Your enchanting masterpiece gave me full-body chills, dear Whitney! 👏💎👏

I tend to separate between love and a relationship. Love — the genuine form — is a free emotion we can give to a stranger, to animals, to a flower, to a beautiful rainbow — you name it!

"Your center is the foundation of your love manifestation. If your center is your children, the love that manifests from that will primarily benefit your children. If your center is the Principles, the manifestation of your love will benefit the Universe."

A relationship, though, is a wholly different story! It takes two individuals, and what would be defining its nature is how much self-aware and emotionally healthy each involved party is.

More to the point, we can love and care about a person, and still decide to stop the relationship whenever it becomes clear there is a deep phase-shift, which could never be a foundation to build trust and a healthy relationship!

The other party could be an emotionally imbalanced kind soul diving into life with numerous emotional scars, unprocessed feelings and limiting beliefs written by their caregivers during the childhood, or (and this is the tricky part whenever we drastically lack self-awareness, critical thinking and knowledge) a manipulator / a tormented lost soul suffering from one of the Cluster B classification mental disorders for whom life is simply a game to win at all costs!

In your case, I believe your (ex) best friend belongs to the latter group, unfortunately. My heart is bleeding for her kids... And I would argue everybody is doing the best they can! Those character-disturbed individuals are very aware of their manipulation games and abuse... Should you be interested, I wrote this story about those evil people and the kids' sanity:

https://medium.com/illumination/shall-we-take-our-kids-sanity-more-seriously-dba1e26f6c88