CHAPTER 3

a new possibility between us: introducing conscious uncoupling

It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate….We have come to the conclusion that while we love each other very much we will remain separate. We are, however, and always will be a family, and in many ways we are closer than we have ever been.

GWYNETH PALTROW AND CHRIS MARTIN

Conscious Uncoupling shot into the lexicon of global awareness in the aftermath of an announcement offered by a beautiful actress and her talented musician husband, who used the term to make public their intention to separate. I will forever be grateful to them for doing so. Within twenty-four hours, millions were talking about how we might more consciously complete our unions, and improve upon the antagonistic and contentious ways of breaking up we’d come to accept as the norm.

At the time, I was deep in the jungles of Costa Rica on a self-imposed writing retreat to work on the proposal for this book. The book (which has since become this book) would share the Conscious Uncoupling process I’d been developing and teaching to thousands since 2009, on how to honorably end a romantic union. For years I, along with many professional colleagues, had been wrestling with the awareness that a paradigm shift in this area was not only possible but also desperately needed.

Though I’d gone to the most remote place I could find in order to minimize distractions, in our virtual world there are few places to hide. Within hours of the announcement, I found myself camped out in a tiny room that was little more than a closet, talking on the only landline the retreat center had available to guests, with reporters from around the globe who, one after another, all wanted to know the answer to one very simple question:

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.

Conscious Uncouplings are most known for their bountiful acts of kindness, big-hearted gestures of goodness, and the genuine efforts made to do the right thing for the right reasons. In short, it’s a breakup that manages to surmount, defy, and even triumph over the unconscious, primitive, and biologically based impulses we may have to lash out, punish, get revenge, and/or otherwise hurt the one by whom we feel hurt.

Granted, it’s easier said than done.

For, as we have been discovering, the brain is not necessarily a big fan of reconfiguring our primary partnerships. In my recent meeting with Dr. Louis Cozolino in his homey Beverly Hills office, whose walls are lined with books and whose desk overflows with papers and periodicals, I had the opportunity to ask what’s going on in our brains that would push even the sweetest of us to suddenly turn into spiteful predators. The good doctor, who’s a dead ringer for actor Harry Hamlin, right down to the hip spike haircut, leaned in to explain. Unlike our pancreas, kidneys, or livers, our brains are actually social organs, having developed over millions of years as though purposely designed to connect with the brains of those around us. This attachment circuitry causes our brains to link up to become one interactive system that, in addition to other functions, serves to regulate our moods and emotions. In the world of neuroscience, this is called “sociostasis,” and it is the reason we can become so deeply dependent upon, and even somewhat addicted to, our lovers. In other words, 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.

Dr. Cozolino demonstrates how this works by sharing a story of two chimps fighting, explaining that chimps will often fight to the death. When it becomes clear that one chimp is clearly losing the battle, the beta chimp, in order to save his life, will often run to a nearby mama, snatch her baby from her arms, and thrust it into the face of his enraged enemy. Immediately upon seeing the baby, the testosterone of the alpha chimp plunges and he calms down, reducing the chances that the beta chimp will be killed. In that moment, the baby chimp has regulated the emotions of the alpha.

I think to myself, Wow, well, this explains why even after a lover has been abusive and cruel, the one face we most yearn to see is theirs, desperate for their presence in much the same way a heroin addict is pining for a fix. Unfairly, nature seems to have designed it so that the one person in the whole world who can best calm us down when we’re terrified is unfortunately the same person who is terrifying us. I am also beginning to understand why we go crazy during a breakup, with tornadoes of terrifying emotions sweeping through us, threatening to empty us of all common sense and sanity. The rupture of attachment throws us into a high state of fear, with a lessened ability to regulate our own emotions, as we have not yet adjusted to our new circumstances by finding new ways to self-soothe that would prevent us from having a meltdown.

