STEP 3
break the pattern, heal your heart
If you don’t like being a doormat, then get off the floor.
AL-ANON
In Step 3 of your Conscious Uncoupling program, you’ll begin to identify your source-fracture story, and start to understand how it’s been the underlying cause of your disappointing patterns in love. You’ll awaken from the trance that your painful patterns in love have simply been happening to you over and over again, and begin to distinguish exactly how they’ve been happening through you instead, giving you access to the power you’ll need to evolve beyond them.
The opportunity at hand is to be liberated from your habitual story of heartache and empowered to generate more fulfilling and gratifying relationships moving forward.
In Step 3, Break the Pattern, Heal Your Heart, you will:
• Identify those core beliefs that have been sabotaging your love life, and awaken to the power you hold to create a new narrative of happy, healthy love moving forward.
• Discover precisely how you’ve been unconsciously generating your disempowering patterns in love, as well as how you can move beyond them.
• Be restored to a positive self-sense as someone who is safe, loved, valued, and honored.
• Learn the new skills and capacities that will ensure successful relationships in your future.
As a young woman in the early 1970s, Veronica Shoffstall wrote the poem “After a While.”
After a while, you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
and company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
and presents aren’t promises.
And you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes open
with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child
And you learn to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn that even sunshine burns
if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure
that you really are strong
and you really do have worth
And you learn and you learn
with every goodbye you learn…
Your mission right now is to learn to love yourself, even when the one you love is unable to love you in the ways you need to be loved, standing strong in the truth of your own value and worthiness to be loved, no matter what. The worst part of a breakup is not the mountain of sorrow that comes with the loss of a treasured connection, as much as it’s the sheer insult it can be to one’s core sense of self. As you make the dreaded shift from being one who is wanted to being one who is unwanted, from one who is loved to one who is not loved, from being special to now being ordinary and decidedly not special. This shift in identity can easily be internalized as proof that your worst fears about yourself and your life may well be true: that you will never be loved, that you will always be alone, or that true love is for other people but not for you. Particularly since the one person who knew you best in the world is now validating negative beliefs you’ve struggled with for years.
It seems so unfair that after all you’ve done to outgrow the disappointments of your youth, you again find yourself here. Alone, undersupported, devalued, unloved, abused, or left behind for what might be the umpteenth time in your life. It’s like those zombie movies in which the ghosts from the past refuse to die, tenaciously coming back to torture and taunt you. It’s enough to inspire a vow of celibacy. Or better yet, how about a vow to finally outgrow your painful patterns in love?
You may find yourself feeling disheartened and resigned by what appears to be a repeat of old childhood wounds, as though you are somehow just cursed when it comes to finding true love. Yet no matter how much you may feel you’re at the mercy of the many things outside your control at the moment, the sooner you can see clearly how your life has been happening through you, rather than just to you, the sooner you can graduate from your discouraging patterns in love and go on to create a much happier, healthier experience of love in your future.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
RICHARD BACH
So, snap on your red cape, grab your black boots and Spandex, and follow me. We’re going on a journey of emancipation.
Discovering Your Source-Fracture Story
This has happened before, hasn’t it? Different faces, names, and circumstances, yet similar painful dynamics come back to bite you in the butt. You again are left feeling disappointed, abandoned, mistreated, or unloved. Sigmund Freud named our tendencies to duplicate the deepest hurts of our childhood the “repetition compulsion.” And common wisdom has it that when we unconsciously re-create our worst-case scenarios over and over again, we’re trying to heal the hurts from our past. Unfortunately, you and I know that this doesn’t tend to work out too well.
Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one’s own sunshine.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
One woman I counseled described her childhood as hell; she had a dominating father who terrorized her and her mother with his unpredictable rages, which frequently had her cowering underneath her bed for hours at a time. She came to see me after getting entangled with an ex-con who carried a gun wherever he went, which initially made her feel safe because she felt he could protect her from all of the dangerous people out there. I assure you this did not wind up being a “healing experience.”
While we human beings seem ever optimistic when it comes to believing that this time we’ll be loved, nourished, and protected in the ways we’ve always needed to be, our tendencies to duplicate past disappointments are largely a function of the beliefs we formed long, long ago. I call these beliefs your source-fracture story. It’s the meaning you gave to the original hurt in your heart that became your underlying narrative about yourself and the possibilities you hold for happy, healthy love. In the case of my client, her source-fracture story was: I’m not safe, men are out to get me, and love is dangerous. Through the lens of these beliefs, she unconsciously responded to the uncertainties of life in a way that couldn’t help but re-create that narrative: she grabbed on to a guy with a gun who wasn’t afraid to use it; who else could protect her from a world filled with potentially predatory men? While it may sound extreme, and something no smart woman would ever do, I’ll add that this woman was a highly educated college professor. We’re all a little remedial when it comes to our core beliefs, and even the wisest, most advanced of us can have huge blind spots.
We are disturbed not by what happened to us, but by our thoughts about what happened.
