Missing someone

Missing someone

You miss someone who you’ve lost – either due to death / a break-up. You miss someone close to you who’s gone away for a while and you’ve been separated by time and space for longer than you’ve ever been. You may even have moments in a day where you miss a person when you walk by something that reminds them of you – even though you know you’re going to be seeing them at the end of the day. There are various moments and reasons for missing someone – and it is okay.

What does compromise you, however – is when you either judge the fact that you’re missing someone and suppressing the experience or adding more emotion into the experience of missing someone, where the moment of ‘missing’ transmutes into an emotional experience of sadness, pain, loss, despair and even escalating into a depression. I have been through both extremes in my life – sometimes judging myself for missing someone, other times allowing the missing to become too emotional and there have been times where I simultaneously accessed both judging myself and becoming too emotional about missing someone.

Let’s first have a look at the dimension of judging yourself and suppressing the moment’s experience of missing someone:

We’re sometimes afraid of being honest about what we’re going through, but it is this very fear of our own experiences, of parts of ourselves that do come up within us – such as the experience of missing someone – that leads to us closing doors of opportunity within ourselves to get to know ourselves and our relationship with others a little better. So, if you find you judge yourself and also suppress moments of missing someone – instead, take a deep breath in, slow yourself down and introspect this experience of missing in that moment by asking yourself “why am I missing them?” / “what does this say about my relationship with them?” / “what exactly is it about them I am missing?” / “what experiences do I share with this person that I missing?” You’ll find that by answering these questions for yourself and having a look at your relationship with another – you may just discover and learn more things about yourself and your relationship with another.

For example: let’s say someone close to you went away for a while and your usual routine of communication changed, where you went from communicating regularly to not communicating for a couple of days and you suddenly became overwhelmed with the experience of missing them. First you take a deep breath in, slow yourself down, looking at the experience and asking yourself “what exactly is it about them / my relationship with them that I am missing?” From here you can have a look at what changed – as within this example, which was the communication. Then you can go deeper inside yourself / the point and ask yourself “what about the communication with them do I miss?” From here you can open up the dimensions of, for example realising how much you enjoyed their company, how much you enjoyed yourself in their company, how much the communication supported you to express yourself etc. Essentially discovering ‘who you are’ in relation to the communication with the person and realising ‘who you are’ in sharing yourself through communication with the person.

So, what is interesting about this experience of missing someone, especially when you introspect the experience inside yourself and open your self honesty within it together with your relationship with someone – you discover much that was always there – but you weren’t aware of. For example, you obviously did enjoy and appreciate the communication and support in the communication as well as your expression within it all – but wasn’t ‘consciously aware’ of it until it wasn’t there anymore and you now had a moment, through introspecting the experience of missing someone, to reflect on it all.

When it comes to judging yourself and suppressing the experience of missing someone – remind yourself to take a breath, slow down and rather introspect the experience and discover your self honesty in relation to you and another. This will assist and support with allowing yourself to miss someone for a moment – realising it’s okay, cause then you realise it’s not only about missing them, but also recognising and realising the fact that you actually appreciate that part of you and the dimension of the relationship; and so a moment of missing simultaneously becomes a moment of appreciation and gratefulness.

Within this, whenever you go through a similar experience with the same person – where the communication changes, you’ll when the moments of missing them comes up – instead of judging and suppressing the experience, instead be in the moment, miss them but also remember the appreciation / gratefulness of who you are in communicating with them and the overall communication of the relationship. And so, a moment of missing someone becomes supportive instead of compromising for you.

In the next post we’ll open up the dimension of how to look at the experience of making missing someone too emotional and how also within this – you miss an opportunity to learn more about yourself and your relationship with another…