‘Conscious uncoupling’ has its D day

Thomas recounted that, dressed in her yoga clothes, she wandered outside on a balmy and breezy evening, opened her laptop and found several e-mails alerting her to the news. Then her inbox began to flood. The New Age-y phrase she adopted a couple of years ago and turned into a business had become a thing, the term of the week and perhaps of the year so far.

Thomas, a 56-year-old psychotherapist and author, has never met Paltrow and doesn’t know if she enrolled in her online course, but no matter. It is a catchphrase that “really does name the experience”, Thomas said.

And what exactly is the experience? “It’s a kinder term for divorce,” she said. (Unconscious coupling has a stronger tradition on apps like Tinder and Grindr.) It is essentially a no-drama approach to separation, she said, one that protects the children and avoids acrimony.

“I think had we been born 50 years before, we would have stayed in the relationship,” Thomas said of her own divorce (pardon, uncoupling) in 2011.

The process of conscious uncoupling involves breathing exercises and self-reflection to “break up victimisation”, Thomas said. “You want to clear the residue.”

Thomas, a former cabaret performer, moved to Los Angeles to become a psychotherapist in her mid-30s, and was inspired by the “human-potential movement”. In 2004, she wrote her first book, Calling in ‘The One’: 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life. It sold close to 150,000 copies, she said, enough to earn her royalty and the credibility to be one of those relationship experts quoted in Cosmopolitan and Glamour.

Thomas modelled her first book on her relationship with her husband, which is what made it all the more disconcerting when her marriage started to fall apart. As her marriage was ending, she was chatting with a friend about their respective separations when, she said, the eureka moment arrived.

“He was telling me about his divorce, but he didn’t call it a divorce,” Thomas said. “He called it a conscious uncoupling. I just gasped.” The friend, Kit Thomas, a filmmaker, said the phrase came to him just at that moment. “That’s a book!” Thomas recalled her saying, before she bought the URL for it right then and there.

Thomas created the conscious uncoupling workshop in 2011. On her website, you can listen free to a 75-minute seminar, and for $297 you can enroll in a five-week online course. She said more than 1,000 people have spent the money for the training.

But since Thomas created the concept of uncoupling, why wasn’t she named by Paltrow? The actor’s divorce announcement was accompanied by a 2,000-word letter by a husband-and-wife duo, Habib Sadeghi and Sherry Sami, explaining the conscious-uncoupling process. Sadeghi is Paltrow’s holistic doctor (Paltrow also supplied the foreword to Sadeghi’s book Within: A Spiritual Awakening to Love & Weight Loss), and Sami happens to be Thomas’s 13-year-old daughter’s dentist.

“I was a little taken by surprise,” Thomas admitted. “I would have preferred if he credited the source.” She added that she hadn’t spoken about conscious uncoupling directly with Sami or Sadeghi, but that he used to be her holistic doctor, and that her book is “prominently displayed on the coffee tables in their waiting rooms”.

Thomas sent him a text after she saw the letter on Goop, she said. “I was trying to tell him that it doesn’t bode well for him that he didn’t credit me. That we as professionals and teachers, we are very respectful of each other’s creations.”