Return your love

Often, people who do not hope to return their love seek help in a consultation, they are worried about another problem - how to live on, how to “stop loving him / her”, how to adapt without any hope of reciprocity. Often the request of these people is so stated: “How can I live without him / her, it seems to me that my life is over”. The consequences of losing a partner are very serious - customers complain about the lack of sleep, constant bad mood, exacerbation of various chronic ailments, etc.
Often they are pursued by thoughts of suicide. If there is such a bunch of symptoms, it is advisable to include a psychiatrist or neuropathologist who can somewhat improve the general background of the client’s condition by prescribing appropriate medications in small doses. But the main thing that people with similar problems need is the rational support and participation that a psychologist can best provide. How can this psychological medicine for unhappy love look like?
Each person, suffering, feels destitute and abandoned. It is important for the client to feel that his experiences in this situation are not meaningless, there is nothing humiliating and unjustified in them, and it is worthwhile to specifically talk about it.
There are at least two considerations that can increase the value of one’s own suffering for the client. It is primarily the idea that any suffering refines, purifies the human soul; to the one who suffers, new aspects of relationships are revealed, his own life and the life of others are interpreted differently. Evidence of this can be easily found in the experience of the sufferer.
Another aspect that may also be important here is the understanding of the value of human relationships as such, which comes to a person through the experience of loss. “If, having lost him / her, you didn’t worry about it, it would mean that love does not exist and human relations have no value.” The idea that suffering pays for the value of love often helps clients come to terms with the fact that they cannot survive, and this allows them to view their own experiences as evidence of the ability to truly love and feel.
In a situation like this, client experiences often determine how his life is organized. Feelings of loss and annoyance associated with the departure of a loved one, often lead to the fact that a person does not want to see anyone, retires, focusing on his memories and thoughts about the past. Semi-mystical ideas can stand behind this, that by concentrating on the beloved as much as possible by an effort of will, you can force him / her to return or that thoughts and memories of him / her are a way of maintaining some connection with him / her. Sometimes the life of such clients is completely ritualized, they begin, like a straw, to hold on to things and actions associated with the past. For example, one client who addressed a similar problem did not change the bed sheet for three months on the bed in which she last slept with her husband, who left her for another family.
It makes no sense to specifically convince the client of the absurdity of these actions, he himself knows this very well. Rather, he must unequivocally answer the fundamental question of whether he wants to really forget the other or is ready to wait for years and hope that something will change. Of course, this answer is needed first of all not by the consultant, but by the client himself, in order to rationally assess his situation, to understand how painful it is in it. The decision that there is nothing to hope for or that it is stupid to sit and wait for “alms” from another person can help a person get out of depression, reorient from the past to the present.
Great help in advising in such cases can provide:
1) reorganizing the life of the client, reorienting it to something that can distract from feelings and switch to something new;
2) changing relationships with a partner.