The Stages of Recovery from a Broken Relationship (otherwise known as, “My Heart is Snapped in Two,
You haven't eaten properly in days, maybe weeks. All you can think about it is the person you've been in love with and living life with. You can't get them out of your head, no matter how hard you try. Your friends tell you to move on. They invite you out for fun occasions to get your mind off of things, but you know you're bad company, so you sit home raging, and crying until your eyes are swollen, and your fridge is empty.
The first reaction after a breakup, even after only a few dates, is, of course, hurt. There is pain. It is legitimate. You might wonder why love hurts so much. It hurts because there has been both a physical and a spiritual bonding. Even a relationship of a few weeks or months can have a powerful pull. Two hearts have joined. Two souls have spoken in silent awe. Two mouths have shared, words, and kisses. Energies have been intertwined. Love is a tapestry that is woven every moment of every day in a relationship. The longer it goes on, the more complex the chords are that bind us to another. To tear that asunder is naturally painful. There are holes, where once there was wholeness. There is space where once there was fullness. There is silence where once there was laughter.
It is natural to feel grief. Let is flow through you. Let your tears run down your face. Howl. As the other person (or yourself) extricates their energy from that tapestry, you will feel like something is being ripped apart, because it is. The bonds are being forever rendered into new patterns, and you are not in control. Expect feelings of abandonment, and confusion. How could he do this to me? I thought she was my twin flame. Over time, just as the cells of your skin knit together to close a wound, the desperate, firey pain that you feel will start to fade. It will diminish from a constant, debilitating stream of angry, hurt-filled thoughts, to ones that surface first 50 times a day, then 30, then 24, and so on, like the slow breaths of a dying man. The pain will little by little lose its power and drive. As humans, we instinctively avoid pain, because it’s a sign of injury. In the case of a breakup, the pain is something you will need to accept, no run away from or avoid.
Beware of a tendency to engage in more frenetic activities that take you away from this deeply important time for reflection and healing. If you find yourself spending very little time alone at home, or bingeing, on TV shows, alcohol, or hobbies, you may be running away. Let yourself sit in the space of hurt. Avoiding it will only increase its power within your life, but will do so in ways that can be undetectable until the damage is done. You don’t have to wallow in the pain, that’s not healthy, but there’s a fine line between becoming more active to stimulate some joy in your life, and staying super busy in order to avoid the more intense emotions that you’re experiencing. I you cry for three weeks straight, and then cry a little every day when you are alone, that is normal. You are experiencing life. You are not dying, although it will feel like you are.
Another emotion you may feel, which will often coincide with the stage of hurt, is anger. “How could he do this to me? I trusted him!”. Or, “He led me on. If he wasn’t interested, why did he act like he was?”. Or, for long-term relationships, “She’s so selfish. She’s narcissistic. I trusted her. I can’t believe she would do this to me”. You feel victimized at this stage. You have been hurt. You are indignant. The other person has wronged you. That is often where many hearts lie after they’ve been left. They stay in this place of abandonment, never moving into the next period, which is spiritual awareness and growth. The great sages strive to skip these two steps, and see the process as one of learning and growth, without the more primal reactions, such as hurt and victimization. There are lessons in each and every experience we have in life. The pain and the confusion provide gifts. This may be difficult to comprehend when we’re in the throws of such intense, powerful emotion, but if you can see past the immediate fog of sadness, there are treasures waiting for you to discover. Succumbing to the tendency to want every story to have an antagonist will trap you in a cycle of negative emotions. Getting to the next stage after the grief has subsided is an important step to avoid wallowing in anger.
Another element of this period of grief and anger may be a desire to reunite with your loved one. You’ll simultaneously experience anger at the circumstances surrounding your breakup, and a deep feeling of ‘missing’ them. The memories of intimacy, laughter, and closeness can be overwhelming at times, and you may find yourself exploring the option of getting back together. I caution you to do this during this time. Take time to weigh the pros against the cons, and to honor what it was that separated you in the first place. If you belong together and the other person is willing, the time will come, but pushing someone who has stated that they wish it to be over, or pulling yourself away from this time of reflection, belies the importance of the restorative period where you each find your balance again.
If your partnership continues to diverge and you each honor the agreement to go your separate ways, the next stage will be acceptance. Acceptance is the portal to a happy future. If you’re longing to reunite, then you’re not living in the present, you’re living in an uncertain no man’s land, one that doesn’t exist except in your imagination. Life is best lived wholly in the present. Once you’ve accepted that you will not be a couple anymore, but a single human, you can begin to work on weaving a new life for yourself. Acceptance helps you move past anger toward your ex, which enables the love that still exists between you to flow. As you probably already know, even when you’re sad, and frustrated at someone whom you love, this doesn’t always cancel out the love. Love is a very powerful, cleansing emotion, and being able to experience that without judgement and negativity as you heal, can diminish how long it takes you to knit yourself back together, so to speak.
Once the period of intense grief and anger has simmered down to a dull ache, and acceptance has set in, your contemplation can lead you to begin exploration of the spiritual lessons within the experience. As you develop your emotional strength, you’ll find that these lessons can be explored during a tumultuous emotional episode, and can be the medicine to help process emotionally charged periods.
