Stages of a Break Up: How to Get Over Your Ex-Boyfriend
If you’ve recently broken up with your boyfriend, you’re probably experiencing a whirlwind of emotions. You’re not only overcome with pain and grief from losing the person you care about most, but your dreams of a future together are shattered. You must now face your fears of starting over alone or with someone new. You may find you have difficulty trusting others. You may experience an identity crisis and wonder who you are now that you’re no longer part of your relationship.
In her book, “On Death and Dying,” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined the five step process people experience when dealing with grief such as a terminal illness or catastrophic loss. These steps, which often can be experienced simultaneously, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Here’s how this plays out during the healing process of a break-up.
Phase 1: Denial
Just after you’ve broken up, you’ll go into shock and start panicking. You’ll think “Why did he do this to me?” and “Will the pain ever stop?” You might begin chasing your ex, begging him for another chance, calling or emailing repeatedly, Facebook stalking him, or asking mutual friends to mediate contact.
As you obsess over the loss of your ex, you’ll neglect yourself, your home, and your work. You’ll talk nonstop to your friends and family about the break-up, about how wonderful your ex was, and how you can’t imagine life without him. You start to glorify your ex – talking up all the positives while forgetting all the things he did that drove you nuts.
While you praise your ex, you’ll start to berate yourself. You’ll see yourself as a loser who can’t keep a boyfriend and managed to mess up the best relationship you’ve ever had. You convince yourself that you’ll never love anyone else as much as you loved your ex, and that somehow the amount of suffering you’re going through proves how much you loved him.
Phase 2: Anger, Bargaining, Depression
As more time passes, you start to realize you may have lost your ex for good. You may feel angry because “he didn’t know how good he had it” and “you can do so much better.” You may try to convince yourself that you never loved him and that your ex was to blame for the relationship’s demise. You feel betrayed that your ex didn’t live up to his words – after all, how could someone who loved you and told you that you’d always be together turn around and hurt you so badly – and that leads to bitterness. Was it all a lie?
Your suffering intensifies when you start to hear about how your ex has moved on with his life or worse, jumped back into the dating world and found a new girl. Ironically, this girl seems to be similar to you in many ways. You wonder if this could be a rebound relationship, and you start plotting ways to get your ex back.
At this stage, one of two things may happen: Your ex completely avoids you or he takes you up on your proposal for no-strings-attached sex. Neither of which is what you want. Aside from being your ex’s booty call, you might try to bargain for your ex’s attention in other ways, like being his “friend” and offering emotional support. If he’s dating someone, you’ll start comparing yourself to your ex’s new lover. You lose weight, get fit, change your hair, buy new clothes and other things to make yourself look great so that when your ex sees you, he’ll have to be impressed.
When none of this works, you’ll become depressed and start researching ways to “get your ex back” or “survive a break-up.” You’ll learn about cutting off all contact with your ex to give yourself time to heal. This will be the hardest thing you’ll have to do, but because you realize nothing else has worked, you might as well give this a shot. You vow to no longer contact your ex or receive any contact from him.
During this time, you’ll have your moments of weakness when you drunk dial your ex, shoot him an email or text, or accidentally run into him in person. You are patient with yourself and realize that while you’ll slip up along the way, this is the only way you can heal. At this point, your ex may wonder what happened to you and contact you – or he may be happy that you’ve finally given up on him.
Phase 3: Acceptance
As time passes, the heartache you experience will slowly lessen. You’ll start to look back at your relationship to learn from your mistakes. You’ll once again be able to acknowledge that you loved your ex. You’ll be able to see where your relationship was great and the negatives that led to its demise. You’ll see your ex for who he truly was and accept why he wasn’t good for you.
You’ll also start to realize that by holding on to the anger, bitterness, hurt and frustration that you feel towards your ex (and towards yourself for any “stupid” things you might have done), you’re only hurting yourself. You’re the one holding onto the obsession and misery. It’s all in your head. All those hours you’ve wasted thinking about your ex and how you wish things were different – he isn’t affected by it. All the negative energy you keep bottled up inside is only damaging you. So you’ll accept reality, forgive your ex and yourself, make peace and then let it go.
Then, one day you’ll be walking along and smile when you realize you haven’t thought about him all morning. Or that you forgot your cell phone so you can’t check to see if he called, and you’re ok with that. You’ll start picking up the pieces of your life – getting things organized and back in order. You’ll accept dates with new guys and realize life goes on.
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