EPICTETUS
Author Anaïs Nin once said, “We see life not as it is, but as we are.” Through the worldview of beliefs formed long ago, we respond to what’s happening in our lives in ways that end up validating these ancient, skewed perspectives. Making choices and taking actions that lead us to manifest more of the same, as though following some distorted inner compass set to lead us home to the same misery we grew up with. All of this happens outside of conscious awareness, and occurs to us simply as our fate to wind up here again, in yet another abusive relationship, with yet another philandering man or with yet another critical, nagging woman. It appears as though Heaven and Earth are conspiring against us to ever find true happiness in love, as we remain oblivious to the actual ways in which we are the authors of our own experience.
My client Sarah was a stay-at-home mother of two small children under the age of five. She grew up with a single, high-powered executive mom. An only child with virtually no extended family, Sarah was raised by a series of nannies. She remembers feeling isolated and alone through most of her childhood. In her lonely little world, relationships were tentative, fragile things. Conflict of any kind was seen as dangerous, for when a nanny disagreed with her mother, they often disappeared the next day. Sarah’s heart broke bit by bit, as over the years she formed this solid source-fracture story: I am alone. Other people always leave. I can never get what I really need from others.
While in graduate school, Sarah met Andrew and was immediately drawn to his warm and outgoing personality. She remembers deciding on their very first date that they would one day marry. To realize this goal, she set out to be everything she thought Andrew wanted in a wife. She agreed with everything he said. She let him make all of their decisions. She laughed at all his jokes and learned about all his interests. And above all, she avoided conflict, certain that a disagreement would be the beginning of the end. Andrew thought he’d met the perfect woman. Within two years they married, bought a lovely little house back in Andrew’s hometown, and started their family.
Sarah aspired to always be sweet, agreeable, and pleasant, and she set about to create the happy home she’d not had while growing up. Yet, as the years passed, she found herself growing more and more depressed. Her feelings confused her, as she seemed to be living the ideal life. Yet, as Andrew’s hours at work grew longer, and Sarah found herself alone each night after the children had gone to bed, she started drinking wine to soothe the puzzling ache in her heart. As she’d waited for her mother to come home from work each evening when she was small, she now waited for her husband. And as her mother had arrived home tired and preoccupied by life outside their little family, so too was Andrew distracted by a world that Sarah was not a part of. The marriage drifted along, lifeless and flat, as they ignored the ever-widening gap between them and filled the emptiness with small talk centered on their children. They might have gone on this way for many years had Andrew not fallen in love with a co-worker. He left with few words spoken, for they were not in the habit of speaking from their hearts about those things that mattered most.
The life of the psyche…is an eternal return, a river which seeks its own source…thereby producing a circular movement which brings back whatever has been.
CARL JUNG
Shattered, Sarah came to see me to help sort out what had happened. We began piecing together the subtle and pervasive ways she’d behaved in her marriage that had covertly re-created the worst of her childhood. She admitted that her unwillingness to risk upsetting Andrew caused her to avoid conflict like the plague, and was stunned to learn that by so doing, she’d failed to ensure their relationship would go through the normal stages of building an authentic union. When I shared the results of Drs. John and Julie Gottman’s studies at the Relationship Research Institute, demonstrating that long-term unions are forged and stabilized through the reconciliation of conflicts and differences, she gasped. Having only been willing to present a carefully crafted image of an idealized wife who never disagreed with anything her husband said or did, she’d not allowed emotional intimacy to take root between them in any meaningful way. She was also horrified to see that in subjugating her true feelings and needs, she’d essentially left herself as emotionally neglected and alone as she had been when she was a child, ignoring herself in ways similar to how she was ignored as a child. She was equally as disturbed to note that she’d also left Andrew alone in the relationship, without any viable partner to go through life with. It was a shock when she realized, sitting across from me in my office, her face contorted with the unwanted truth of it, how much he must have actually wanted a partner as he’d left her for a woman whom he frequently collaborated with at work.
You may be wondering why I would ask Sarah to be responsible for Andrew’s questionable behavior. Wasn’t I blaming the victim? Yet, I didn’t ask Sarah to be accountable for Andrew’s hurtful choices. I did, however, invite her to see herself as the source of her lifelong pattern of alienation and aloneness so that she might begin to finally evolve beyond it. I was helping her to see the indirect and ubiquitous ways she’d set both herself and Andrew up to play out her worst-case scenario over again to ensure that this shocking abandonment would be the last one she’d ever unconsciously re-create. It was a stunning and sobering realization.
Trauma has the quality of converting that one sharp stab into an enduring state of mind….The moment becomes a season; the event becomes a condition.
KAI ERIKSON
While initially painful to see herself as the source of her experience so clearly, in recognizing the specific ways she’d duplicated the pain of her past, she had the wonderful realization that her lifelong experience of isolation was not the dreaded fate she was destined to live, but simply the fictitious story she’d made up as a confused and hurting child. As a little girl, she couldn’t possibly have understood that her mother had an avoidant attachment style and was not bonding properly with her daughter. The only meaning Sarah could make of the big hurt in her little heart was that everyone she loved would eventually leave her. God made the mountains, God made the sun, and God made little Sarah to be alone in this lonesome world.
