Why consciously uncoupling is HOGWASH!
By LUCY CAVENDISH who wanted to throttle her ex — not ‘love and respect’ him
We have all heard of conscious uncoupling — the term popularised by Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin when they separated. They posted a statement on Gwynnie’s Goop website asking for privacy as they ‘conscious uncouple’ and it stuck, even though most people were not sure what it meant.
Now, thanks to a new book by marriage therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas, who claims to have invented the term, parting couples have a step-by-step guide on how to consciously uncouple themselves. The end goal being a ‘happy and harmonious break-up or divorce’.
The secret, says Katherine, is treating your partner with respect, in the hope that they will follow your lead. She also advocates behaving decently, honouring all the good things between you and leaving each other with ‘a deep sense of love, gratitude and spiritual peace’.
Then, once you have told your ex you wish them all the best life has to offer, you do a long inventory of yourself and your role in the breakdown of the marriage. You take responsibility for your sins, get rid of your ‘poor me’ attitude and go into the world as a new you.
I don’t wish to be negative. But when I separated from the father of three of my four children four years ago, I would have loved to ‘harness the intensity of the emotions you are feeling and transform them f rom destructive impulses into constructive energies’.
It’s just that, when your heart feels broken and numb and all you want to do when you see your ex is to plunge a knife in his heart, being consciously loving and graceful is hard.
Of course, I understand that being responsible and decent and mutually respectful is essential for continued co-parenting, it’s just that, in the real world, i t’s not that simple. Most couples are left shattered.
It’s not easy to be kind if you’ve been married to a lying, cheating, moneygrabbing scumbag, as some are. Nor when you find out your ‘loving’ husband of two decades has actually been carrying on with another woman for the majority of your marriage.
This happened to a friend and, every time she saw him, she wanted to run him over. emotions are emotions. We can’t j ust train them to disappear. It i s not possible to experience only the good ones and filter out the bad. We can spend our lives chanting and practising yoga, but those emotions need to go somewhere and, when they are raw, it is important to recognise them for what they are. In fact, it is more healthy to do so. In order to grow and mature, we need to accept that all these emotions are part of us and that, sometimes, raging anger and deepseated hatred are appropriate.
It is also important to know these feelings pass. We can hope to consciously uncouple a few years down the line when the pain has lessened. But when you are right in the middle of it, it seems impossible to tell your ex how much you appreciated them never listening to a word you said and making out with every younger woman in sight.
My ex, fortunately, didn’t do either these things (well, not the latter one). Yet when we split — because we grew apart — we were both full of hurt, anger and disappointment, even though there was no one else involved. We felt let down by each other. In many ways, we lost our minds. I think back on it now and realise I lost all perspective. all I wanted to do was shout. Or cry.
I was angry, bolshy and feeling like a martyr. Nothing was my fault. everything was my fault. I had wild mood swings. I was no more capable of making a calm inventory of my behaviour than I was flying to the moon on a broomstick.
This is part of the problem. When you are going through something that is so utterly soul-destroying, it is impossible to behave in a wellintentioned way. I count myself usually as a compassionate and relatively thoughtful person who wishes most people well. But, back then, I wanted a building to fall in on my ex and flatten him.
Love is a strong emotion, one of the deepest and potentially darkest we experience. Love takes us to places that make us feel crazy.
It is mad, frightening, heady, obsessive, wonderful, jealousy-inducing. Love makes us act in ways we didn’t think possible, and it is even worse when it goes wrong. Given that, how do you consciously uncouple?
Is it healthy to be nice and bake him a vegan lentil pie as a farewell gift? If couples can separate this decently and admiringly, why didn’t they stay together in the first place?
I am not saying it’s better to stay together. I just know from my own experience — and that of others — how separation evokes many terrifying and strange emotions.
It is possible to love and hate someone all at the same time. There is a role for being goodhearted and decent — especially when there are children involved — but this part takes time and thought. It is only now, four years on, I feel my ex and I are in the process of consciously uncoupling.
In the early days, when we agreed to separate, I stayed in the family home with the children and he often came back to see them. That was probably the first step in trying to find a new way to be.
But tensions ramped up when lawyers got involved about money and who was keeping the children. I think that was when a shift started to happen. We realised the stress was getting out of hand — as were the fees — so we decided to sort it out ourselves.
It was obvious we needed to co-parent. and in order to do that, we had to start communicating.
We called off the lawyers. We agreed we had loved each other and still did, in a way. We realised we wanted the same things — the happiness of our children, a future together but apart.
SO We started to talk. We began, slowly, to apologise, to take responsibility for our own part of what went wrong. That was very hard. I had to admit to all the things I had done that hurt him, and it wasn’t easy. It’s much easier to blame someone else than shoulder your own part in the sad mess.
We did kids’ birthday parties together — then a Christmas. Now, we see each other most days and are respectful. Our children are at the centre of our lives.
The nasty stuff is behind us. But what if we hadn’t been through all that? I am not sure we could be this amicable i f we hadn’t l et the banshees out of the box for a bit.
Of course, it is important to try to keep your children away from all the nastiness but, in many ways, consciously uncoupling might not be doing them any favours, either.
If you see your parents separate despite still loving each other, then what message is being taught? If separation is a breeze, I am not sure if they are being given the best tools to form meaningful relationships themselves.
The very idea of consciously uncoupling is cutting off the thing you need to experience in an intimate relationship — the downs as well as the ups. If ou don’t go through this, the next relationship slides the same way, because nothing has changed.
Intimacy, being loved and loving someone is scary. But that is real love rather than fairytale ‘true’ love. To love someone is to battle through the scars — his, yours and the wounds you create together.
ConsCious uncoupling (Yellow Kite, £14.99), by Katherine Woodward Thomas, is out now