Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

A poorly navigated loss, and its resulting poorly healed heart, can make you a lifelong victim to the darker side of love, and keep you locked into a lesser life with a diminished capacity to love and be loved moving forward.

Releasing a relationship in a way that leaves your heart happy and light, open and free to love again, is a conscious choice you must make a thousand times a day, as you deliberately turn your attention away from the past and make a concerted effort to align your energies with the creation of a bright and positive future. To do this you must become

One or both of you may have made mistakes that exposed fatal flaws you failed to notice or minimized before now, but that doesn’t mean what you had was untrue or held no value. Longevity is not the only measure of love.

sound actions and make wholesome choices that are more in keeping with our conscience and which are centered 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

Dr. Lieberman concludes that the ability to label our feelings “seems to dampen down the response in these basic emotional circuits of the brain. What lights up instead is the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls impulses.” Apparently, the unassuming act of putting a label on each of our feelings, called “affec

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

“I know you’re hurting, honey, but hurt is the risk we take when we open our heart to care about someone. Everyone gets his or her heart hurt at one time or another. I promise you, you’ll heal.”

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 neve

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 t