“Like a sandcastle, all is temporary. Build it, tend it, enjoy it. And when the time comes, let it go.” ~Jack Kornfield
So have you ever loved someone who has been rejected. How do you help them cope with it? What is the right thing to do?
There are times they will just want you to sit with them quietly. There are times they will want you to hold and hug them. There are times they will want to ask you the whys and wherefores they are asking themselves. There are times they will just want to be alone.
How do you judge what they want? You might not get this right all the time but hopefully you can sense this or they will let you know.
They will have so many questions, they will blame themselves, they will be sad, they will be angry, they will drink too much and party too hard, they will at times wallow in their misery.
I don’t have the answers but I do know that the first thing they need to do is to Allow themselves time to grieve. Its normal, its natural and can take days, weeks, months and in some cases years, and there will be times that this grief will come back to haunt them.
They may not want to hear it but somehow we need to let them them know that things won’t always be this way.
“Tough times never last, but tough people do.” ~Robert H. Schuller
I think most important to the healing process is they need to accept that things will never go back to the way they were. You cannot make them do any of this. They need to accept and realise this for themselves.
The person that left, has most likely moved on. They would not have made the decision on the spur of the moment. They would have been thinking about it for some time. And they would have known they were hurting him or her when they made that decision.
Somehow, we need to help them release blame, anger and resentment. They will not regain peace of mind until they can do this.
We need to remind them of how far they have come in life, compare this to previous times in their lives. That their ex’s in fact did make some positive differences to their lives.
When someone rejects you, for whatever reason, it’s because you two aren’t a good fit—they just saw it first. Eventually, you would have seen it as well. The fact that they act on this early realization is actually a blessing, because they are saving both of you from wasting time.
And most importantly you need to remind themselves that today and the future is the only thing they can do something about. The past cannot be changed. Yes, there. will be uncertainty but there is always uncertainty.