Conscious Uncoupling Quotes

Every way that you’ve given away your power, denied your own deeper knowing, put someone else’s feelings and needs before your own, stayed embedded in a victimized story, or settled for less in life—all of it is now up for review. You have nowhere to hide. Life has broken you open and it is violently, mercilessly forcing you to evolve, to develop, and to grow.

If you don’t like being a doormat, then get off the floor. AL-ANON

So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear. Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful. ETTY HILLESUM

Anger begs us to make a powerful commitment to what we will or will not tolerate in our lives any longer, making it our best friend if we can turn it in the right direction.

The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.

In a nutshell, a breakup is nothing short of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a complete spiritual awakening. One that catapults you to a whole new level of authenticity, compassion, wisdom, depth, and—dare I say it?—even joy.

Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out. ROBERT FROST

You can live your life out of circumstance or you can live your life out of a vision. WERNER ERHARD

Feel the feelings. Drop the story. PEMA CHODRON

…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.

ASK YOURSELF: “What commitments do I wish my former partner had made to me that I can now make to myself?

For learning to live happily even after, finding a way to forgive the unforgivable, and to move forward in life graciously with hope in our hearts and goodwill in our gestures and in our words, may very well be the essence of what it is to truly love each other.

And while your new life may look little like the one you left behind, your goal is not to try to create a better version of what you once had, but to expand what’s now possible to include fresh new horizons, friends, and interests—and the exploration of forgotten, yet promising possibilities.

I call it your source-fracture wound, the original break in your heart from long ago. It may have happened in an instant--a little rejection, a shocking abandonment, or a slight misattunement that suddenly made you realize how alone you were in this world. Or perhaps it was a bit-bu-bit splintering as over the years you met with an intermittent meanness, an unpredictable but repetitive abuse, or a neglect that stole your childhood inches at a time. Wherever, however, or whenever it happened, one thing we can assume is that no adult helped you make accurate meaning of your confusing and painful experience. No grown up sat you down and lovingly said, "No, honey, it's not that you're stupid. It's that your big brother is scared and insecure." "It's not that you don't matter, angel. It's that Daddy has a drinking problem and needs help." "It's not that you're not enough. It's that Mommy has clinical depression, dear, and it's neither your fault nor yours to fix." Without this mature presence to help explain to you what was happening to your little world, you probably came to some pretty strong and wrong conclusions about who you were and what was possible for you to have in life. And those conclusions became a habit of consciousness, a filter through which you interpret and then respond to the events of your life, making your grief all the more complex.

For centuries, Eastern religions have been telling us that it’s our egos that trap us in suffering. In the 5th century, Indian adept Vasubandu wrote, “So long as you grasp at the self, you stay bound to the world of suffering.” These spiritual traditions emphasize meditation, contemplation, altruistic service, and compassion as ways to escape the ego. Our emotions and thoughts become less “sticky” and “I, me, mine” “lose their self-hypnotic power.” That’s how we stop selfing. Once we drop our identification with the ego-self enshrined in the prefrontal cortex and enter Bliss Brain, we make the subject-object shift. We can ask ourselves, “If I’m not my thoughts, and I’m the one thinking those thoughts, then who might I be?” This perspective takes us out of selfing and into the present moment. In the meditative present, we can connect with the great nonlocal field of consciousness. Different traditions have different names for it: the Tao, the Anima Mundi, the Universal Mind, God, the All That Is. We then see our local self as the object. With this view from the mountaintop, we’re able to perceive new possibilities of what we might become, this time from the perspective of oneness with the universe. Free of the drag of the ego, uncoupled from the chatter of the demon, the conditioned personalities we inherited from our history and past experiences no longer confine our sense of self.

Our brains much prefer it when we’re able to predict the future with accuracy, and so we’re inclined to create cultural stories and patterns that allow us to do that. Living happily ever after is one such collective pattern that grants us a sense of predictability and certainty in life and holds the standard for societal harmony.