We all know that once we allow fear to hijack us and step into the driver’s seat of our lives, that we’re apt to say and do some really dumb, pretty destructive things. Fear just makes us plain old stupid. Right at the moment when we need our thinking brains the most to help sort through some incredibly important decisions, the consequences of which we will be living with for many years to come, our brains are programmed to not be thinking much at all.

In understanding this, I gain an even deeper respect for a person’s decision to remain conscious while uncoupling. 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. This is the part of us that can keep our compulsion to behave like a crazed wounded animal in check, and ensure that we show up in ways that make the triumph of our ethics over our emotions even possible.

The Conscious Uncoupling of Dianna and Brian

To realize the ideal of a conscious, peaceful parting of the ways, I’ve developed a five-step process to help navigate our way through the thorny terrain of lost love, and safely deliver us to the other side of separation with hearts, psyches, and souls intact. 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?

Dianna learned to swim. Though at the beginning of our journey, I was uncertain as to which direction she might go.

The first thing I noticed about Dianna, an attractive real estate attorney in her midforties, as she impatiently flipped through People magazine in my waiting room, was the handsome dark blue wool suit she wore. The second was the anger in her eyes when she looked up to greet me. It was not until we were alone in my office, with the door closed behind us, that her face softened into a deeply sad expression of pain and confusion. Her story began tumbling out almost before I had the chance to sit down. Her husband, Brian, an aspiring filmmaker and primary caregiver to their four-year-old daughter, Stephanie, was having an affair. He’d informed her days before that he was leaving her for his new love. He was clear he wanted a divorce.

Dianna was both shocked and seething. For years she’d financially supported Brian as he plugged away at his “nonexistent film career” by working long hours as an attorney. She was unprepared for the intensity of her fury as the injustice and insult of it consumed her. She was having intrusive fantasies of throwing bleach on all of his clothes, hacking into his computer to delete and destroy his scripts, and driving over to his lover’s house to break all of her windows. She felt terrified to be having these feelings, and on some level deeply unsafe with herself—as though if provoked further, she might actually lose control and start behaving this way. Initially, she acted on these feelings by putting an aggressive attorney on retainer who assured her Brian would get little beyond what he brought into the marriage. Yet, pausing to take a deep breath, she looked into my eyes and confessed that she did not want to behave in the same hostile and hateful ways her parents did when they divorced some thirty years before—behaviors that seasoned her childhood with periods of deep depression and despair.

Together, we began sorting through the pain, and thinking things through to try to gain some perspective. How might it impact Stephanie if she were torn between two enraged parents? If Dianna behaved vindictively as was her impulse, how might her angry actions impact any romantic relationship she might hope to have in the future? Did she really want to give Brian and his lover the power to determine the kind of human being that she herself would become? Given the circumstances, which looked unlikely to change, what might be the best possible outcome for all involved?

Thus began our work. We started with the 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. These constructive energies could help catalyze her own growth beyond the woman she had been in her relationship with Brian—insecure, people pleasing, self-abandoning, and chronically overgiving as a way to try to prove her value.

In letting go of her festering rage, Dianna softened into a sorrow so deep she thought she might drown in it, admitting after a long and pregnant silence that this sadness was nothing new. It had been there long before she’d even met her husband. Having grown up with an alcoholic mother who’d barely spoken to her, no matter how well behaved she was, how much she tried to please her mother, or how well she performed in school, Dianna knew well the pain of being chronically undersupported and left to fend for herself in life. She decided to set an intention to use this breakdown to evolve beyond her old, painful patterns of feeling so alone in life, and became determined to use this breakup as the catalyst for a whole new life.

We then moved on to Step 2, Reclaim Your Power and Your Life, to help Dianna stop obsessively ruminating on everything offensive that Brian had done by turning her attention instead toward herself, to discover what role she may have played in what happened between them. This was not at all easy to do. Yet, Dianna recognized that if she ever hoped to have love in her future, she’d need to understand her role in how things went down, in order to prevent something like this from ever happening again.

