A client and I were talking about unrequited love during a coaching session. Loving someone who doesn’t love you back, or stops loving you, is incredibly painful. It’s one thing to experience in your youth, but later in life, when it involves divorce, children, and splitting shared assets, it becomes much more complicated.

For most of us, rejection is the most painful experience to go through and the fear of rejection can be crippling. In one of those startling, ‘coaching-sessions-mimics-real-life scenarios’, two days before this discussion, I had experienced a vivid reminder of just how painful rejection can be.

Having recently reconnected, on Facebook, with a few people I had lost touch with more than twenty years ago, I was happily mulling over the rich tapestry of life. I was thinking how although people come and go, their impact remains a part of the very fabric of who we are.

In this frame of mind, I thought nothing of sending a friend request to a long lost ex-boyfriend. He had re-appeared quite out the blue as a friend of a friend when we both commented on a post. You can meet him here: Mr Gorgeous! If the truth be told, I thought nothing of sending it ... until  the moment I hit the the send button.

One minute I was smiling at wonderful memories, the next I was felled by a twenty-five year old wave of insecurity and shame. Time means nothing to fear. Fearful emotions can be experiencing as intensely, in the present moment, as they were felt in the past when the original painful or scary event happened.  In an instant I was thrown back to how I felt as a young woman facing her first heartbreak.

It’s at times like this that that we need to remember we are more than just emotional beings. We have to dig deep and call on our intelligence to bring balance. I’m here to remind you we can! With practice, we CAN channel our thoughts in a more helpful direction.

Reality checking is a good place to start, especially when fear is raging. Am I in danger? Has something actually happened? Breathing deeply with awareness calms our nervous systems and gives us a chance to pause and re-adjust. Sometime all we need to remember is that this feeling too shall pass and I will still be here when it does.

Love is about connection, it’s what drives human behaviour and what makes the experience of rejection so unbearable. Having a compassionate connection to ourselves in times of panic or rejection helps us keep our balance.

We do not have to abandon nor turn on ourselves just because someone else may have. Whether we are loved back or not, we CAN love, because it’s who we are. How empowering is that!