The 12 Stages of Breakup Grief
There are innumerable writings that explore the progression of the grieving process, especially as it pertains to loss through death. At the forefront is psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ groundbreaking identification and description of the five stages of grief, first published in 1969. In order, they are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Kubler-Ross’ stages provided a basic framework for understanding what happens when someone you love dies. She created generalizable descriptions of how grief unfolds as a means of recognizing where you are in your grief, how it is experienced, and how it may be expressed.
While certain aspects of the human experience of grief are universal, many aspects of how you grieve are unique to you. It is important to know that your version of the stages do not necessarily present “in order,” nor is it always apparent when one stage ends and another begins. Earlier stages are often revisited at later times, and vice versa. Because the experience of grief is vast and multi-faceted, there are nuances and dimensions within each stage, as well as infinite ways that emotions and actions can manifest. Therefore, in your grieving process, you might feel stuck for months on a single step. Or, you might cycle forward and backward through the stages at warp speed, yet in a kind of slow motion. Ultimately, stages may repeat many times in many forms. They may also regress and reemerge when you least expect them.
With Kubler-Ross’ 5 stages as my springboard, I have created a list of 12 Stages of Breakup Grief. Like Kubler-Ross’ stages, the stages of breakup grief are not linear, but rather quite fluid. They can occur all at once, cross over each other, or even morph into indistinguishable blobs. Take comfort in knowing that as you go through these stages, you will have flashes of hopefulness about the future before being submerged again and again under waves of despair.
How you experience these 12 stages of breakup grief is greatly impacted by innumerable factors such as your genetics, the circumstances of your birth, your childhood, your formative experiences, how quickly you become anxious or distrustful, your moods, past exposure to trauma, your self-esteem and many more. How you perceive past relationships, your communication tendencies and patterns, how much you depend on others to help you manage your emotions, and how your relationship expectations have formed, all impact your response to grief. In other words, the stuff that makes you, you shapes how you grieve.
In defining these 12 stages, my goal is not to define a single experience for every person, but to help you get your bearings. I offer you a rough roadmap through the rocky, unpredictable breakup terrain. While you may not be able to see through your pain right now, a path forward does exist. It will not be linear nor easy, but the path does exist and at its end is hope.
- Shock
“Huh? What do you mean, it’s over?” This new information overloads your brain. The feeling that you’ve been discarded and abandoned – that you’re disposable, replaceable, and irrelevant – shoots through you in shockwaves, like sticking a fork in an outlet. It’s as if your identity was just stolen and you don’t know where to go or what to do to retrieve it. Not only have you lost your sense of self, which was so intertwined with your relationship, it also feels like you’ve lost your place in the world. Who are you if not a part of this bigger whole that was your relationship? You are overwhelmed by the dread of having to exist without your ex’s continued investment in your whereabouts, wellbeing and security. Your intimate knowledge about their emotions and everyday life, and theirs of yours, was just cut off. It’s as if you’ve been hurled into an abyss.
Shock is a primal response to loss, the result of being inundated on all levels, all five of your senses overloaded to the point of short-circuit. Meanwhile, questions you can’t answer rain down on you. There’s the logistical: “How will I pull it together for work tomorrow?” “How can we coexist in the same space until one of us moves out?” And then there’s the existential: “What’s the point? Maybe it’s all in vain…” Yet, despite the shock, there are immediate decisions to make and real-world obligations to manage. You feel numb, spacey, and unfocused. Autopilot takes over to get you through what you have to get through and it’s all a blur.
- Denial
“Nope. It’s not possible. It did not happen. They don’t mean it.” Life without them is unfathomable. You can’t believe it. In fact, you refuse to believe it. You HAVE to talk them out of it. You’ve put everything into your relationship. It’s been your world, your identity. Right now, every last vestige of hope is invested in the viability and durability of your relationship. “This is just a stage they’re going through,” you say to yourself. Therefore, no matter how remote the possibility, you continue to carry on insisting the relationship is still viable. It will recover. Denial is the postponement of grief because you are not yet prepared or equipped to acknowledge that there is anything to grieve about.
