It takes the form of an interview between the self who created it – Fox – and another self – Ara. If you haven’t read one of our plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out our other Plural Selves zines, and our free books about Plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here interesting.

Location: Fox’s favourite cafe.

Food: Lemon and almond cake, with black americano.

TLDR: Fox has made a new zine about plurality and they have all the feels about it. You can find that zine, and a companion zine with more information, here.

Ara: Well here we are.

Fox: So many different ‘here’s since last time we did one of these.

Ara: Geographically different, plurally different, and perhaps more here-and-now than we’ve ever been. Have we ever shared a conversation between us before?

Fox: I don’t think so. I always did these interviews with James in the past: About my monster feelings zine three years ago, and my triangles and circles zine a year and a half ago. In the plural conversation blog posts we did back around 2020 I think we both talked to other selves but never to each other.

Ara: And you and I probably talked the least overall too. There’s a strange sense that the most subsidiary characters are running the show these days. Which is reflected in your new zine of course.

Fox: About that…

Ara: Yes, about that. D’you want to start by saying what it is?

Plural Tarot Zine

Fox: Sure, oh so many things to say!

Ara: Maybe start with the basics.

Fox: Ok, so this zine is an almost purely image based zine, and it is made up of a set of drawings based on the major arcana of a tarot card deck. It tells the story/ies of our plural journey through those cards.

Ara: What made you decide to draw tarot cards?

Fox: It’s a funny one. I think we’ve had the idea to do a creative project based around the tarot since we were a teenager and we first came across tarot. We were always drawn to magical, mystical things: ghost stories, folklore, fairy tales. And we also always wanted to draw pictures, and write stories, from our imagination. At one point we created a whole notebook with the headings of the major arcana characters, thinking we’d come up with stories relating to each one. 

Ara: Ah so this project represents a kind of return to both themes and processes that we disowned and disallowed over the years.

Fox: Right! I guess we never completely let go of the idea that we might draw pictures and write stories, but we found kind-of ‘acceptable’ ways of doing those things in the worlds we inhabited, like using creative methods in academic research, or publishing graphic guides illustrated by someone else, or using supernatural themes to explore aspects of human struggles. 

Ara: We’ve continued to gradually allow ourselves to return closer and closer to those early passions – topics we’re fascinated by and creative practices we love – as we’ve returned closer and closer to you, our littlest one.

Fox: I hadn’t seen that. So this zine is big for me, being purely based on a kind of mystical storytelling, and entirely using pictures.

Ara: I also love that sense of a slow, slow journey to finally complete this project, over the course of our whole life. We waited till we finally knew the shape it needed to take, and then it just flowed.

Fox: Watch this space for our book of fairy tales, and ghost stories, which we’ve also imagined for nearly as long.

Why Tarot?

Ara: Back to the tarot. Can you say why it particularly appeals to you?

Fox: Well it’s interesting because we don’t generally practice tarot in the conventional sense. We have occasionally done tarot spreads – where you shuffle the deck and see which cards come out – in order to explore a particular question or issue. But generally I don’t tend to do that. I find it’s more aligned, for me, to choose a particular card – or cards – deliberately to have on our altar as a reflection of something we’re going through, or a quality we want to cultivate for whatever we’re facing. A bit like we do with Pema’s compassion cards.

Ara: There’s something about the range of cards that there’s always one that seems to match where we’re at, or what we’re working on.

Fox: Right. And I guess the Major Arcana cards particularly represent archetypes: particular kinds of characters that recur again and again in stories in many different cultures. And we have the sense that the selves – and parts of selves – that we’ve met in ourselves are both unique to us (our life, our culture) and resonant with the selves – and parts of selves – that we’ve met in others, and hear about other people grappling with in themselves. 

Ara: Mm, so these cards are a particularly good mechanism for representing one particular journey, and for depicting a journey that others may find something familiar in.

