Many people don’t seem to know how to help their friend through a breakup. They either don’t know how to help or don’t want to help because they feel overwhelmed by their friend’s crying, sadness, desperation, and obsession with the dumper.
They don’t want to say the wrong thing and hurt their friend, so they don’t say or do anything at all.
Helping a friend through a breakup requires empathy and some understanding of breakups. It requires you to know that your friend feels anxious, rejected, unwanted, and hopeful for another chance with the dumper.
He or she is obsessed with the dumper due to separation anxiety, shattered self-esteem, and broken relationship goals, so you can expect your friend to be sad or depressed for a while.
Expect him or her to have a hard time performing daily tasks and listening and caring about your wants and needs. A broken-hearted friend will feel shocked and abandoned and will likely need to talk about the dumper and the breakup a lot.
Be prepared for conversations to steer back to his or her ex, feelings, and problems.
It can be tiring or even frustrating at times to see your friend down and hear him or her talk about the same person and problems over and over again, but you must remember that your friend wouldn’t be talking about the dumper if he or she didn’t need to.
If your friend was mentally and emotionally unaffected and in control, your friend would appreciate the people who remain in his or her life and focus on the present and future.
Since your friend can’t get his or her mind off the dumper, your friend gets anxious and scared and wants to process difficult thoughts and emotions. He or she does this by thinking and venting about the dumper. This has a therapeutic effect on your friend and gives him or her a sense of control.
Your friend may not express it, but he or she will appreciate you for listening, asking questions, expressing thoughts, and offering support. Your friend will see that you can be relied on for healing and that he or she should continue to converse with you when emotions run high.
You need to be patient and remember that you’d want support too if you got broken up with and felt miserable. You’d be depressed, angry, and scared and feel a myriad of other unwanted emotions that force you to ponder about your ex day and night.
You’d expect your support system (friends and family) to sympathize and listen to you when you need their attention and care the most. You’d expect them to encourage you to open up and take care of you for a while.
Their lack of support would make you feel uncared for and all alone during one of the most difficult times of your life.
So make sure to help your friend. Be there for your friend and urge your friend to avoid shutting in, holding difficult emotions inside, feeling alone, blaming him/herself for the breakup, devising a plan to get back with the dumper, and having a lot of free time to think about the breakup.
If your friend has a lot of time, he or she will stay anxious and feel tempted to make breakup mistakes that push the dumper away and lower his or her chances of reconciliation and happiness.
Your job as a friend is to keep your hurt friend grounded. Encourage detachment without giving or killing too much hope. Aim for a healthy balance between telling your friend to get over the breakup and reassuring your friend that the dumper will come back one day.
Your friend will take your words seriously. If you state that lots of exes reconcile and that you even know a couple who got back together after breaking up, your friend will want to know more and keep his or her hopes up.
Your friend will essentially refuse to accept reality and ignore the need to detach and heal.
Conversely, if you tell your friend that his or her ex will never come back and that his or her ex is dating and having the time of his or her life, your friend will get highly anxious and spiral into depression. It will be too much too soon for your friend to accept and deal with.
So choose your words wisely. Even if you’re certain your friend and his/her ex are incompatible and won’t get back together, saying it may not be the right thing to do. It’s not a good idea to say it when wounds are fresh and hope is keeping your friend from breaking down.
By all means, tell your friend that he or she deserves love, commitment, and a more caring partner. But don’t say that the dumper is gone and that it’s impossible to get back together. Don’t say anything that your friend isn’t willing or capable of accepting yet.
You can tell what your friend can accept simply by observing his or her emotional state, ex-obsession, and self-love. By listening to your friend’s concerns, expectations, and ways of talking about the breakup, you can tell what kind of comments are appropriate to make and what kind of support your friend needs.
Mind you, not all dumpees need constant support and a highly empathetic approach. Some dumpees prefer friends who can distract them and leave the past behind. Again, you’ll be able to tell how much support and what kind of care your friend needs simply by spending time with your friend.
If your friend is crying, you’ll need to be super empathetic. Adjust your tone, talk slowly, and be serious and caring. But if your friend is laughing and wants to take his or her mind off the dumper, do things that keep your friend busy.
The best advice I can give you is to listen when necessary and match your friend’s tone and attitude. Things will flow naturally as long as you have sufficient self-awareness and empathy.
In today’s article, we talk about how to help your friend through a breakup. We explain how to help an anxious friend open up to you and feel supported by you.
How to help your friend through a breakup?
If you’re trying to learn how to help your friend through a breakup, you’re a good friend. You genuinely care about your friend’s feelings and despise seeing your friend suffer. Your friend’s unhappiness makes you unhappy too, so you want to help your friend and yourself as well.
This means you care and want the best for your friend.
A person who cares about a friend going through a difficult breakup has a strong sense of empathy. Oftentimes, he or she has been through a lot and understands what anxiety, pain, and depression feel like. Due to experience, compassion, and a strong moral compass, he or she feels inclined to help.
Since you’re interested in helping your friend get through a breakup, it means that you’re emotionally intelligent and reliable in times of need. Friends like you are rare, so go ahead and toot your own horn. Take pride in having developed empathy and helping people who could use your help.
Anyway, helping a friend through a breakup is easier than you may think. If you care and want to help, all you have to do is put yourself in your friend’s shoes and ask yourself what kind of help you’d want from a friend if you missed your ex and felt hurt by his or her abandonment.
