STEP 2
reclaim your power and your life
Out with the old, in with the true.
JEFF BROWN
In Step 2 of your Conscious Uncoupling program, you’ll let go of being a wounded victim of love and shift your perspective to begin taking personal responsibility for your part in what happened. By doing so, you’ll start to see how you have been a source of your own suffering in a way that liberates you from ever repeating this dynamic again, and empowers you to evolve beyond disappointing patterns in love.
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 victim…So change the situation…leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
ECKHART TOLLE
If you’re the one who left, your story may take a different tack. Less shocked and doubled over in pain, you may actually feel euphoric to have finally found the courage and strength to break free of the bonds that constrained you. Yet paving the way for this grand emancipation are the countless and covertly logged slights, flaws, failures, and imperfections of your former partner, as for weeks, months, or even years you patiently gathered evidence against him and solidly built your case for why he gave you no choice but to leave. Feeling guilty, but with enough self-righteous indignation to fuel your way forward, your breakup narrative will tell the tale of the many ways you’ve been underfed, underseen, unappreciated, and alone in this relationship, again from a one-sided and decidedly victimized perspective.
Either way, in an attempt to integrate this breakup into your overwhelmed and fragmented psyche, the majority of your attention will likely be drawn toward pinning blame, as you carefully craft a grievance story that justifies your indignation. And for good reason, too. Your former partner probably did behave like a beast. He let you down. She didn’t keep her word. He was deceptive. She was a cheat. What happened was most likely crappy, unfair, immoral, or self-serving. She probably does deserve to be run out of town, forced to wear donkey ears and a dunce cap, and branded on her buttocks as a warning to any potential lover she may ever hope to have in her future.
Yet, here’s what’s more true: as long as your attention stays fixated on what he did or didn’t do that was shameful, wrong, bad, and immoral, you’re not looking to discover all of the covert and toxic ways that you are responsible for the mess you’re in. Even if the monster was 97 percent at fault, unless you take ownership of your 3 percent, and figure out how to change your ways of being in a relationship that make you vulnerable to being disempowered, disappointed, or abused in love, you will never be able to trust yourself to fully open up your heart again to another human being.
How’s that for inspiring you to take responsibility for yourself as the source of your suffering? So, this question, Where is my attention? needs to be your mantra as you continually turn away from the finger pointing that your mind will automatically gravitate toward, and look deeply into the mirror to try to see clearly your part in things, so that you might be liberated to begin doing it differently from now on.
ASK YOURSELF:
“Where is my attention?”
Understanding Yourself as the Source of Your Experience
When we first try to understand ourselves as the source of our suffering, we often begin by asking self-reflective questions that will slide us straight toward shame, self-hatred, and self-blame. I always have to remind people that “What the f—— is wrong with me?” is not a question that will ever lead to positive growth and change. Shame-based questions like “Why can’t I ever do anything right?” “Why does everyone always leave me?” “Who’s going to love me when I’m this messed up?” “When is life going to cut me a break?” or “How could I be so stupid?” can only serve as further evidence for your faulty source-fracture story and validate the false conclusion that you’re somehow cursed when it comes to romantic love.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.
E. E. CUMMINGS
To break free of relational patterns that left you vulnerable to being hurt and disappointed in love yet again—patterns of co-dependency, love addiction, abuse, and/or neglect—you must learn to ask yourself questions that can harvest the growth necessary to ensure you can trust yourself to never, ever do this again. Because for every self-centered, narcissistic man, there’s a woman who chronically self-abandons and disappears herself to try to win his favor; and for every judgmental and critical woman, there is an insecure man desperately giving himself away to try to gain her approval. And if you’re gay, well…you get the point, right? Yes, the other person may be messed up. But your primary focus needs to be on you, so you can discover all the ways you set yourself up to repeat these heart-wrenching, painful patterns.
Your mission right now is to reclaim your power and your life. That can only happen when you start asking yourself questions that inspire you to be ruthlessly honest about all the ways you’ve been giving your power away, self-sabotaging, turning away from truth, and/or showing up as less than who you are. I know. You suddenly want to put down this book and go for the pint of Häagen-Dazs. Please don’t. Stay with me here. For once you allow yourself to clearly see the unconscious ways you’ve been covertly setting yourself and others up to repeat your sad source-fracture story ad nauseam, you finally gain the ability to make a different choice; because responsible self-reflection is the beginning of reclaiming your power. Yet, if you choose instead to root your story of victimization and build a shrine around it, you’ll never access the power you’ll need to change your love life in any meaningful way.
