Coaching practices for How Deal with Unrequited Love

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How Deal with Unrequited Love, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• We’re both trying so hard and somehow both ending up feeling unloved, and I’m starting to think we’re each pouring love in the exact form we’d want to get it back
• There’s someone I have so much unsaid with
• Things have gone cool and stiff with someone and we’re both just frozen, neither willing to make the first move or have the awkward talk
• There are relationships that still sit unfinished in me
• I keep telling myself to just move past what they did and not make a big deal of it, so I never actually look the hurt in the face

Practices that may help

1. Discovering and acting on each other’s languages
   Find out — by asking and observing — how each partner most readily feels loved, then act on it.
   The Five Love Languages, Honestly
2. Write an unsent letter to process relational difficulty
   Write a letter — never to be sent — to someone with whom you have unresolved feelings, saying everything you actually feel.
   Expressive Writing (Pennebaker)
3. Use a small ask to repair a strained relationship
   In a cool or conflicted relationship, asking for a small favor can reset the dynamic more effectively than doing one.
   The Ben Franklin Effect, Made Practical
4. Write the forgiveness passages your legacy needs
   Name who you need to forgive and who you need to ask forgiveness from — and write it out.
   The Legacy Letter: Writing What You Want to Leave Behind
5. R — Recall the hurt
   Face what happened deliberately and calmly, without minimizing it or replaying it as a victim.
   Forgiveness: The REACH Model
6. A — Give the Altruistic gift of forgiveness
   Recall a time you were forgiven, and offer forgiveness as a gift rather than a transaction.
   Forgiveness: The REACH Model
7. Apply the reserve clause in relationships
   Offer your best honest communication, care, or help — with the reserve clause: you cannot control how it is received.
   The Stoic Reserve Clause
8. Treating grief as a form of gratitude
   When something ends and you feel grief, recognise that the grief is proportional to the love — and let it be both.
   Mono no Aware: The Pathos of Things
9. Work the difficult-person stage without forcing
   Extend metta to a difficult person not as approval of their actions but as unconditional goodwill for their wellbeing.
   Metta Bhavana: The Practice of Loving-Kindness
10. Task 4: Find an enduring connection with the deceased
    Relocate the relationship from physical presence to an internal, meaningful connection.
    Worden’s Tasks of Mourning, Made Practical

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