What would you do if you lost your love?
A recurring theme presented by many of the post-80s and post-90s who come for counselling is that they have fallen out of love and don't know how they should deal with such an important emotional setback.
There are three pieces of advice for you.
The First Piece of Advice: Watch over rather than Guide
Because falling out of love is a very emotional process, it does not belong to the realm of reason.
After falling out of love, both boys and girls are prone to have this kind of experience: feeling hollowed out, a sense of loss, a very strong sense of being hollowed out and lost. A lot of rational advice or rational guidance at this time, especially in the early stages of the loss of love for the parties concerned, is very difficult to see the effect.
If your friend has fallen out of love, your presence itself, our presence itself, and staying at his or her side will actually be more meaningful than any specific guidance you may give.
The Second Piece of Advice: Allow Yourself to Have All the "Negative" Emotions that Come with a Breakup.
There are two emotions that often arise after a breakup.
One is great sadness.
One is anger.
And a third, possibly helplessness, a mixture of emotions. Why should these emotions be allowed to appear or exist?
A case in point is that some people have fallen out of love, and a month or two has passed, or even three months, and they come to me and say: why am I still staying in this emotion?
Actually, emotions are a very interesting thing:
The sooner you want the emotion to go away, then the more it will act as a booster, the more it will stay with you.
Because emotion is different from will, it is therefore different from reason. It comes with its own laws that are very difficult for you to control with your will. So in a way, the more you allow yourself to fully experience the emotions that surface after a loss, the more likely those emotions will leave you alone. Passive activism is, in Buddhist terms, a form of counter-wisdom.
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The Meaning of Grief after a Breakup
You may be thinking: isn't grief such a saddening emotion that people avoid? That's why when people bless each other, they always say they wish you happy in ... . So why does the emotion of sadness still exist after the evolution of mankind?
When you feel sad, you slow down, you cry, you sigh, you feel weak, it slows down or even fixes the pace of your life for a while, allowing you to regain the momentum of change to the point of reintegrating yourself so that you can move on. So grief is a very integrative emotion, and there is a strong health significance to its presence.
Grief is often associated with loss.If you don't even allow yourself enough time to grieve after you've lost something important, someone important, an important relationship, maybe the relationship wasn't that important in your mind. A true relationship, after it ends, will naturally result in grief. Don't prevent grief from arising naturally.
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The Meaning of Anger after a Breakup
Clinically, I refer to people who, for some reason, are unable to express their anger as "people who live with their hands tied". Imagine a person who lives with his hands tied. If he walks down the street, or in his house, or in his interpersonal relationships, and anyone touches him, molests him, even bullies him, or abuses him, he may not be able to defend himself.
So the emotion of anger is like our hands, when others violate the boundaries of our private lives, when injustice is inflicted upon us, we naturally develop anger so that we can push back the force of that injustice, an anger that is full of justice and maintains the interpersonal boundaries between us and others.
If you were in a relationship with an ex where you experienced unfairness, such as the other person was a bit mean to you, or did something unfair to you, you would be angry, even express anger, and this would in a way also help you to get out of the relationship as quickly, or steadily, as possible.
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Talk about the "Negative" Emotions
Our modern society focuses too much on so-called positive energy and ignores negative energy. This distinction between positive and negative is actually a rather shallow and irresponsible one. In addition to sadness and anger, loneliness and aggression and others that are all so-called "negative" emotions that, to some extent, cause us to integrate or accept all our experiences. Walk through it and you'll find that your emotions won't hurt you in the end, and your emotions won't treat you poorly in the end. A person who has experienced a breakup and is able to embrace the range of emotions that arise in the aftermath of a breakup will gradually accumulate something called experience.
A person who runs away from their emotions and a person who is able to accept their emotions are people who will grow in different directions. The more you are able to compile or integrate the negative energies in your life, the more three-dimensional and complete a personality you will acquire, and the more depth you will have in your whole life.
A psychologist has said that the greatest works of mankind come from the tragic nature of humanity. These works include philosophy, literature, and other kinds of art.
So, I think the meaning of "negative energy" is that it makes our personality whole and deep, and becomes a part of you.
The Third Piece of Advice: Maintain Emotional Boundaries
What does it mean to maintain emotional boundaries?
It means drawing attention away from the other person and back to yourself.
Many visitors who have fallen out of love will often say that their ex treated them badly, even cheated on them, was sarcastic about them, ridiculed them, and did unfair things.
Although love is a matter for two people, what we can do is to be responsible for ourselves after the breakup becomes a fact.
So if your ex wasn't able to grasp this love, or if some objective factors tore you apart, I would also think you've done your best. To some degree, you have sacrificed yourself for this love and gone through the process of expressing, accepting, experiencing, and ending it. You have done it to make yourself worthy of this love of yours.
So one of our guiding principles is to give back to him or her the experience of love, whether the past one or the present one, so that he or she can know: this is a choice I have made. I am not just a victim, I am an important part of this love.
By maintaining the boundaries of the relationship in this way,
By moving the feelings from a position of blame for the other person and identification with one's own victimisation, to
back to taking responsibility for oneself.
So that he or she can know this role and responsibility that he or she has taken on in love.
When you are really out of the loss of love, you will grow, know yourself better. In the next relationship, you will be more responsible, more sincere, and even more responsible.
