Disrupting an approval automation

Currently we run our approvals through the same task

Here is the scenario :

The designer posts their email file, they then change the status of the task from "in progress" to "internal review" after all approvers in internal review approve it automatically moves to external review. After external review is completed the task status changes to Complete.

My PM went into the external review status and changed it to complete before all reviewers had marked it rejected or complete. This "erased" (from the stream) the people who were assigned to review that task externally. She wanted to be able to go into the stream and see who had been assigned and was unable to do that because the approval automation had been stopped. Is there a way around this? We would only mark something completed before approvals were done if we were verbally told it was approved and to move it forward. Hope this makes sense, thanks!