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding. I want the understanding which bringeth peace.

HELEN KELLER

Dianna sheepishly confessed that Brian had been asking to go to marriage counseling for two years before this happened, complaining of deep frustration with the long hours she worked. At the time she’d been too busy to consider counseling. Dianna began connecting the dots between the neglect she suffered as a child and the negligent ways she’d been behaving toward her husband and daughter. While painful to admit, ultimately, facing this truth freed her to begin making some serious changes in her life. It also helped her to understand the complexities of what had happened rather than settle into the half-truth of a victimized story that risked leaving her mistrustful of future love.

We then dove into Step 3, Break the Pattern, Heal Your Heart, where we looked to discover Dianna’s “source-fracture wound”—the original break in her heart, which happened during her parents’ divorce and left her emotionally homeless with a deep sense of having been displaced. Together, we made conscious the story she’d constructed in response to that experience: “I’m alone,” “Men always leave,” and “I can never really get what I truly need from others.” Stepping back, as though watching her life as a movie, she tried to uncover how she might have inadvertently been duplicating this sad story ever since. She was surprised to see the many covert ways she’d been thinking and behaving that made it hard for others to find their way into her world. She prided herself on being self-sufficient. As a person who enjoyed being independent, she rarely asked for help, and often did not accept it even when offered. She was uncomfortable sharing her feelings, and presented herself as having everything together, as though she needed nothing from anyone. Once she saw herself as the source of her disappointing love story, Dianna discovered there was no shortage of evidence that she was the author of her own deep aloneness in life.

Dianna determined to graduate from this painful pattern and started by challenging her old beliefs. She recognized that she had a deep capacity and desire for closeness and love. She decided that the losses of her past would not determine what was possible in her future, and she began identifying new ways of relating to others that held the possibility of creating a different story. She began to take actions that were aligned with the creation of happy and healthy relationships with everyone in her life—co-workers, family, and friends, including Brian, because, after all, he was the only father Stephanie would ever have.

Moving on to Step 4, Become a Love Alchemist, Dianna learned how to clear the air of any residual resentment by taking responsibility for how her neglect of Brian had impacted him when they were together. While she could not hold herself accountable for the destructive choices he made in response to her neglect, she could acknowledge with a tender heart how her behavior must have caused him deep suffering. The bigheartedness of her amends inspired Brian to follow suit by taking responsibility for the immature and hurtful ways he mishandled their separation. With true regret, he was able to acknowledge the negative impact on her and on Stephanie.

Dianna realized she no longer wanted Brian’s betrayal to characterize the connection between them. Rather than punish him for choosing another woman over her, she chose instead to further generate goodwill by giving him a financial gift as a thank-you for their years together, and for the beautiful daughter he’d given her. She wrote a kind note telling him she was forgiving him and hoped he’d do the same for her, suggesting that perhaps he might want to use her gift to help finish the short film he’d started that had gotten pushed aside in the turmoil of their separation. Stunned, he gratefully accepted, using the money as she’d suggested. It was that film that launched his career as a filmmaker.

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

MITCH ALBOM

Brian, humbled and moved by her kindness, looked for ways to reciprocate. He rearranged his schedule to care for Stephanie each afternoon to spare Dianna the expense of a nanny. This routine of being picked up from school each day by her father created a greater sense of cohesion for Stephanie, as she got to spend time with him at least five days a week. This was the first of many positive and good-hearted exchanges that have since come to characterize the relationship between Dianna and Brian.

Because of these gestures and others suggested in Step 5, Create Your Happily-Even-After Life, which helps restore a sense of well-being to one’s extended community of relatives and friends, Stephanie now moves freely between both of her homes with a feeling of warm friendliness, as well as an expanded sense of family, which is the outcome we aspire to in a Conscious Uncoupling.

