Hi I'm Mark Tyrrell of Uncommon Knowledge, and welcome to 3 Soul
Soothing Ways To Help Your Clients Overcome A Broken Heart - How to Help Your
Clients In Pain Beyond Giving Them Sympathy. Now, a recent client, Samantha,
came to see me and she told me that she still loved her boyfriend very much and
missed him all the time and couldn't stop thinking about what had happened
now Samantha actually shook with grief as she tried to tell me about the pain
of her recent breakup with Paul her love of seven years and Paul had ended their
relationship with a gut-wrenching suddenness and she said that it was like
it just ripped off a band-aid off a wound that she hadn't even known she'd
had and she was really so upset during the session and he told her bluntly
apparently that he felt they had grown apart and that he needed yes you've
guessed it space to move on with his life and I sometimes think that you know
from the way so many people talk about space and their need for it that the
relationship world is full of forted astronauts so yes Paul had read the
cliche book of breakup platitudes and hit Samantha with every one of them it
seemed and five weeks later when Samantha came to see me she was she had
dark shadows under her eyes and she just wanted to keep focusing on what had
happened but she didn't know how to feel better
she was also drinking herself to sleep every night because of what had happened
so we talked of the pain of breakup and this word is more accurate than you
might have realized when we feel rejected from a relationship or social
group these same parts of the brain that process physical pain become active in
the brain so see reference one of my written article so love or at least love
gone wrong really does hurt so I sympathized with Samantha of course
but could I really help and I didn't make the pain go away all
at once of course but here's three things I did do that set her on her way
and you can do them to to help those in need of romantic recovery who come along
for help so number one don't pretend they don't hurt if you've just stubbed
your toe forcefully against the corner of a fireplace you won't you won't take
too kindly to being told that the shrill scream of anguish coming from your toe
isn't real because you know that it is more real than anything else so we don't
tell someone their agony isn't real or try to minimize it by the way we talk
about it but nor do we drip-feed them meaningless mumbles like you know I know
just how you feel or even worse keep on asking them how
they feel because well it's pretty obvious how they feel on the other hand
if you actually do know to some extent how they might be feeling from personal
experience you might like to talk a little bit about that as long as your
self disclosure has a happy ending research has found that therapists who
do a little self disclosure actually build more rapport with their clients so
this reminds me of tip number two once you've really heard them tell them a
story when someone is in that kind of emotional pain there's nothing worse
than jumping in too soon trying to make it all right so listen
sympathize be calming by your very presence give them time to really absorb
the fact that you've fully taken in what they've told you then respectfully tell
them an anecdote or story that matches theirs to stomach to some extent that
leads someplace better for example you might say something like you know I can
hardly imagine how you must be feeling right now as if pool was the only
possible right person for you in the world
and years ago a woman came to see me who'd been through something rather
similar to you and all she could do at the time was cry and cry
and cry the man that she thought of as her soulmate and her love of her life
had up and left unexpectedly and she felt she'd never get over it
and that's the thing about pain like the Sun coming out after days of non-stop
rain and she was quite surprised to notice bit by bit
after a while that what felt immediate started to feel past sure that she'd
stop looking back through those rose tinted glasses she started to be able to
see that if he really had felt the relationship wasn't right for him in a
reality it wasn't right for her either and quite slowly but quicker than you
might have expected she began like a seed starting to
germinate and grow and bad and blossom after the seemingly eternal frozen
winter to come back to life again and she started to see her friends again and
to look on her relationship with a man she once loved as only one part of what
her life had been not the whole of her life now I don't want to talk too much
about how she met her new love and how happy they are now because it's way too
soon to even think about that but of course me saying that means that I have
actually mentioned the idea anyway then you can change the subject so after
you've told a little anecdote like that you can change the subject so why do you
change the subject because an abrupt change of subject
that takes her attention to something else altogether can help her conscious
mind leave the pattern of what you've described alone while her subconscious
mind assimilates the pattern as a blueprint for her own future and of
course if you know how to heal with hypnosis in psychotherapy then use
hypnosis to calm her or him right down so that you can help them rehearse
healthy behaviors and new patterns in the future we all talk about the need to
move on but few talk about what that actually means and how to help people do
that when people move on it essentially means that their
brain has been able to process an event and mark it as past and specific rather
than present and global everywhere when you feel that something is a past part
of your life rather than current and all enveloping it's much easier to move on
from allowing you to live your life fully which leads us nicely to tip
number three so tip three is talk about the relationship in terms of what
they've learned from it someone is traumatized when their brain
is processing some past event or series of events as still present and not past
so they know intellectually it was in the past but it feels like it's
happening again all the time and this means they still feel threatened in the
here and now by what is really over and done with and this happens because the
memory of the event or events effectively gets stuck between a part of
the brain called the amygdala the part of the brain that triggers
fight-or-flight and the hippocampus the part of the brain that processes
short-term memories when memories don't fade it can be because of this
traumatizing effect breakups can be very traumatic Samantha had frequent and
intrusive almost flashback memories to the actual time pool had ended their
relationship and was constantly reliving it as though it were happening right now
over and over again so I helped her process this memory through the rewind
technique so that these intrusive thoughts could stop and finally feel
past and no longer current so they began to fade like normal memories not feel
immediate or as though it happened yesterday or something so then we talked
about meaning now it's easy to feel that a painful traumatic event is meaningless
and I'm not suggesting that every trauma anyone ever suffers is always rich with
potential wise learnings but when you help someone focus on what they've
learned from a breakup you can help them move on from it more easily and this is
because your your framing it as something that in itself is passed but
the learning they've gained from that past event is by implication all to do
with helping them heal in a happier future so when Samantha was ready she
told me that what she'd learned was that it was important to respect herself
within a relationship and how in the future her words which all I was very
happy to hear when I met with someone at that point I could even happier I won't
just be thinking about what they need and want it'll be more about what we
need as a couple not just what they need she was calm enough now to talk about
the relationship as something that was truly past she told me how she felt her
anxiety at the way she had treated her so thoughtlessly had made her more
clingy and hence the need for him to sort of blast off into outer space
as it were you know so we drive people away when we've become too clingy in it
in that sense and of course we worked together in other ways too I encouraged
her to continue seeing friends in order to stay engaged with her wider life as
much as possible and to sleep without having recourse to oceans of alcohol Oh
for every night so she started to feel healthier as well and it wasn't as long
as you might have expected before she was really feeling that what had once
seemed like everything had indeed being a very important something but it wasn't
everything there was more to her life in the future
so I hope you found that useful and if you did please hit like and subscribe
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bell below I'm art Earl of uncommon knowledge and
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slash blog that's UNK comm slash blog and thanks for watching
Oh