Over my years as a therapist I have helped many people experiencing relationship breakup difficulties. Such problems are perfectly natural but can cause enormous distress and we can even get stuck in those feelings. So, why are breakups such a problem?
Why breakup hurts?
Put simply, breakup is a form of bereavement; you have lost a key person in your life. This is still true even if you wanted the relationship to finish. Breakups difference to classic bereavement is that the other person still exists. You might think that this should make it easier, but often it seems to make for more complications. Typical psychological complications might be:
- Rejection – Someone having left you can make a person feel that they have failed in some way. This may be because they blamed you or because you are falling short of your own standards.
- Confusion – At the end of a relationship it is common to be left with outstanding questions. These questions may be related to rejection, or simply not understanding what has happened in the relationship. There may also be larger questions regarding long term patterns in relationships.
- Loneliness – It is strange to go from a place of companionship to one of solitude. Humans are essentially social creatures who bond deeply with partners. This bonding is profound, frequently being at the neurological level with long term partners often synchronising aspects of their brains and physiology. The shock of this bond being broken can be deeply unsettling, even traumatising.
- Loss of the vision of the future – When in a relationship people often construct an idea of the future. When that relationship ends that vision crumbles, leaving the person bereft of their life plan.
- Loss of friendship groups – Often in a breakup a couple’s friends will have to choose sides. Sometimes one partner will find themselves without many friends at exactly the time when they need them most.
Stages of relationship breakup
There are a couple of common ways of modelling relationship breakup.
Time based model
The first is about how recent a breakup is, so it can be:
- Recent – This means the breakup occurred in the last few days or weeks. Typically, a person in this stage of a relationship breakup is still in shock and dealing with the transition from being in a couple to being single. This stage is likely to happen to some degree to everyone who experiences a breakup. How well it goes determines if the person winds up in the next stage.
- Long term – This is when someone gets mentally stuck in their breakup. Typically, we would not consider someone to be stuck in a breakup until several month after the relationship has passed. Being stuck in a relationship means that a person has not yet come to terms with the breakup, usually because they have some unfinished business. Quite often it will present as excessive thoughts about their ex.
The other useful model is Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief and loss model.
Stages of grief and Loss model
This model has been heavily criticized as over prescriptive and likely to cause misunderstandings. However, many of the aspects of loss highlighted by the model are common to relationship breakups. These are presented in alphabetical order:
- Anger – This is most common when a person has been dumped. However, anger can be present when someone has used anger as a force to get them to finish a relationship. The usual cause of anger is perceiving that the Ex took something. This could be; social standing, time, vision of the future, sense of control, the specialness of their connection or any number of other things.
- Bargaining – This is usually bargaining with the past. The mind attempts to solve the problem of the relationship breakup by examining past events and reworking them in what is often described as ‘if only’ thinking. This can be seen as the minds ability to problem solve and learn from experience getting stuck attempting to solve an unsolvable problem because it has yet to actually let go of the relationship.
- Denial – In the context of a relationship, denial most often takes the form of wanting to talk to the Ex in the hope of making them see sense and get back together. Usually this occurs in the recent stage of breakup, but a person can become stuck in it. This results in them excessively rehearsing what they will say to the ex and how it will be in the future. This behaviour is one of the routes which sometimes leads into stalking as the person attempts to force the contact which they feel will re-establish the relationship.
- Depression – This usually occurs when a person begins to accept that the relationship has ended but they have as yet begun to envision a new way of living. This tends to result in a feeling of emptiness. However, depression can also occur through burnout as a result of being in a state of anger or denial for a prolonged period of time.
Help getting through a relationship breakup
As a hypnotherapist I frequently find myself helping people to cope as they get through their relationship breakups. To find out more click here.
The Author
Dr Matt Krouwel PhD is an experienced hypnotherapist and memberships of both the NCH and BSCH . He see clients in his office in Birmingham (UK) and works internationally online.