Fox: I think/hope so. And as always it’s so fine if this doesn’t resonate with others. People have different ways of taking in information: visual images certainly don’t work for all bodyminds. And people will have different feelings about tarot: they might struggle with anything ‘woo’, have bad experiences with them, or prefer other systems that are more aligned with their faith or spirituality, for example.

Ara: Interesting that you chose tarot when our primary spirituality is Buddhist/non-dual.

Fox: Yes. I did have that in mind during this project actually. When we wrote our book about Mindful Therapy we did an illustration of the Buddhist ox herding picture (included in the Plural Tarot Companion Zine). I feel like it has a similar vibe to tarot. It depicts someone setting out on a journey, the challenges they face along the way, the ways the path isn’t perhaps what they expected at all, and then this kind of return to the beginning. That’s something I like about both the ox herding pictures and the tarot, that they are circular rather than linear.

Ara: The ox herding pictures end with the character returning to the marketplace with helping hands, and the major arcana with The World. There’s a sense that these journeys fetch us right back where we started, but perhaps – hopefully – a little more able to be in our worlds, our relationships, our projects in helpful ways.

Fox: Right, there’s a common image of a spiritual path taking people up the mountain, away from everyone else, to a place of transcendence. But teachers like Pema and Adyashanti say it’s much more about going down into the depths and the mess and the pain where everyone else is. Learning how to be with all that in ourselves, and in others and in the world.

Ara: It reminds me of those blog posts we wrote about Stephen King’s It: Reading it as an invitation down into the storm drains, to address our personal and collective trauma. That’s what you’re depicting in these cards.

Fox: Right. We really did it, these last five-to-seven years. So another way of understanding this zine is as, kindof postcards from the end of the world: both literally in terms of what the world is facing, and metaphorically in that when you go down into your personal hells and underworlds it feels like the end of the world. That’s the feeling you’re confronting, and you really don’t know if you will be able to survive it.

Ara: A way of depicting what we’ve been through, and being alongside others who are going through such times, perhaps offering a kind of solidarity, even hope.

Fox: Right, and not like hope as in a linear narrative, like ‘follow this path, or set of steps, to get to a better place’. It’s more queer/neuroqueer/mad than that, challenging narratives of healing, recovery, or happily-ever-after. But it does show that things are impermanent, that there is movement, through these experiences, especially if you can meet them, and be with them, rather than resisting them (and that is a big if, a lot of the time it’s more being with the fact you can’t help resisting them!) Am I saying too much?

Ara: Just the right amount of saying. 

Fox: It’s like it’s this huge project that is all of these things to us, and about everyone and everything (all at once). And it’s also just a way of saying ‘this is what we were up to the last few years’, and ‘we’ve moved (literally and metaphorically)’. Heh moved and returned. Full circle.

Ara: Of course we have. We’ve recently marked a kind of ending, or transition, from our five years of deep retreat, by moving back to Yorkshire, where we’re from originally.

Fox: Which the last card in the deck represents, but it’s also a return to the first card, and it kindof holds all the other cards, and selves, in the one card, and in you-and-me.

Ara: Maybe we can dig into some of the specific cards in a bit. For now I guess we’re saying that, for us, this zine is a way of honouring our journey, and all of our selves, as well as communicating something to others which they might find useful or resonant themselves.

Fox: Thankyou. Yes. I can get tangled in the words.

Ara: Words can be tangley. I love that you communicate so well through pictures and stories.

Fox: They’re good for the feelings.

Inspirations and ideas

Ara: Can you say a bit about your inspirations for this zine, how you came up with the idea?

Fox: Mm, yes. Like I said, something had been lurking since we were young. But we hadn’t actually worked/played with tarot much until a few years back when we got the Wild Unknown deck. I think it was around the time we came out as non-binary because we were drawn by a deck that was all animals and plants rather than humans. Not completely without gender-ing, but definitely more open when it came to gender. Since then we’ve seen a few other decks that represent more gender – and other – diversity, or which don’t have humans in them, but the Wild Unknown remains our favourite. I guess these kinds of decks got me thinking though, whether – rather than depicting differently gendered people – a deck could depict the many-gendered sides of the same person.

