Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

by Katherine Woodward Thomas

you are either going to throw in the towel and contract from life in order to protect your heart from this kind of hurt again, dooming yourself in the process to living a lesser life, or you are going to find a way to use this tragic experience as the opportunity to cultivate greater wisdom, depth, maturity, and a deeper capacity to love and be loved.

If you’re willing to use the pain you’re in to flush out the falsehoods you’ve been tolerating for far too long, and emancipate yourself from the painful patterns you’ve been unable to face until now, it’s for you.

If you’re ready to use this shocking loss to break your heart open, expanding and enlarging your capacity to authentically love yourself and others in the process, it is for you.

What love stories can we even point to where living happily ever after included a kindhearted, honoring breakup, and where the love that was shared changed forms and was blessed and celebrated by all?

shame differs from guilt in that guilt is something we’re more likely to feel when we violate our own core values, disturbed that something we have done is fundamentally bad and wrong. Shame is what we feel when violating external rules and expectations that society imposes upon us, and it leaves us feeling that we are fundamentally bad and wrong. When we feel vulnerable to the negative judgments of others because we believe they’re covertly assessing our “defects,” even if they do it ever so nicely and with pity in their eyes, we can easily slip into a deep, dark sea of shame.

Expectation has been called “the root of all heartache,” and certainly, failed expectations are often the root of deep confusion and inner chaos, as well. For our minds lose their footing when our reality doesn’t live up to the way we thought things should go. Just as surely as if we were lost in the woods with no clear path in sight, we can become disoriented and even paralyzed with panic about what to do next to find our way back to safety.

Setting aside the escapist fantasies we have of the lives we wish we could live and move toward a more wholehearted vision that’s relevant to the lives that we do actually live.

Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right. MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

“What wisdom have I gained?” and “What have I learned about love that I can now apply moving forward?”

For learning to live happily even after, finding a way to forgive the unforgivable, and to move forward in life graciously with hope in our hearts and goodwill in our gestures and in our words, may very well be the essence of what it is to truly love each other.

Hope

hurt people hurt people.

Truer words were never written/spoken

the rage and hatred we can feel for someone who we recently loved with all our hearts is actually “an evolutionary relic from the past,” and it is simply nature’s way of helping us to separate from that person and disengage from the relationship.

Love’s opposite is not hatred, it’s indifference.

Hate is just as strong a bond as love, and will quickly make a negative bond of a positive one, keeping us just as tied to our former love as we have ever been. The bonds we form are a continual exchange of energy that keep us interested, invested, and engaged with one another, whether that engagement be positive or negative. They are the underlying emotional synergy we share that goes way beyond speaking with or seeing one another.

as the brain is a social organ and hardwired to stay connected, it’s not necessarily prone to letting go easily of a primary attachment. In the brain’s world, better to have a negative bond than the existential death of no bond at all. And so, even if you know deep down inside that leaving is the right thing to do, even if you have five times as many bad days together as good ones, even if the lies between you are making you physically sick, the brain still doesn’t want to let the relationship go.

Yet once the pain of staying in the relationship has surpassed the fear of leaving it and the decision to break up has been made, the brain can still hold on for dear life in a number of ways.

One way the brain may try to do this is through a highly contentious and nasty separation, where both people feed each other a steady diet of hostility and disdain, upping the ante on lowlife behaviors, and where one or both people become obsessed with winning and/or getting revenge. This negative engagement can go on for a lifetime if the brain is left to its own devices.

So tangled together is your psyche from theirs that it seems nearly impossible to get it all straightened out. What opinion belongs to you, what belief might be theirs, and what goal is yours to keep or to give back—all can be hard to unknot.

Hard to tell where they end and I begin.

until we get busy with the very proactive task of healing heartbreak, and take steps to initiate the alchemy of making something beautiful of it, the agony of lost love can and often will steal years of happiness from our lives, just as surely as severe illness or acute physical pain can do.

There is a movement in the therapeutic community to have Prolonged Grief Disorder, also referred to as Complicated Grief,

Complicated Grief is described by the Mayo Clinic as a chronic, heightened state of mourning characterized by numbness, intense longing, irritability, purposelessness, depression, and a lack of trust in others. It’s being stuck in the quagmire of lingering regret, sorrow, and shame, with life as void of joy as it is of hope that things will ever get better. You will be vulnerable to experiencing Prolonged Grief to the extent that you have previous tendencies toward anxiety and depression, or your breakup shocked and took you by surprise. It can also hit you if the way things went down between you and your former partner validates your worst fears about yourself, or your grief is compounded by previously unresolved losses you’ve suffered along the way.