It’s often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.”
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
This shift from relating to her beliefs as though they were the awful truth about her life, to suddenly understanding them as the invented construct of a sad and lonely little girl, changed everything. Sarah finally understood that she wasn’t actually handicapped, as much as she was just habituated: prone to routinely relating in ways that couldn’t help but re-create the unresolved traumas of her past. In facing herself as the creator of this nightmare, she also saw that she possessed the power to wake herself up from it.
With encouragement from me, she began challenging the validity of her childhood story, and she found the courage to profess a more truthful narrative. Tears streaming down her face, she declared, “I was not born to be alone! I have a deep capacity to love and be loved. And I have the power to learn how to have happy, healthy relationships with people I love who love me back in the ways I need to be loved!” Thus began her highly transformative journey of evolving beyond her source-fracture story.
ASK YOURSELF:
“How has my former partner disappointed me in ways similar to how I was disappointed in my youth?” (For example: “He abandoned our family in the same way my father had when I was five.”)
“How might I have disappointed my former partner in ways similar to how I was disappointed in my youth?” (For example: “I was hypercritical in the same way my mother was hypercritical of me.”)
Identifying Your Source-Fracture Story
Liberation from your painful patterns in love begins with seeing your source-fracture story clearly. For once you make conscious the underlying beliefs that have been driving you to duplicate your sad story in love, you become free to create happier, healthier dynamics moving forward.
The following exercise will support you to identify your source-fracture story by helping you name the beliefs you formed in childhood about yourself and the possibilities you hold for happy, healthy love. It was co-developed with my colleague Claire Zammit.*
1. Become Still. Find a quiet space to sit for a few minutes uninterrupted. Close your eyes, take a deep breath as though you could breathe all the way down to your hips, and relax your body to the best of your ability.
2. Become Aware of Your Feelings Regarding Your Breakup. Become aware of all the feelings you’re holding about this breakup. Notice where these emotions are in your body.
For example: “The emotions are like a burning in my solar plexus,” “They are a heaviness on my heart,” “They are a hole between my shoulder blades as though someone stabbed me in the back,” or “They are a lump in my throat making it hard for me to swallow.”
3. Welcome In Your Feelings. Breathe deeply and notice the part of you able to witness these feelings with deep compassion. Extend love to the part of you experiencing these painful feelings, welcoming each one with a sense of kindness and care. Repeat your Step 1 practice by asking yourself what you are feeling and tenderly reflecting back each of your feelings one at a time. Notice that, in doing so, your ability to step back and lovingly observe your feelings, rather than be swallowed up by them, grows stronger.
4. Notice the Meaning You Are Making of Your Breakup. Let go of trying to figure anything out from your mind, and drop your awareness down into your body, becoming aware of the emotional center of all your difficult and dark feelings. As though you could let the emotional center of your feelings speak for themselves (not your mind), I invite you to answer the following questions:
“What am I making this breakup mean about me?”
For example, “I’m not loved,” “I’m not wanted,” “I’m alone,” “I’m disposable,” “I’m not good enough,” “I’m inferior,” or “I’m a failure.”
“What am I making this breakup mean about my relationship with men/women [whichever gender you’re attracted to]?”
For example: “Men always choose other women, not me,” “Women don’t like me,” “No one really cares about my true feelings and needs,” “People only love me because of what I can do for them,” or “Men only want me for one thing.”
“What am I making this breakup mean about the possibilities I hold for happiness in love?”
For example: “Life doesn’t support me to have love,” “I can never have what I want,” “My love life is cursed,” or “It is dangerous to let anyone get too close.”
5. Identify Your Source-Fracture Story. I now invite you to weave these beliefs together to name your source-fracture story.
For example: “I’m not enough. Men like other women more than they like me. There’s never enough love to go around.”
“I am not valuable. Women just use me for what they can get and then dispose of me. I have to work really hard all the time to try to prove my value.”
“I’m not worthy. Men leave me if I don’t constantly try to please them. My life is empty and void of love.”
6. How Old Is This Part of You/How Big Is the Energy Held in Its Center? See if you can now identify the chronological age of the part of you that is stuck in this story. This answer need not be literal, but more like a felt sense in your body of the age you were when you first came up with this perspective.
ASK YOURSELF:
“How old is this part of me that’s stuck in this story?”
For example: “I’m just a baby,” “I’m about five or six,” or “I’m twelve.”
Notice also how big the energy is that is being held in this center.
ASK YOURSELF:
“How big is the energy that I’m holding here?”
For example: “It’s huge, taking up an entire city block,” “It’s extending about 6 inches out from my body,” “It’s a dense, black knot that is wrapped around my entire heart.”
7. Open Your Eyes and Shake It Out! To help you return to your strong, adult self, open your eyes and shake your body.
ASK YOURSELF:
“What’s the best thing about being my current age as opposed to being me when I was ______ [the age you discovered you are at the core of that story]?”