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?”
The moment you can tolerate seeing things as they really are, and can hold the complexities of your own inconsistencies and flawed humanity with a tender, humble heart, your life can begin to radically change for the better.
There is always a victim story to be told, and most are exceedingly convincing. When my client Monique’s husband of five years, Larry, left her and their three-year old son, Zachary, a child with Down syndrome, not one of their friends or family members understood why. And once he started missing his child-support payments, he gained a reputation as a heartless and selfish man. Even his mother stopped speaking with him during this time. Yet to Monique’s credit, she did not take the easy way out for what was obviously bad behavior. While she was understandably upset, before running back to court she paused and deliberately turned her attention toward trying to discover herself as the source of her experience of being undersupported and abandoned by Larry. By doing so, she unleashed a tremendous amount of clarity that has since changed her life.
Monique had a rough ride early in life. Her father was a drug addict and her mother a prostitute, and she was left to fend for herself at a shockingly young age. She has memories of standing in front of an open refrigerator when she was a mere two years old, scouring the shelves for something to eat. Her source-fracture story was that she was all alone in life and that no one ever took care of her, leaving a cavernous hole in her heart that was reopened in numerous ways and with various partners over the years.
Many of us make these kinds of connections where we can see how the painful wounds from our childhoods are played out with our lovers, again and again. Yet, this is as far as most of us get, and we become victims not just of our parents and the partners we choose but also of our own consciousness, which seems to somehow find a way to repeat painful disappointments in spite of all the efforts we make to evolve. Monique, of course, had a sinking moment of despair in seeing how she’d duplicated this dynamic in her former husband’s refusal to take care of her and their son.
Freedom is the willingness to be responsible for ourselves.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Yet, I encouraged her to look below the surface beyond any sense of victimization by taking responsibility for the choices she had made that had led to her current state of affairs. And this is when she saw it. There was a part of her that was forever a two-year-old child sitting in the center of the room, holding her breath till she was blue in the face, until someone else came along to take care of her. She admitted that throughout her marriage, she had let this part of herself run the show by refusing to earn money even though her husband had begged her time and time again to go back to work. She insisted he take care of her in ways she really could easily have done herself, particularly before their child was born. Yet once their son came along, she had an excuse to not bother earning money. She was all set to ride on his financial coattails for years to come, when he rebelled and gave her the message loud and clear that he was not about to be the sole support for the two of them for the rest of his life.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
ALICE WALKER
It was humbling for Monique to admit how infantile and selfish her behavior had been. Yet it was the first time she’d ever made this toddler part of her conscious. In doing so, she was finally given a choice. Did she want to stay in the middle of the floor (metaphorically speaking), kicking and screaming, and playing out that sad story of deprivation and neglect? Or did she want to cut her childhood losses, take responsibility for her life, and learn to stand in the world as the powerful, resourceful woman she actually was? When we put it this way, it was kind of a no-brainer.
Today, Larry and Monique have a great co-parenting partnership in which they amicably share custody of their son. She financially takes care of herself, and they both contribute to the economic care of their son. She is excelling in her dream career as an entrepreneur and life coach, and she is becoming more and more known for her unique wisdom, bright wit, and sharp intelligence. It’s all because, in spite of his obvious guilt, she refused to be a victim, choosing instead to take responsibility for herself.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
VIKTOR FRANKL
I encourage you to look below the surface. To stretch beyond the obvious guilt of your former partner, and become deeply curious about all the ways you’ve covertly re-created a situation that could wound you in ways similar to how you’ve been wounded in the past. If you’re the one who was clearly in the wrong and you’re consumed with guilt, then you want to ruthlessly turn toward examining your behavior with a decidedly objective eye, looking to uncover the truth about the choices you made and what was motivating you. 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?”
Your Breakup Story: A Creative Exercise
Eventually, you’ll want to make sense of what happened by creating a breakup narrative that honors your life together and values all that was learned and gained through your union.
Yet, in this moment, the horror of your breakup may be living in your body as a tension, an ache, a shortness of breath, a heaviness, or a repressed scream. Norwegian painter Edvard Munch created his masterpiece The Scream after a two-year love affair with his married cousin ended unhappily, capturing the existential angst of what it can feel like to lose a relationship with someone you love.
