Mourning the loss of a relationship is perhaps one of the most painful processes in life. It can feel exactly as grim as it sounds — the grief that comes along with breaking up is sometimes a lot like grieving an actual death. This looks different for everyone — from losing your appetite to binging on food as a coping mechanism, or from having insomnia to oversleeping.
After the inevitable period of mourning, one has to eventually let go. Letting go of someone can feel hard and potentially terrifying, especially if you had a strong emotional attachment to them. Perhaps your ex-partner was a great person, but the situation just wasn’t as great anymore.
However, learning to let go is vital to moving forward in life after experiencing loss. Although it takes effort and time, consciously letting yourself go through this process can teach you essential coping strategies to deal with moments in life where it is hard to let go. With practice, it becomes a part of our emotional muscle memory, thus building the resilience needed to get through similar situations in the future. Beyond that, the mindset of letting go can be freeing. Releasing yourself from old situations, patterns and people you have outgrown can sometimes give you the much needed space to pursue greater things.
Here are the stages of letting go after a break-up and some essential coping strategies you can use if you ever find yourself in this situation.
The Mourning
This period will be heart-wrenching.
When the break-up starts to sink in, the realisation that someone will no longer be in your life (at least in the capacity that you were used to) will send you through the “Five stages of grief”: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It’s a highly individual experience. A person may go through the stages in any order and there is no fixed timeline. The cycle may even repeat itself for a while.
That is completely understandable. You are grieving the loss of many things — the person, the relationship, the past, and the potential future you envisioned with them. Sometimes, you’re also grieving a part of yourself that might have changed because of the breakup.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to hack this cycle, but it is essential to have compassion for yourself during this time. Turn to others for support, seek comfort in familiar TV shows, movies, and old hobbies you once loved. Most of all, let yourself cry for hours if you need to.
When you’re ready, the next step of reflection can help you better process the break-up and help you get started on letting go.
Reflection
While reflecting can feel like a chore, it’s essential to decluttering your mind after it’s been put through the wringer. There are many resources online that provide prompts if you do not know where to start, but here are two from my personal list that were helpful for me in terms of letting go.
- Deconstructing the failures of the relationship
If the relationship did not end on particularly bad terms, we may feel the tendency to hold onto the good things. That is perfectly fine, but can trap you in a cycle with no way of moving forward. Taking off those rose-tinted glasses by acknowledging the faults of the other person and the incompatibilities of the relationship can help us better understand why things ended.
A good starting point would be examining the recurring issues that kept coming up throughout the relationship. Perhaps you didn’t like how they never got you flowers or that they were defensive in arguments. Reflect on what happened, how it made you feel, and what you wished had happened instead.
This may trigger nasty feelings like anger, betrayal and disappointment, but sitting in these feelings and giving ourselves permission to be upset are important in the process of letting these strong emotions pass.
During this process, resist the urge to villianise them for what they did (or did not do). It might feel great in the moment as some kind of post-breakup, trash-talking ritual, but ultimately only provides temporary relief. Attempting to distort that reality prevents one from moving forward authentically.
- An exercise in taking accountability
This may be done within the same process as the above. Taking accountability for the things that transpired in the relationship can be painful but ultimately liberating.
Perhaps you had said something spiteful in the past that hurt the relationship or broke a promise. Reflecting on the role we played in that situation and taking a hard look at ourselves and our faults can be difficult because it hurts our ego. However, owning up to it can help us understand a relationship’s failure better, which helps letting go of a person easier. This also allows us to grow from our mistakes, eventually pushing us to become a better version than who we were before.
Even in situations where it was not your fault, taking accountability for what happened can be healing. Perhaps we ignored certain red flags, were desperate for the situation to work out, or had set certain unfair expectations for people. Accepting that responsibility isn’t the same as accepting blame. Through taking accountability, we get a chance to forgive ourselves.
Action
Action begins with the radical acceptance of one’s situation. Viewing the breakup as a form of newfound freedom is a cliché, but it holds some truth. After the mourning and reflections come the rewriting of a whole new experience that you can potentially have.
While the end of a relationship may feel like a crippling loss, shifting your mindset to embrace the perks of being by yourself can be helpful. You have the extra time, energy and money that you would have previously invested into the relationship, all to yourself now.
Channel all those resources back into your own life. Write a list of things you used to do for your ex-partner and do them for yourself. For example, if you used to cook for them, dedicate the same attention and care to cook a delicious meal for yourself (and don’t skimp on presentation!) If you used to give them back massages, book an appointment and get yourself a well-deserved pampering session.
It can seem a little silly at first, but the act of ticking the list off one-by-one is a conscious practice of self-love, which reflects positively on how you feel about yourself. Recentering yourself as a priority in your own life through building self-esteem and self-sufficiency can help you let go of old relationships and crutches that you once relied on.
Ultimately, the process of letting go may be a tough and long one, but what stands at the end of it is not just moving on from someone. It’s gaining the invaluable skill of emotional resilience, and rediscovering who you are, which is as terrifying as it is exciting.