What if the friendships you were working so hard to protect were already costing you everything?
Not in a dramatic way. Not a blowup, not a betrayal you could name and point to. Just a slow, steady erosion of yourself. You stopped sharing the things that didn’t fit. You stopped talking about your job because they didn’t get it. You stopped bringing up the hard stuff because you didn’t want to rock the boat. You became the listener, the one who showed up for everyone else, and somewhere in all of that, you made yourself disappear.
That’s what today’s guest, Erin Snow, did for years. And then she went through a divorce, told her friend group, and watched the people she’d been protecting for years either shut her out or treat her like a disease they didn’t want to catch. She lost the friends she’d been shrinking herself to keep.
So she walked away from all of it. And then she built something entirely new, both in her friendships and in her work.
Erin is a Professional Listener and the founder of The Unmuted Room, a first-of-its-kind confidential listening space in Newington, New Hampshire. After 17 years as a trauma-informed legal advocate for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking, she knew better than most what it costs when people have nowhere safe to say what is true. When she went looking for that space for herself during her divorce and couldn’t find it, she built it. (Classic move. Can’t find it, build it.)
This episode is a lot of things. It’s about:
- ▪️ Rebuilding friendships after divorce
- ▪️ Leaving a friend group that never really knew you
- ▪️ What happens when you finally find people who actually show up
- ▪️ Why being heard is not a luxury
But underneath all of it, there’s one thread that runs through Erin’s entire story, and I think it’s going to hit close to home for a lot of you.
When You’re the Listener, You’re Also the One Who Disappears
Erin’s friend group came together when she moved to a new neighborhood after buying a house with her then-husband. She’d been in a season with no real outlet… just work and kids on repeat. So when she suddenly had this group of neighbors, parents at the same school, people who wanted to get together and actually hang out, it felt like a lifeline.
She became the listener. The one who was curious, who cared, who held space. And she was good at it. It was also how she’d spent her entire professional life.
But here’s what she said that stopped me:
“I was already kind of on the outside. I would talk about my work doing domestic violence work, they didn’t understand that. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity to be anything other than like the fun girl who showed up at parties and listened when you needed somebody to listen to you. But sharing a whole lot about myself was kind of like… you’re a lot.”
She edited herself to fit. Not all at once, not with any single decision. Just slowly, consistently, over time, she rounded off the edges that didn’t fit the group. And the listening? That became her contribution. The thing she could offer that nobody could argue with.
“I felt like that’s where I added value. I didn’t share a whole lot about me. I shut off a lot of myself to protect my ex-husband and really to make myself fit in with that group.”
I want to pause here because I think a lot of you just heard yourselves in that.
Maybe you’ve done this in one friendship. Maybe you’ve done it in every friend group you’ve ever been in. Maybe you’re doing it right now and you’ve never had the words for it until just now.
Being the listener isn’t just a personality type. For a lot of people, it’s a strategy. A way of contributing something valuable enough that nobody notices you’re not really showing up as yourself.
And the painful part? It doesn’t even work. Erin lost those friends anyway.
The Divorce Nobody Saw Coming (Because She Never Let Anyone In)
When Erin decided to make her divorce public, she was more nervous to tell her friends than she was to tell her kids.
Think about that for a second.
She already knew how this was going to go. And she was right.
“I got completely shut out. I was the odd number now, so I didn’t get invited to the things. I was the bad guy. I was the whore, like all of the things. And so the thing that I tried to protect, which was an image, got distorted anyway.”
She’d spent years protecting her ex-husband, protecting the group’s image of their relationship, protecting her own spot in the circle. She’d given up:
- ▪️ Years of being known
- ▪️ Years of real reciprocity
- ▪️ Years of actually being seen
And in the end, she lost them anyway. The friendships she’d been quietly sacrificing herself to keep.
That’s the part that gets me every time. She paid the full price and still didn’t get to keep what she’d paid for.