For example: “I have a lot more choices than I had back then,” “I can set healthy boundaries to protect myself,” or “I have a lot more resources than I did back then and can get the help I need.”
For a free audio download of this practice, please go to www.ConsciousUncoupling.com/StepThreePractice.
Perpetuating Your Source-Fracture Story
When Emily, a twenty-six-year-old law student, met Rick, the lead singer in a rock band, she fell head over heels in love. He was taken with her as well, and they began seeing a lot of each other, each date more exciting than the last. Yet about four weeks in, Rick stopped calling. Whereas earlier he’d at least texted every day to check in, suddenly Emily heard nothing for one day, two days, three days, then four. By the fifth day, she was beside herself. Having had a father who walked out on the family when she was five years old, her abandonment fears got the best of her and, to break the tension, she texted Rick with what she thought was a brilliant preemptive strike against being rejected. She told him she’d met someone else and was no longer interested in pursuing the connection. It wasn’t until three years later when they ran into each other at a club that they discovered what had happened. Rick hadn’t gone silent because he was no longer interested in seeing her. Instead, he was actually taking some time to contemplate making a deeper commitment to Emily, and to bring closure to a few other casual relationships he’d begun in order to make himself available to ask her to be in an exclusive relationship with him. When Emily found out, she was stunned. Inside of her core belief that men always leave, she was certain that Rick’s silence was an indication he was choosing out of the relationship, and she was heartbroken to discover how she’d been the source of her own experience of abandonment by being the one who bailed on him.
While you can’t keep your heart from getting broken, you can stop breaking your own heart.
LEIGH NEWMAN
Our relational patterns don’t just happen to us. They happen through the lens of our own assumptions, which influences how we then respond to our circumstances. In order to graduate from your painful patterns in love, I invite you to take stock of how you may have unconsciously shown up in your relationship in ways that literally caused your source-fracture story to happen again.
To begin, reflect upon the following questions:
1. How Did You Relate to Yourself in Ways That Validated Your Source-Fracture Story? As your relationships with others can never be better than your relationship with yourself, I invite you to identify the specific way(s) you treated yourself that was reflected back to you in the treatment you received. Look for the ways you may have trained your former partner to treat you by how you tend to treat yourself.
For example, if your former partner abandoned you, look for the ways you self-abandoned throughout the relationship. If he or she was self-absorbed and self-serving, look for the ways you may have treated your own feelings and needs as if they didn’t matter. If he or she was critical, look for the ways you might be inappropriately hard on yourself.
2. How Did You Set Your Former Partner Up to Validate Your Source-Fracture Story? How did you covertly set your former partner up to disappoint you in ways similar to how you’ve been hurt in the past?
For example: “I failed to share my feelings and needs, and so my former partner couldn’t possibly have known what I needed from him and couldn’t help but disappoint me.”
“I didn’t want my former partner to be mad at me, so I failed to set healthy boundaries until it seemed the only way out of my chronic self-abandonment was to leave.”
“I was so desperate for love that I settled for less than I deserved; constantly tolerated bad behavior, hoping that he would change. Yet by not standing up for myself, I actually gave him permission to treat me poorly.”
Note: Beware of the tendency to be victimized by your own weaknesses and old wounds. Rather than say, “I can never stand up for myself because my father abused me when I was a child,” try being responsible for your choices by saying, “I have continually chosen to abuse myself in ways similar to how my father abused me. By doing so, I trained my boyfriend to treat me just as badly.” As long as you stay victimized and helpless, you will not grow beyond your old patterns. Look to own the volitional component of the choices you’ve made, as those are your leverage points for change.
3. How Have You Related to Life in Ways That Have Validated Your Source-Fracture Story? We tend to project onto the universe the worst of our childhood, imagining life to be punishing, withholding, uncaring, or cruel in much the same way we experienced our primary attachment figures (such as our parents or older siblings) to be when we were young. Inside of this worldview, we relate in ways that covertly create evidence that our beliefs are valid.
ASK YOURSELF:
“Because of the beliefs I have about life, how did I contribute to how things went down in my relationship?”
For example: “Because I believed that I couldn’t have what I wanted, I chronically compromised and settled for less than I deserve until I couldn’t take it anymore and left.”
“Because I believed it’s dangerous to be seen, I was not authentic about my true feelings and needs until I felt so invisible I had to end things.”
“Because I believed that life is a battle, I was constantly combative and on the defensive until he got tired of fighting and left.”
Note: Understanding your contribution to the breakup can be an eye-opening and humbling experience, and you may be tempted to move into self-hatred and shame in response. Remember, however, that if you allow yourself to be swallowed by shame, you risk becoming stuck in it, unable to use what you’re discovering as a catalyst for positive evolution and change. 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. You’ve already had one person not love you the way you need to be loved. Please don’t repeat that letdown with yourself.
What’s Really True?
