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October 15, 2023
What the heck is a Conscious Uncoupling? This is what I told them: a Conscious Uncoupling is a breakup or divorce that is characterized by a tremendous amount of goodwill, generosity, and respect, where those separating strive to do minimal damage to themselves, to each other, and to their children (if they have any), as well as intentionally seek to create new agreements and structures designed to set everyone up to win, flourish, and thrive moving forward in life.
In the Tibetan language, the word karma is literally las.rgyu.abras, which means “action-seed-results.” Ken explains
Conscious actions and choices may not give you the euphoric high of revenge, but neither will they grow poison oak in your backyard. They can, however, grow you a bountiful and beautiful life.
The goal of a Conscious Uncoupling is not necessarily the restoration of justice, the attainment of restitution, or the vindication of being right. The goal of a Conscious Uncoupling is to be free. And to move forward from here empowered to create a happy, healthy, and fundamentally good life for yourself and those you love. As such, we strive to take all that is ugly and rotting, and turn it into compost to grow beautiful lives.
The word generous shares the same root as genesis and generate—gen, which means “to give birth.” A generous gesture initiates new life, giving birth to beautiful beginnings and liberating us from the cycle of reactivity and retaliation.
where there is no light, you have the choice to become it.
the negative bias of language when it comes to the end of a relationship. Phrases like breaking up, splitting up, on the rocks, dumped, finished, and kaput, with our poor children now coming from broken homes, perhaps because of some shameless home wrecker, leave a lot to be desired. And of course, there’s also the offensive title of ex, which rhymes with hex, ejects, wrecks, and vex, and is reminiscent of x-ing something out to delete it forever from our lives. However, the phrase conscious uncoupling in and of itself opens up a world of possibility for breakups moving forward,
It is my hope that these steps will become guideposts in the process of healthy separation, in much the same way that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief are a roadmap to help us understand the emotional process of loss and grieving.
Studies show that, no matter how many good times you may have shared before your breakup, a hellish end will soil your recollection of the entire relationship and color your perspective on love in the future. And though you may be far from considering your next relationship at this moment (consumed as you are with the loss of this one), I caution you that your next love affair will not begin when you meet your next lover, but with how you end this one.
Conscious Uncoupling is not a quick and easy fix to heartbreak. Nor is it a spiritually superior path that will magically spare you from any and all suffering. Suffering is appropriate when facing the loss of love.
When you are walking through the blackest of nights, and journeying through the thick of the woods, all there is to do, really, is to learn to love the silent softness of the moonlight, as Life miraculously finds a way to light your way home one step at a time.
An oft-quoted study called “The State of Our Unions” from Rutgers University suggests that only 38 percent of married people in America describe themselves as happily so. Apparently, we don’t leave our relationships all that easily. We tend to tough-out the hard times, rolling up our shirtsleeves when things get rough to try to make a good go of it. Yet, after doing all we can to make the relationship work, many of us will eventually choose to terminate the union.
If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were. KAHLIL GIBRAN
Doing Conscious Uncoupling Alone It only takes one to consciously uncouple. Your ability to use this breakup as a catalyst for your profound awakening does not rest in the hands of your former partner. Even if he or she is behaving like a beast, you are not bound to behave in kind.
Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them. PAULO COELHO
Truthfully, most people do this program alone. The two of you are breaking up for a reason, and most likely you have different ideas about how things should be done. This is nothing new. If your former partner is not choosing to do this program with you, it may be that he or she doesn’t value growth and development in the same way that you do.
Conscious Uncoupling does not necessarily advocate for staying friends after the end of the relationship. Rather, it stands for clear completion so that you are free to move forward in life unencumbered by false hopes, ambivalent attachments, and/or dimmed down dreams.
Something has been broken and it is more than just your heart.
In fact, studies indicate that those in the midst of a painful breakup show the exact same brain patterns as those undergoing the death of a loved one.
Usually the eating away of engagement happens when one partner undergoes a shift in core values. He or she grows to care about things that are foreign, and perhaps even somewhat threatening, to their partner, widening the gulf between them until eventually it is too cavernous to cross, leaving one or both too alone to be inspired to continue.
The Alarming Absence of Safety If love provides us shelter from the storms of life, where can we turn when our most intimate relationship becomes the menacing threat? Our romantic relationships are the sun we orbit around, the air we breathe, and the very home of our heart.
In his book Emotional Intelligence, author Daniel Goleman explains what happens when we’re hijacked by the reactive part of our brain during a life-threatening event, which the brain can perceive a breakup to be. As alarm bells go off, urgent messages initiate the release of fight-or-flight hormones that mobilize movement before rational thought.
