Conscious Uncoupling Quotes

“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.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“I call it your source-fracture wound, the original break in your heart from long ago. It may have happened in an instant--a little rejection, a shocking abandonment, or a slight misattunement that suddenly made you realize how alone you were in this world. Or perhaps it was a bit-bu-bit splintering as over the years you met with an intermittent meanness, an unpredictable but repetitive abuse, or a neglect that stole your childhood inches at a time. Wherever, however, or whenever it happened, one thing we can assume is that no adult helped you make accurate meaning of your confusing and painful experience. No grown up sat you down and lovingly said, "No, honey, it's not that you're stupid. It's that your big brother is scared and insecure." "It's not that you don't matter, angel. It's that Daddy has a drinking problem and needs help." "It's not that you're not enough. It's that Mommy has clinical depression, dear, and it's neither your fault nor yours to fix." Without this mature presence to help explain to you what was happening to your little world, you probably came to some pretty strong and wrong conclusions about who you were and what was possible for you to have in life. And those conclusions became a habit of consciousness, a filter through which you interpret and then respond to the events of your life, making your grief all the more complex.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“If you don’t like being a doormat, then get off the floor. AL-ANON”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“Anger begs us to make a powerful commitment to what we will or will not tolerate in our lives any longer, making it our best friend if we can turn it in the right direction.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear. Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful. ETTY HILLESUM”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“In a nutshell, a breakup is nothing short of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a complete spiritual awakening. One that catapults you to a whole new level of authenticity, compassion, wisdom, depth, and—dare I say it?—even joy.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“And while your new life may look little like the one you left behind, your goal is not to try to create a better version of what you once had, but to expand what’s now possible to include fresh new horizons, friends, and interests—and the exploration of forgotten, yet promising possibilities.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“ASK YOURSELF: “What commitments do I wish my former partner had made to me that I can now make to myself?”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out. ROBERT FROST”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“You can live your life out of circumstance or you can live your life out of a vision. WERNER ERHARD”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: The 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“Feel the feelings. Drop the story. PEMA CHODRON”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: The 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“It’s time for you to give yourself the love, attention, loyalty, and care you’ve been trying to get from others your whole life. Grief has you gripped tightly by the ankles, and she may not let you go too soon. There’s nowhere to go but home to yourself. This simple gesture of giving yourself your full attention when sorrow is shaking you to the bone promises to carve depth and kindness into the core of who you are—more than anything else I know.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: The 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“…you are deeply loved by all of life. …you have the power to keep yourself safe. …no one knows more than you what’s right for your life.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“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.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“The older you grow, the more you realize that one half of you can firmly believe what the other half equally firmly refuses. CONSTANCE HOLME”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“There are a million little ways that a marriage grows apart, most too mundane to mention. Yet what happened to Mark and me, in a nutshell, is that I changed. And I mean, I radically and in many ways quite unfairly, changed. It’s kind of an occupational hazard—the downside of being a teacher”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“every exit is an entry,”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“I encourage you, therefore, to hold your imperfections tenderly. Value the learning of life lessons as an important part of becoming a wise and mature human being.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“The end of love is a crossroads, and there will be those who go on to live lesser lives in the aftermath of heartbreak. My hope is that you are not one of them.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“Our brains much prefer it when we’re able to predict the future with accuracy, and so we’re inclined to create cultural stories and patterns that allow us to do that. Living happily ever after is one such collective pattern that grants us a sense of predictability and certainty in life and holds the standard for societal harmony.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“Transformation often begins with what we’re willing to subtract from our lives, rather than what we’re trying to add.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“You have to consciously create the possibility of an affirmative future while coming to terms with the painful loss of the future you’d envisioned”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“you must become more interested in what’s possible from here on than you are in rectifying the past, and more invested in how you might midwife this transition harmoniously than in getting what you want in the short term.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“We have to stop asking why this is happening to me and start asking why it is happening for me.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“We are disturbed not by what happened to us, but by our thoughts about what happened. EPICTETUS”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“It’s only after we have felt the sting of remorse and become present to the costs of our confusion that we’re given the chance to redeem ourselves with a pledge to do things differently.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“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?”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else. RALPH WALDO EMERSON”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After