Just as a near-death experience can wake us up to the true meaning of life, so too can the death of love awaken us out of the trance of false beliefs and to the magnificence of our own being. In an instant, our old story is revealed to be just that—a story. One constructed when we were far too young to have understood things any other way. In awakening to this truth, we can begin to question the conclusions we came to and start to see a more nuanced picture of what may have been happening between ourselves and others at the time we formed these worldviews.
Beliefs are relational—meaning, we created them in relationship with those we loved and depended upon the most. We didn’t just pluck these stories out of the ether. Something was going on between you and your mom, or you and your dad, grandma, or weird Uncle Jim that was wildly painful and confusing, and beyond your capacity to comprehend. Given that, as a kid, your main developmental task was to form a sense of who you are and where you fit into this world, it’s understandable that you would make whatever was happening mean something about you. It’s only when you revisit the conclusions you came to with the rationality of an adult who has an enhanced capacity to hold complexity and nuance that a more sophisticated and accurate picture can emerge.
You must go back to rescue the younger you from that wacky and distorted hall of mirrors. Because the meaning you made about yourself and your life—that you are bad, not wanted, not loved, too much, not enough, powerless, and/or destined to be alone in life—is simply not true.
Until we identify and challenge these core beliefs, they will return to haunt us. Yet, once we do, we are finally free to graduate from that old, painful story once and for all. Author of The Courage to Love, psychologist Stephen Gilligan, tells us that “It may take years, even generations, but a negative experience returns until human presence is brought to touch it with love and acceptance and integrate it….On this point, nature seems eternally patient and forever cruel.” The part of you stuck in that old story has been waiting for you to love it. I invite you right now to put one hand over wherever that story has resided in your body (for example, your solar plexus, your heart, or your throat), and just say to yourself, “Sweetheart, that story is not even true. What’s more true is _____” and fill in the blank.
For example:
…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.
Of all the nostalgias that haunt the human heart, the greatest of them is an everlasting longing to bring what is youngest home to what is oldest, in us all.
LAURENS VAN DER POST
As my client Sarah did when she caught a glimpse of how much power she was holding to create deep and rich relationships with others, I encourage you to fight to wake yourself from the trance of your source-fracture story in a way you wished others had fought for you. Be the hero or heroine of your own journey and kiss yourself awake from your slumber. Do it now. Don’t waste one more precious day of your beautiful life sleepwalking through the nightmare of those erroneous assumptions.
I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.
HAFIZ
Belief or Truth?
ASK YOURSELF:
“Regarding my source-fracture belief(s), what’s really true?”
Belief: I’m not enough.
Truth: My very existence is more than enough to be worthy of great love. I am inherently worthy of receiving respect, honor, and love.
Belief: I don’t matter.
Truth: My feelings and needs matter. They matter to me. And it is appropriate for me to have a healthy expectation that they also matter to those who are closest to me.
Belief: I am not lovable.
Truth: Even when the man I love closes his heart to me, I am still deeply lovable and worthy of being loved.
Belief: I’m bad.
Truth: Just because I’m feeling shame, that does not mean I actually have anything to be ashamed of.
Or
Truth: The mistakes I’ve made are lessons learned and I commit myself to cleaning up my messes. It is the mark of a good person to humbly learn from his or her mistakes and make amends moving forward.
Belief: I’m alone.
Truth: I was not born to be alone. I came here to love and be loved, and I have the power to learn how to have happier and healthier relationships moving forward.
Belief: I’m not valuable.
Truth: I am a treasure unto all of Life. I need never do a thing to try to prove my inherent value.
Belief: I’m not safe.
Truth: I have the power to learn how to keep myself safe by learning new, healthier ways of relating.
It’s so easy to provide wisdom and counsel for a friend in need—reminding her in moments of weakness of the truth of her own value and power—yet that’s so much harder to do for ourselves. Caught up in our big emotions, we can easily mistake our feelings for facts, and slip into seeing our situation from a child’s perspective. When you find yourself in the downward spiral of your source-fracture story, look for the part of you that is a wise, intelligent, educated, and developed adult who can see what’s happening with clarity, perspective, and compassion. From this adult center, lean in and lovingly tend to the younger part of you that is confused and hurting, as though you were caring for a treasured friend whom you loved with all your heart. Offer yourself your pearls of wisdom, your nuggets of truth, your common sense, and the profound insights and understanding you have access to when you dig deep into the recesses of your heart and soul.
Soul-to-Soul Communication
The temptation of a breakup is to see yourself through the eyes of your former partner as somehow less than who you are. Maybe he or she has a negative, judgmental story about you that played a part in your breakup. Maybe this person is now devaluing you as a way to lessen the pain of losing you. While you cannot know for sure what he feels or thinks of you, your imagination can run wild with the piercing experience of no longer being wanted, loved, adored, or chosen. Under such an assault, can you hold steady the truth of your own power and goodness? Can you take back the permission you’ve given another to determine your worth, and hold strong to the truth of your value in the face of being devalued by the one who just yesterday was everything to you?
