Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

by Katherine Woodward Thomas

You want to let the agony you’re in wash you squeaky clean of every unconscious, fear-driven, and habitual way you’ve shown in life as a dimmed-down, inauthentic version of yourself. You want to take your hurt and transform it into a huge commitment to realize your potential for liberation, health, happiness, contribution, and the fulfillment of love in your life.

“What intention can I set that will support me to use the pain I’m in to transform my life in positive ways?”

you want to be more interested in developing yourself than you are in defending yourself, more interested in being rigorously honest than being right.

It’s often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.” JEFFREY EUGENIDES

DAMN!

Beliefs are relational—meaning, we created them in relationship with those we loved and depended upon the most. We didn’t just pluck these stories out of the ether. Something was going on between you and your mom, or you and your dad, grandma, or weird Uncle Jim that was wildly painful and confusing, and beyond your capacity to comprehend. Given that, as a kid, your main developmental task was to form a sense of who you are and where you fit into this world, it’s understandable that you would make whatever was happening mean something about you. It’s only when you revisit the conclusions you came to with the rationality of an adult who has an enhanced capacity to hold complexity and nuance that a more sophisticated and accurate picture can emerge. You must go back to rescue the younger you from that wacky and distorted hall of mirrors. Because the meaning you made about yourself and your life—that you are bad, not wanted, not loved, too much, not enough, powerless, and/or destined to be alone in life—is simply not true.

And here is the truth, plain and simple yet hard to understand and wrought with complexity. So, there's only one thing to do, get to work!

We have to stop asking why this is happening to me and start asking why it is happening for me. AUGUST GOLD

No matter how psychologically savvy you’ve become over the years—able to recite your issues backwards and forwards, stating with great accuracy exactly what happened to you, when it happened, who it happened with and why—until you learn those specific skills and capacities that will allow you to create a more satisfying experience of love, you’ll stay stuck repeating the past.

“Beginner’s Mind.” It’s softening into an inquiry toward all you don’t yet know, valuing uncertainty over certainty and vulnerability over the protection of looking good. You look to identify the specific skills and capacities that would set you free, and commit to learning them as if your life depended upon that, because in many ways it does.

“How can I relate to myself in way(s) that would demonstrate the truth of my value, power, and worthiness to love and be loved? What new skills and/or capacities might I need to develop to show up this way?” For example: “I can begin paying attention to my own feelings and needs before automatically tending to the feelings and needs of others. The skill I would need to learn is to better gauge what my feelings and needs are.” “How can I relate to others in way(s) that demonstrate the truth of my value, power, and worthiness to love and be loved? What new skills and/or capacities might I need to develop to show up this way?” For example: “I can take the risk to share my authentic feelings and needs with others so that I can discover who cares about me, and who doesn’t, and to know which relationships to continue to invest myself in. The capacities I’d need to grow are (1) the ability to tolerate being more vulnerable and (2) expanding my willingness to receive.”

“How can I relate to life in way(s) that demonstrate the truth of my value, power, and worthiness? What new skills and/or capacities might I need to develop to show up this way?” For example: “I can raise my expectations and begin asking for what I truly want and need in life. The capacity I’d need to cultivate is the ability to hold a bigger vision for my life, stretching my picture of what might be possible for me beyond what was possible for the women in my family.”

Devaluing love once shared is like snubbing the sun at sunset, pretending the garden that grew in the warmth of those rays is now just a basket of plastic flowers.

One or both of you may have made mistakes that exposed fatal flaws you failed to notice or minimized before now, but that doesn’t mean what you had was untrue or held no value. Longevity is not the only measure of love.

Reverend Dr. Michael Beckwith says, “Pain pushes until the vision pulls.”

This isn’t about winning a war. It’s about giving up the idea of war altogether, and going the extra mile to make sure everyone wins moving forward. The truth is, at this point, it doesn’t really matter who’s right and who’s wrong. It doesn’t matter who hurt who more. It doesn’t even matter if you can’t agree on the reasons your relationship is ending. What matters is that you seek to bring closure in ways that help all involved to thrive when they get to the other side of this disappointment.

Grief does not change you. It reveals you. JOHN GREEN

Rumi once said, “It looks like the end, it seems like a sunset, but in reality it is a dawn.”

Conscious Uncoupling is about mindfully generating well-being for all who may be impacted by your breakup, carefully creating cohesion and alignment in your extended network of family and friends, and helping everyone to adjust to the new status of your relationship.