Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

by Katherine Woodward Thomas

You’ll need to tell the story: going over it again and again and again in your mind, laboriously trying to piece together a narrative that weaves the fragmented, jagged, and ill-fitting bits of memory and information into one cohesive whole. All the signs you should have seen, all the things you should have known, come sharply into focus as the nebulous details of your intimate life come crashing into conscious awareness. Ruminating upon the subtle clues missed, conversations ill timed, and fatal mistakes only now clear in hindsight, you will try to craft a story you can live with and that will go on to become the legacy of this love affair. Most likely your tale will be centered on the multiple ways you were misunderstood, mistreated, devalued, and wronged. It may feature the deplorable ways you brought this heartache upon yourself, as you gather rounds of ammunition with which to torture yourself for years to come. The victimized, blaming, and shaming story of your love will go round and round in your mind, building momentum and gaining traction as you struggle to figure out what went wrong, who is to blame, and why. All this ruminating is to try to protect yourself from its ever happening again, for how can you live in a world where all you hold sacred and dear can betray you in an instant? Where your very identity can be stolen out from under you, and where all you have counted on for your future can disappear in a flash? When you complain, you make yourself into a vic...