by Natalie Lue
This stage is normal and expected but it is the judgements you make about yourself and trying to hide away from your feelings that can lead to full depression that can greatly affect your life. You may feel very down but you may not actually be experiencing depression in its fullest sense – it’s when you continue to feel down over an extended period of time and you can’t seem to pull it back, that you can find yourself needing to take action which may include seeing a professional.
UNDERSTANDING THE NC GRIEF STAGES: ACCEPTANCE
WHAT TO EXPECT
One day you realise that you can think about them without your heart sinking to the floor.
You suddenly realise you’ve been so busy and happy that you haven’t thought or even dreamt about them for a while.
You’re making and realising plans.
You feel quietly happy about yourself.
There may be a little sadness but nothing that pulls you down – you know that you did the right thing.
If they attempt to contact you, it doesn’t feel like the sky is falling in.
You don’t think of yourself as NC; you’re just living your life.
You’ll stop trying to be The Good Girl / Guy doing the right thing for them and instead doing the right thing for you.
You’ll stop trying to be friends with them or making plans to be friends with them in the future.
You won’t feel angry or sad whether it’s towards yourself or them – you’ll find yourself increasingly at peace. Period.
You’ll stop wishing that things had been or were different.
You’ll stop trying to rationalise the irrational.
You’ll no longer want to fix things or wonder what it would be like to get them back and have the relationship that you wanted.
The blame shrinks or completely disappears. You won’t blame them for everything because you’ll be accountable for your own contribution and focusing on your own efforts to create better relationships.
You’ll realise that despite your worries your worst fears haven’t been realised, you’re OK.
You’ll accept the way that it ended and not worry about what coulda, woulda, shoulda happened.
You’ll accept the relationship and realise it’s OK. You’re here, you have a different path in front of you, and because you’ve accepted, you have the power to adapt your love habits, create boundaries, love yourself, and create a better experience.
During NC when you're very aware of the end of your relationship and a lot of your efforts are focused around making sure you don't get in touch with, or accept contact from, the source of your pain, you will find yourself moving back and forth between the various stages of grief but you will, if you remain committed to yourself and moving on with your life, get to and stay at acceptance. It’s not necessarily going to hit you like a sledgehammer and instead it tends to creep up on you and you’ll find that you stop resisting moving away from this relationship.
This stage shall set you free. Accept that you will experience the other stages first. Remember that moving back and forth amongst the stages is natural – it is your way of processing what has happened and digesting the reality.
GETTING THROUGH GRIEF
Denial
-- Keep it real about the events and the people because you can be objective and move through any anger that results. It will also stop you from persecuting yourself with blame and shame.
-- Deal with your fears. Whatever you're afraid of, what you do already know is that doing the same things will continue to make you realise your fears. Get them in proportion; don't let them rule you and drive your relationships because it's a big wrecking ball.
Anger
-- I cannot recommend Unsent Letters highly enough. These are an opportunity to write out your feelings and process your thoughts so that you can cleanse yourself of the anger and gain perspective. There’s a free and very detailed guide and worksheet available from my site. The chief objection to Unsent Letters is always about it not being ‘as good’ as telling the person all about themselves but beside the fact that very few people are going to accommodate your desire to pour out your anger on them, you’re doing this to help yourself and move on.
-- If you don't want to spend a lot of time feeling angry, indignant and screwed over, don't screw yourself over by having little or no boundaries. It doesn't work. You already know this.
-- Learn to say no and you'll discover the sky won't fall down. No is not a dirty word. You will simmer with burning resentment if you say yes to everything with the expectation that people will treat you better. Write down what you need to learn to say NO to – these are examples of boundaries.
-- Ask yourself what you would do if you were to continue to stay angry? When I was NC and asked myself this, I couldn't think of an answer. It occurred to me I'd probably think about being angry and wonder if the other person would see the light and yada, yada, yada, and I realised that I wouldn't be doing anything other than stewing in my own anger. That is only going to affect me.
Ask yourself: 'If I'm going to stay angry, what am I going to do?'
-- Accept what has happened so that you can accept your anger and come out of the other side of it. You could fritter away the rest of your days being annoyed and wanting the person you're doing NC on to change but you're trying to control the uncontrollable. Remember – they have their own comfort zone and what you'd like them to be would take them out of that, and clearly they've resisted.
-- You will continue to feel angry with this person who has disappointed you if you keep expecting them to do differently to what they have consistently done. I wouldn't bank on NC making them see the light.
-- Forgive yourself. That means letting go instead of obsessing and getting stuck. If you start being a doer – the whole point of NC – you'll start to see that you're doing good by yourself, which makes it a hell of a lot easier to let go of whatever has happened and forgive yourself.
