4. Grief, Separation, and Partner Search | Consonance (Gleichklang)

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Grief, Separation, and Partner Search | Consonance (Gleichklang)

The end of a partnership means a loss in many ways. In the long term, however, such critical life events can also have positive consequences and open up new life perspectives. Grief, separation, and partner search are closely connected. In this chapter, you will learn how to find out when the right time has come to search for a new relationship.

The loss that accompanies the end of a partnership can manifest itself individually in different ways. Often there is a loss of closeness, familiarity, and togetherness – the point of reference suddenly disappears. Emotional and also material security can be lost. Shared activities are no longer possible. Sometimes even one’s own life plans are abandoned. Previous life goals lose their context or seem no longer relevant. Unprocessed feelings and conflicts with partners can often no longer be resolved. Burdensome feelings of regret, shame, anger, hurt, and bitterness can be the result.

However, there are also positive consequences of grief and separation, but these are often not immediately recognizable because they are overshadowed by feelings of loss, are not in focus, or only manifest themselves in the long term. Nevertheless, they exist. New life perspectives with new experiences can open up. Entrenched ways of thinking may be questioned and changed. The question of how life should be shaped may arise anew. The need for compromise and possibly excessive accommodation falls away. Now there is room again for new things and change. A new social network with new social relationships may emerge. A deeply dysfunctional, hopeless, or even violent relationship may also fall away.

Loss Through Death

Verena Kast (2009), building on the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (2014), developed a phase model of grief for loss through death.

The basic assumption is that grief can be successfully processed. However, according to Kast, successful grieving requires passing through four phases sequentially and completely.

1. State of shock: At the beginning, the grieving person is in a state of shock. Denial and refusal to accept occur. The shock overlays the processing and leads to the suppression of the loss.

2. Intensely emerging emotions: This is followed by a phase of intensely emerging emotions with high intensity. Grief, pain, loneliness, fear, anger, and rage shape the experience. Feelings of joy and relief can also occur, but typically they are accompanied by feelings of guilt. This is followed by self‑reproaches for things left undone. Wrestling with one’s own fate is also often observed in this phase. Negative feelings and stress dominate. Emotional‑mental processing is clearly narrowed, and openness to new paths is not yet present.

3. Grief work: The third phase can be described as searching, finding, and letting go. It is about consciously feeling the connection with the deceased and experiencing it intensely, visiting places, having inner dialogues, and looking at keepsakes. This process is accompanied by both positive and negative feelings. Those affected learn to get in touch with their feelings, to deal with them, to allow contradictory feelings, and to integrate them. In the best case, this results in coping with the grief and reconciliation with the loss.

4. Reorientation: This is followed by the phase of acceptance and new beginnings. The loss is now accepted, and active redesign of life begins. Life goals are considered. New possibilities are recognized and implemented. The deceased is not forgotten, but the loss can be accepted, processed, and integrated into life, so that space is created again for change and further development.

The model recommends that those grieving confront all phases and, especially in phase two, the phase of intense emotions, not suppress these feelings but allow them in order for successful coping to be achieved.

Kast’s model is often experienced as helpful by those affected, but it certainly does not reflect all individual grief processes. Overall, phase models in psychology that assume a necessary sequence of fixed states have proven insufficiently complex to describe individual processes.

Grief processing and coping can take very different individual courses. In fact, grief can come more in waves than in phases, and forward movements as well as backward movements are always possible. The extent of reorientation and change after grief processes also differs greatly.

Nevertheless, the model is helpful for understanding and shaping one’s own grief process and can serve as a thinking model to help you determine whether and when the right time for a new partner search has come.

When Can a New Partner Search Begin?

Starting the partner search is still premature if you are only in phase one or two. If you have not yet faced the loss or are still completely overwhelmed by intense feelings such as grief, despair, guilt, perhaps even hatred and anger, this could negatively affect a new relationship.

There would also be a danger that your partner search would be guided too much by negative feelings or by your desire to bring it to success as quickly as possible. This may lead to unfavorable partner selection (missing opportunities, getting involved with the wrong person) or to unfavorable relationship building (transferring unprocessed grief to the new partnership).

At the same time, the grief could remain unprocessed and catch up with you later.

But you do not need to wait until you feel no more grief. The stronger the love was, the more often feelings of grief will not completely dry up even after decades. They can keep coming back. However, if you have processed these feelings sufficiently, they no longer endanger your inner stability and ability to form relationships.

Only you yourself can determine when the right time for partner search has come. You will notice it when the focus on loss and the past diminishes and your interest increasingly turns back to everyday life, when you begin to engage with life goals again, and when the desire for a new relationship arises and grows stronger.

Even if grief is still strong, you can already begin your partner search if coping and reorientation have made progress.