As a way to help move the story through you, I invite you to draw, paint, sculpt, or write the horrifying parts of it to rid it from your body. This is where you get to be a victim and capture the dark underbelly of emotions of what it is to be rejected, humiliated, oppressed, abandoned, or abused. See if you can catch the powerlessness, rage, shame, and despair in color, form, or language. Love the pure humanity of your emotions, and do not be concerned with whether or not you are depicting the story accurately. Exaggerate. Embellish. Amplify and inflate. Unleash the hot rage, the dark despair, and the frozen helplessness into a swirl of colors, shadows, shapes, and designs.
By allowing yourself to create uncensored, you are documenting your journey into the depths of your own vulnerable humanity, and helping to move yourself along toward the light of acceptance and integration. When done, place this work on your altar, if you have one, as a symbol of your intention to work this through to a place of conscious completion; or simply in a private, safe place where no one else will see it.
Making Amends to Yourself
By now you may be starting to suspect that the amends you’ve been hoping to get from your former partner may actually be yours to make to yourself. When Kate, an intelligent and accomplished woman nearing forty, met Jack, she was so swept off her feet that she ended her engagement to a good-hearted man who loved her to pursue the connection. Charming, elegant, wealthy, and irresistibly handsome, Jack dangled the carrot of commitment for five years as Kate gave more and more of herself to the relationship. Leaving her career behind to tend more to his needs, and moving away from her family to be closer to him, she made countless sacrifices, relentlessly trying everything she could to convince him to marry her and give her the family she desired. Yet, when her doctor told her at age forty-four that it was too late for her to bear a child, Jack suddenly decided he was ready to start a family. He soon left Kate for another woman ten years younger, marrying her, and getting his new bride pregnant within the year.
When she first heard the news, she took to her bed for a week. Yet as time went on, her bitterness did not abate. Feeling victimized, resentful, and despondent, she was challenged by the suggestion that she examine her own choices and take responsibility for what had happened, for clearly there was a strong case to be made for what a monster of a man Jack was. Yet, once willing to look for the ways she’d colluded in her own demise, she was flooded with new understanding. To start, she admitted Jack’s abandonment of her was a perfect reflection of her own abandonment of herself throughout their entire relationship. Without his giving up much of anything to her as a prerequisite for the many sacrifices she’d made, she’d given up everything—her fiancé, her career, close ties with her family and friends, and even her dream of being a mother. Looking back, she saw countless examples of how she’d overgiven to try to prove her value and convince him to choose her, minimizing her own feelings, needs, and desires; withholding opinions that differed from his and rarely making waves, she desperately tried to be the woman she thought he wanted, essentially disappearing herself. So much that, in the end, there was really no Kate to love. To rub salt in the wound, rumor had it that the woman Jack married had a huge life and career that demanded Jack organize his life around hers for their relationship to work. Jack seemed proud of his new wife, and apparently couldn’t do enough to demonstrate his willingness to accommodate the demands of partnering her. While humbled to admit it, Kate saw that it wasn’t Jack who needed to make amends to her. It was she who needed to make amends to herself, as she was confronted by the myriad of ways she gave herself and her power away to be in that relationship.
That insight changed her life. Kate set about making amends by setting an intention to outgrow the self-abandoning woman she’d been with Jack. Recognizing that part of her still believed Jack to be the man for her, she took on becoming a wiser, more mature, happier, and healthier version of herself in order to evolve into a woman who would not at all be interested in a man who treated her as poorly as Jack had. Though a high bar to set, Kate let go of overgiving and people pleasing as a way to convince people to like her, and focused on becoming a woman who knew her own mind, lived true to herself, and was organized around the realization of her own potentials, before martyring herself to support those of others. She started setting healthy boundaries with her friends and family, and began sharing her feelings, needs, opinions, and desires with those close to her, with the healthy expectation that they care enough to respond appropriately.
Today Kate is happily married to a kindhearted, successful, and intelligent man. Having adopted twin girls, Kate is now deeply grateful that Jack broke her heart. She’s convinced that her resolve to use heartbreak as a wake-up call, running toward her own growth and development like her life depended upon it (for surely it did), is the reason her life is so happy and fulfilling today. She admits that the passive, people-pleasing woman she was with Jack is not a woman she even recognizes anymore. Nor would that version of her have been the right partner for Jack, who she now believes chose wisely for himself, doing them both a great service in the process.
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
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 abusive that may have caused my former partner to respond in defensive and destructive ways?”
“What choices did I make that contributed to how things went down, and what motivated me to make them?”
