Sample Chapter: An Explanation of the Four Phases You Will Be Going Through During Your Break-up

Words from Alex: This is a sample chapter from my ebook “The Ex-Girlfriend Solution” called “A logical progression of emotions – an explanation of the four phases you will be going through.” Read more about the book and purchase it by clicking here.

The loss

When we lose something we care for or somebody we love, we can classify it as a loss. A loss is a loss, no matter how it happened or what it revolves around. The differences only lie in the intensity of your emotions and the time it takes for you to heal.

The more intense the feelings for your loss were, the longer time it generally takes for the healing to become complete. If you lose something that you don’t hold too dearly, your emotions hopefully won’t last for too long.

Example: You have spent a few hours baking a cake. When you take it out of the oven and you smell the sweetness and your start to drool and you just want that first bite so much and you have made everything ready… You drop it on the floor and have to trash it. Even though you will become both angry and sad, you will get over it pretty quickly and can most likely laugh about it just a few hours later.

If you on the other hand lose someone that you love, be it a lover or a family member, that same healing process will take considerably longer. It all depends on your exact feelings towards that person, and because of this, there are no definitive answers when it comes to talking about how long it will take.

When you break up with someone, the healing process can take everything from a few minutes to several years. The more intense your feelings for your ex were, the longer time it usually takes to heal – it’s common sense. And the longer time you had been together, the stronger the feelings most likely were. But the way your relationship ended also plays a crucial key in determining how long the healing process will take.

It’s not you, it’s me

If you woke up one morning and thought that everything was a fairytale, but then got the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech later on in the afternoon from your beloved, the shock effect itself will most likely draw out the process. If, on the other hand, you were the one breaking up and you knew exactly why you did so and had thought of it for a long time, the healing process might not be as long. As they say, it all depends…

But no matter what, your feelings and your healing process is your own and it is entirely unique. That’s the main reason that no one can give you the magic words to make the pain disappear and go away.

The process takes time, and both you and I have to respect that. This is not the time to rush through – if you don’t have the time to give yourself the time you need and deserve now, the pain won’t go away and it will only grow stronger if you don’t acknowledge it.

But even though I don’t believe in quick fixes, there are many things that you can do to make the worst pain go away. The pain that you will live with for the most of the healing process is not the type of pain that will make you want to lie sleepless at nights or kill your appetite – it’s more the type of pain which will appear sporadically. It’s realistic that thoughts and feelings of sorrow and remorse will appear even when you don’t want it. Later on in the book, tools will be presented for you to work with to hold these down and make you get over them rather quickly.

In my experience, when dealing with the loss of a lover, the logical progression of emotions looks like this:

Shock – Reaction – Reparation – Reflection

Let me elaborate:

Shock:

This is the phase where the break-up just happened. Your body and brain will try to shut you down emotionally to help shield you from the first wave of pain, and it usually makes you numb. You either can’t or won’t believe that the break-up happened. Objectivity is far away and your emotions are all tangled up and hard to interpret. This is usually the toughest phase, but also the shortest one. The shock phase usually lasts from 3 to 14 days.

Reaction:

After the shock comes the reaction. In this phase you will be very emotional and have feelings of pain, anger and depression. One minute you will shift between being angry with your ex for stuff that she put you through, and the next you will feel sad and lonely and sit in a corner sobbing. It is in the reaction phase where you look back on what happened and what you could have done differently.

Most guys have a tendency to try to analyze everything in this phase, such as reading back on the last few text-messages to see if they could have seen it coming. The reaction phase can take long if you don’t have the right tools to move forward, but with this book in your hand (or on your screen), it is very unlikely that it lasts for more than three weeks.

Reparation:

The reparation phase is the phase that this book will guide you both to and through.

The reaction phase is characterized with you looking backwards and asking yourself questions such as what you could have done differently. But the reparation phase is characterized by looking forward instead. Now the focus is on getting better and moving on with your life. Glimpses of some of the emotions you had in the reaction phase will still be present, but the intervals between them will be much bigger, and whey they do occur, you will be much better prepared to deal with them.

Just as the other phases, the duration of the reparation phase is determined by the intensity of your emotions to your ex-girlfriend. For some, it can take as little as a few weeks, and for other’s it can take several months. In the reparation phase, light is at the end of the tunnel, and you’re moving closer to it one step at a time. The reparation phase ends when you’re fully able to let go and move on.

Reflection:

The reflection phase is not really a phase of a break-up in the same sense as the others, but I decided to include it anyway. In the reflection phase you have gotten over your ex, and as the name implies, now is the time to reflect.

If you neglect this phase, you won’t learn as much from your experiences as you can if you go through it. It is in the reflection phase that you grow as a person and learn from your mistakes, and hopefully, it lasts a long time; at least until you’re hit with a shock again later on in life, if ever. In the reflection phase you will be able to look back at the break-up objectively, and see where it went wrong so you won’t make the same mistakes twice.

Words from Alex: If you liked this chapter, you’ll definitely like the rest of the book…Read more about the book and purchase it by clicking here.

Image by Meredith Farmer