Expectation has been called “the root of all heartache,” and certainly, failed expectations are often the root of deep confusion and inner chaos, as well.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean. MAYA ANGELOU

Keep

Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right. MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

the human potential movement, as it encourages us to be undeterred by our current life conditions, to nobly strive toward the possibilities of an abundant and flourishing life, no matter what evidence we might be experiencing to the contrary.

a Conscious Uncoupling is a breakup or divorce that is characterized by a tremendous amount of goodwill, generosity, and respect, where those separating strive to do minimal damage to themselves, to each other, and to their children (if they have any), as well as intentionally seek to create new agreements and structures designed to set everyone up to win, flourish, and thrive moving forward in life.

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward. C. S. LEWIS

Effective grieving, however, turns the love you’ve been giving another toward yourself.

dissociation, “the escape when there is no escape.”An infant typically seeks his parents when alarmed, so when a parent actually causes alarm the infant is in an unsolvable situation in which it can neither approach or avoid. Neurobiologically this represents a simultaneous and uncoupled hyperactivation of the sympathic and the parasympathic circuits. This is subjectively experienced as a sudden transition into emotional chaos. Sieff asked what might cause a mother to behave in such a harmful way with her baby. Schore answered that this is not a conscious voluntary but an unconscious involuntary response, and that typically women who cannot mother their child in an attuned way are suffering from the consequences of their own unresolved early emotional trauma. The experience of a female infant with her mother influences how she will mother her own infants. Thus if early childhood trauma remains unconscious and unresolved it will inevitably be passed down the generations. Additionally, Sieff asked what role the father plays in a child’s emotional development. Schore explained that children form a second attachment relationship to the father especially during the second year. The quality of the attachment to the father is independent of that to his mother. At eighteen months there are two separate attachment dynamics in operation. It also appears that the father is critically involved in the development of a toddler’s regulation of aggression. This is true of both sexes, but particularly of boys who are born with a greater aggressive endowment than girls. Afterwards, a long discussion followed where Schore highlighted the damaging effects of long bouts of unregulated shame for the toddler, the differences between shame and guilt, and the enduring consequences of early chronic shame. Schore emphasized that when the caregiver is unable to help the child to regulate either a specific emotion or intense emotions in general, or – worse – that she exacerbates the dysregulation, the child will start to go into a state of hypoaroused dissociation as soon as a threat of

The older you grow, the more you realize that one half of you can firmly believe what the other half equally firmly refuses. CONSTANCE HOLME

There are a million little ways that a marriage grows apart, most too mundane to mention. Yet what happened to Mark and me, in a nutshell, is that I changed. And I mean, I radically and in many ways quite unfairly, changed. It’s kind of an occupational hazard—the downside of being a teacher

The end of love is a crossroads, and there will be those who go on to live lesser lives in the aftermath of heartbreak. My hope is that you are not one of them.

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.

every exit is an entry,

If it lasts, then it’s real. If it doesn’t, then it wasn’t. Either that, or someone screwed it up really badly.

can begin tending to the soft spots of your own tender heart, causing a bittersweet breakthrough in your ability to love yourself even when someone else refuses to. When you use the sheer force of your sorrow to crack open your heart, it promises to drop you down into a deeper capacity for compassion and care for all living beings. You become initiated into your own humanity

Much of the horror of a breakup is the insult to our expectations of how this story was supposed to unfold versus how it actually did.

When Things Fall Apart,

It’s time for you to give yourself the love, attention, loyalty, and care you’ve been trying to get from others your whole life. Grief has you gripped tightly by the ankles, and she may not let you go too soon. There’s nowhere to go but home to yourself. This simple gesture of giving yourself your full attention when sorrow is shaking you to the bone promises to carve depth and kindness into the core of who you are—more than anything else I know.

What we found is that when people [are] excluded, you see activity in…the neural regions [of the brain] that are also involved in the distressing component of pain, or what sometimes people call the ‘suffering component’ of pain.

Social rejection—or the feeling of not belonging, of being less than others, unwanted, and an outcast—activates the same brain regions as physical pain.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet. WINSTON CHURCHILL

Grief does not change you. It reveals you. JOHN GREEN

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.

and strength

leaving each other, and all those impacted by our separation, whole, healthy, and complete rather than wounded, walled off, and significantly broken by the experience.

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. MAYA ANGELOU

You have to consciously create the possibility of an affirmative future while coming to terms with the painful loss of the future you’d envisioned

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor…. Be grateful for whatever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. RUMI

What’s waking up in me as a result of my rage? How can I use the intensity of this energy to fuel positive change in my life? What rights am I now willing to stand up for?

