There are stages of break up, much like there are stages of griving a significant loss. We have boiled these down into nine specific stages.
The difference between these two griving processes, other than what those stages are, is that you won’t go through these in a linear manner. You’ll feel shock for a few days and instead of experiencing denial. Then, you slide into feeling the desperate for answers stage. Subsequently, you feel shock again and follow it up with denial.
Some of these stages feel familiar to you because you’ve already experienced them. Learn more about them so you can feel better about what’s going on.
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There’s no set time limit on how long you will stay in each stage. You will cycle through a few in a day, especially early on, then you’ll hang out in one for a few days.
Understand each stage to determine where you have or haven’t been.
The Stages of Break Up: Shock
The first stage is shock. He calls, texts, or shows up and says he’s breaking up with you. You feel shocked, especially if you didn’t see it coming. Here are some things you’re experiencing:
- The feeling that you’re replaceable in the heart of someone you thought would love you forever
- A sense that you’re suddenly irrelevant in his life
- An uncomfortable feeling of being disposable
- Your identity changes – you’re now just you, not part of a couple; you guys suddenly doesn’t fit
- A sudden change in feeling safe – there isn’t someone who’s checking up on you at night to make sure you got home okay
- All the sounds, sights, smells, touches and even tastes of your life have changed
- You’re in survival mode to compensate for the foggy, numb, spacey way you feel; your body is on autopilot
A new reality has moved in and you’re dealing with altered chemicals and emotions which make you feel uncomfortable.
Understand this phase and be aware of these feelings and changes. They aren’t bad, but they’re different and uncomfortable.
Phases of a Breakup: Denial
In denial, you believe none of this is happening. Your mind convinces you that none of this is real. It didn’t happen. He didn’t mean what he said. This isn’t happening, not to you.
To imagine your life without him in it is surreal. You rationalize the breakup, telling yourself he’s just going through a stage or a phase and he’ll be out of it soon. He will come to his senses. You’re sure of it.
You move through life as if you’re still in a relationship. This is a primal response to the breakup. Your body is in a withdrawal from the chemicals associated with love, and this is the response.
Your body wants to keep those love chemicals flowing and your mind plays tricks on you to get you to believe things you know, deep down inside, aren’t true.
What’s really happening is that you’re postponing the grieving process to protect yourself from the pain of the breakup.
This is one of the tricky stages of breakup where you don’t realize you’re here. Denial is a subconscious response to the breakup. The problem is that once you recognize you’re in denial, another problem erupts and you’re faced with a different challenge – avoidance.
When you practice avoidance, you avoid the truth of the situation so you don’t have to feel the pain.
You’re Desperate for Answers as You Move Through Stages of Break Up
This is one of the busiest stages of break up, mentally anyway. This is the why did this happen to me phase. You thought everything was perfect, or pretty darned close to it anyway, and then this? What the heck happened?
There’s no rational thought during this stage of the breakup. Your emotions are on overload, and you want answers! What did you do wrong? What could you have done differently? Since this stage occurs outside of rational thought, you won’t come to any logical conclusions.
There is a method to the madness of your mind. Looking for the why is the first step in disproving those how’s and why’s of the breakup. If you prove to yourself, and hopefully your ex, that the reasons for the breakup aren’t valid, everything will be okay.
At some point, you find there is no good reason for the breakup and your focus shifts to proving why those reasons are no good.
You have to be careful at this stage because your friends will grow tired of hearing your thoughts on how irrational this breakup was. You want to talk to anyone and everyone about it, but they’ve heard it and they’re sick of it. All those things you came up with in the denial phase come flowing out during this stage.
This phase acts like a buffer. You’re not ready to process the why yet. You’re still avoiding the reality of the loss.
And Then, There’s Internal Bargaining
You will recognize this phase because many of your sentences will begin with, “If only I had”:
- Picked him up at the airport instead of making him take a cab
- Kept up with the laundry
- Not begged him to get a bigger house
- Been prettier
- Didn’t ask him to help with the housework
This stage of the breakup is where you internalize the problems of the relationship. You envision different outcomes to each problem you think of.
The reality is you can’t reverse time so there is no way to go back and pick him up at the airport, if that was the problem. The second issue is that those things didn’t really happen that way and may not have played a role anyway.