While not all such stories must end with a new love interest to qualify as a happy ending, I am glad to share that Dianna’s efforts were well rewarded with the affections of a kind and loving man who brings her much joy. She’s become more deeply present, awake, and aware as a result of her heartbreak, and now understands the attention and care all relationships need to stay vibrant and strong. As simple as that sounds, it is not something she understood before. She has also learned to tend to her own deeper feelings and needs, and given up overgiving as a way to prove her value to others. Rather than work around the clock to support the dreams and creative aspirations of others, as she did with Brian when they were married, she prioritizes her own creative aspirations, and is currently working on her first novel. Dianna is living a much more true and well-rounded life than she was before, and for that she is deeply grateful.

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

The lessons of love can be costly and the price of wisdom steep. Yet, these initially unwelcomed tutorials hold seeds of great potential to liberate us to live more authentic and meaningful lives. Dr. Ginette Paris, Jungian psychologist and author of the lovely book Heartbreak, reminds us that “the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from living with a captive heart.” 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.

The Practice of Generosity, Goodwill, and Grace

Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod speaks about the concept of karma, which many spiritual seekers assume to be the cause and effect of our actions. If I step on the gas pedal, my car will go faster. If I assault someone, they, in turn, may hit me back. Either that, or life will find a way to even the score, perhaps by arranging a fender bender later that evening, or by having my wallet stolen when next at the market. Often we will be motivated to behave ourselves simply because we don’t wish to create “bad karma” and be punished for our selfish and immature actions. This interpretation of karma, however, leaves out nuances that are easily lost when translating one language into another, and one culture’s belief system to another’s.

In the Tibetan language, the word karma is literally las.rgyu.abras, which means “action-seed-results.” Ken explains that Tibetans often put together two or more words to define abstract ideas, such as joining the words near and far to explain the concept of distance, or large and small to represent the notion of size. Karma, as it was originally defined, means that each action we take is like planting a seed that will grow into a particular result. 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. During a breakup, when our biology may be pulling on us to take rash actions, the challenge is not to give in to the temptation to plant seeds of ill will and revenge—actions that could eventually grow into bitter fruits that we may be forced to eat for many years to come. Instead, we want to plant seeds of forgiveness, goodwill, and generosity, so that in time our actions will grow to be a cornucopia of riches for ourselves and for those we love. 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 would rather have eyes that cannot see, ears that cannot hear, lips that cannot speak, than a heart that cannot love.

ROBERT TIZON

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. In response to the toxic downward spiral created by two interlocking limbic brains, we consciously look to see how we might interrupt and redirect the snowballing momentum of angry and reactive words and deeds. And there is no more powerful action to turn things in a harmonious direction than a gesture of authentic generosity. For a generous gesture is like pouring cool, clear water onto the festering embers of hurt and resentment, often averting a blazing fire that could easily burn the house down, and course-correcting everyone back into the cortex brain, which is where we need to be to ensure the safety and well-being of all involved. While most are unable to offer a big financial gift as Dianna chose to do, we can all offer a tender and sincere gesture of kindness to our departing love, to set us in the right direction.

The best of who we are can be discovered in the choice to be generous in the face of great suffering and loss. 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. That’s not to be confused with co-dependently motivated giving, with its covert agenda to get something back, whether it is approval, validation, safety, or love. An act of generosity asks for nothing in return. It is a wholesomely motivated love offering to the universe, a simple act of goodness that affirms the sweetness of life, even in the face of sorrow and disappointment.

One way to be generous is through the simple gesture of offering a blessing to our former partners. As breakups often end with a curse of anger both on our lips and in our hearts, to say goodbye while also extending a heartfelt blessing can be incredibly moving.

There are flowers everywhere for those who bother to look.

