Coming Apart: How to Heal Your Broken Heart (Uncoupling, Breaking up with someone you love, Divorce, Moving on)

© Copyright 2020 Daphne Rose Kingma

Cover Design: Kathryn Sky-Peck

Cover art by Andrew Bret Wallis/Getty Images

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Coming Apart: How to Heal Your Broken Heart

ISBN: (p) 978-1-64250-298-5 (e) 978-1-64250-299-2

BISAC: OCC019000, BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Inspiration & Personal Growth

LCCN: Requested from the Library of Congress

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

For Nancy who believed

For Mary Jane who insisted

For Wink who encouraged

and

For Leo who proved beyond the shadow of a doubt

It is difficult

suddenly to put aside a long-standing love.

It is difficult, but somehow you must do it.

—CATULLUS

Table of Contents

Foreword

A Note to My Readers

Introduction to the Revised Edition

1

A Hand to Hold

2

Why Is Breaking Up So Hard to Do?

3

Exploding the Love Myths: Why Are We Really in Relationships?

4

Charting the Lifespan of Love: Seven Relationships and Why They Ended

5

The Emotional Process of Parting

6

The Unconscious Process of Parting

7

Binding the Wounds: How to Get Through the Ending

8

The Postscript Relationship: An Antidote to Love

9

Finding Resolution: A Personal Workbook

10

Is There Love after Love?

11

A Ritual for Parting

ADiagnosticCoda

When Love No Longer Works—Signs and Symptoms

of Ending

Foreword

If you’re reading this, it’s safe to assume you’re hurting. Struggling with a disappointment so deep you may be afraid you’ll disappear forever into the black hole that’s now holding your heart hostage. A breakup (or rupture of attachment as we psychotherapists like to call it) can take us out in ways that few things can. And if we’re not careful, a poorly navigated breakup—where we skip over doing the deep inner healing and growth that the loss of an intimate relationship demands—can leave us with a closed and compromised heart, having healed a little too crooked, a whole lot defensive, and a bit too easily bruised moving forward.

Most of us have no idea how to heal a broken heart. And without this understanding, we stumble alone through this pitch-dark night of the soul, bumping up against our core fears and insatiable hungers with a deep sense of dread, desperately hoping that one day soon time will somehow release us from the terrible pain we’re in. In the meantime, we do the best we can, obsessively trying to put the fragmented pieces of our shattered psyches back together again, so that we can again feel some sense of comfort in our now comfortless lives. And though we normally know ourselves as good and decent people who would never do harm to anyone, we may now be tempted to lash out, to deliberately hurt the one who has hurt us so deeply. If you identify with any of this, you’re not messed up, and you’re not a bad person. You’re just normal. Because a breakup or divorce is one of our most underrated traumas in life, and it will bring out the worst, even in the best of us.

All too often, we’ll attempt to sweep our grief under the rug, trying desperately to get rid of it by buying into the overly simplistic idea that we should just move on. Well-meaning and caring friends may try to hurry your sorrow along by the suggestion you get back out there and go find someone new. They may even start to devalue and diminish the person you’ve loved, as though dismissing that person and cheapening your relationship could somehow release you from your longing.

Yet all is not lost. For in finding this insightful, wise, and loving guide, you are finally in excellent hands, and you may soon come to believe this beautiful manuscript to be nothing short of answered prayer. For while time can’t necessarily heal a broken heart, my dear friend and colleague, Daphne Rose Kingma, can. And in this book, Daphne will take you under her wing (and yes, hers is indeed a literal angel’s wing!) and lead you step by step through a profoundly intelligent, compassionate, and kindhearted healing process that is highly transformative and which will literally weave you back to wholeness in all those places where you’ve felt betrayed, battered, broken, and bruised.

Frankly, I’m honored to be given the opportunity to write this foreword so I can publicly acknowledge Daphne for being an important leader and pioneer in the field of conscious breakups. Though many more of us are now just catching up, writing books, creating projects, and launching programs designed to help people get through one of the toughest times they may ever have to endure, Daphne’s been doing this for nearly two decades now. Long before actress Gwyneth Paltrow made the world aware that there is indeed a more conscious way to uncouple, Daphne was in the trenches, healing humanity one heart at a time, as bit by bit, she discovered ways to help us turn our traumas into triumphs and our sorrows into stepping stones towards whole new, beautiful, and deeply fulfilling lives.

As much as we all yearn for happy endings and strive to live happily ever after with those we fall in love with, the reality is that few of us will make it through this life without at least one big whopping heartbreak that turns our world upside down, inside out, and sideways. And as painful as those times are, here’s the good news about a bad breakup. This is the one and only time the Universe has your complete attention. Because all there is for you to do right now is to finally face all the covert ways you’ve been unconsciously perpetuating your childhood pain by recreating disappointing scenarios that are suspiciously similar to how you were disappointed when you were young. So here you are. There’s nothing else to do to stop that pounding, piercing pain in your heart (other than dissociate with sugar or substances), but to finally resolve, and evolve beyond, your core wounds from childhood.

You now have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stand the deeper truth of your enough-ness, your inherent worthiness to love and be loved, your power to learn what you need to learn to have things go differently next time, and your inherent value, where you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you need do nothing to prove you are lovable. Your task right now is to awaken to how deeply you deserve to be respected, valued, supported, and loved, even if the one you’ve loved is unable or unwilling to give these things to you in the ways you have wanted and needed him or her to do.

As you begin this sacred healing journey with Daphne, I invite you first to close your eyes and take a deep breath. For a brief moment, imagine yourself a few weeks or months from now. See yourself liberated from the hurt in your heart and walking through life lighter. Laughing with your whole body. Loving with your whole heart. And living with a great sense of hope for a happier future. Not just in spite of this breakup. But in many ways because of it.

—Katherine Woodward Thomas, MA, MFT,

author of the New York Times bestseller,

Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

A Note to My Readers

When Coming Apart was originally written, a relationship, and especially a marriage, was generally, at least in public, considered to be between a man and a woman. As we now know, a multitude of relationships are between partners of the same gender, and many of these relationships, too, come apart.

Although the relationships profiled in this book follow the accepted binary gender expression of the time, the issues and relationship dynamics can occur in any type of coupledom: gay or straight. You may relate to a person of any gender in these stories. That’s because, just like relationships themselves, relationship dynamics are diverse and are not confined to gender lines.

Above all, this note is an indication that our expression of love in relationships has found many new forms since this book was originally written. Whatever your relationship orientation, may it offer you the insight and comfort you need.

Daphne Rose Kingma

Santa Barbara, California

Introduction to the Revised Edition

WHEN I WAS A GRADUATE STUDENT getting divorced, a colleague of mine said to me: Well, now you’re the kind of person your mother wouldn’t want you to have as a friend. I was devastated by his remark. Yet five years later I found myself counseling a number of people who were shocked to find that their marriages, too, were ending. Wondering how he’d ever get through the process, one of my clients asked if there was a book I could recommend to help him navigate these roiling emotional waters. When I realized that there wasn’t, I was inspired to write Coming Apart.

Although in our hearts we still hold marriage as the form we most want our romantic relationships to take, the truth is that in the years since this book was written we have seen a whole raft of new relationships spring up like mushrooms. We’ve also seen that along with marrying, people often come apart; that along with falling in love, we frequently end relationships. Whatever your relationship configuration, marriage, living together, or hopeful romance, if it’s coming to an end, you’ll find your heart hurting, your psyche scrambled, and your world turned upside down.

No matter how many people have already ended a relationship—and millions have—no matter whether you’ve done it before yourself, the end of a romantic relationship is still one of the absolutely most devastating emotional experiences you will ever go through. It’s like a death, except that with a death you at least know for sure that the story is over: there’s no going back. With the end of a relationship, however, there are thousands of agonizing opportunities for second-guessing,

wondering whether you’ve done the right thing, asking yourself if you shouldn’t try harder, if there isn’t some way to rewrite the story so it can have a happy ending.

In the last several decades, divorce, the legal, court-sanctioned breakup of a marriage, has really come out of the closet. Fully fifty percent of first-time marriages end in divorce, and many statistics speculate that the percentage is even higher for second-time marital unions. In spite of the fact that divorce is now a familiar thread in the fabric of our society, there’s still a tremendous amount of shame and confusion when a marriage comes apart. And the multitude of invisible breakups—pulling the plug on a living-together relationship or a romance that’s barely out of the starting gate—can be equally, if not even more, traumatic. That’s because when you’re still just exploring the possibilities of a relationship, or if you’ve been in it for a while and are wondering whether or not to take it to the next level—to start living together, for example, or to turn your living-together relationship into a marriage—the heartbreak can be almost doubled. Not only are you losing the relationship you have, you’re also losing the relationship that now you never will have—the one you thought might evolve out of this one.

It’s sad but true that overall we’re a lot more scared of relationships than we used to be. What seemed in the past like a sure till-death-do-us-part scenario is now beset by circumstances we never used to have to consider: a fragile new economic landscape, a jungle of employment uncertainty, cyber distractions of every ilk, and a just plain terrible shortage of time.

In this social landscape, it’s harder than ever to pursue romantic relationships and to nurture them. It’s harder to keep a relationship together, and even more difficult—in the midst of all the things we’re juggling—to confer an intention of permanence on a budding relationship. We used to feel optimistic about solidifying our relationships, and pretty darn sure about taking the step of marriage. So we were therefore all the more shocked when our marriages crumbled to an end. But now, as if all that weren’t enough, added to the new fragility of marriage is the current explosion of alternative relationship forms, making us vulnerable to a whole new array of unexpected endings.

Whether you slipped into a romantic engagement that isn’t quite working any longer and are wondering whether it’s time to end it, or you were happily grounded in a marriage you were sure would last a lifetime, this book is for you. It’s a hand to hold through every agonizing step of the process of letting go. It will tell you how to discover whether or not your relationship has run its course, and what you’re likely to encounter as you go through each of the stages of parting. Even more important, it will help you understand why you got into this particular relationship in the first place, as well as what, in the larger frame of your life, was actually accomplished through your being in it. Finally, it will give you practical advice about how to regather yourself for the upcoming chapters of your life—even though right now it may be almost impossible for you to imagine that there will be some.

Time does a lot to heal our broken hearts, but really understanding what transpired in each of our relationships is what allows us to finally let go and move on.

No one I’ve ever worked with who has ended a relationship has come back to me later saying they wished they could resurrect the relationship they struggled so hard to let go of. That’s because life keeps taking us to new places. It wants us to continue to grow and so it keeps sending us new people and experiences to enlarge our experience of life and of ourselves. So take heart. Although there may be plenty of tears in the process, you’re not headed down a dead-end street. In fact, when you’ve taken yourself through the process of parting, you may just find yourself standing at the doorway to a whole new life. It is my deepest hope that you will.

1

A Hand to Hold

ENDING A RELATIONSHIP is so painful and makes us feel so awful—bad, hopeless, inadequate, desperate, lost, lonely, and worthless—that most of us are afraid we won’t live through it. We feel bad about what our families will think, we’re afraid of what the neighbors will think, we feel terrible for our children, we worry about leaving our houses, and we’re anxious about our financial futures. But worst of all, we feel badly about ourselves. Not only are we losing context, history, and the familiar choreographies of our lives, but we are also losing a sense of who we really are and we get shaken to the core about our own self-worth.

At precisely the moment when we most need some perspective, some sense that there are reasons besides our own failures to account for what is happening, we are most inclined to take the blame entirely upon ourselves. It is exactly because it is such a natural inclination to define the ending of a relationship as a personal failure—and, consequently, to go through what is often a devastating crisis in self-esteem—that it is terribly important to see that there are always some other factors operating when a relationship ends.

Rather than viewing the end of a relationship as a statement of personal failure, I believe there are always good, legitimate, and understandable reasons why relationships end. These reasons have to do with the chemistry and process of relationships themselves.

In our individual lives, relationships are one of the most important vehicles by which we create our identities and through which we define ourselves. Since this is the case, it may