3. What Else Has It Cost You in Your Life to Give Your Power Away Like This? Become present to the cost of showing up in ways that belie your true worth, power, intelligence, goodness, and values.
For example: “Being unwilling to set appropriate boundaries has trained everyone in my life to take advantage of me,” “By withholding my truth and staying silent when I should have spoken up, I have modeled being a doormat for my kids,” “By giving myself away to men who don’t value me, I’ve deprived myself of being loved,” “By only going after men I believe I can control, I leave myself unfulfilled time and time again.”
4. What Amends Do You Need to Make to Yourself in Moving Forward? Commit yourself to the positive growth and development that would allow you to evolve beyond these destructive and self-defeating behaviors.
For example: “I commit to honoring my own feelings and needs as much as I honor the feelings and needs of others,” “I will wait until I know someone well before becoming sexually involved,” “From now on, I am going to negotiate on my own behalf rather than silently suffer being taken advantage of,” “I promise to listen more closely to my own inner knowing and have the courage to act upon my intuition.”
Note: The first thing that comes up for many of us when identifying new ways of relating that would liberate us from old patterns is that we don’t know how to interact this way with others. Perhaps healthy ways of relating were never modeled in the home you grew up in, or you were discouraged from learning basic skills that would allow you to assert boundaries, resolve conflicts, or communicate your needs. Until now, you may have felt powerless in the face of these limitations, as though held hostage by your own missing development. Luckily, we human beings are ever-evolving creatures, and have been given the remarkable gift of being able to learn new things at birth. With this in mind, I invite you to answer the following question.
5. What New Skills and Capacities Will You Now Need to Develop to Live This Way Consistently? To make these amends, you’ll need to develop new skills and capacities. See if you can identify exactly what they are and take on the challenge of learning them.
For example: “I will learn to identify what my feelings and needs are in order to share them with others,” “I will learn to negotiate on my own behalf to stand up for what’s mine,” “I will learn how to set appropriate boundaries to ensure I am not taken advantage of again,” and/or “I will grow my capacity to tolerate disapproval from others in order to stay true to myself.”
For a free audio download of this practice, please go to www.ConsciousUncoupling.com/StepTwoPractice.
At this point, you may be seeing so much about yourself as the source of the breakdown in your relationship that you want to pick up the phone, write an e-mail, or drive over to your former partner’s house to try to make things right. I won’t dampen your enthusiasm if you feel compelled to take such an action. However, if you stay with the process a bit longer, there are more pieces to the puzzle of conscious completion that I’d like to offer before you reengage. Unless you’re doing this program together, I suggest you wait until you’ve completed Step 4 before extending yourself to make things right, particularly if you’re still a bit lovesick. The impulse to make amends is often accompanied by a secret desire for reconciliation, and you may hope that by taking responsibility for what happened, your former partner will change his or her mind about leaving. It’s understandable. Yet it taints the amends with an agenda that covertly pulls on the other person to give you something in return. Ideally, your amends should be a clean offering to right a wrong, lessen suffering, initiate healing, or give your blessing as you release this person from your life. Check in with yourself to discover your motives before moving too quickly into action.
A Conscious Uncoupling will not always mean a neat and tidy ending. Sometimes it will mean you wake up out of your habitual unconscious behaviors, understand the hurtful impact of your conduct and choices on yourself and others, and use the discomfort of seeing yourself clearly to inspire you to change in the future.
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. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.
GILDA RADNER
When Lily, an interior decorator in her midthirties, shifted her focus away from blame and toward understanding herself as the source of her very bad breakup, she was overwhelmed with remorse for how badly she’d treated her former boyfriend, Jason, the forty-three-year-old manager of her local bank. For the first six months of their relationship, things went well as Jason, a soft-spoken and serious man, asked her out regularly and seemed to genuinely care about her. Yet, at some point he began calling less often. Sometimes she would not hear from him for three or four days at a time. When Lily asked why, her words were more like an accusation than an inquiry. He tried reassuring her by saying this was a time of year he generally had to work longer hours, suggesting that in a month or two, things would go back to normal. Yet, Lily felt overwhelmed with anxiety. She started pulling on him to pay more attention to her, and used her sexuality to try to get him to affirm her value. She’d compulsively call and leave sexy messages, hoping he’d call her back immediately. When he didn’t, she’d feel hurt and rejected. She asked him during lovemaking if this was the best sex he’d ever had, a question he seemed uncomfortable with and ill equipped to answer. When she didn’t get the reassurance she was looking for, she became critical and started accusing him of being an uncaring, duplicitous, and selfish man. Things devolved quickly. When Jason broke up with her, he did so by cutting her off entirely, calling her abusive and forbidding her to contact him again.