Ara: We are indeed a many-gendered thing.

Fox: Heh. Now you are sounding like James!

Ara: *smiles*

Fox: So playing/working with the Wild Unknown got me thinking in these directions, especially when I discovered Carrie Mallon’s writings about them which really clicked with me. But the thing that made me realise I could do this was receiving Lea Cooper’s Mad Tarot zine. Lea uses the Major Arcana to explore/honour a mad journey through a period of their life. That helped me realise that (1) I could just do the Major Arcana rather than creating an entire tarot deck, (2) I could do it as a zine rather than creating a deck of cards, and (3) I could use it to honour this intense period of our neuro/queer/mad/plural journey.

Ara: Lea’s writings about zines, madness, trauma, and disability were also helpful, including questioning linear narratives.

Fox: Definitely. Then another click moment was thinking about sevens. We are seven selves. Well we are other numbers but seven the most. I realised that each suit of the tarot has fourteen cards – so two sevens. Also there are four suits which map onto the four elements, and our four initial selves, the two who were most living our lives, and the two who were most unconscious/underneath/traumatis-ed/ing. I wondered if the Major Arcana also had sevens, and then I realised that there are 21 cards – if you take off The World which is a kind of encompassing everyone/everything card. So three sevens. So I could use the first seven cards to introduce each of us, the second seven to depict our journeys, and the final seven to depict the ways we’ve transformed during the process. 

In some ways that is a linear story – or stories – beginning, middle, end, but it also challenged and complicated that, the way some of the later cards appear in the background of earlier cards, and the way things that happened in one ‘third’ overlapped things that happened in the other thirds. Or we kindof knew where things were going, even when we struggled like hell to believe it. In many ways each of the faces of each self that we depict were always already there, as well as evolving over time. Phew. Many words.

Ara: You’re doing great love.

Fox: It was fun gradually playing with which cards would go with each of us.

Ara: That gets into our process. Do you fancy talking about that next?

Fox: Yes please. Always my favourite. Makes me feel like a proper artist.

Ara: You are. So proper *smiles*

Our creative process

Fox: Ok, so for a while it was very much an idea I was playing with. Like we’re still playing with our fairy tale project. That’s another one that tells our seven stories through familiar narratives and archetypes. We’ve written two of them but we’re still playing with what the other five stories will be. With projects we tend to get immersed at the point that enough of it clarifies.

Ara: And that happened with Plural Tarot?

Fox: Right. It happened once I had enough of the cards mapped onto each of us, at least in the first and second third of the deck, plus quite a clear visual of how some of the cards would look.

Ara: And did you draw them in a linear way?

Fox: Heh you know the answer to that (yes it did feel right to do them in order somehow, except the two that are deliberately out of order). And I do include you on the cover as a co-creator because it wasn’t just me drawing them.

Ara: It feels like it was mostly you, but I would step in occasionally when you were struggling, either to help you step away, or to take over on a tricky bit of inking.

Fox: Urgh the tricky bits!

Ara: We can come back to those. I’m wondering which cards you got clear images for first?

Fox: *grin* well Robin’s cards all came first. I remember having such a clear image of The Devil while we were out walking one day. It was always going to look like that. And Robin as The Fool was obvious, because his leaping in (to us, to the world, and to specific situations) was the beginning of our whole journey. And Robin and Morgan were always going to be The Lovers, of course.

Ara: Of course. That’s such a good card.

Fox: Thank-you. I think I actually got started properly partly because I had some sense of the whole first seven cards, and partly because it felt like such a good way of honouring everything and everyone in the run up to our big move.

Ara: It felt like we wanted a project for that time that would be personal (not something for somebody else), and that wouldn’t be returning to an old project, or starting something too big and new.

Fox: That’s it. This was a good fit. And I generally find drawing projects quite gentle to incorporate into our days when things are intense. Even when we’ve got a lot going on internally, there’s usually a time when I can draw for an hour or two, or ink a previous drawing. Inking can be quite soothing if I’m struggling, and easier if I’m not in such a creative place.