You can’t go back in time and change the past. There’s no way to know whether picking him up at the airport would have made a difference anyway. If he was so bothered by the laundry, he could have stepped up to help.
You Experience a Relapse
It’s possible this isn’t the first breakup with this guy.
The break up/make up cycle feeds the next phase, which is when you try to convince him to reconcile with you.
This is another attempt to alleviate the pain of the breakup and get those happy chemicals coursing through your veins. The problem is nothing has changed. You’re the same. He’s the same. Why on earth would you expect a different outcome?
Past hurts exist he’s harboring negative feelings about the relationship. He is going through these stages of break up as well. It doesn’t matter whether you were the one to break up or the one who was surprised by it, you go through these stages.
Getting back together right now, while you’re still moving through these stages won’t work. Past hurts will rise up again and bite you in the butt. There will be another breakup. It’s inevitable, especially if you’ve begged your way back.
Right now, you’re not only avoiding the pain of the breakup, but you’re not allowing yourself to imagine a life without him. You’re not thinking about what your life might look like without him in it. It’s just too difficult to imagine.
Stages of Break Up: Initial Acceptance
I bet you thought you’d never hit this one! Finally, you accept the breakup. You experience moments of clarity, and you sometimes see yourself living without him. Those moments of clarity are mixed with irrational moments filled with elements of the other phases.
You will visit this stage multiple times, especially early in the process. As you proceed, if you set yourself on a healthy healing course, your time spent in this phase will get a little longer each time.
During this phase, you can resist the desire to contact him. Once you suffer a relapse, you will reach out to him again.
Your goal right now is to get him back, so you don’t understand the acceptance phase, but it’s necessary, whether you get back together or not. It represents healthier thinking, less emotion and a different outlook.
During this stage, you place boundaries to closely align with your values. You can focus on the future, instead of the past.
The first few times you experience this phase are quick and you won’t feel progress, but each time you visit this stage, things will get better.
The Anger Phase of a Breakup
The anger phase takes many different forms, depending on how close to the breakup you are.
In the beginning, you turn the anger on yourself and find your shortcomings, real or imagined. You use them to blame yourself for what happened. You’re angry with yourself for causing the breakup and you conjure up some really destructive negative self-talk, such as I’m too:
- Fat
- Ugly
- Stupid
Your focus is placing blame, and venting anger is one way to accomplish that task. You’ve moved out of the anger phase when you no longer feel angry over the breakup and aren’t working hard to place blame.
The anger provides you with the energy you need to get over the breakup. The trick to moving past this phase is learning to be responsible for your own anger. When you do that, you pull things together and move forward into a mindset for reconciliation.
A Wonderful Feeling of Hope
There are many ways to experience hope. First, you hope for reconciliation. You do anything and everything to revive the relationship, including begging, crying, non-stop texting and anything else you imagine might work.
True hopelessness is one of the worst emotions a human being can feel. It is a truly desperate emotion. The only time human beings really lose hope is when they’re facing death. Even when you feel all hope is lost in your relationship, you can still reach a hopeful feeling.
Hope shifts from hoping the relationship can be saved to hoping you can survive without it. This depends on how you progress through building your confidence. Many women decide their ex isn’t worthy of them any longer and they want a better guy. Either way, you’ll get there in time.
When you reach the point of feeling hopeful, you can build on small accomplishments. They will slowly but steadily build into bigger and bigger accomplishments and victories.
What Does It Mean?
You probably see yourself in one or more of these phases already. This is natural. It’s possible to be in more than one of these stages of break up at a time. You will also experience some of them multiple times, each time more positively than the last.
Don’t worry about feeling stuck in one phase or another for what feels like too long. Also, don’t allow friends and family to tell you to move past the phase you’re in. They mean well and just want you to feel better, but they aren’t you and they don’t know what’s best for you.
What Can You Do?
Recognize that what you’re experiencing is normal. With the exception of the shock phase, you’ll experience these phases a few times and you won’t go through them in the order they’ve been presented here.
You’ll skip one and experience it later. You’ll stay in one for a while and zip through the next. There’s no right or wrong.
It feels overwhelming right now. If your breakup is new, you feel so much emotion that you can’t make sense of what you’re reading.
That’s okay. Bookmark this page and come back to it in a day or two. Meanwhile, begin with Step One of Our Steps to Getting Him Back and work on overcoming your highly emotional state.
