second selves. When we hurt a friend, we hurt ourselves. And when we hurt ourselves, we hurt our friends.

Friendships, for Aristotle, are necessary for the best possible life. In recovery, we can forge new friendships and revisit older ones. One of the greatest gifts in recovery is friendship. As Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) wisely notes, “No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it.”