Coaching practices for What to Do About Unrequited Love

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For What to Do About 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
• There’s one person I can’t stop resenting, and the bitterness loops in my head and exhausts me

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. 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
6. Catch and release the "if only" thought
   Notice when you’re mentally replaying a fixed past event as if it could be changed — and let it go.
   Amor Fati: Loving What Happens
7. R — Recall the hurt
   Face what happened deliberately and calmly, without minimizing it or replaying it as a victim.
   Forgiveness: The REACH Model
8. Build a culture of genuine appreciation as a horsemen antidote
   Daily authentic appreciation is the structural counter to contempt -- and it has to precede the conflict.
   The Four Horsemen: Gottman's Warning Signs of Relationship Breakdown
9. Identify the action urge
   Name exactly what the emotion is pushing you to do, so you can choose the opposite.
   Opposite Action: Acting Against the Emotion’s Urge
10. Repair a poor response
    When you respond badly to good news, circle back and give the engaged response you missed.
    Active-Constructive Responding, Made Practical

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