- Desperate for Answers
As you begin to wrap your head around the reality of your breakup, the intensity of your need to understand why, when, and how it happened can become all-consuming. You feel compelled to find answers to unanswerable questions, which comes at the expense of restraint and takes the place of rational, reasonable thoughts and behaviors. There are at least two conflicting drives occurring simultaneously: the drive to understand why this is happening, and, at the very same time, the drive to prove that there are better solutions than breaking up.
The urgency to understand your ex’s reasons for ending the relationship extends well beyond anyone’s ability to explain them to you, including your ex, because no reason is acceptable anyway. Instead, you look for ways to poke holes in the validity of their conviction that the relationship is over. You fixate on the many ways in which their reasons are invalid, which you use as the foundation of your own argument that the relationship deserves another chance.
Even in a breakup that takes months (or years) during which you and your ex rehash the relationship over and over, you may very well still feel blindsided when the end eventually comes. Your insatiable need to understand the exact reasons for the breakup trumps your willingness and ability to hear and accept the answers. Remember, you are still in the place where this breakup wasn’t supposed to happen. Essentially, at this point, the reality of the breakup is impossible to grasp. Instead, you get stuck in the quagmire of desperately trying to “get to the bottom of what happened” and finally understand the “real” reason you broke up. During this stage you are driven to relentlessly debate well-meaning friends, family, coworkers, and maybe even strangers about why your relationship shouldn’t end, as if convincing them is the same as convincing your ex.
- External Bargaining
If your ex will just take you back, you’ll be a better, more attentive partner. Everything that’s been wrong, you’ll make right. It seems like finding a way to convince them that the relationship will be better this time is the only way to make your pain go away – anything to avoid acknowledging that it’s over. In this stage, your capacity for reason and judgment are significantly impaired, (you probably shouldn’t be operating heavy machinery either). It can feel like you’re standing on the edge of cliff. You cling to any possibility of reconciliation no matter how unrealistic or elusive it is, because the alternative feels unbearable. By promising to fix all the relationship’s problems, you put the entire burden of repairing, maintaining, and sustaining the relationship on you. But any relief you may get by cajoling your partner into consenting to try again is usually fleeting. You can’t seal every crack, compensate for every problem the two of you had, especially after taking the breakup blow, because your trust in your ex was damaged in the process. As much as you might believe you can postpone the pain of breakup and single-handedly fix everything that’s been wrong, it’s impossible to maintain the level it would take to do that. Trying to fix a broken relationship all by yourself is a losing proposition. Somewhere within you, you know that; you’re just not ready to face it yet.
- Internal Bargaining
There is another insidious form that bargaining takes: the “if onlies.” In this stage, you replay moments, scenarios, decisions, actions and inactions within the relationship. You ruminate about what you should have done differently to prevent the breakup. The if onlies can be a repetitive, endless, excruciating loop of familiar scenarios where you imagine much happier outcomes. “If only I had picked him up from the airport that day.” “If only I didn’t complain about my job so much.” “Why couldn’t I have just gone on that camping trip?” “Why didn’t I tell her I loved her more often?” If only you were a different person who did different things in a different way! That’s you bargaining with your past self, as if you can alter how time has already unfolded.
Yes, it’s true, I won’t argue with you. Maybe you could have changed the outcome of your relationship by altering things you said, did and felt in the past. Then maybe, just maybe you could have saved your relationship. Meanwhile, back in real life, we have no idea if your theories are true, nor will we ever know, because that’s not what happened. The if onlies are a seductive loop, as what you imagine is so much less painful than what you have to face.
- Relapse
Because the pain feels so unbearable, you may relentlessly pursue reconciliation. “This time it will work,” you just know it – so much so that you might actually convince your ex to try again. (This may not be your first or even second breakup with this person.) By reconciling, you can temporarily relieve the agony of withdrawal, although not without some discomfort and insecurity due to the tenuous nature of the reconciliation. But the amount of pressure that’s now on you to keep the relationship afloat is both unrealistic and exhausting to sustain, fueled by anxiety, insecurity, shame, and even anger, making it highly likely that it will fall apart once again. Relapsing or giving in to withdrawal is another way to avoid the fear of the unknown, i.e., life without your ex. It’s your way of staving off the pain of acknowledging that the relationship is no longer viable. You may not realize it, but you are trying to buy time to avoid the despair that accompanies this loss. Warning: you may need to go through the process of reconciling and breaking up many times before the breakup sticks. We’ll call these false starts.