When you’re willing to be with your experience, simply naming your feelings and needs without frantically trying to get rid of them, you’re practicing what Buddhists call “mindfulness.” It is neither passive nor active, but a deep honoring of your own humanity as you come to terms with the vulnerabilities of having a heart that loves.

to expect more of my primary partnership than staying together for the sake of the children

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken. WILLIAM STAFFORD

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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?

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.

suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.

We are disturbed not by what happened to us, but by our thoughts about what happened. EPICTETUS

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

Shame derives its power from being unspeakable. BRENÉ BROWN

guilt in that guilt is something we’re more likely to feel when we violate our own core values, disturbed that something we have done is fundamentally bad and wrong. Shame is what we feel when violating external rules and expectations that society imposes upon us, and it leaves us feeling that we are fundamentally bad and wrong.

shame differs from guilt in that guilt is something we’re more likely to feel when we violate our own core values, disturbed that something we have done is fundamentally bad and wrong. Shame is what we feel when violating external rules and expectations that society imposes upon us, and it leaves us feeling that we are fundamentally bad and wrong.

Love’s opposite is not hatred, it’s indifference

brain has but one primary mission: to keep us safe and ensure our survival.

In the brain’s world, better to have a negative bond than the existential death of no bond at all. And

Every way that you’ve given away your power, denied your own deeper knowing, put someone else’s feelings and needs before your own, stayed embedded in a victimized story, or settled for less in life—all of it is now up for review. You have nowhere to hide. Life has broken you open and it is violently, mercilessly forcing you to evolve, to develop, and to grow. In

The only way to outrun the sorrow of losing the attentions and affections of the person you have loved is to use the fierce and fiery pain of it to catalyze your own awakening and propel you to become the person you were born to be.

the heart of all attachment is fear regulation,

Unfairly, nature seems to have designed it so that the one person in the whole world who can best calm us down when we’re terrified is unfortunately the same person who is terrifying us.

We all know that once we allow fear to hijack us and step into the driver’s seat of our lives, that we’re apt to say and do some really dumb, pretty destructive things.

Did she really want to give Brian and his lover the power to determine the kind of human being that she herself would become?

chronically overgiving as a way to try to prove her value.

Once she saw herself as the source of her disappointing love story,

Once she saw herself as the source of her disappointing love story, Dianna discovered there was no shortage of evidence that she was the author of her own deep aloneness in life.

assume to be the cause and effect of our actions.

Each action you take, each choice you make, will grow something in your life and in our world.

The Sun Never Says.” Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.

When they have reached their term, take them back in kindness, or part from them in kindness. KORAN

grief, that most dreaded of teachers, does not come empty-handed. Though she may violently be sweeping away much of what you’ve known and loved, she also comes bearing precious gifts. As she offers to carve greater depths of kindness, compassion, wisdom, and courage into the core of who you are, it’s sometimes best to just surrender yourself to her agenda. You might even invite her to stay for a while and at least try to become friends, recognizing that something beautiful is seeking to wake up in your life as a result of her presence. When you are walking through the blackest of nights, and journeying through the thick of the woods, all there is to do, really, is to learn to love the silent softness of the moonlight, as Life miraculously finds a way to light your way home one step at a time.

When Andrew extended himself to meet Claudia’s needs, she did not back up or push him away. She

the one thing we do know for sure is that the relationship you once shared—the one that was clearly not working for one or both of you—has to die.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. KAHLIL GIBRAN

That you’re not missing your former love as much as you’re missing the person you thought he or she was.

noticed it at first by the profound feeling of being exposed

Expectation has been called “the root of all heartache,

our minds lose their footing when our reality doesn’t live up to the way we thought things should go.

feel good when life matches our vision of what we think could and should happen.

Transformation often begins with what we’re willing to subtract from our lives, rather than what we’re trying to add.

We have to stop asking why this is happening to me and start asking why it is happening for me.

you must become more interested in what’s possible from here on than you are in rectifying the past, and more invested in how you might midwife this transition harmoniously than in getting what you want in the short term.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

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

If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were. KAHLIL GIBRAN

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.