How I invented the phrase ‘conscious uncoupling’
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin famously had a ‘happy divorce’ after they practised ‘conscious uncoupling’. Here, Katherine Woodward Thomas explains what led her to coin the original phrase
‘Conscious uncoupling’ shot into the lexicon of global awareness in the aftermath of an announcement offered by the actress Gwyneth Paltrow and her musician husband Chris Martin, who used the term to make public their intention to separate in 2014. I will be forever grateful to them for doing so. Within 24 hours, millions were talking about how we might more consciously complete our unions, and improve upon the antagonistic and contentious ways of breaking up we’d come to accept as the norm.
I had coined the phrase four years earlier as the name for my online course on how to have a better breakup. At the time of the Paltrow-Martin story, I was deep in the jungles of Costa Rica on a self-imposed writing retreat to work on the proposal for a new book. The book (which I have since written) would share the conscious uncoupling process I’d been developing and teaching to thousands since 2009.
Though I’d gone to the most remote place I could find to minimise distractions, in our virtual world there are few places to hide. Within hours of the announcement, I found myself camped out in a tiny room that was little more than a wardrobe, talking on the only landline the retreat centre had available, with reporters from around the globe all wanting to know the answer to one very simple question: what the heck is a conscious uncoupling?
This is what I told them: a conscious uncoupling is a break-up or divorce that is characterised by a tremendous amount of goodwill, generosity and respect, where those separating strive to do minimal damage to themselves, to each other and to their children (if they have any), and intentionally seek to create new agreements and structures so everyone can flourish and thrive moving forward in life.
In short, it’s a break-up that manages to surmount, defy and even triumph over the unconscious, primitive and biologically based impulses we may have to lash out, punish, get revenge and/or otherwise hurt the one by whom we feel hurt. Granted, it’s easier said than done. It was through my own turbulent personal experience of divorce that I came to develop the five-step conscious uncoupling programme. When I was a young girl, my parents divorced. The result was a nasty custody battle that led to my eventual alienation from my father when I was 10 years old, and he finally threw in the towel, surrendering his paternal rights altogether due to his inability to get on with my mother.
Many years later, my subsequent marriage to Mark Austin Thomas, a news director and broadcaster, unravelled before my eyes. The one thing I knew was that I wasn’t going to do to our daughter, Alexandria, who was 11 at the time, what my parents did to me.
There are a million little ways that a marriage grows apart, most too mundane to mention. Yet what happened to Mark and me was that I changed. As the years went by, the core values by which we lived grew further and further apart. Whereas I am a change junkie, Mark, gentle-hearted man that he is, aspires to the appreciation of things as they are.
Once I had dealt with the shock and pain, I immediately began to look back to see if I could decipher the process by which we had managed the transition of our union with such goodwill and grace.
The mores of dating, mating and marriage have never stayed the same for long. From the radically novel idea of having romantic love as the reason for marrying in the mid-18th century, to the “traditional” idealised stay-at-home mum and breadwinning dad of the Fifties, to the two-daddy household, where birth mothers visit two weekends a year, the customs of love have always been, and remain, a moving train.
Just as it was once the norm to meet and marry your one true love, it’s now just as common to not mate for life. A recent New York Times article reports that for the first time in recorded history, more people over 50 are now divorced than widowed, the rate of uncoupling after a long marriage having nearly doubled since 1990. More than 40 per cent of first marriages, more than 60 per cent of second marriages and more than 70 per cent of third marriages end in divorce.
Our attempt to redefine a “happy ending” is not evidence that we no longer believe in love. On the contrary, we are relentless believers in love and lifelong union. Yet, given the realities of our time, which include the postmodern tensions between the stability of marriage and ideals of individual freedom, selfexpression and personal growth, we must accept the choice to unmarry by the many who make it.
For learning to live happily even after may very well be the essence of what it is to truly love each other.
It is fear and anger that generally hold us back. Once we allow fear to hijack us, and step into the driver’s seat of our lives, we’re apt to say and do stupid and destructive things. Right at the moment when we need our thinking brains the most to help sort through some important decisions – mapping out a separation, the consequences of which we will be living with for many years to come – our brains are programmed to not be thinking much at all.
In understanding this, I gained an even deeper respect for a person’s decision to remain conscious while uncoupling; to strive to overcome the limbic brain-induced impulses to burn the house down, smash all the china or give his expensive suits away to charity – choosing instead to take sound action that is more in keeping with our conscience and which is centred in the cortex, the rational part of the brain.
This is the part of us that can keep our compulsion to behave like a crazed wounded animal in check, and ensure that we show up in ways that make the triumph of our ethics over our emotions even possible. The challenge is not to give in to the temptation to plant seeds of ill will and revenge – actions that could grow into bitter fruits that we may be forced to eat for many years to come.
To realise this ideal of a conscious, peaceful parting of the ways, I have developed a five-step process – the conscious uncoupling programme – to help navigate our way through the thorny terrain of lost love, and safely deliver us to the other side of separation with hearts, psyches and souls intact.
It is important to know that conscious uncoupling is not just for those who made it all the way to the altar. It’s for anyone whose heart is heavy with the unspeakable grief of lost love. All break-ups are critical crossroads, and the loss of love is a definitive moment in life that will demand a grave decision of you.
From the dung heap of your despair, you can contract from life to protect your heart from this kind of hurt again, dooming yourself in the process to living a lesser life, or you can find a way to use this tragic experience as the opportunity to cultivate greater wisdom, depth, maturity and a deeper capacity to love and be loved.
In a nutshell, a break-up is nothing short of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a complete spiritual awakening. With that in mind, above is a précis to my five steps to living happily even after…
Learning to live happily even after may be the essence of what it is to truly love each other