HENRI MATISSE

Doju and Lucio had been married for thirty years when Doju confessed to her husband that she wanted a divorce. It was difficult for her to explain why exactly. In many ways theirs was the ideal marriage. At the center of their relationship was a shared devotion to Buddhism, as together they practiced non-attachment and the letting go of self-cherishing with great commitment and unwavering faith. Lucio was crushed. To lose his wife after all these years was not the life he’d planned. It was the ultimate challenge of his faith. Yet, Doju felt that the constraints of marriage itself were holding her back. Although Lucio had been a loving husband, the role of wife no longer suited her and she could not bear to continue on in a structure that felt oppressive to her. Reluctantly and respectfully, Lucio accepted her desire to be released from their marital vows and agreed to set her free. The day she left, Lucio drove Doju to the airport so she might return to her family’s home many thousands of miles away. After checking her bags and walking her to the security gate, Lucio looked deeply into Doju’s eyes. Tears streamed down both of their faces. Yet Lucio smiled, took a step backward, and with deep love and honor, bowed before his wife, blessing her decision to leave the marriage and wishing her well on her journey. She returned his bow to receive his blessing, turned, and soberly walked away to begin her new life. Even now, some ten years later, tears well up in her eyes as she shares her story with me, still so deeply moved by his generosity, goodness, and kindness.

Sufi poet Hafiz, who lived in the fourteenth century, wrote one of my favorite poems. It is called “The Sun Never Says.”

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.

By encouraging you to be generous, I am not suggesting you foolishly refuse to take a stand for what is rightfully yours, as you painstakingly start the sorting and divvying up of your life and assets. However, with all of the darkness you may be walking through right now, it’s good to remember that where there is no light, you have the choice to become it.

A New Narrative for the End of Love

I just think of things as beautiful or not….I don’t think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.

JOHN FOWLES

Futurist Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Conscious Uncoupling is not about how we can fix an old, ailing system, as much as the suggestion that we begin building a new one that empowers us to have healthier, wiser, and even happier endings. Many bright and dedicated people in the therapeutic and family law fields have been laboring for this evolution for decades, and I would be remiss to not credit their pioneering efforts. 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.

If we’re to now start changing the narrative of breakups and divorce to be a more life-affirming one, we might even consider creating new language. My good friend Kit Thomas, filmmaker and founder of CircleOfWisdom.​org, recently pointed out to me 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, and it’s my theory that this is why it took off the way it did once it was introduced to the world. For language is generative, informing and inspiring us as to what’s possible. New phrases and words like wevorce, expanded families, wasband, sister-out-law, binuclear families, and stepwives begin to make sense in helping to usher in softer, gentler ways to describe our matrix of relatedness in a post-breakup world.

Although this book is largely about the dissolution of romantic unions, heartbreak and loss are not reserved for lovers. I was pleasantly surprised when, in the aftermath of its introduction to the world, Conscious Uncoupling cartoons began popping up in newspapers and magazines around the globe. Rather than focus on romantic love, the majority of them were commenting on professional, political, and other kinds of endings. In a mobile society, where most of us will change jobs, the cities we live in, our professional networks, our circle of friends, and our spiritual communities almost as often as we change the oil in our cars, we are constantly uncoupling. 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.

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS

While many have aspired to the friendly ending of love, few have been able to overcome the biology of our brains’ tendency to see a breakup as a life-threatening event. The five-step process offered in this book will serve as a blueprint that can bring out the best, rather than the worst, of who we are during one of the more stressful and challenging periods in our lives. 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. As Ms. Kübler-Ross’s model offers a flashlight that can help us make our way through the woods, so too Conscious Uncoupling can support us to make healthy, wholesome decisions at a time when clear thinking may be just out of reach.

Like it or not, a breakup is a time when we’re stranded between worlds. You are no longer the person you once were, and not quite the person you have yet to become. I encourage you to use the guidelines of Conscious Uncoupling as the candelabra you’ll need to help you find your way through this dark night of the soul, and deliver you safely to the enhanced, expanded, and enriched new life that will soon be available to you. Not just in spite of your breakup, but paradoxically, in many ways, because of it.