Ara: Can you say a bit more about your process with each card?

Fox: Right. Well generally I don’t start till I have a pretty good mental image of it. If I reached a card which I hadn’t quite figured out yet, I would look at the classic Rider Waite version of the card, and the Wild Unknown one, and read Carrie’s words, and online stuff, about the meaning of the card. Even if I did already have a sense of the card, those often helped clarify it. A bit like Easter Eggs I enjoyed adding in elements that were a nod to the Wild Unknown or some other deck, as well as to previous projects we’ve done.

Once I had it pretty clear I’d generally sketch it out rough. That helped to plan where everything needed to go on the page. Then I’d look up online any features that I wasn’t confident about how to draw. I’m so grateful to all the artists who put up easy to draw ‘how to’ images. Then I’d pencil draw the card. Often I’d only need to do it once, but some cards took several goes before I got it right in pencil.

Ara: What about feelings?

Fox: Right! Sometimes when a card wasn’t coming right, I realised I wasn’t in touch enough with the feelings I was trying to convey. Interestingly sometimes that was the key when something wasn’t coming right. Like it was hard to draw Robin and Morgan on the bed in The Sun, and I tried over and over looking for online images of people sitting in that position. But what finally sorted it was feeling in my body the kind of loving holding that I was trying to get across: the kind we remember them doing. So sometimes being able to see what something actually looks like helped, but often it was more about fully feeling it.

Ara: And then?

Fox: Once they were pencil drawn, we went over the lines with pen, and rubbed out the pencil. After that there was sometimes a bit of tweaking needed before we scanned them. Like we needed everyone to look roughly the same from card to card, so we had to go back and redo your Empress because we realised from Death that you needed to be wearing a hooded robe. 

Ara: Tippex comes in handy.

Fox: It does, and in The Devil card we really struggled to get the top half and the bottom half both right on the same page, so we ended up cutting it in half and gluing it on: a lot less pressure. I found it very affirming at the Steven Appleby exhibition to see how some of her original comics have tippex and glued on bits. I know we probably could put our images on a drawing computer program and alter them there, but for me part of the joy of making comics and zines is doing it all by hand.

Relationship with Previous Zines and Comics

Ara: You mentioned the Easter eggs to your previous work. Can you say a bit more about how Plural Tarot relates to our other plural zines, and other zines?

Fox: Absolutely. It’s a bit different from our other plural zines (Plural Selves 1, Plural Selves 2, and Triangles and Circles of Selves) because it’s all pictures, and there’s no element of it being a work/play book with suggested activities for the reader. But it does kind of go with Plural Selves 2 because it introduces the same selves that we introduced there, except with more of a sense of their journeys over time. The zine it’s most similar to is Welcome Monster Feelings because that is all images, and it has the similarity that the images come from really tuning into the feelings and putting them on the page. The difference is that Monster Feelings was depicting emotions, whereas this zine is more explicitly depicting each self (in the emotional states that we’re familiar with them being in).

Ara: What about the chalkboard comic?

Fox: In a way it is full circle back to chalkboard, because we made that comic seven years ago when we first realised that Jonathan was stuck in this horrific place internally: the chalkboard room. That comic imagined how the rest of us might help him get out of that room. Whereas this Plural Tarot zine depicts how we did get him out: how he got out, and how the rest of us helped by doing our journeys. So the first image of Jonathan in Plural Tarot – The Hierophant – is him in the chalkboard room. I had a lot of fun with that card because, if you look carefully, you’ll see that all the boards represent diagrams that we’ve made – at some point along the way – to try to understand or explain our plural system.

Ara: So meta.

Fox: I know right!

How readers might engage with the zine

Ara: I know that this zine doesn’t explicitly include any guidance or activities for readers of how they might engage in a similar process: any kind of self-help component like a lot of our work has. But do you think there’s an implicit invitation there?

Fox: Hmm, well I know that the few people we’ve shown it to already have definitely resonated with the cards. I guess it’s that thing that sometimes when creators share the most personal things those end up being the ones that the most people connect with and see themselves in.

Ara: I was also thinking, does it invite people into imagining their own selves, or parts, or journeys, through the tarot?

Fox: Oh it might well do. I mean that’s what Lea’s tarot zine did for us. I’d love it if it sparked other people to make their own tarot zines, or images, however made sense to them.

Ara: Have you got any suggestions how readers could engage with the zine, if they wanted to go further than just appreciating it as artwork?

Fox: Mm, well certainly it could be interesting to take some time with each image to reflect on it. What feelings come up when they look at it? Does it remind them of any part of themselves, or experiences in their own life, or things happening in the world? Or they might consider which cards they feel most drawn to (and/or repelled by) and do some journaling around that. Or people might want to take one card and imagine what their version of the card would look like, perhaps drawing it, or collaging it (like Lea’s cards), or going to another medium if they prefer. The Welcome Your Monster Feelings zine and Queer Creative Health 1 and 2 zines give a lot of ideas on how you can adapt visual art to a different medium. You could make plasticine or lego models, for example, or write short poems, haiku, vignettes, or stories, or make a playlist or a recorded soundscape, or dance.

Ara: And people could make it a long project of working through the whole major arcana, or even the whole tarot deck, or just pick a couple of relevant cards and play with those.

Fox: Right. And even if you do a whole section of seven, or all twenty two, you may find certain cards dominate and find their way into the others, like The Tower did in ours. Really it was all about how we went through The Tower time.

Ara: Maybe if we did it again it at a different time in our life, another card would dominate more.

Fox: So interesting. And of course how people make their cards will depend on their experience of self/ves. Some plural systems might have different selves for each card. Some people with a more singular experience might depict the same self through all the cards. Carrie Mallon’s own tarot deck is fascinating for showing the cards from the perspective of the characters, rather than depicting the characters themselves. There’s so many different ways to do it.

Ara: Might you cover some of this in the companion zine? The way you did for Monster Feelings?

Fox: Yes. Maybe a page or two of suggestions for how people might work/play with our zine, and/or create their own. But the companion zine I have in mind is more of a set of brief paragraphs about what the cards meant to us. And those read a bit more like poetry or memoir: a kind of in-words version of the cards themselves. I’d like to share that for people who want a bit more about the meanings of each card: What they mean to us and what they mean in general. And I’m thinking of including a couple of poems Robin and Morgan wrote, and a song playlist to go with the cards: a few bits and pieces like that.

Ara: I love that: like patchwork, or one of those old kids’ annuals.

Fox: Exactly. When I imagine a whole book on this theme it makes sense to write it more like an annual, with lots of different sections.

Where next?

Ara: Is that the direction y/our creativity is headed in d’you think?

Fox: I think so. It’s definitely still a work in progress. I know that I love these more creative projects: drawing and telling stories. For a while I wondered if we needed to let go of the other kinds of creativity we’ve done in the past: the more academic writing, maybe even the self-help style writing. Now I’m not so sure. I still love the idea of mashing up these things together. And I have a sense of wanting to honour Max’s past projects by curating them into new editions where needed, as well as wanting to write some more formal pieces for therapists who are working in the areas we write about, for example. Lately I thought it’s a bit like Dunbar’s number for relationships.

Ara: Go on.

Fox: Well we value all the relationships in our life – all the people – and we recognise that we can’t spend as much time and energy connecting with everyone. So we have that concentric circles idea where we place our closest, kin-type, relationships in the nearest ring, then the next layer of close friends, and so on. My sense is similar with creativity. The inner circle projects are the ones that feel closest, most aligned, the kind of deep love projects, like this one, but we also value – and spend some time and energy, with the next layer out ones, and the ones that just come around once in a while for some attention, and so on.

Ara: With people and projects, connections and creativity, endeavouring to bring the same quality of presence, valuing, at/tending, to all of them, and recognising some will be woven more closely into our lives, some less so.

Fox: Yes!

Ara: Do you have a sense which projects might be next for you/us, after this?