Because beliefs are relational, when a lover leaves, we are often left struggling with the residue of what that means about us. We forget the thousands of ways that the relationship reflected back our value to us, and remember instead the few horrible moments when we felt dishonored, discarded, and/or devalued, leaving us to struggle with a wounded sense of self from having endured this experience. Because it might not be possible to restore a sense of balance in the actual relationship itself at this time, I offer the following practice to help free you from this residue and shift you back into a deep sense of your own worthiness, value, and power in a way that you can feel in your body.
Note: If you are doing the program with your former partner, I suggest you do this exercise as a personal practice rather than try to engage it directly with one another. You may wish to share the experience afterwards in your debrief of this step of the program.
1. Become Still. Find a quiet space to sit uninterrupted for a few minutes. Close your eyes, take a deep breath as though you could breathe all the way down to your hips, and relax your body to the best of your ability.
2. Anchor into Your Adult Self. Connect with the part of you that is a strong, resourceful, intelligent, developed, wise, and loving adult and, as though you could anchor the energy of this adult self all through your body and beyond, breathe deeply as though you could breathe all the way down to your hips, your legs, and your feet, extending your energy down into the earth and out to the edges of the room.
3. Invite Your Younger Self to Leave the Room. Lovingly instruct the younger part of you to go someplace safe, much as you might ask a child to leave the room when the grown-ups are about to have a serious conversation.
4. Invite Your Former Partner to Sit Before You for a Soul-to-Soul Communication. (Note: If your former partner was physically threatening or violent, I suggest you imagine putting up a firewall of protection around you that prevents him or her from being able to touch you.) As if you could invite the soul of your former partner in for a meaningful conversation, ask this person to come sit before you. Keeping the tone between you cordial and respectful, imagine looking into his or her eyes, and say the following (feel free to use your own words and embellish, but do your best to keep the overall meaning of the communication intact):
“I give you the benefit of the doubt by taking responsibility for training you to treat me in the ways you did. I recognize your behavior toward me in many ways mirrored my own.”
Imagine this person listening to all you are saying with rapt attention and authentic interest. Continue on by saying:
“Your poor treatment of me helped wake me up to the truth of my value, my power, my goodness, my intelligence, and my worthiness to love and be loved. For that, I thank you.”
“Yet, I now wish to right things between us by sharing with you who I truly am so as to correct any misperceptions you may have been left with.”
Speak what’s really true about who you are and what is possible for you.
For example: “I am a powerful, loving man who is deeply worthy of being seen, supported, honored, and respected,” “I am a sexy, sensual, voluptuous woman who is worthy of being sexually ravished by a partner who is turned on by my body,” “I am an amazing, smart, and intriguing woman who is worthy of being treated like a queen,” “I know I showed up as less than who I have the potential to be in our relationship, but there is so much more to me than that and I will take all I’ve learned with you and apply it to my next relationship so that I can create a much happier future in love.”
Let this person see the full truth of who you are, especially if you showed up as a dimmed-down version of yourself while in the relationship. Imagine your former partner seeing you as if for the very first time. See the respect, admiration, and appreciation in his eyes and feel him extending a sense of goodwill and love toward you.
Now, repeat the following, as though you had a direct line of communication to the soul of your former partner:
“I ask that you treat me with honor and respect from now on. Whether or not we see each other in person, I ask that in your thoughts, words, actions, and deeds you relate to me in ways that are reflective of my true value, power, intelligence, goodness, and worthiness to love and be loved. And I give you my word to do the same for you.”
Ask this person: “Do I have your agreement?” and wait for the “Yes” before moving on. Visualize looking directly into his eyes, fully present and available to restore dignity and honor between you.
Now, imagine all moments of humiliation, shame, embarrassment, dishonor, or disrespect dissolving between you, and feel yourself restored to a place of honor, dignity, esteem, and love in your former partner’s eyes.
5. Imagine You and Your Former Partner Offering a Deep Bow to One Another. Picture your former partner and you offering a deep bow to one another to complete your conversation, recognizing that these new agreements have now been set in motion.
Note: If and when you find yourself slipping into a feeling of low self-worth prompted by how things were left at the end of your relationship, stop yourself from dwelling on the moments when you felt devalued, dishonored, disrespected, and unloved. Instead, turn your attention toward remembering your experience here. You may also wish to consider the moments of delight, admiration, desire, tenderness, and authentic love that passed between you while in the relationship, and make a decision that these were the times when your former partner was seeing you most clearly.
Graduating from Painful Love Patterns
Happy, healthy relationships aren’t just about meeting and falling in love with the right person. Nor are they about being born under a lucky star or having your astrological chart line up a certain way. Good relationships are about having the necessary development—both inner and outer—to sustain healthy intimacy and goodwill over time between yourself and another person. And while most of us assume we’ve been repeating old patterns in an attempt to heal the past, it’s just as likely we’ve been duplicating these dynamics because we simply haven’t known how to do it any differently.
We have to stop asking why this is happening to me and start asking why it is happening for me.
