Should I let my ex see how hard the breakup is hitting me?

By Benny Lichtenwalner, breakup coach & author of How to Get Your Ex Back · Updated 2026-10-10

Short answer: No. Even if you're genuinely struggling, showing your ex how hard it's hitting you reads as pressure and pushes them further away, like visible nervousness on a first date. Grieve honestly with friends or a therapist. Around your ex, including on social media, show the version of you that's handling it, not broadcasting the hardest parts.

It’s tempting to think honesty requires showing your ex exactly how much the breakup is costing you. It doesn’t, and doing it usually works against you. Being authentic about your struggle with a friend, a therapist, or yourself is healthy. Broadcasting it to your ex, or to the version of you they’ll see on social media, isn’t the same thing, and it carries a real cost.

I’m Benny Lichtenwalner, breakup coach and author of How to Get Your Ex Back. This comes up constantly from people who feel almost guilty about not looking visibly devastated in front of their ex, like managing that is somehow dishonest. It isn’t.

Why visibility backfires here

Think about a first date. It’s authentic to be nervous, to want it to go well, to already like the person across the table. You still don’t say any of that out loud, because saying it changes the dynamic and usually kills the exact outcome you wanted. The same logic applies with an ex, just under harder emotional weight. People read desperation and grief accurately, and both tend to trigger distance rather than sympathy, especially from someone who’s already pulling back.

What this actually requires

Grief has a natural arc. The first month or so after a breakup is genuinely the hardest part for almost everyone. After that, most people start regaining a sense of direction and control. Being sad for a stretch is normal and doesn’t need to be hidden from your own life. What changes is whether your ex specifically becomes the audience for it.

What to actually do

1. Let yourself grieve fully, just with people who aren’t your ex: friends, a therapist, your own journal.
2. Take an honest look at what’s actually draining your energy right now (a job, a relationship, a habit) and start changing what you can.
3. Build routines and connections that genuinely make your life better, not ones staged purely for an audience.
4. Keep dating or socializing at whatever pace feels right to you, both for your own sake and so your life isn’t visibly on pause.
5. Let what shows up around your ex be the composed, handling-it version, without performing happiness you don’t feel.

What not to do

• Don’t vent to your ex about how hard this has been, even if they ask. It invites pity, not attraction.
• Don’t fake a highlight-reel life online while your actual day-to-day stays unchanged. The gap between the two eventually shows.
• Don’t put your life fully on hold waiting for them, hoping stillness reads as devotion. It usually just reads as stuck.

A composite case

A client, a composite of a few similar situations, kept replying to his ex’s rare check-ins with long messages about how badly he was struggling, assuming the honesty would land as sincerity. It didn’t. The messages got shorter and further apart each time.

Once he stopped routing the grief toward her and started actually rebuilding: therapy, a new workout routine, reconnecting with friends he’d let lapse, the check-ins from her side became warmer, not because he was performing anything, but because there was finally a real, separate life on the other end of the conversation instead of a running account of how much he was hurting.

For the deeper version of “is self-improvement alone actually enough,” what do I do if leveling up isn’t getting my ex back covers where visible change does and doesn’t move the needle.