One overriding lesson that can be explored within each experience is the profound truth that there is no separation. In other words, “he is me”, or “she is me”. The idea of oneness, if you really dive into it, makes little sense if you subscribe to the ideas taught to us by mainstream society. We’re taught that they are physical boundaries that separate us from the person in front of us. From a spiritual perspective, quite the opposite is true. Think of it this way: You have co-created the very situation that you’re in, and the person who is “doing it” to you is actually doing so at your soul’s bidding. Whatever they are “doing to you”, is quite possibly being done by you, either to yourself, or in other aspects of your life. If you see someone else’s actions against you as an invitation to explore your spiritual relationship with the world, you will stop seeing others as your enemy, but actually, as an aspect of you, brought together to help you grow. This is sometimes referred to as mirroring.
Here’s an example: Someone who you’ve been dating, stops calling and asking you out. You’re not sure why, or whether he or she is sincerely disinterested, or just busy. There seems to be a breakdown in communication. This person is not using words to communicate, but rather, actions. When something like this happens, which is ‘hurting’ you, It is always beneficial to ask yourself where in your life you are engaging in the same patterns. So in this situation, ask yourself if you ever fall prey to the tendency to use silence as a way to send a message, or do you ever shy away from sharing your feelings because of fear of hurting someone? Most of us are guilty of exactly the behaviors which we resent in others, but we don’t always see it in ourselves. Seeing it in another helps us begin to address this particular issues in our own lives.
This is also an opportunity to witness the pain that can be caused by this behaviour, so that you can place yourself more quickly and easily in another’s shoes when you are deciding how to handle communicating with others. It is advisable to practice compassion toward another who is doing anything that make you feel hurt. Seeing them in a humanistic perspective will shift you from, ‘he’s hurting me”, to, “I wonder what drives him to choose that path”. This will help you dig more deeply into your own patterns, because when judgement waits, ready to bang the gavel, there is less likelihood that you will search your soul due to a feeling of not being “safe”. Shame and fear are powerful drivers and often prevent us from engaging in a healthy way within the more difficult emotional events that occur in our lives.
Another way to ease feelings of victimization within a breakup is to recognize the autonomy of the other person. We can fall prey to the tendency to need a particular outcome to the point of forgetting that there is a whole life in front of us that someone is trying to live. We may no longer factor into that person’s life. They have a right to walk away. We do not own another. We cannot and should not try to control their experiences in order to further our own gain. This becomes more difficult to keep in our vision when children are involved, since fear is a very persistent driver within the sphere of parenting. Worrying about how you’ll support them, and whether the other parent is doing their part, will bring you into a space of duality, which can be very damaging to the children’s sense of wholeness and sanctity. As hard as it may sound, trusting that they will be okay, will feed into this probability, and will help you stop seeing the other person only in terms of what they do for you or your children. Just as you want the freedom to make choices and to control your life, you need to offer this to the people in your lives.
Recognizing that someone’s role in life is not solely to provide “for you”, (there is a distinction between providing ‘for’ you, vs supporting and nurturing each other within the relationship) can be coupled with an awareness that you can provide some of what you want from others, yourself. This is part of reweaving the tapestry and repairing all of those tears that the breakup caused. If you miss being able to discuss spiritual topics with a partner, start spending more time reading on topics that interest you in this area, sign up for a book group, or join a spiritual circle. If what you’re looking for is affection, ramp up your affection toward yourself. Get a pet, such as a cat or dog, which provides ample opportunity for love through touch. Some people never really see being alone as an opportunity to engage in affection and self-love. There does not have to be someone there for you to spend time experiencing eroticism and touch. If being with another person makes you feel secure and you don’t feel safe without them, try to determine what it is in your life that is making you feel insecure and consider some remedies, such as putting extra locks on your doors, or living with a roommate instead of alone. Transitioning out of a relationship means learning how to enjoy life on your own again. This does not mean you don’t want to share these things with someone else, it just means that you should work on building a joyful, full life without a partner, so that when you meet a special person, you are bringing your healthy, joyful life to the table, instead of just your needs and expectations.
A final, and very powerful concept for healing, is to see the love instead of the person. See and honor the eternal nature of love, instead of the finite nature of the relationship. If you see each relationship as an experience of love, one moving into another in a conjugal flow, the love itself becomes the focal point of your awareness, instead of the people with whom you shared the love. Becoming aware of this manner of witnessing the love relationships in your life will help you connect to your deeper awareness of the power and permanence of love. Yes, there is a sense of loss in terms of losing the relationship, but the recognition of the eternal nature of love can live side by side with the pain, and over time, will help improve your ability to focus on the gifts and lessons provided within the relationship. Those gifts continue for the rest of your life, and with proper introspection and reverence, will improve your functioning within any future relationships.
It is not impossible to come out of a broken off love relationship happier and stronger. It takes time and discipline. Searching for the deeper spiritual lessons within the experience not only helps ease the pain, but also keeps you centered, so you're less likely to lose your balance from the upset and difficulty associated with transitioning to being single again. Keep your eyes and heart on the lessons, honor the person you've separated from, even if they've 'wronged' you, and don't be afraid to celebrate as well as grieve the love you've shared.