-- Break the cycle of your anger – deal with your fears, learn to confront situations that make you angry so that you don't feel powerless and berate yourself and lower your self-esteem. Holding on to and getting stuck in anger is stopping you from embracing your more positive self and we all have one in there that we need to nurture so we can welcome the good in our life.
-- The key to working through anger is to gain perspective and perspective doesn’t come from blaming yourself – it’s about owning your own stuff, letting them own theirs, and not doing the whole ‘one false move’ thing where you think if you hadn’t done that one thing, nothing else would have happened. It wasn’t all them, it wasn’t all you, and the net result is that your relationship couldn’t continue.
Bargaining
-- Don’t negotiate with your dignity and don’t make bargains based on bullshit. Don't bargain with assumptions that have no basis other than a wing and a prayer!
-- Some bargaining can allow you to see your way to a constructive solution but make sure it's a constructive solution that has a healthy, uncompromised you in it.
-- If you have to continue to have your boundaries busted and basically make a radical departure from who you are, you're bargaining yourself into pain.
-- The best type of bargain you can make with yourself, is something along the lines of:
You know what? I'm going to give myself 3 months where I'm totally focused on me and getting on with my own life and if I still feel a burning desire to be with them after that (you won't), I'll revisit the situation then.
Depression
What you must remember is that you’re human, you love, and you want to be loved. And like everyone on the planet, you don’t always do things that are in your best interests and you sometimes do things that you term ‘mistakes’. That doesn’t make you a failure as a person and part of the issue of why people get stuck in the anger stage is because they punish themselves by reliving what they think are their ‘failures’ and wallowing in a pit of blame.
Support yoursel
f. Knowing that you’re going to feel down for a time is also a heads up to support yourself. Be compassionate and empathetic. Listen to yourself and work your way through the feelings. Allow yourself to feel this.
You don’t have to snap out of it but at the same time as supporting yourself, you have to be willing to recognise where you might be being pulled into something deeper. This means you may have to keep plugging away at doing normal stuff and resisting the urge to cut off entirely.
This is a good time to write Unsent Letters.
It’s also a good time to rely on your support network or reach out to find new ones.
Recognise the blessing in disguise. Loss is hard but you might be only focusing on one facet of this and not recognising how much you’ve gained. If you only focus on the loss, then you’re going to feel depressed but if you look in the other direction, you’ll actually see that you have so much to be thankful for and this in itself can represent a turning point.
But most of all, accept that like all of the other stages this stage too shall pass. Keep working your way through accepting the loss of the relationship and you won't act on any bad bargaining ideas.
Acceptance
Even when you reach this stage, you may find that you get caught off guard by feelings or memories. Don’t freak out, you’re just clearing out.
DON’T SCRATCH THAT ITCH!
UNDERSTANDING YOUR COMPULSION TO MAKE CONTACT
When I correspond with people who feel a near compulsion to make contact with their exes, they conjure up excuses to send a text, agonise over whether to send a birthday card, worry about what their ex might think about the fact that they are not supposed to be thinking about him/her, and they will have gone through regular periods of cutting contact, albeit maybe more fleetingly. Many people who embark on NC cut contact physically, as in they don’t see or speak with their ex, but they remain mentally connected by moving into obsessing. This is effectively like conducting your relationship in spirit on an alternative planet.
Obsessing about your ex and analysing the coulda, woulda, shouldas of the relationship is about looking for reasons to blame yourself, which also become reasons to find a way to try to ‘fix’ things, which in turn also keeps you emotionally invested in the person and the relationship.
Of course, if you are literally consumed by your thoughts and feelings for this person, you’ll not only fail to move on, but you’ll end up being trapped/hijacked by your own feelings and overbusy mind, which pretty much means that your ego is running the show. This situation arises due to chasing unhealthy thoughts (I had a thought so I must feed it with negativity/fantasy) and due to finding it difficult to come to terms with difficult emotions, especially any that open up old wounds. You keep doing things to stem the feelings and thoughts, which keeps you locked in pain.
It’s very difficult to gain objectivity, perspective and a sense of reality if you’re submerged in an underworld of illusions. You’ll feel intrinsically tied to him/her irrespective of whatever pain you’ve been through and then you’ll become convinced that having them in any way, shape or form is better than not having them at all in your life. It’s the some crumbs is better than no crumbs philosophy.
And so you will opt back in to the cycle and likely make contact and lather, rinse, repeat until something else happens to cause you to feel like you have to find a way out of the relationship. After opting out, these feelings and thoughts will pop up again and if you keep responding in the same way then you’re going to wind up in the same problems despite the fact that you know how this story goes. And lather, rinse, repeat.
Not only will you be trapped by your feelings, often feeling paralysed, unable to do anything or to resist the compulsion, but you may feel isolated.
