I have issues with this model. I have no doubt that the strategy "works," but I think it lacks a coherent model of why it works. So the recommended strategies are unnecessarily rough or negative, in my view. One thing I agree with in the article is that a heartbroken person is experiencing grief.
Grief is a state that about replanning, essentially. We all have a very nuanced and complicated set of subconscious plans to get all the things that are important to us. Everything from basic survival to social status, we have a model of how to consistently get in our lives. Friends, family, work, personal habits, all of these things interweave to create a complete system for our lives being okay according to us. Of course this can go wrong--we can get stuck believing that key things will never be better, and sink into depression--but I'm talking about psychologically healthy people.
But then sometimes those key factors in your life go away. You lose your job or your mom dies. Well, woven throughout your psychology maybe you were relying on your mom being a bedrock source of safety and support, among uncountable other subtle effects you emotionally anticipated your mom would have on you life. And then she dies, and all that goes away. You don't have a ready replacement for practically any of it--the bedrock of support, the unconditional love you once emotionally leaned on, perhaps. And so you grieve. You reimagine, from a very deep emotional level, what your life will be like. And at first it's almost too painful to bear, because at that moment it just feels like you simply won't have the many gifts from your mom for the rest of your life, and that is terribly painful.
So you go through a complex process of "figuring out," mostly subconsciously, how you're going to get that stuff. Social support gives you hope that maybe you can find support and love in a way that make things ultimately alright. Funny movies give you hope about feeling happy in the future. Remembering her, having a personal relationship with a strongly felt sense of her you still carry with you give you a sense that she may still be a source of wisdom. You lean more on your other family or friends for the same.
In the happy case, as time goes on, most of everything gets solved, and you come to feel like you can live and have a good life without her. The rest stays with you in quiet moments of missing that never fully go away, in my experience.
So this is the same during a bad breakup. You put a lot of your future hopes and dreams on the partner you no longer have. And now it feels like all that is gone forever, and it's devastating. The process is the same though -- you go about the business of reimagining your life from the ground up, being okay with living in a world where you and your now-ex aren't together.
So of course if you get stuck romanticizing them forever, you never quite get over the feeling that something irrevocably lost. One workable strategy is to think of them in a bad light, to consciously say to yourself: they weren't that great, here are all the reasons. And this works. It works because it prompts your mind to consider other options for how your life might go. But one pitfall of the strategy is that it doesn't actually require you to think of better options, it just hints at it. So some people doing the strategy will successfully convince themselves that their ex sucked, but also have absolutely no other emotional options for feeling hope about the future. That's a rough place.
But a different strategy is more like "they WERE great, but also other people can be great, and they can be great in ways I don't currently know, but I can be excited to find out."
Most social support after a breakup involves friends telling you everything will be fine, and you'll find someone better, and anyway the ex was a jerk, so no big deal. Stuff like that totally plays into a healthy process of grieving for the life you thought you were going to have, ie. reimagining that life as a different but equally good or maybe better life.
So yeah, one place to get stuck is failing to let go of the one conception you have of how your life can be good, that was totally predicated of your relationship with your ex continuing.
Another way it can go wrong is if you just refuse to process it at all. You drink yourself into a stupor when it comes up, for example. Sure it blocks the pain, but it also blocks the process of reimagining. And if that's your main coping mechanism you're just drawing out the pain longer, maybe permanently (not to mention the damage many substances do to your body).
So the "real" answer, according to me is that you have to encounter your own pain in a mindful way, acknowledging what is lost and how much it hurts, while staying just ahead of it and questioning the strong feelings that say "nothing can replace this, everything is bad forever." Is it really true? Can you imagine a way that it might not be true?
And yes, staying connected to your social support system and the other things in your life that actually are working, instead of just crawling into a hole of despair and laying down to die.
Grieving is hard, but it's important, and you can't avoid it. Either you face the pain with courage and intelligence, or you let it eat whatever potential for goodness was once there. Either way you have to wrestle it.
I'm leaning toward the idea that grief is a response to a shattering of a worldview. The Kübler-Ross model was developed not based on people who'd sufferred loss of a loved one, but had been informed that their own health conditions were terminal.
Having to rebuild the ordering system of your world is profoundly painful, especially when there is no clear new system to replace it with. Cultural traditions about life events, particularly loss, ease this, IMO, assist with this.
Its transitions which are unexpected and unsupported which are most painful.
Grief is a state that about replanning, essentially. We all have a very nuanced and complicated set of subconscious plans to get all the things that are important to us. Everything from basic survival to social status, we have a model of how to consistently get in our lives. Friends, family, work, personal habits, all of these things interweave to create a complete system for our lives being okay according to us. Of course this can go wrong--we can get stuck believing that key things will never be better, and sink into depression--but I'm talking about psychologically healthy people.
But then sometimes those key factors in your life go away. You lose your job or your mom dies. Well, woven throughout your psychology maybe you were relying on your mom being a bedrock source of safety and support, among uncountable other subtle effects you emotionally anticipated your mom would have on you life. And then she dies, and all that goes away. You don't have a ready replacement for practically any of it--the bedrock of support, the unconditional love you once emotionally leaned on, perhaps. And so you grieve. You reimagine, from a very deep emotional level, what your life will be like. And at first it's almost too painful to bear, because at that moment it just feels like you simply won't have the many gifts from your mom for the rest of your life, and that is terribly painful.
So you go through a complex process of "figuring out," mostly subconsciously, how you're going to get that stuff. Social support gives you hope that maybe you can find support and love in a way that make things ultimately alright. Funny movies give you hope about feeling happy in the future. Remembering her, having a personal relationship with a strongly felt sense of her you still carry with you give you a sense that she may still be a source of wisdom. You lean more on your other family or friends for the same.
In the happy case, as time goes on, most of everything gets solved, and you come to feel like you can live and have a good life without her. The rest stays with you in quiet moments of missing that never fully go away, in my experience.
So this is the same during a bad breakup. You put a lot of your future hopes and dreams on the partner you no longer have. And now it feels like all that is gone forever, and it's devastating. The process is the same though -- you go about the business of reimagining your life from the ground up, being okay with living in a world where you and your now-ex aren't together.