Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

by Katherine Woodward Thomas

Out with the old, in with the true. JEFF BROWN

In Step 2, Reclaim Your Power and Your Life, you will: • Let go of being a victim and craft a holistic and accurate breakup narrative that starts you on a path of peace and true completion. • Reflect on yourself as the source of your experience in a way that feeds you power and supports you to grow beyond your painful patterns in love. • Release unconscious and habitual patterns of people pleasing, self-abandoning, overgiving, or tolerating less than you deserve, and begin showing up in ways that are reflective of your true value. • Learn how to make amends to yourself in a way that frees you from the residue of resentment and regret. • Evolve beyond the person you were when you created your relationship and discover how you can truly trust yourself to love and be loved again.

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...

Blame is the creed of the disempowered. STEVE MARABOLI

Questions that will support you to grow and evolve are going to be ones like: “How did I give my power away in this relationship, and what can I do to reclaim it?” “How do I let myself down in ways that are similar to how I feel let down by my former partner?” “Where was I pulling on my former partner to take care of me in ways I was refusing to take care of myself? What has this cost us both?” “What were the lies I was telling myself in order to stay in the relationship?” “How does it work for me to have chosen someone so clearly unavailable?” “What disappointing story from my past is being repeated here, and how have I behaved in way(s) that covertly re-created it?”

It’s important we learn to look at our mistakes straight on, and let the consequences of those mistakes touch our hearts. It’s called an awakening of conscience, and it’s a good thing because it means that you’re becoming a more wholehearted and mature human being. By looking to discover yourself as the source of your experience, you’re essentially becoming a seeker of truth. Not just your own personal truth, which is important, of course, but also truth from an objective, rather than a subjective, perspective even if that means seeing things about yourself that are less than flattering. The rule of thumb: you want to be more interested in developing yourself than you are in defending yourself, more interested in being rigorously honest than being right. Seeing ourselves clearly can be a humbling experience, for sure. Yet, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “You can’t save your face and your ass at the same time.” ASK YOURSELF: “When I stop pointing the finger and look below the surface to examine the actions I took and the choices I made, what can I see about how I am responsible for this situation?”

Making Amends to Yourself To help you evolve beyond being a victim, and start making amends to yourself, I invite you to take your journal and reflect upon the following questions: 1. Who Do You Resent and for What? Notice the resentments you’re holding toward your former partner (and anyone else involved in your breakup) and write them down. Don’t censor yourself, or try to talk yourself out of your suffering, anguish, and rage. Write it down as it lives in your body. For example: “The bastard ruined my life,” “The witch destroyed my capacity to ever trust anyone again,” “That thief stole my final childbearing years from me.” “I hate myself for sabotaging my chance for happiness.” 2. What Can You Take Responsibility for in Each Situation? Step back and shift your perspective. Recognizing that taking responsibility is not an admission that something is your fault, nor the condoning of bad behavior, look to see how you may have contributed to things happening the way they did. ASK YOURSELF: “In what ways did I give my power away to this person?” “Where might I have skipped over my own knowing, dismissed my feelings, or avoided telling the truth and/or asking for clarification?” “How was I trying to get someone to love, want, or approve of me more than I was attempting to make an authentic connection?” “Why didn’t I do what I knew I should have done that may have averted a bad experience, and what made me hesitate to do it?” “In what ways was I selfish, unkind, or even abusi...

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Grab a plate and throw it on the ground. Okay done. Did it break? Yes. Now say sorry to it. Sorry. Did it go back to the way it was before? No. Do you understand?

The antidote to tragedy is learning. ISABEL GILLIES