When you’re really consumed and preoccupied by a person, very little around you makes sense and it can feel like this person has to be reached out to because they’re the source of your pain but also appear to be the source of your happiness, plus it seems like they’re the only ones who can truly ‘understand’ what you’re feeling. You might reason that reaching out is making sense of these feelings (even though it’s not) so it’s this idea that each time you reach out that you’re going to get better and ‘strong enough’, when actually, it’s going to get worse. There might also be this underlying logic that the feelings and thoughts are about them hence they’re the only ones who can resolve them. This is an avoidance of your responsibility to make sense of your own feelings and thoughts and to also manage them.
You want to place your feelings somewhere. You want them to have a purpose, an outlet, some meaning and when something feels so incredibly consuming to you, you can become fixated on doing things that you think will get them to give you what you want or will at least prevent some sort of unfavourable outcome (like being ‘forgotten’) and then you’ll do things off the back of this that you are likely to regret further down the line.
No Contact is difficult. The reward doesn’t seem immediately obvious because it feels like you’ve made a difficult decision and been ‘rewarded’ with pain. Particularly if you’re constantly fighting yourself, you’ll struggle to recognise what the reward is because you’ll perceive the ‘absence’ of him/her from your life as ‘punishment’. You’ll associate the feelings of loss and grief with being penalised and particularly if you already have very negative associations with disappointment from childhood or previous experiences, you will struggle with this concept of having to say NO to you. You may feel very tormented by your emotions and thoughts.
Unfortunately by isolating yourself in your feelings, you’re putting yourself into emotional purgatory.
When this happens, the likelihood is that you have a habit of validating yourself based on your success or lack of it with your relationships, so when your relationships end, it feels like you’re broken. You’re heavily reliant on external validation so your identity is very vulnerable and you’re likely to feel invalid when you stop trying to pursue a relationship with this person and will internalise the reasons as to why the relationship ‘failed’ or the person didn’t act as you wanted, turning these into you being a failure. You may not even know why you want what you want, you just know that you feel like you want it because of the fact that things haven’t worked out in the way that you expected.
Being trapped by your feelings and thoughts means that you struggle with rejection and disappointment and in fact may see them as one and the same.
We choose partners that reflect the things that we believe about ourselves, love and relationships, and if we’re carrying a lot of negativity, we’ll find ourselves with people who exacerbate our worst fears and beliefs. The classic example of this is being afraid of abandonment and then finding yourself with partners who disappear on you or who keep abandoning the relationship and are completely disloyal or who you feel totally insecure around so are constantly afraid of ‘screwing up’, which leads to people pleasing. The danger in having a lack of self-love is that if we seek validation in others, when we are alone, we’ll panic, and quickly try to go back to the original source for some familiarity because we lack personal security and don’t have the means to meet our own needs, expectations and wishes.
If you’ve kept going back to a relationship, you don’t know how to, are afraid of, and are unprepared to deal with loss. In fact, you may be hypersensitive to loss, and rather than actually work your way through it, you just avoid going the whole hog of feeling the loss. This means that you may have a lot of loss piling up, so each time you experience hurt and loss, it reopens an old wound. This is why it hurts so much and you quickly try to shut down or avoid the feelings.
Avoidance of feeling the pain and professing fear of it, is about dodging the full extent of your feelings and thoughts about the loss, abandonment and any perceived rejection.
Hard as it may be for you to hear, the fact that you avoid feeling something to the fullest extent, doesn’t change the reality. The relationship is still over,
you still need to grieve it, and you’ll still feel rejected, even if it’s not actually a rejection of you. However, the difference is that you’re prolonging your own agony and suspending yourself in limbo and this is why you’ll end up being stuck in an illusion being completely distanced from the reality. You won’t see the reality of your ex and they’ll recognise this because you need to live a lie so that the reality doesn’t pierce it. If you have expectations of them and no doubt communicated this through actions and words, they know that you’re not being realistic about who they are because if what you expected matched who they are not who you would like them to be, you wouldn’t be around them anymore.
Burying your feelings as a coping mechanism is shutting down and will affect your emotional, mental and physical health, which has a knock-on effect in terms of how you cope with stress, general life and even boredom.
At times it might feel as if you’re trying to swim through quicksand. Plus, while you’re ‘stuck’, they’re getting on with their own life or have even moved on with someone else. The more you attempt to avoid dealing with your own thoughts and feelings and the more you keep trying to control the uncontrollable and ‘prevent’ whatever it is that you think that your feelings and thoughts are telling you, the more pain you end up in. The more exposed you are to being and doing things that you will later come to regard as embarrassing, the more you get sucked down the obsessing rabbit hole because you have an increasing number of things to feel blame, shame and regret about and if you don’t force yourself to step back, impose some boundaries, help yourself and even get additional support, this can spiral unnecessarily.
