Future of Conflict #6: Conscious Uncoupling

This week I read Conscious Uncoupling by Katherine Woodward Thomas. My impression of the term “conscious uncoupling” was pretty eye-roll-style, like a divorce rebranding.

Which, it turns out, is exactly what it is.

Except the rebranding has some significant substance and requires a whole different attitude going in… an attitude that has a lot of overlap with what we do here at Ten Thousand Heroes.

Here’s Katherine’s definition:

Conscious uncoupling is a breakup or divorce that is characterized by a tremendous amount of goodwill, generosity, and respect

She also has some great neologisms meant to take the sting and negative connotations out of divorce and break-ups, like “wevorce” and “wasbund”.

Katherine covers a lot of ground in the book. It’s aimed at women who are currently going through a separation as they read it, so some parts didn’t quite land with me, but I appreciated the full-spectrum coaching approach.

There are sections on concepts like The Only Way Out is Through, Every Conflict Is An Opportunity, We Seize Opportunity Through Intention, Emotions Are Information, and Forgiveness is not Justice.

(Those links go to specific sections of the quotes post for more detail, in case you want a refresher on those concepts.)

The four lessons I want to highlight today are:

The Right Question Changes Everything
The Brain Is Not Always Your Friend
Relationship Is A Set Of Agreements
Community Guidance Around Break-ups

If you’re not going through a life-altering break-up (I’m not), there’s still a lot of value as much of what I glean applies to other (intense) relationships.

That said, I’d encourage you to think about a failed past relationship as you read the rest of this post. I did that while reading the book. It kind of sucked, but was ultimately worth it. You know the drill.

The Right Question Changes Everything

Part of Katherine’s break-up formula is a version of the Personal Responsibility Principle (as it should be).

The basic idea is we can get much more mileage and closure by looking at the parts of the dysfunctional relationship that we created, instead of blaming the other person and taking our bullshit with us to the next relationship.

However, once we have made the (difficult) switch to looking at our own involvement in what went wrong, there is a tendency to ask unhelpful questions. Here are some examples:

“What the fuck is wrong with me?”
“Why can’t I ever do anything right?”
“Why does everyone always leave me?”
“How could I be so stupid?”

You get the picture. I’ll give you some questions she likes and then we’ll discuss the key difference:

“How did I give my power away in this relationship, and what can I do to reclaim it?”
“How do I let myself down in ways that are similar to how I feel let down by my former partner?”
“Where was I pulling on my former partner to take care of me in ways I was refusing to take care of myself? What has this cost us both?”
“What were the lies I was telling myself in order to stay in the relationship?”
“How does it work for me to have chosen someone so clearly unavailable?”
“What disappointing story from my past is being repeated here, and how have I behaved in way(s) that covertly recreated it?”

So, what’s the difference?

Ideally, I would be able to listen to you reflect for a few minutes before sharing my take. But this is email, so…

I see two key differences:

The unhelpful questions are mostly rhetorical, whereas the helpful questions require reflection.
The unhelpful questions encourage self-blame, whereas the helpful questions are specific and curious.

Maybe it’s the same thing: The good questions require you to think. And when you’re thinking and analyzing, you’re so productive that you don’t have time to wallow in blame.

As Katherine says:

When we first try to understand ourselves as the source of our suffering, we often begin by asking questions that will slide us straight towards shame, self hatred, and self-blame.

But that doesn’t get the job done.

Your mission right now is to reclaim your power and your life. That can only happen when you start asking yourself questions that inspire you to be a ruthlessly honest about all the ways you’ve been giving your power away, self-sabotaging, turning away from truth, and/or showing up as less than who you are.

There’s an analog here to what William Ury talked about last week. He wants us to be “soft on the people” and “hard on the problem”.

Similarly, the questions should be compassionate towards yourself, but still hardball.

In fact, the fact you are not defensive will allow you to think creatively and open your mind to really grasping the answers to the hardball questions.

This is basically true in any kind of post-mortem analysis. We want to understand what we did that led to the situation going “off the rails”. It’s not to beat ourselves up but to know what to do differently in the future.

I’ve had more success with this approach when thinking of it as reading a case study about somebody else.

“Skinny Indian guy did A. Then skinny Indian guy did B. Everything dissolved. What led to skinny Indian guy’s decisions? What could influence him to act differently next time? Aha.”

The Brain Is Not Always Your Friend

What issue would not be complete without throwing shade on the brain?

Katherine spent some time interviewing researchers (usually in their Beverly Hills offices for some reason) about psychological impulses around break-ups.

She learned that the brain is a “social organ” and what it fears more than anything is exile and the loss of the primary bond.

