While Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin have been hiding away in the Bahamas avoiding the press since they announced their divorce, therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas has been having a busy, if complicated, week.
Thomas is the therapist who came up with the idea of "conscious uncoupling" in 2011 when she was getting divorced and she's currently working on a book about the idea. Well, she didn't quite come up with the term on her own; a filmmaker friend of hers named Kit Thomas used it to describe his own divorce and she liked it so much she asked if she could co-opt it, she told the New York Times.
But Thomas was not included in the Goop post attached to the bottom of the couple's "conscious uncoupling" statement. Instead, there was a lengthy note from Dr. Habib Sadeghi and Dr. Sherry Sami; Sadeghi is Paltrow's "holistic doctor." Thomas has worked with Sadeghi before – he was her "holistic doctor" and the two are still friendly. They have plans to meet this week to talk about how he threw her under the bus when he didn't source her as the brilliant mind behind this movement that's now sweeping the nation.
Sadeghi's traitorous behavior didn't come up during Thomas's interview with the Today show Monday, where she said that though the Gwyneth/Chris split interrupted her work on her book proposal at a spa in Costa Rica, the whole thing has been "amazing!" I mean not for Gwyneth and Chris, but still!:
First of all I just want to say how sorry I am for Gwyneth and Chris that they're going through this but I am just so grateful for them because they took their time of personal heartache and really used it to introduce a whole new way to end relationships. It's healthy and less contentious and I'm very grateful to them.
Thomas teaches online courses for people who want to break up the right way, but they're anonymous, so she doesn't know if Gwyneth and Chris have been students of hers (let's dream big and assume that they did). She also shrugged off those who are making fun of the idea of a "conscious uncoupling," explaining that people "just aren't quite aware yet of what it is." If you need an education, a conscious uncoupling is "a breakup characterized by good will, generosity and respect" where the two people involved are trying to "minimize the damage" they do to themselves and those around them. Which sounds great! But what would we have to complain about if all our relationships ended amicably?