Meet the California therapist who invented 'conscious uncoupling'

When Katherine Woodward Thomas and her husband split up, they found a way to work through their divorce in a generous and healthy way.

They now live in the same apartment building so their teenage daughter can split her time between two homes. Woodward Thomas took that experience and came up with conscious uncoupling.

"We went through the bad divorces of our parents. We felt the impact of feeling homeless on an emotional level. So we're the ones that are now finding a new way."

Conscious uncoupling is a 5-step program to minimize the damage done to everyone involved in a divorce or separation. 

The phrase and the program were used by Gwenyth Paltrow and Chris Martin when they announced their 'conscious uncoupling' in 2014. The phrase caught on immediately and has ushered in a new wave of conscious uncouplers who aim to do divorce differently then the generation before them.

She was thrilled when Gwenyth Paltrow and Chris Martin used her term, "It catapulted this whole new possibility for breakups into the lexicon and within 24-hours the dictionary had defined consciousness uncoupling as redefining divorce in the 21st century."

This story originally aired on November 5, 2016