Broken hearts, like broken legs, need a lot of tending to in order to properly heal. Unless, of course, you don’t mind the possibility of your heart’s healing a little too crooked, a little bit closed, a whole lot defensive, and way too easily bruised moving forward from here. That’s the heart’s equivalent of walking with a limp for the rest of your life and feeling pain every time it rains.

I like this analogy

It’s one thing to lose your beloved, and another thing entirely to lose yourself.

Every way that you’ve given away your power, denied your own deeper knowing, put someone else’s feelings and needs before your own, stayed embedded in a victimized story, or settled for less in life—all of it is now up for review. You have nowhere to hide. Life has broken you open and it is violently, mercilessly forcing you to evolve, to develop, and to grow. In the immortal words of the great Leonard Cohen, “There is a crack in everything./That’s how the light gets in.”

Beautiful insight

You know when you come across one of those empty shell people and you think, what the hell happened to you? Well, there came a time in each one of those lives where they were standing at a crossroads. Some place where they had to decide to turn left or right. This is no time to be a chicken shit.

The only way to outrun the sorrow of losing the attentions and affections of the person you have loved is to use the fierce and fiery pain of it to catalyze your own awakening and propel you to become the person you were born to be.

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.

I like the idea of this.

at the heart of all attachment is fear regulation, and our closest relationships serve the purpose of calming us down when we’re in danger of spinning out of control.

To strive to overcome the limbic-brain-induced impulses to burn the house down, smash all the china, or give his expensive suits away to Goodwill—choosing instead to take sound actions and make wholesome choices that are more in keeping with our conscience and which are centered in the cortex, the rational part of the brain.

The developmental task of heartbreak is to harness the huge amount of pain we are in, and to use it to evolve beyond our old painful patterns in love, as well as to awaken us to the power we hold to re-create our lives to be even more beautiful than they were before. In being hurled into a well of unspeakable suffering, we are given a terrifying choice. Will we sink, or will we now learn how to swim?

This seems to be the core of this approach to heartbreak.

first step of the Conscious Uncoupling process, Find Emotional Freedom, which taught her how to harness the intensity of the wildly difficult emotions she was feeling and transform them from a destructive impulse to do harm into the constructive energies of lasting, positive change.

Grow as a member of the human race

Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that’s all. MITCH ALBOM

If we are willing to walk fearlessly and tenderly into the crucible of a painful ending, we will find gifts waiting for us there that we never could have seen had we continued clinging to the safety of the familiar. CRAIG HAMILTON

these initially unwelcomed tutorials hold seeds of great potential to liberate us to live more authentic and meaningful lives. Dr.

While we cannot protect ourselves from being hurt in life, we can certainly escape becoming captivated by loss by choosing to make something beautiful of it. Such is the opportunity of a broken heart.

"Escape becoming captivated by loss"

More than cause and effect, karma is the idea that the actions we take will, over time, begin to grow our lives in a particular direction.

Each action you take, each choice you make, will grow something in your life and in our world. 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.

I believe this. I'm looking back now..read this book about two years ago during a hard break up and truly tried to use this approach. It does seem to have been a better way to move through it, for me.

love. As such, we strive to take all that is ugly and rotting, and turn it into compost to grow beautiful lives. In

interrupt and redirect the snowballing momentum of angry and reactive words and deeds.

An idea whose time has come will always arrive through a tribe of people, rather than just one individual, and there are many of us who have been working for years, patiently tilling the soil for this day to come.

As we continually find ourselves in a state of letting go of the lives that we have for the possibility of gaining the lives we might create, it behooves us to learn the art of healthy completion, in order to reap the benefits in all areas of our lives.

I caution you that your next love affair will not begin when you meet your next lover, but with how you end this one.

Definitely food for thought. Can't love someone else until I can love myself.

Before you up and leave, find the courage to share your feelings with your partner without blaming or shaming them, and do so prior to coming to a decision, so that he or she has a chance to address and/or rectify the problem.

If safe.

in response to your heartfelt sharing, your partner begins taking concrete actions in a positive direction to make things better, I suggest you at least try to match that commitment with your own.

Don't just puff up and leave, be open and willing to try to rectify issues.

drinking excessively. These behaviors damage the fundamental safety of the connection and violate the agreements the relationship is founded upon.

Yep

Yet, if you ever hope to love again, you will have to face your loss head on, and surrender to reality: as of this moment, you are broken up. Even if there is a bit of push-pull and in-out going on, the truth is that the commitment between you has been compromised and right now, you are not, in fact, “a couple.”

And if you think you are, you may want to look at your habit of giving your power away to other people to determine who you’re going to be in life.

Insightful

Remember, the patient on the operating table is you.

room. If this is you, you have my full support. 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.

Clear completion.

New life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark. BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR