Hello and welcome to Revolutionize Your Love Life.
Do you want to know more about love relationships?
What makes them work?
How to create the one of your best dreams?
Do you want to be in a really healthy, juicy love relationship?
In these podcasts we will give ideas and practical advice to light your way.
Whether you're looking for a love partner, already in a relationship, you wish could
be better, or leaving one that has run its course.
There will be something to inspire, empower and support you.
Revolutionize Your Love Life is a fortnightly podcast where you will access the knowledge
and wisdom of love, experts and relationship coaches from across the world to help you
find true fulfillment in love.
I am your host, Heather Garbett.
Welcome.
I'm asked a lot how conscious uncoupling works.
I'd like to give you a brief overview today about that.
Quite often at the beginning when people come in for coaching or for therapy, when they're
in the process of separation and divorce, they're in a very highly emotional state,
quite often triggered to early attachment style stages, that sort of core old beliefs
of "I'm not good enough, I'm not wanted, I don't belong."
Those powerful things that we've come to believe about ourselves when we were very young.
So we can feel like we're two and in the nursery and nobody's interested in us, or we've
been abandoned.
So the first piece in conscious uncoupling is actually to help you stabilize your mood,
calm your feelings, just be kind to yourself and understand yourself.
It's cutting yourself some slack, but it's deeper than that.
It's really going into what you feel and what you need and learning how to look after your
own feelings and needs.
So as you withdraw from a relationship, the expectation that the other person is going
to look after your needs is obviously really diminished.
That's the old agreement you had, and whether that worked or not, that's an end to that agreement.
The next stage is a real reclamation of you, it's remembering who you are as an individual
rather than part of a couple.
And that is an extension of your self-care, really doing the things that you like to do
and being with the people that you know like and trust and feel a good commitment from,
then you can feel calmer and clearer.
The important thing about when we're triggered is the centers of our brain are different.
We actually have more blood supply at the panic bit of our brain and less at the thinking
bit of our brain.
So we're more likely to be reacting from fight and flight, freeze or fawning even.
And that's really important if you're making big decisions about your life, that you're
not doing it from that reactive place, but a much more thought through responsive place.
So the next piece would be to create an intention.
This is for what you would ideally like to come out of the situation.
So that could be that you separate out well, you work out ways of managing the finances
between you so that you can both have a life, that you manage childcare between you so that
you can both be good parents together.
You can be one family in two homes rather than a pulled apart family and nobody feels
like they've got a home.
Those things are so important.
So we get a really clear idea of what you want and then that is it's like your destination
that you put into Google Maps.
So then every decision you make, you measure it against whether you're going towards that
goal or veering off and it will really, really help you stay clear about what you want.
It's good as well because we're bound to get triggered along the way to have a self-soosing
saying that you just say to yourself, you know, it's like, it's all going to be all
right, darling, I've got you.
You've got all the support that you need.
Just keep walking towards the horizon is what one of my good friends said to me.
So helpful, so helpful and really deepen into any other methods of self-care.
So you might be a yoga person, you might be a swimming person, you might be an art world
person or music person, theatre person, a meditation person, whatever you like, do more
of that feeds your soul, that calms you, that gives you pleasure, that lifts your spirits
because that's the place you want to be making decisions from, not being depressed and shut
in at night with Netflix.
Step two in the programme is looking at what's happened and how.
Most of us when we part from our exes will have a victimised story, excuse me, will have
a victimised story.
He did that, she didn't care about me anymore, he was more bothered about football and he
was about talking to me.
He didn't do his role as a father, she was never home, whatever your story is about the
other.
We acknowledge that and then we'll probably have been bad behaviour on their part but
also probably less than appropriate behaviour on your own because of how you saw things.
Our most intimate relationships bring up the most raw of feelings and in parting it's
worse but even when we're in a marriage or relationship we get triggered to earlier stages
of development.
So quite often you can find yourself giving away your power as if the other person is
a parent telling you what to do or saying how things will be or you will dominate in that
way, telling the other person what they should do and how they should be.
It can be that you've grown apart through not making enough time for the relationship,
become co-workers in a family or just co-workers in a household.
You may just have drifted apart, one of you may have had an affair, there's lots of painful
stuff to deal with but we look at how you were thinking, feeling and behaving that might
have contributed to that even if it's only your 3% because that's where your learning
is so you can grow and be more powerful for yourself, taking care of yourself and any
children and your money and all of that, it's really important and it gives you the opportunity
to learn for future relationships so you don't go and choose the same type of person all over
again or the opposite which is quite often what we do before we learn, we go one way
and the other.
And that's my goal for you, that you can learn from this and grow from this, become
more of the person you're meant to be, more fully you, more expressed, more confident,
more able to choose from a clear perspective rather than a needy or desperate one, feeling
like you're left on the shelf or nobody's going to want you so you better accept the
first one that chooses you, that sort of thing.
We trace back where your motivation for giving your power away or dimming your light, being
less than you could have been antagonistic in the relationship, is it really about that
or is there also roots and root into the past?
And in step 3 that's where we go, we find those roots where the blueprints were drawn
up in our relational life early on.
Catherine calls it a source fracture story.
So when we were first let down, neglected, abused even and what sense we made of it and
what decisions we made on a fundamentally unconscious level about how we would be in
relationships, how we would protect ourselves and sometimes that can just be through excessive
self-quitucism.
Ironically, that's protective but it is, it is because you get there first, you don't
take it in from anybody else.
And it might be that because you've been so let down, you've become outrageously independent
and that is a protection against vulnerability and any further hurt.
So these things may have happened in your childhood, you may not even be conscious of
them.
Quite often when I'm doing this work, things become uncovered that are completely unexpected
and enlightening because when we shine lights into those dark corners, so much is revealed
that we can then start to live separate from rather than having an underlying control.
We can choose, ah, ah right, I see, I'm responding from my four-year-old self today.
How can I calm myself?
What is the truth about me really?
And quite often, you know, let's think of what I would say.
I remember being in a school classroom and being asked to do mental arithmetic and I
couldn't do it because I was so anxious, I couldn't do it.
It was in front of the class.
I couldn't do it.
And I was shamed by the teacher who said, "How can such a bright girl be so stupid?"
So I've got a thing, it's the ironic thing I'm sitting here talking to you about being
seen and being heard.
This is a big innovation for me to be able to do this.
But for years, I've played small, safe and hidden, so never to risk that sort of approbation
or shaming again.
So I've always given way, acquiesced, gone along with, um, what would another thing be?
Well, I've just not been visible to myself, just been fearful of ever standing up and
speaking up for myself.
That's changed as a result of doing this work.
But you can see how that would colour a relationship.
There wouldn't have been room for me in it.
I would just have been a going along, like the pet in the relationship.
Really not powerful at all.
So finding the deeper truth about myself in that is actually I'm a very confident person.
I've got lots to say.
I'm clever.
I don't know how many degrees.
I'm clever.
I've got qualifications and academically proven.
I can do my account so I'm not sick when it comes to sums.
I've lived this long and managed my money.
So all of those things are truths I can tell myself.
I wasn't here to be alone.
I'm here to love and be loved and to have the richest of relationships.
And the other people that I let close to me are really kind to me would never shame me
or supportive and loving and encouraging.
And life itself gives me opportunities all the time.
I feel the universe is at my back supporting me, encouraging me forwards.
So those would be examples of power statements that can really make you know what's true
about you rather than the old truths from when you were young.
And getting in touch with the new you you'll learn new ways of relating and you'll learn
new skills in relationship and with the world that go along with that.
It's very powerful.
You become more you.
I have become more me.
I speak up.
I speak out.
I'm doing this.
I've had podcasts of over 50 now, podcasts where I'm visible and audible.
I do Facebook lives.
I speak publicly.
That would never have happened before I did this work.
So in step four, we go to generating a positive future.
This is creating a relationship based on that new intention and new agreements between you.
There may be practical simple things like actually you don't walk into each other's
houses without knocking.
You don't eat food out of each other's fridges without asking.
Just those little things that create a distance and separation and a layer of respect that's
different from when you're married and everything's combined.
When you're together or living together, everything's combined.
There may be broader issues where you you agree about children and money and housing.
Those can come at this point.
You may need the help of the mediator to deal with that, but you will be speaking up from
a much more powerful place about your feelings and needs and what's important to you in the
relationship going forward for your family, for your money.
It's beautiful work to see when you actually rise up and can speak up for yourself clearly.
And it's good if you can't have a conversation of clearing the air of acknowledging how you
contributed to the destruction of the relationship because quite often at the end of a relationship
it's all you, you, you, not I, I, I.
You have to be careful because if you're with somebody narcissistic they will seize upon
this and work out destroying your power.
So with them the boundaries are different.
But on the whole, if you're with somebody wholesome from whom you've drifted apart,
this is the way to go, clear the air.
And there's a mechanism for doing that.
And if it's not safe to be with them to do that, to have that conversation, we can do
an as if experience in our coaching so that you can get to say all that you want to say
and be heard.
And we visualize a positive, clear response.
So this cleanses all of the mess out of you.
You get to say all the things.
You get some closure even if the other person isn't there.
And if they are wholesome and there's a good future together, you learn through this path
new ways to communicate new relationship skills that allow you to cooperate around children
and family or to part and separate out easily, freely working out who else is affected by
your breakup, taking care of them in the most kind way that you can.
I'll reduce for this.
It may be that friends and further family are affected.
And you just want to be very clear about them that you're not going to bad mouth your ex-partner.
You might not want to be in the same room with you all, but it might be that you'll
want further down the line to be able to be in the same room to do weddings or funerals
or whatever.
And you don't need an overlay of unresolved stuff there.
So learning to communicate and plan ahead is part of the program at that point.
Especially as well in the last stage, going into any old agreements that you had.
You know, this is things like your wedding vows or along the other love you.
We talk to each other every day.
Or, I don't know, we don't speak about our relationship outside.
Those are old agreements that might not serve you going forwards.
I don't mean you're going to talk about your relationship and bad mouth them, but you know,
tell people in a very clear way that you have drifted apart, that you have decided you
don't want to be together and you decided together and this is how you're going forwards.
And you can separate out well.
And if you allow that to be in the relationship with all of your friends and family, then the
systems will calm down too.
You work out the new agreements you're going to have with them.
And that can be, I always have the children on a Sunday.
You always have them on a Wednesday evening, whatever it is.
And you'll develop new skills and ways of being that really live into those new agreements
and that intention that you set right at the beginning.
So that is conscious uncoupling in the nutshell.
If you would like to work with me, you'll see that there's a link for a free half hour
exploration call.
You're welcome to do that.
Or you can email me on Heather@heathergobot.com or phone me on 07808776150.
That's a UK number.
So if you're calling from outside the UK, it's plus 4.4 instead of the first zero.
My heart is with you if you are going through separation or divorce because it's a radical
thing to go through.
I'm holding you in my heart.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Revolutionize Your Love Life.
I'd like to know what has been your biggest takeaway from this conversation.
To take a minute and share this with us and visit us on our Facebook page.
You can connect with me personally on my email at heathergobot.com.
If you can think of someone who will benefit from listening to this podcast, please do
share it with them.
If you have any feedback on how I can improve it, please do reach out to me as I'm always
keen to learn more.
Thank you so much again for listening.
And we'll meet again on the next episode of Revolutionize Your Love Life.
Thank you.
[Music]
JINNY