Although every person has different coping mechanisms and ways of dealing with stress, rejection, and anxiety, most people want if not need someone to talk to. They need company so they have less time to obsess about their ex and more time to do things that actually matter.
Dumpees often need to be pushed a little. They need to be forced to get out of the house, hang out, and participate in activities they enjoy. The best people to help them are their friends. Friends (with common interests) can motivate or force them to get out of the house and stop stressing.
They can make dumpees see that life isn’t over and that they have plenty of positive things to be grateful for and look forward to.
Conversely, bad friends or friends who lack empathy and breakup knowledge may avoid dumpees or push them into situations they’re not ready for.
They may introduce them to people they’re not emotionally ready to date, tell them breakups happen for a reason, lose their patience with them, introduce them to drugs and alcohol, or even date their ex behind their back.
Such people show no consideration for their ex’s feelings and history—and tend to complicate their ex’s recovery process.
Although an ex is an ex for a reason, it’s not compassionate to say it to a friend who needs understanding and emotional support. He or she can’t benefit from it because it shows a lack of care and desire to talk about unprocessed feelings.
I encourage you not to repeat breakup cliches and hard-to-hear-truths you’ve read on the internet. Instead of telling your friend that his or her ex doesn’t love him/her, choose a more considerate approach.
Tell your friend that his or her ex took the relationship for granted and chose to fall out of love due to a lack of willpower and interest in fixing things.
That will make your friend understand why the relationship ended rather than cause your friend to think he or she is entirely to blame for the breakup.
You probably won’t say all the right things. But if you keep your friend’s pain in mind, you should encourage healing rather than denial or complete loss of hope.
To help your friend through a breakup, share some of your vulnerabilities. Tell your friend what you thought, felt, and did after your breakup and how you recovered from it. This will make your friend listen to your story and advice and allow you to bond with your friend better than ever.
Your friend will relate to you and consider you a mentor in the breakup field; especially if you show that you handled the breakup maturely and that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
Make sure not to talk about non-breakup-related problems too much. Your friend cares about you, but he or she doesn’t care about your problems now that his or her self-esteem and well-being are at an all-time low.
Your friend is mostly interested in breakup topics and things you did to overcome the breakup.
Don’t just wait for your friend to reach out when he or she needs help. You should reach out and check up on your friend sometimes as well. You should especially do that if your friend is trying to avoid people and brood in depression.
In that case, you should encourage your friend to confide in you and get as much help as possible. Friends can be great, but so can family members and therapists specializing in mental health.
Some people are better at dealing with rejection than others. Some dumpees need therapy and medication whereas others need a good friend to lean on. You won’t know what your friend needs unless you talk to him or her and make it safe for your friend to open up.
With that said, here’s how to help your friend through a breakup.
Your friend may not be super fun to be around for a while. The first few months will likely be emotionally draining for all parties involved, including you. During this difficult time, your friend will learn who truly cares about his or her feelings and who sticks around only for the fun times.
Sadly, life isn’t always sunshine and rainbow. Sometimes unpredictable/painful things happen—and require people to seek support and heal. That’s when genuine friends step in to support, while pretentious ones retreat.
Don’t think you need to talk to your friend 24/7 and attend to him or her as if you were his or her parent. All you need to do is check up on your friend once in a while, ask how he or she is doing, invite your friend out, and say some encouraging words.
You need to do these things a bit more often than before so that your friend feels cared for and distracted. The fewer times he or she relives the breakup, the easier he or she will cope with anxiety.
Helping a friend through a breakup is no rocket science. You just need to do be a good listener and let your friend vent.
If you show empathy and care, your friend will feel closer to you and return the favor when you need help with something.
What if my friend doesn’t want any help?
People cope with heartbreak in different ways. Some want a friend by their side to talk to whereas others deal with breakup pain internally. It depends on their upbringing, attachment style, coping mechanism, and personality.
If your friend is a dumper, doesn’t want help, or doesn’t want to talk about the breakup, your friend is probably doing okay emotionally and/or wants to keep difficult emotions to himself or herself.
In that case, you should spend time with your friend, while avoiding discussions about emotions. The second you learn that your friend isn’t interested in opening up about feelings and exes, you should support your friend non-verbally – by doing things together like you did before the breakup.
Use actions rather than words to show your friend that you value him or her—and your friend will feel supported in ways he or she wants to be supported.
Women typically want to talk about the breakup. They express their feelings and search for understanding and compassion.
Men, on the other hand, are doers and want a mixture of communication and planning. They want to talk about their ex and ways to fix things (get back together). They do this when they’re hurt.
When they feel in control of their emotions, though, they prefer to stay busy and not talk about their ex.
Both men and women can want or not want help, depending on how they feel and perceive their ex. You need to be supportive in their moment of weakness and relax/go with the flow when they want to focus on anything or anyone but their ex.
Be perceptive of social cues and respond appropriately to their feelings and behaviors.
Don’t overthink it. Just read your friend’s mood and act naturally. You’ll do okay as long as you put your friend’s needs before yours and continue being a supportive friend.
I hope you’ve learned how to help your friend through a breakup. How do you think you should help your friend cope with anxiety and pain? Share your tips in the comments below.
And if you want to talk to us about ways to support a friend going through a tough breakup, get in touch with us by signing up for 1-on-1 coaching.