And when she finally needed someone to show up for her, when she was going through one of the hardest things a person goes through, there was no one. She said she was furious watching TV shows where the girlfriends show up with wine, blankets, and movies. Because that’s not what happened to her.
“I looked for something where I could find that support I was looking for. I really just want a space where I can be raw and say all the things and it’d be okay. And I couldn’t find it.”
So she built it. But we’ll get there.
🎧 The full episode goes deep into what those months actually felt like: including the COVID overlap, the social media moments of seeing someone else standing in her spot in photos, and the specific conversation that finally pushed her to let go. It’s worth hearing in Erin’s own words.
What Reciprocal Friendship Actually Feels Like (When You’ve Never Had It)
Here’s the thing about rebuilding friendships after divorce, or after leaving a friend group, or after any major rupture in your social circle: you don’t always know what you’re building toward. You just know you need something different.
For Erin, the shift came when she started joining women’s networking groups after launching her business. These were women who had known her for a month, maybe less. And they showed up in ways her decade-long friend group never had.
“Whether it was business or something personal, they rallied around me at various times. It started to be that reciprocal relationship where I’m telling you, you’re telling me, and we’re having equal footing conversations. And I was like, what IS this?”
She didn’t know what to do with it at first. Because when you’ve spent years being the person who holds everyone else’s stuff and never puts yours down, reciprocity feels almost disorienting. Like, wait, you actually want to hear about me?
And then she did something I love so much. She stood up at the end of one of those networking meetings, in a room full of women, and said out loud:
I want to thank every woman in this room who has shown me what support looks like, what friendship looks like. I broke up with all my friends. And you gave me the courage to do that.
“I was prepared to do this on my own. I had accepted that. And they showed up and showed me something entirely different. It is definitely quality over quantity. You can have one really good person in your life. Have one really good person. You don’t need 100.”
That moment matters because of what it represents.
She didn’t leave her old friend group because she’d already found something better. She found something better BECAUSE she’d been brave enough, and desperate enough, to let herself be seen in a new room.
The new friendships didn’t replace the old ones. They showed her what had been missing all along.
The Pattern Most of Us Don’t Notice Until It’s Too Late
I want to be direct about something here, because I think this episode is a wake-up call for a specific type of person.
If you are:
- ▪️ The listener in your friend group
- ▪️ The one who always shows up, who always asks, who always holds space
- ▪️ Also the one who never really shares
- ▪️ The one who deflects when someone asks how you’re doing
- ▪️ The one who has become so good at being there for everyone else that you’ve lost track of what it would even feel like to let someone be there for you…
…this episode is about you.
Not in a critical way. In a this is SO common and nobody talks about it enough way.
Being the friend who always listens but never shares isn’t generosity. It’s a quiet form of disappearing.
And the scary part is that it usually doesn’t feel like disappearing. It feels like contributing. It feels like being needed. It feels like having a role.
Until the day you actually need something. And you look around and realize nobody knows enough about you to even know what to offer.
We talked about this same pattern back in Episode 85 with Deb Blum, all about shifting people-pleasing friendship patterns. Deb was doing the same thing. Morphing herself into whatever felt most acceptable, leading with listening, making herself smaller. It’s not a coincidence I’ve had two people with this exact tendency on the podcast. I think it’s one of the most common and least-named dynamics in adult friendship.
You can change this pattern. It is just a pattern. It is not who you are.
A Small Shift That Changes Everything in a Conversation
One of the most practical things Erin said in this episode came from her background as a trauma-informed advocate. She talked about how people who have been through hard things often test the waters before they open up. They drop a small comment and see how you respond.
“I’m going to say, hey, how was your weekend? And you’re like, how was yours? And I’m like, good, it was kind of rough. And if you just gloss over that and just keep going instead of saying, hmm, I just heard Erin say this weekend was rough, I’m going to ask her… that can really drive whether or not somebody ultimately starts talking to you about what’s really going on.”
This is story roots in action. (If you’re not familiar with that framework, go back to Episode 12.) Story roots are the beliefs we hold about our friendships, things like “my friend cares about me,” and those beliefs get built or eroded through small, repeated moments.