AUGUST GOLD
By becoming aware of the ways you’ve been setting yourself up to lose in love, you now have the opportunity to set yourself up to win. You can begin learning how to show up in ways that are congruent with the truth of your value, rather than behave in ways consistent with your false beliefs. You can learn to stand up for yourself, speak your truth, set healthy boundaries, ask questions that would create safety for yourself, identify your own deeper knowing, or even extend care to others in ways that build trust and connection. By identifying these specific new ways of relating, you’ll begin to feel relief from the hopelessness of your heartache, recognizing the opportunity at hand to graduate from old, dysfunctional ways of showing up in life.
For most of us, emancipating ourselves from these old, disappointing habits will require us to learn some basic skills and capacities that we somehow never acquired. Imprisoned by our source-fracture stories, our development was stunted. If you really don’t believe that others care about your feelings and needs, why bother learning how to communicate what they are? If you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that others always leave, why learn to navigate conflict in ways that deepen understanding? Wouldn’t that only hurt more in the long run? If you assume that love is dangerous, why take down your guard and drop your aggressive defensiveness? In doing so, you’d surely leave yourself at risk for harm. Yet, without healthy relational skills and capacities, you won’t be able to graduate from your old patterns in love, because you’ll be ill-equipped to create anything else.
Out of difficulties grow miracles.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
No matter how psychologically savvy you’ve become over the years—able to recite your issues backwards and forwards, stating with great accuracy exactly what happened to you, when it happened, who it happened with and why—until you learn those specific skills and capacities that will allow you to create a more satisfying experience of love, you’ll stay stuck repeating the past. When my client Sarah took a stand to evolve beyond her source-fracture story of chronic aloneness in life, she was immediately confronted with how little she knew about creating emotional intimacy with another human being. Recognizing how ill-equipped she was to have an authentic relationship, she felt overwhelmed and confused about how to proceed. She didn’t even have much of a relationship with herself. After years of pushing aside her emotions, dismissing them as unimportant, she realized that much of her inability to share her feelings and needs with others was due to how clueless she was about what they actually were.
In our work, Sarah learned that emotional intimacy occurs when people take the risk of sharing what’s happening in their inner world. To prepare for this, we began by helping Sarah learn to distinguish her own feelings and needs. Rather than simply say she was feeling down, we worked to help her discern the many shades of blue that one can feel: despairing, discouraged, disappointed, dazed, numb, despondent, hopeless, or bereaved. Rather than simply report that she was having a better day, she learned to label her inner experience more accurately by saying she was feeling hopeful, engaged, optimistic, serene, revived, excited, or restored. She then learned how to use her feelings as important information to assist her in discerning her needs, learning to name these needs in a way that gave her the chance to address them. She needed to be recognized as valuable, treated with respect, listened to, and loved for who she is.
Ideally, Sarah would have discovered how to distinguish her own feelings and needs between the ages of four and eight, when it would have been developmentally appropriate for her to learn the skills of emotional literacy. Yet in the home she grew up in, no one was helping her to decipher her own, inner experience. And because her source-fracture story included the assumption that she could never get what she needed from anyone, it never occurred to her to even try to develop herself in these ways.
Once we identified the missing skills and capacities that were sabotaging Sarah’s ability to form a healthy relationship and got to work developing them, she was free to evolve beyond her painful patterns of isolation and aloneness that had permeated her whole life. Within a relatively short period of time, Sarah became a good communicator. I’m happy to say that her efforts paid off. As of this writing, Sarah is now in a markedly more satisfying relationship than the one she had with her husband. She and her boyfriend sometimes argue, yet they’re apt to do so in ways that bring them closer, and leave them more capable of tending to each other’s well-being and happiness. While wistful about what might have been in her marriage had she been the woman then that she is now, she would tell you she’d not trade what happened for the world. The shattering of her marriage was the opening she needed to wake her up to a whole new possibility of what life, and love, could be.
You may be confronted with the fact that you don’t yet know how to evolve beyond your old patterns. Perhaps you’re confused about what healthy boundaries even are, let alone how you might set them with others. Or maybe you feel remedial when it comes to negotiating the fulfillment of your needs, clueless about which ones are even appropriate to ask another person to fulfill. You may feel totally baffled when it comes to knowing how to self-soothe so you don’t fly off the handle and go into a rage every time you don’t get your way. We all have blind spots that prevent us from realizing the potential each relationship holds for love and happiness. Yet, this is where most of us get stopped, for we are intimidated by what we don’t yet know, and we are quick to step back into our habitual, limited ways of doing things simply because, well, that’s just what we know to do.
What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful.
BRENÉ BROWN
So that you might outgrow your repetitive patterns in love, I invite you to take on what the Buddhists call “Beginner’s Mind.” It’s softening into an inquiry toward all you don’t yet know, valuing uncertainty over certainty and vulnerability over the protection of looking good. You look to identify the specific skills and capacities that would set you free, and commit to learning them as if your life depended upon that, because in many ways it does. None of us who’ve suffered a shattered heart, or who have broken the heart of another, wishes to do so again. Which leaves you two choices. One is to shut down, and never let yourself love and be loved ever again; the other is to take on your own development so that you can trust yourself to create a happier, healthier experience the next time around.