Anger takes many forms in breakup. The ways it manifests depends on where you are in your grieving process. The main way destructive anger manifests is through blame. Blame is anger in its most insidious, paralyzing form. Blame may be focused on yourself, your ex and/or various other people who may have impacted your relationship. Turned on yourself, blame results in self-disgust. You’re “not good enough.” You’re “ugly,” “stupid,” “fat,” “old,” “useless.” You should have lost weight and been nicer to their friends. The breakup is all your fault. There is no relief, solution, or resolution since you can’t alter an outcome that’s already happened. When you blame yourself for the demise of the relationship, it intensifies self-loathing, shame, and maybe self-destructiveness: “I’m a loser, I deserve this.” You may also be stuck in a cycle of blaming other(s) for the demise of your relationship. It can be very easy to get stuck in a cycle of ruminating about the things your ex did to destroy the relationship, and/or talking about it over and over with anyone who will listen. In a way, this anger expressed as blame may help you to delay coming face to face with the reality that the relationship is over. As toxic as it is, destructive anger is inevitable; it’s a natural part of grief, especially early in your post breakup process. Feeling stuck in destructive anger can feel so unbearable that you may go to your ex to diffuse your anger for you, as if telling them how angry you are about why you believe the breakup happened will release you. Just be aware that remaining stuck in blame means you’re depending on things or people outside yourself to heal. This makes it progressively harder to move through this stage, even if that blame is “justified.”
- Productive Anger
As your anger evolves, it goes from endlessly restricting your quality of life to feeling sick and tired of feeling bad. Your destructive anger begins to morph into being angry that you’re angry. Recognizing how useless your destructive anger has been becomes motivation to alter your focus from things you cannot change, like the end of your relationship, to things you can, like the quality of your life post-breakup.
- Initial Acceptance
Like many of these stages of breakup, initial acceptance is a stage you are likely to visit more than once. In between the waves of despair, during moments of clarity, you are able to recognize that keeping away from your ex (to the best of your ability) is in your best interest, even though you don’t want to. You have enough awareness and self-control, no matter how fleeting, to recognize that the relationship is no longer viable. You recognize the need to exercise restraint when the urge to contact your ex descends.
- Overarching Acceptance
Eventually, as you move through the stages of grief, you will move toward an overarching acceptance that the breakup is real. The relationship is officially over. You begin to put boundaries in place to help you make the breakup stick, because you have to.
- Elusive Hope
Hope is a life force. Therefore, losing access to hopeful feelings about the future is a profoundly desperate feeling. In fact, it is one of the most devastating feelings a human being can experience. When you lose hope, your first inclination is to find a way to resurrect it. But, in reality, the only time you can literally lose all hope is in death, or when death is impending and inevitable. Otherwise, what you are losing is not hope itself, but your access to hopeful feelings. Nonetheless, when experiencing an epic loss like a breakup, the fear of losing “all” hope can overtake you. It can set in motion a series of reactions and responses to re-access this life force in any way you can. Initially, it’s common to try to pre-empt losing access to hope or to try to retrieve it by funneling or redirecting hopeful feelings into reviving the relationship, like the hope you have that you’ll win the jackpot at the slot machines, “this time.”
- Evolving Hope
As the time between the waves of pain grows longer, it really begins to sink in that reconciliation is not an option. You are shifting from the hope that the relationship can be saved to the possibility that you just might be okay without it. As hope evolves, the ripples of realization and despair about your loss will keep coming. But the time between the waves will grow longer, which affords you more time to look around and begin to get your bearings. As you visit and revisit this stage, hope lies in small accomplishments within your control, like clearing some items off your to-do list. Eventually, living beyond breakup can reestablish a more durable connection to feelings of hope not just for existing but for thriving.