How to Console Your Sister After a Breakup

A sister is never more in need than after a rough breakup, particularly if the breakup marked the end of a long-term relationship friends and family all expected to lead toward the alter. Consoling your sister is your duty of compassion, but it is also a duty of technicalities. There are many rights and wrongs when it comes to reassuring your broken-hearted sibling and getting her back in the saddle and emotionally recovered.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Be patient and let her give you the story at her own pace and without interruptions. Unlike friends who are often polite and diplomatic, sisters don’t always have to be and so frequently tend to get pushy and outspoken. Try to think of yourself as a friend. Although you’re probably more equipped than a friend to call her bluff, read her mind and know what’s best, let her open up on her own terms. This gradual verbal recounting will be cathartic.

2. Ask some key questions only after she’s been allowed to recount the breakup at her own time. She may need an objective voice to help her sort out what went wrong and how to make sense of the breakup. The important thing is to indeed be objective, reasonable and cool-headed. You may feel almost as angry at the offending partner as she is, but joining in the rant may slow down healing process. Man-bashing or other activities of the like, while temporarily comforting, embitter a person. Instead, try to sensibly pinpoint problem areas that contributed to the breakup and hash them out calmly. With carefully posed questions, tease out the scenario. If you get her on the defensive, back up the questions and keep them small-scale. Blurting out, “What’d you do?” will certainly push her away or inside herself just when she needs company and needs to connect outwardly with others.

3. Take her out for some healthy fun so she isn’t allowed to wallow in the house or apartment feeling sorry for herself. Try an afternoon of lunch and shopping. Catch a movie (no romantic comedies) or head to a museum. You may even want to plan a weekend trip to get her completely, mentally and physically, out of her presently dreary milieu. Remind her that some of the best times aren’t spent with a significant other, but with friends and family.

4. Stay in touch. Even if you’re too busy to spend afternoons with her or often spend evenings with your own significant other, don’t abandon her. In this hypersensitive post-breakup state, your sister may feel as though you’re abandoning her if you simply wait too long to return her call, email or text. She may, in turn, transfer her anger and confusion from the breaker-upper to you. Let her know you’re with her and thinking of her by frequently, if only briefly, dropping a line. If you’re busy, make concrete plans for next week so she has something to look forward to.

Tips & Warnings

• Convince her that, as trite as it sounds, he really didn’t deserve her or truly understand her gifts if he was so quick to let her and them go. Remind her of times at the beginning of the relationship when she wasn’t even sure about him. Don’t let her build up the person into god-status just because of how the power negotiations of the relationship turned out. Help her reclaim her own agency and her own ability to construct herself as a subject rather than an object to be discarded.