One swift cut.

In a physical surgery one swift clean surgical cut will result in faster healing than a messy tear. Emotional severances follow this same principle. Elizabeth Svoboda's posting on breakups addresses this principle nicely.

Here's a short version of how the swift clean cut to end a relationship might sound.

"I've made a tough decision. I've decided to leave this relationship. The match just doesn't feel right for me. In many ways it's hard for me to leave. There is much I find attractive about you. At the same time, there's enough non-matching, especially about our (specify the most importantt way in which you differ) that I've decided to say goodbye."

A clean cut.

Prevention of infection is vital in surgical procedures. The wound must be kept clean. The same is true in emotional severances. Beware of infecting the event with negative messages about the person being let go. Any "you are not ok" message slows healing and invites longer-term distress.

Here's an example. "I don't love you anymore because you're a slut."

Name-calling like this is obviously less than helpful. Name-calling gives a negative message about the person, their character traits, their identity. A harsh or critical tone of voice will similarly convey an overall negative feeling toward the other person.

At the same time as verbal and voice-tone negative messages about the person contaminate healing, it can be helpful for the terminee to learn what the problem and what specific behaviors factored into the relationship termination.

Here's an example of giving amessage about the problem and about specific behaviors rather than about the person. The when you...I format notes a specific behavior and then focuses on how this behavior has been a problem for the speaker.

"I have decided to end the relationship because when you looked to me like you were flirting with other men at parties, I became distrustful that our relationship would be stable in the long run. Once I feel distrustful, that's like a broken vase. I'm not willing to try to repair it."

Saying the specific behaviors that you didn't like so that the person you are leaving can choose to change these in future relationships takes courage. There's always the risk of the information being received defensively and then responding with an argument. At the same time, specifying behaviors that were off-putting for you gifts the person you are leaving with information that they could potentially utilize for better relationships in the future.

Communication. Post-surgical healing is likely to proceed more rapidly if there has been sufficient pre and post-op communication between the patient and the doctor.

Sharing information alleviates the anxiety generated by not knowing. In medicine the communication might address why the procedure is necessary, the risks, what the doctor will be doing, what recovery will entail, and post-surgically what happened during the surgery, what the patient is feeling, why those feelings are occurring, and what they can do about it.

Information-sharing communication also conveys the nature of the power relationship. In medicine, in spite of the doctor's clear role as the expert, a doctor who respectfully dialogues with a patient to understand and respond to the patient's concerns creates a feeling of collaborative doctor-patient partnership. The doctor-patient hierarchy in this regard will feel relatively flat, i.e., like cooperation between two equally important people, rather than a one-up, one-down relationship of King Doctor and Mini-Person, the patient.

Similarly, in breakups, sufficient mutually respectful communication between a person ending a relationship and the person receiving a good-bye relieves the anxiety generated by insufficient understanding.

Information-sharing dialogue also ends the relationship from a position of mutual side-by-side respect as opposed to a relationship of a winner (the person who is leaving) and a loser (the one who is being left).

The latter factor, that is, the power relationship, is the key depression-inducing or anti-depressant ingredient. Collaborative two-way communication can put the healing process on a track that moves forward as recovery from grief. A dominant-submissive, winner-loser relationship by contrast invites the healing process to stall, miring the loser in protracted bereavement and potentially precipatating a depressive collapse.

What is the difference between grief and depression?

Grieving entails sadness. Triggered by loss, feelings of sadness are akin to the tenderness and soreness of post-surgical wound healing. "I miss him so much," expresses the sadness of a normal grief response.

Depression goes beyond sadness to the experience of what psychologist Aaron Beck labeled the negative cognitive triad: fixed negative thoughts about the self, others, and the future. "I was such a fool to trust him. He lied to me when he said he loved me! I'll never trust a man again. That's it for me on relationships." This kind of negative talk would be characteristic of a depressive collapse.

I use the term depressive collapse to describe the profound sense of loss of power, often described as a sense of helplessness, that people feel when they are depressed.

What collapses in a depressive collapse? Self-confidence collapses like a basketball that has lost it's air. In addition, internal energies decrease. I once arm-wrestled with a professional football player when he was thinking depressed thoughts. His powerful throwing arm felt like marshmellow; I could win with no effort.

What triggers depression?

Depression results from dominant-submissive, winer-loser, interactions. If one person says "I'm leaving" or "I'm firing you," and the other has no voice, the person in the dominant position is likely to emerge with minimal feelings about the event other than relief. The powerless person however may be plunged into a long-lasting depression.

By contrast, if a termination discussion includes sufficient bilateral (two-sided) information exchange with input from both participants, the termination will still be likely to bring forth sadness, but will be significantly less likely to provoke a depression. That's because when both participants have a voice, the process switches from feeling dominant-submissive to feeling collaborative.

How could dialogue make a difference if the outcome is still going to be the end of the relationship?

A brief but sufficiently back-and-forth dialogue offers an opportunity for the person receiving the bad news to verbalize concerns, questions and feelings and also to digest the termination aloud. A termination conversation of this sort creates a feeling of participatory partnership as opposed to unilateral victimization. The odds of depression then zoom downward.

When there has been two-way discussion, the feeling of cooperative interaction remains in spite of the fact that the decision itself will be unchanged. The person who is being dismissed feels respected along with rejected. Sharing sufficient information about the dismissal and listening to the dismissed person's responses are acts of respect that can be profoundly emotionally empowering

What are some nitty-gritty how-to's of this kind of dialogue?

The principles and sentence starters that follow establish a collaborative process even if the decision to end a relationship has been made unilaterally.