What can support us in de-escalating such live-wire emotions in a healthier way is a surprisingly simple practice: labeling our feelings. Research shows it is highly effective at helping us respond rationally when in the midst of stressful life experiences.
psychologist Dr. Matthew Lieberman of UCLA spearheaded a study where he and his colleagues scanned the brains of thirty people who were shown pictures of faces expressing strong emotions, such as sorrow and despair. Initially, activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that is associated with fear, panic, and other intense emotions, increased dramatically. Yet, when people were able to connect a word with a facial expression, such as the word anger to describe an angry face, brain activity decreased significantly. Dr. Lieberman concludes that the ability to label our feelings “seems to
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Rather than your feelings having you, you instead can have your feelings.
When you’re willing to be with your experience, simply naming your feelings and needs without frantically trying to get rid of them, you’re practicing what Buddhists call “mindfulness.” It is neither passive nor active, but a deep honoring of your own humanity as you come to terms with the vulnerabilities of having a heart that loves.
put your grief to good use.
Effective grieving, however, turns the love you’ve been giving another toward yourself. You can begin tending to the soft spots of your own tender heart, causing a bittersweet breakthrough in your ability to love yourself even when someone else refuses to. When you use the sheer force of your sorrow to crack open your heart, it promises to drop you down into a deeper capacity for compassion and care for all living beings. You become initiated into your own humanity in a way that connects you to all life.
Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh likened anger to garbage, yet recognized that it takes garbage to make compost, and compost to make a flower: “I recognize that there is garbage in me and I am going to transform this garbage into nourishing compost that can make love appear.”
If you’ve been particularly co-dependent in your relationships, putting other people’s feelings and needs before your own, withholding the truth for fear of upsetting others, unwilling to ask questions or set proper boundaries, all for the terror of being abandoned, then your rage is like the life-affirming cry of a newborn who is smacked into its first deep breath. Something in you is waking up, and you want to nourish that life-giving impulse and bring it into the light of day to fully make it your own.
We assume psychological health to mean we are self-regulating and self-sustaining, without the pesky need for other people getting in our way. Yet, nature is not aligned with this perspective, suggesting instead that we are interdependent creatures who rely upon each other by organic design.
of a puppy when she is taken from her mother. First, she will whine, then cry, and then search frantically for Mama before finally collapsing into a passive state of depression and despair, mirroring the behavior of a person in the grip of grieving the loss of an attachment figure.
Though we may believe that slipping into a depression is bad, it can actually mean you’re heading in the right direction by grappling with life on its own terms, as you crawl your way toward grief’s final resting place: acceptance.
Stop pushing to get rid of sorrow too quickly with a steel will.
If you’re like many, all your life you may have been sidestepping solitude, going to remarkable lengths to avoid being left alone—throwing yourself under the bus time and time again to make sure that someone would always be there to help you pick up the pieces. Yet, why not now let that someone be you?
ASK YOURSELF: “What commitments do I wish my former partner had made to me that I can now make to myself?”
You can’t believe everything you think and feel, especially now
Feel the feelings. Drop the story. PEMA CHODRON
Though a crowd of lies comes pounding on the door of your consciousness, trying to explain the mess you’re in, it’s the adult part of you that can sort through the confusion to make more empowered meaning of your experience.
1. Name Your Assumptions.
2. Challenge Your Assumptions.
3. Offer Yourself Wise Lessons of Life.
I promise you, you’ll heal.”
4. Create Your Mentoring Mantra.
ASK YOURSELF: “What words of comfort, strength, wisdom, and love can I say to mentor and soothe myself when I’m feeling overwhelmed?” “What can I do to demonstrate profound levels of self-care in this time of heartache and hurt?”
In 1995, Dr. Lawrence Calhoun, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, coined the term “post-traumatic growth” to describe resilience that not just allows one to come back from a crisis but to come back changed for the better. “It’s not about being resilient,” he says, “Resilience is when you get punched, stagger, and then jump right back up. Post-traumatic growth is different—when you stand back up, you are transformed.”
Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
There’s no better time to take a stand for your life than this very moment.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. ERNEST HEMINGWAY
STEP 1 SELF-CARE SUGGESTIONS (Take at least 2 each day) 1. Keep a journal that is for your eyes only. Write out your rage, disappointment, indignation, embarrassment, sorrow, guilt, and horror. Let yourself express the entire spectrum of your emotions, censoring nothing, judging nothing, and turning away from nothing. 2. Move your body, even if it’s just for a few moments. Walk, stretch, run, swim, ride your bike, do yoga, jump on a trampoline, skate, lift weights, bounce a ball, dance, etc. 3. Listen to music that mirrors your emotions and sing along at the top of your lungs. 4. Look for
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