What Erin is describing is one of those moments. Someone says “my weekend was rough” and you either pick it up or you don’t. And that response, or non-response, tells them everything about whether you’re safe.
Now, I know some of you are going to hear that and think: okay, but what do I actually SAY? Because in the moment, your brain short-circuits a little. You don’t want to make it weird. You’re not sure how to respond without it feeling forced.
Go listen to Episode 90 with Antonio Nieves. His go-to phrase for exactly this moment:
“Tell me more about that.”
And then silence. That’s it. You don’t need the perfect words. You just open the door and let them decide whether to walk through.
🎧 There’s a lot more in the full episode about how Erin uses this in her listening sessions, and how she approaches the question “how do you want me to listen to you today?” It’s a genuinely useful reframe for any friendship.
The Unmuted Room: What It Is and Why It Exists
After everything Erin went through, she built something she couldn’t find when she needed it most.
The Unmuted Room is a confidential listening space.
- ▪️ Not therapy.
- ▪️ Not coaching.
- ▪️ Not a friend who has opinions, or family who is too close to it, or a colleague who might judge you.
Just skilled, steady listening from someone with nowhere to be except present.
“I want a space where if you’re jagged and pointy and raw and messy, all those things, great. I would love to create that safe space where you get to be that.”
She sees people going through:
- ▪️ Divorce
- ▪️ Empty nesting
- ▪️ Fertility struggles
- ▪️ Aging parents
- ▪️ Burnout
- ▪️ Rough jobs
- ▪️ Friend group fallouts
But she also sees people who have GOOD news and no one to tell it to. Either because they don’t have a support system, or because they do, but their people are going through something hard and it doesn’t feel right to share.
That second one hit me.
Two emotions can exist at the same time. Your friend can be genuinely happy for you AND not able to hold that conversation right now because of their own pain. And so you swallow the good news. You shrink the joy. You find yourself with nowhere to put it.
The Unmuted Room exists for both. The hard stuff AND the good stuff.
And here’s what Erin said that I think is genuinely useful for anyone who has a friend going through something long and heavy:
“Just because they’re done hearing it doesn’t mean you’re done talking about it. So come here, talk to me about it, so that you can have some space. Your friend can have some space and a little bit of a break, but you’re also still able to process and talk about it. So that when you do go out with your friend, you have other things that you can discuss. And then when something comes up, they have more capacity. I’m re-energized. I’m ready for it.”
She called it a friendship saver. And honestly? She’s right.
Not every hard season can be carried entirely by one person. Not every friendship is built to hold unlimited emotional weight.
Having a place to put some of it down doesn’t mean your friendships failed. It means you’re being smart about what you’re asking of them.
If Any of This Sounds Familiar
So many people are going to finish this episode feeling seen. Maybe for the first time in a while.
Because what Erin described, that slow, quiet realization that the friendships you’ve been showing up to don’t actually KNOW you, is so much more common than anyone talks about.
- ▪️ You made yourself smaller.
- ▪️ You edited yourself down.
- ▪️ You were so busy being everyone else’s person that you stopped letting anyone be yours.
And now you’re wondering: can I actually walk away and start over? Will anyone really like the real version of me?
Erin’s answer is yes. My answer is yes.
If this episode cracked something open for you, go listen to Episode 86. It’s a solo episode I recorded called How to Embody Main Character Energy in Your Friendships. It’s about peeling back the layers on your authentic self and letting yourself actually be seen, instead of riding everybody else’s waves and losing sight of your own needs. Which, after today’s episode, probably sounds very familiar.
And if you heard Erin’s story and thought, I need THAT. I need somewhere to just say the thing (all of it) without someone jumping in to fix it or judge it or make it about them… go find Erin. The Unmuted Room is linked in the show notes. She offers a free 10-minute consultation so you can learn more about what this looks like and whether it’s the right fit for you.
Being heard is not a luxury.
Erin built a whole business on that premise. And she’s right