Now, I’m old enough to know that the brain is not One Thing, and there’s a lot of completing processes going on in there. However, I think the conclusion is relevant:

The brain has but one primary mission: to keep us safe and ensure our survival. It doesn’t really care that much about our spiritual aspirations, our noble ideals, or our self-image of being nice and loving people. And, as the brain is a social organ and hardwired to stay connected, it’s not necessarily prone to letting go easily of a primary attachment.

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

What does “better to have a negative bond than no bond” look like in practice?

One way the brain may try to do this is through a highly contentious and nasty separation, where both people feed each other a steady diet of hostility and disdain, upping the anti-on lowlife behaviors, and where one or both people become obsessed with winning and/or getting revenge.

And we’ve all seen or done that before. I include this bit to:

foster a little compassion when we see (or engage) in those behaviors, and
orient our self-talk (or friend coaching) towards getting the deep need for safety met in the brain as a way to defuse this tendency.

How do we do that? Reality-testing questions. Reality-testing questions are questions that make you seem like an asshole, but asked in a compassionate tone of voice.

Like:

“If you did leave the relationship, how many people would still talk to you?”

I’ve found that the actual answer to these questions, when thought through, are much better than what the mind imagines when it’s trying to avoid them.

(If I don’t think that’s the case, I usually don’t ask the question. I’m not trying to drive people into despair, after all.)

Relationship Is A Set Of Agreements

This was actually just an offhand sentence she mentions once in the book, but I really liked it:

At the heart of each bond lies a series of agreements, some consciously consented to and some simply assumed.

What better work than to uncover and explicitly confirm these agreements, leaving the assumptions in the dust?

For me, this also highlights the difference between unconditional love and relationships. My teachers — Gandhi and MLK — are all about unconditional love for all being. Gandhiji calls it ahimsa and MLK calls it agape.

Does that mean I have to hang out with people I can’t stand? No!

Love is unconditional. Relationships are not.

Healthy relationships are set of agreements. We negotiate (with “The Adversary”, in Jim Camp’s language) the agreements. If we don’t like them, or can’t stick to them, there goes the relationship.

This is meant to be a fundamentally empowering approach.

It doesn’t work everywhere — parent/child and employer/employee relationships have severely limited options — but at least in the Western romantic love world, it can lead to more self-reflection and care in relationships to remember this.

Community Guidance Around Break-ups

Again, this was a short section in her book, and very specific to break-ups. But I had never heard it before and I want to highlight it for everybody. Joy to the world once we internalize this point:

If you’re breaking up and don’t want to destroy your community, Katherine says:

Offer clear guidance to others in your community on how they should behave around your break-up.

This applies equally well to business and marital partnerships.

Don’t let your friends guess how they should treat the other party. Tell them explicitly what you want.

To defuse a potential division in your community, make sure to take the lead in letting others know that they need not take sides. Give people permission to maintain their relationships with both of you regardless of how tempted you may be to split your friends and family down the middle. Because once that happens, it could take years, even decades, to repair the damage, if at all.

Okay, so she’s assuming you don’t want to turn your friends against the other side. Maybe you do! For me, the key point is your friends’ Confusion around Expectations.

Am I allowed to be friends with both people?
What does honoring my bro/sis look like?
Should I pretend nothing is happening?

As the person in the conflict, you can easily answer all those questions for your friends by giving clear guidance.

I really liked that. At this point, I think I like anything that involves clarity over assumptions. Why assume when you can ask?

That reminds me (#offtopic) of a story a friend of mine told me today. He was playing darts with some work colleagues and noticed one of the people (a woman who had never played before) holding the dart in an awkward way. Her darts also tended to fly strangely and veer all over the place.

He was going to give her a dart tip but then (thoughtfully!) remembered recently learning about “mansplaining”. His key takeaway was “never explain anything to a woman”.

Dearly beloved, this is the wrong conclusion! We can bypass assumptions (and mansplaining, which is a kind of assumption) with a simple question, like “Are you interested in a small tip on holding the dart?”

Some people want the explanation. Some people don’t. We don’t have to guess.

(Okay, end of rant.)

Conclusion and Takeaways

Every self-blame question has a curious analog.
Meet the brain’s need for connection and safety (or else).
Love is unconditional. Relationships are a set of agreements.
When breaking-up, tell your friends how you want them to behave.

Books are long. There was a lot of other stuff in it. I put a bunch of the self-help material in the quotes post. It’s a full-on course for conscious uncoupling for those who need it.

Let me end with two of my favorite quotes she had found:

Nietzsche:

Freedom is the willingness to be responsible for ourselves.

Buckminster Fuller:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Together,

~ Ankur