By Sheila Marina, Planet of Peace Energy Healing
The relationship is over.
Maybe it ended loudly — in a moment you will never forget. Maybe it ended slowly, so gradually that you can’t quite identify the day it became something else. Maybe it has been over for years in every way except officially, and you are only now finding the courage to name what you already know.
However it arrived, you are here. And something in you is grieving.
This post is for you — wherever you are in that process. Whether the wound is fresh or whether you have been carrying it, quietly, for longer than you want to admit.
You may have heard about the five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — the framework that has helped millions of people understand why healing is not linear.
What that framework doesn’t fully capture is this: the stages rarely arrive in order, they often circle back, and the timeline is entirely your own.
What appears consistently, across every person I have sat with who is moving through the end of a relationship, is something subtler than a stage. It is a story — one the person is telling themselves about what the relationship meant, what its ending means, and what it says about them.
That story determines everything.
He was 42. He and his wife had not been intimate in six years. They had long since moved into separate bedrooms — he into the basement, where he also worked from home. By the time he came to see me, they had agreed to sell the house and go their separate ways.
He had expected to feel relief. Instead, he was mourning.
Twenty years, he told me. Twenty years of his life. His youth. His hope of becoming a father. He had stayed, and tried, and waited — and now he was looking at the wreckage of those years and telling himself they had been for nothing.
In his session, we followed his body’s intelligence back to the day he was married — his 24-year-old self, standing at the beginning of those twenty years. What we found there was a cluster of trapped emotions rooted in an interaction with his brother. Pain that had lodged in his body on that very day and traveled with him through every year of the marriage that followed.
When those emotions were identified and released, something remarkable happened. His language changed. The story he had been telling — twenty wasted years, nothing to show for it — began to shift, mid-session, into something looser and lighter. He began to speak differently about what those years had given him, what he had learned, who he had become.
The facts of his situation were identical. The story his body was holding had changed.
He left feeling freer than he had arrived.
Here is what I want every person in the middle of a breakup to hear:
The pain you are feeling right now is there as a messenger. It is asking to be acknowledged, to be felt, to be moved through. It is a sign that something mattered — that you brought your whole self to something real.
It is entirely okay to connect with that pain. To feel the feelings fully. They are part of your journey, and they carry information about who you are and what you value.
And — the pain is not a sentence. It is not the final word on who you are or what your life will be.
There is a phenomenon that every person who has moved through genuine loss eventually experiences: one door closes, and something begins to move toward them that they could not have imagined while they were standing in the wreckage of what ended. Something better. Something more aligned. Something that required exactly the journey they took to become ready for.
Trust that this is true for you. Even when — especially when — you cannot yet see it.
This is the question I hear most often. And it deserves an honest answer.
The timeline of healing is shaped, more than anything else, by the story you are telling yourself.
In the early days, it is entirely healthy and necessary to look backward — to revisit, to feel, to process. The mind is doing important work when it replays and examines. Honor that.
A little later, you will begin to notice something: other thoughts start entering the space. Small ones at first. A moment of curiosity about the future. A morning where the first thought is something other than the loss. These are signs that your inner landscape is reorganizing. They are worth noticing.
What supports that process more than almost anything else is writing.
Keep a journal. Write about how you are feeling every day — or multiple times a day, whenever the weight arrives. Here is why this works at a deeper level than most people realize: the glide of the pen across the page adds to the release. The movement of the hand while the thoughts dictate creates a physical channel for what the subconscious mind needs to express. Writing in this way — freely, without editing, without judgment — allows what is held inside to move outward. And what moves outward releases its grip.
You will feel lighter. Not all at once. And consistently, over time.
Sometimes the pain of a relationship ending is amplified by something older — an emotional wound from long before this person entered your life, that this ending has reactivated.
The man in the basement was not only mourning his marriage. He was carrying something from his wedding day. From his relationship with his brother. From his 24-year-old self, standing at a threshold with unprocessed pain already lodged in his body.
This is more common than most people realize. A current loss can open a door to older losses — inherited emotions, childhood wounds, generational patterns around love, worth, and belonging.
When that is the case, understanding why emotional patterns repeat even after genuine effort and reflection can offer meaningful grounding. The body holds more than the current story. And releasing what it holds changes the story from the inside.
If you feel ready to explore what your body may be carrying beneath the surface of what you are moving through, sessions are available in person and via Zoom. You are welcome to arrive exactly as you are.
Sheila Marina is the founder of Planet of Peace Energy Healing and a certified Emotion Code, Body Code, and Belief Code Practitioner with over 35 years of experience. She sees clients in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom. planetofpeace.org