Fortunately, we are ever-evolving creatures who are capable of learning new things throughout our entire lives. Also fortunate is the fact that there are a slew of amazing teachers who teach what you missed in your youth. In the Online Resources section of this book, I provide a partial list of some gifted teachers whose life mission is to empower you to have happy, healthy love in your life, in all of its many forms. I hope you make the choice to allow some of them into your life so you can have the relationships you’d hope to have.
Let this be an amazing beginning, and not just an end. Most of us need wake-up calls such as the one you’ve just received to be inspired to become all we have the potential to be. And many go on to call their biggest lessons their biggest blessings, because they choose to relate to their losses as opportunities to live and love more deeply than ever before.
ASK YOURSELF:
“How can I relate to myself in way(s) that would demonstrate the truth of my value, power, and worthiness to love and be loved? What new skills and/or capacities might I need to develop to show up this way?”
For example: “I can begin paying attention to my own feelings and needs before automatically tending to the feelings and needs of others. The skill I would need to learn is to better gauge what my feelings and needs are.”
“How can I relate to others in way(s) that demonstrate the truth of my value, power, and worthiness to love and be loved? What new skills and/or capacities might I need to develop to show up this way?”
For example: “I can take the risk to share my authentic feelings and needs with others so that I can discover who cares about me, and who doesn’t, and to know which relationships to continue to invest myself in. The capacities I’d need to grow are (1) the ability to tolerate being more vulnerable and (2) expanding my willingness to receive.”
“How can I relate to life in way(s) that demonstrate the truth of my value, power, and worthiness? What new skills and/or capacities might I need to develop to show up this way?”
For example: “I can raise my expectations and begin asking for what I truly want and need in life. The capacity I’d need to cultivate is the ability to hold a bigger vision for my life, stretching my picture of what might be possible for me beyond what was possible for the women in my family.”
STEP 3 SELF-CARE SUGGESTIONS
(Take at least 2 each day)
1. Drink lots of pure, clean water as a symbolic gesture of flushing toxic habits from your life.
2. Eat healthy, hearty, and nurturing foods that are packed with nutrients and love.
3. Fill your home with fresh air, lots of light, beautiful flowers, and things that smell good.
4. Stretch to try out at least one new way of relating each day that demonstrates the deeper truth of your own value, power, intelligence, goodness, and worthiness to love and be loved.
5. Put on some music that you love and dance, allowing your body to fully express the emotions you’ve been holding.
6. Write three lists. The first is a list of 20 things you are losing that you are happy to be losing (e.g., listening to his snoring all night long!). The second is a list of 20 things you are actually gaining by losing this relationship (e.g., I finally have time to tend to my own creative projects). And the third is a list of 20 ways you could turn this disappointment into the best thing that ever happened to you (e.g., I could finally start being an adult woman and fully in my power with men).
NOTE TO COUPLES DOING THE PROGRAM TOGETHER
In this third step of your Conscious Uncoupling program, you’ll want to share with one another those insights and breakthroughs that will begin to create a sense of closure and cohesion so that you continue moving forward toward greater levels of autonomy. The motivation for sharing should not be to feel closer to your former partner, although that could, paradoxically, be a by-product of doing this exercise together. Your incentive for the conversation should simply be to liberate yourself from ever again repeating your source-fracture story with anyone new.
Notice that I said “liberate yourself.” You are each responsible only for your own growth in this regard; neither of you should bear the burden of trying to fix the other, nor should either of you feel compelled to hold up a mirror to point out the missing development of one another. To this aim, you want to be rigorously honest and transparent about your own flaws, blind spots, and false motivations, and be willing to lose face in service to saving your soul. Remind yourself that your former partner doesn’t actually need to “get it” as much as you need to get it, in order to be free.
I suggest you refrain from giving advice or feedback unless specifically asked by your former partner to do so, keeping the focus entirely on yourself and cleaning up your own side of the street. After each of you has shared, make sure to thank your former partner for being honest and having the courage to tell the truth. It is important that you allow for diverse perspectives, recognizing that not all things need be resolved between you. Do your best to simply tolerate the tensions of those chasms that cannot be crossed, and honor them as the wisdom of life that is now leading you in different directions. Remember that the opportunity of this conversation is to help you mature beyond these patterns, as well as to restore a wholesome sense of goodwill between the two of you as you bless each other to do better in future relationships.
* Originally called “Transformation of Identity,” this exercise was created as part of the curriculum for the online Feminine Power Transformative Courses for Women (see www.FemininePower.com). It has been taught in both the Calling in “The One” (see www.CallingInTheOne.com) and the Feminine Power online courses to tens of thousands of participants over the years to help them break free of repetitive and painful patterns and realize their higher potentials in life and in love.