Love is unconditional. Relationships are not.
GRANT GUDMUNDSON
As the post-breakup weeks passed and the phone refused to ring, Lily had time to reflect on her behavior. With great embarrassment, she saw how immature, manipulative, and destructive her conduct had been, how motivated she’d been by the ancient, unhealed rejections from her alcoholic father from long, long ago that had nothing to do with Jason. She yearned to apologize directly, yet he’d have nothing to do with her and refused to acknowledge her communications. Realizing she’d hurt him, yet without the ability to make direct amends, she vowed to never again behave like this with another man, making the commitment to evolve and pay forward the lessons learned as a way to make things right.
Not everything can be taken back. The following is a recent share from a Facebook friend:
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?
We can’t always undo the damage we’ve done, and feeling bad about that is appropriate. The rules of common decency are spot on, and when you violate them it’s good to feel a little sick to your stomach—it means you’re not a sociopath. Over the years, I’ve learned it’s best to give the pangs of conscience our full attention, with deep respect for the ways in which we’re being challenged to become more mature, more wholesomely motivated, and yes, even more moral people. Such are the relentless lessons of life, as we’re continually offered maturations, insights, and awakenings that only seem to come to us through myriad mishaps and mistakes.
The antidote to tragedy is learning.
ISABEL GILLIES
Our impatient desire to be free from these messy, muddled stages of grief—the resentments, sorrows, depressions, and regrets—may compel us to move in haste and rush to forgive. Yet one of the world’s foremost experts on forgiveness, Dr. Frederic Luskin from Stanford University, tells us that forgiveness is the end of our journey, not the start. He calls forgiveness “the last stop of our suffering” after many rounds of wrestling with the pain we’ve caused ourselves and others by the foolish, short-sighted, and/or immature choices we’ve made. 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. After suffering has realized its purpose by pushing us to rectify, repent, grow, and evolve, it is then free to find relief through the deep letting go that forgiveness allows.
The great Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, himself well acquainted with suffering, having survived a German concentration camp in World War II, once said, “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.” By working with heartbreak, and allowing it to peel away years of unhealthy habits and immature, self-defeating ways of relating, you can transform your anguish into something deeply meaningful that promises to bless you and those you love for many years to come.
ASK YOURSELF:
“What amends can I make to myself that promise to give purpose and meaning to the mistakes I have made, as well as help me to reclaim my power?”
STEP 2 SELF-CARE ACTIONS
(Take at least 2 each day)
1. Carefully gather all reminders of your relationship from your home, such as pictures, gifts, and love letters, and store them somewhere safe, out of sight, and far away from your bedroom.
2. Throughout the day take a deep slow breath, inhaling and exhaling deeply, as though you could breathe all the way down to your hips.
3. Find a confidant to support you through this difficult time, whether that’s a wise and caring friend, a paid coach or therapist, or both. Make sure you trust and respect this person and feel safe telling him or her the truth without the need to keep up appearances, or the fear of being criticized or judged unfairly. Allow yourself to be witnessed and supported as you move through this by someone who cares about you and who has your back.
4. Look in the mirror, gazing deeply into your own eyes, and share with yourself all the ways moving forward that you’re going to improve your behavior to reflect more self-love, self-respect, dignity, and honor.
5. Sit outside and turn your face upward to soak up the warmth of the sun and remember how much life loves you.
6. Practice what the Buddhists call mindfulness by giving your attention to whatever is happening within you throughout your day. Be deeply present and self-aware, noticing all of the feelings and sensations in your body, and witnessing your feelings, needs, and desires with kindness, as though you were able to hold yourself as you walk through this experience with great tenderness and love.
NOTE TO COUPLES DOING THE PROGRAM TOGETHER
In this second step of the Conscious Uncoupling program, I suggest you continue to engage in a formal manner and give each other plenty of room to self-reflect outside of the need to be right or save face. If you are secretly hoping to reconcile, make sure the amends you offer are wholesomely motivated and given simply to right a wrong, rather than as a covert attempt to renew the relationship. Do not push on your former partner to make any amends to you, or share insights about how they might be responsible for what happened between you. Be respectful of each other’s right to do the program at your own pace, and grant each other privacy to do the work without needing to make amends before feeling fully ready to do so.