Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

His sorrow cannot help but be compounded by an environment that is a shrine to all that no longer exists, perpetually pulling his attention backwards with little room for new life to emerge.

It Must Be About the Future. You don’t want to set an intention to try to go back to being friends the way you were before you were lovers, or to finally get to the bottom of all your unresolved and unsolvable problems. Rather, you want to generate a new possibility for how your relationship might unfold from here. For example:

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

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

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

You will be vulnerable to experiencing Prolonged Grief to the extent that you have previous tendencies toward anxiety and depression, or your breakup shocked and took you by surprise. It can also hit you if the way things went down between you and your former partner validates your worst fears about yourself, or your grief is compounded by previous

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.

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.