Abandonment Universal Stages Of Grief Each of these stages affects a different aspect of human functioning and calls forth a different emotional response. They overlap one another as part of one inflexible process of grief and recovery. Here is a brief overview of the stages of abandonment grief. 1. Shattering: The painful tear in your attachment, a stab wound to the heart.The sudden disconnection sends you into panic, devastation, shock, and bewilderment. You feel symbiotically attached to your lost love—as if you couldn’t survive alone. You’re in crisis and feel as if you’d been severed from your Siamese twin and you were in the recovery room in pain and alone. You try to keep remnants of your fractured self together, but your whole sense of reality feels destroyed. One minute you succumb to the overwhelming despair, suicidal feelings, and sorrow. The next, you see glimmers of hope. 2. Withdrawal: Love withdrawal is just like heroin withdrawal—each involves intense yearning for the object of desire, and this craving is mediated by opioids within your body. You feel a painful aching, longing, needing a love fix and can’t get one. You feel strung out. Your mind incessantly waits for your lost love to call or return. You’re plagued with separation anxiety—an expectant, urgent feeling of heightened vulnerability. Physical components of withdrawal from love are the same as they are for withdrawal from heroin. You’re in withdrawal from your endogenous opiates as well as suffused with fight-or-flight stress hormones. Your withdrawal symptoms include wasting, weight loss, wakefulness. 3. Internalizing: You begin to turn your rage over being rejected against yourself, which accounts for the intense depression that accompanies abandonment.You idealize your lost love at your own expense, indicting yourself for losing the most important person in your life. You internalize the rejection, interpreting the dismissal as evidence of your alleged personal unworthiness. Internalizing is the "I" in the middle of the process — the eye of a hurricane wreaking destruction on the self. Internalizing is the most critical stage, when your wound can become infected, scarring your self-image. You inculcate a narcissistic injury. Your self-doubt has the power to implant an invisible drain deep within the self that insidiously leaches self-esteem from within. You have grave doubts about your ability to hold someone’s love and blame yourself for the loss. Old feelings of insecurity merge into your new wound, creating lingering insecurity. Without recovery, this feeling can interfere in future relationships. 4. Rage: You attempt to reverse the rejection, expressing rage over being left.You are restless to get your life back in order and riddled with low frustration tolerance, your anger spurting out of control. You resent being thrust into aloneness against your will. You regress into fantasies of revenge and retaliation.Your aggressive energy is like a pressure cooker. You boil over easily, sometimes spewing anger onto innocent bystanders (like your friends when they fail to understand what you’re going through). Many of you who have difficulty with assertiveness tend to invert your rage into an agitated depression. 5. Lifting: Life begins to distract you, lifting you back into it.You experience intervals of peace and confidence. Abandonment lessons are learned, and you get ready to love again. Without recovery, though, some of you make the mistake of lifting above your feelings, losing touch with your emotional center, becoming more isolated than before.