Loss Through Separation

The loss of partners through separation shares many similarities with loss through death.

However, there are also special features:

Contact with the other person remains possible, sometimes even necessary. A separation initiated by one partner may also have been accompanied by particular hurts, while a self‑chosen separation can lead to feelings of guilt and regret. Difficulties may arise in taking responsibility for ending the relationship. In addition, legal disputes regarding custody and maintenance may arise.

But just as with grief through loss, separation also involves achieving processing and coping:

In the short term, what is lost often stands in the foreground. Strong feelings of despair, sadness, or fear occur. Rumination, refusal to accept, self‑reproaches, anger, annoyance, jealousy, hatred, withdrawal from activities and friends, complete cessation of contact with ex‑partners, avoidance of memories and associated places, or, conversely, tendencies toward stalking behavior can occur.

In the medium term, however, with successful processing, a reorientation with acceptance of the loss can occur.

Positively, a separation loss can also be a starting point for taking stock of the relationship, setting new goals, and recognizing options for action.

Hobbies and social contacts can be activated, and distance can be gained from self‑reproaches and blame‑shifting. Sadness and fear, but also hatred and anger, can be overcome, and a realistic assessment of mutual contributions to the failure of the relationship can be reached.

Once the loss has been processed in the long term, memories can be allowed, and you may even be able to enjoy positive memories. An integration of the loss into your own inner model of your biography has now been achieved. Reconciliation as friends is often possible, and occasional melancholy, longing, but also anger and rage can be accepted.

Just as with grief, there is no universally valid rule for how separation processing must proceed. Instead, diverse individual courses with forward and backward fluctuations are possible in reality.

By actively engaging with what happened, allowing your feelings, but also realigning your everyday life and goals, you can prevent yourself from remaining in a phase of despair, grief, anger, or rage that could otherwise turn into lasting bitterness.

For a new partner search, you are ready – similar to grief after death – when you notice that reorientation has already begun. When you begin to accept the loss and look to the future, you open yourself up again to a new relationship. Now your partner search can begin.

What Can Endanger the Coping Processes?

Loss through death and separation have always been part of human life. Correspondingly, we humans basically have a repertoire to cope with and accept these critical life events.

Nevertheless, coping does not succeed in every case, and some people fall into deep depression or still struggle with their fate after decades.

The reason for this is often that dealing with one’s own feelings has been avoided, so that the necessary prerequisites for coping could not develop. On a cognitive level, acceptance of the loss may also be refused and the necessary reorientation neglected. Moreover, in separations involving conflict, there can be a persistent suppression of one’s own contributions and a dysfunctional focus on the question of blame. This can lead to bitterness.

Do you recognize yourself here, and have you not yet succeeded in processing the loss?

Do not despair, but give yourself a push to break free from fixation or bitterness. Look for pleasant perceptions and experiences in your everyday life and direct your attention to them.

Imagine a fulfilling new relationship and a worthwhile future. In your imagination, say goodbye once more and let the other person go. Or give the person a fixed imaginary place in your memory or in your everyday life that does not overlap with your orientation toward the future. In some cultures, it is customary to symbolically live with the dead, so that a loss through death loses its terror. You can learn from this.

But also have the courage to seek help if processing does not succeed. It is never too late for help. Even after years and decades, processing losses can still be possible through psychotherapeutic treatment. With the help of psychotherapy, you can become free for new perspectives. In that case, you should postpone the partner search a little longer until you are ready.

Has the Right Time for Partner Search Come?

Test yourself:

• Have you already overcome intense, overwhelming, and everyday‑life‑impairing feelings of despair, grief, fear, hatred, anger, or rage, or at least no longer feel helplessly at their mercy?

• Are you able to accept the loss as a fact and live with it?

• Do you want to reorient yourself and do you wish for a new relationship?

You answer all questions with yes or rather yes?

Nothing stands in the way of a search for a new partnership!

How Partner Search Can Support Coping

So far, we have only discussed how the processing of grief and loss can influence partner search and when the right time to start partner search has come.

In fact, conversely, partner search can also make an important contribution to processing grief and to reorientation:

• In a content‑analytic study, Young and Caplan (2019) examined the free self‑descriptions of 241 widowers and widows looking for a partner on the dating platform Match.com. They found evidence of grief processing strategies that can help with grief processing by giving meaning to the loss, developing opportunities for change from the loss, and creating a vision for a new partnership. However, such strategies were found much less frequently in the 280 profiles of divorced people seeking a partner. At least: both in the case of loss through death and among divorced individuals, there was a positive correlation between mentioning the loss in the free self‑description and naming a vision for a future partnership. Engaging with the loss thus seems to have a forward‑looking function in this sense.

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