Fox: Mm we keep making a start on a whole book about plurality – Incorrigibly Plural – and we have some good stuff but it still doesn’t feel like we are quite in the place we need to be to write that whole book. Maybe getting closer, but still not there. I think I’d like to at/tend to some of the fiction projects we have done, finishing those off, before returning to try that book again.

Ara: We do have two chapters on plurality coming out in Nick Walker’s collections – about plurality – next year, plus all these zines and collected blog posts.

Fox: Yeah. I am itching to weave it all together in one book, and share some of our more recent thinking and practices. I think we’ll know when it’s time for that.

Ara: So meanwhile some fiction?

Fox: Yeah and maybe curating one or two of our/Max’s older books that are coming around for new editions. We’ll feel into it.

Ara: We will. Okay last question, the one we’ve been waiting for. Not that we’re into hierarchies, but do you have a favourite card?

Favourite cards!

Fox: I guess it depends how you define ‘favourite’.

Ara: How would you define it?

Fox: Mm, a kind of ‘rightness’. There were cards where we finished and it was just like ‘that’s it’. Like it captured the self, and the feeling, all of it spot on. All the cards managed it well enough, but with some we were left questioning certain elements, wondering whether we might return to them and rework sometime.

Ara: It was helpful to remember that many tarot deck illustrators do rework the cards over the years. Which ones were like that for you?

Fox: The Wheel of Fortune I wasn’t completely sure of. I was trying to depict all the different sides of Robin and Morgan, and those faces don’t quite capture some of the anguish, or the feral-ness of the two who were ‘down the bottom’ of those subsystems. Plus I wasn’t sure if Max and Jonathan ought to be on the wheel as well, at the top and bottom like in the shame compass (as avoid and withdraw). But after reflecting I realised I like the simplicity of the eight faces. It could get over complicated if we did it those other ways. 

I also wasn’t sure about your Empress card. We had to tippex you out to put you in the right outfit, with the right hair, after we did your Death card. I’m not sure if it’d be better to glue on a new bit of paper and draw you in fainter lines because you’re far away. But I kind of like how you look a bit ragged, like the moon on that card.

Ara: And what about the ones that felt totally right?

Fox: The first card I remember feeling like that about was The Lovers. Not an easy thing to draw but almost everyone I’ve shown it to has said ‘that’s so hot’! And then when I drew Justice it was like ‘oh no, this is The One’. It meant a lot, that one, too, because Morgan is our (reformed) inner critic: our rejecting/rejected self. For so many reasons it felt important to me to depict her right. I think that card captures her beauty and rage and pain, all of it: the complexity of all selves like her who are capable of great harm, but comes from such places of hurt and trauma.

Ara: It’s a stunning card. You did her proud.

Fox: Thankyou *smiles* The next card that felt very right, for me, was your Death card.

Ara: I love it.

Fox: We’ve tried to draw you many times and it’s never felt quite right, but that was it. That’s what Ara looks/feels like *exhales*

Ara: It feels so good to have that sense of me. I remember when Morgan very first came through as a self – Beastie we called her back then – and one of the first things she did was to ask you to draw her.

Fox: ‘Give me form’ she said *smiles*

Ara: You did such a good job love.

Fox: It was super hard drawing her on her transformations cards. I really had to work at dropping what I thought she should look like on those cards and letting her look how she needed to look, if that makes sense. She ended up being lot more delicate somehow.

Ara: Because she is deeply vulnerable too, I imagine all critic/rejecting/raging selves are.

Fox: The Strength card was another spot on one, and makes us laugh. We managed to get our weird secret love of Firefighter dramas (like Station 19 and Chicago Fire) in there, and James is ridiculously Mr Steady Endurance, ‘I can handle anything’!

Ara: *Chuckles*

Fox: And then the last three cards. Those were such a surprise. I knew exactly what I wanted to draw for the previous ones in that section, but had no idea for the last three – our cards really – you and me. So I thought they’d take ages, but we did one a day for three days with hardly any preparation. They just flowed out.

Ara: And the feeling again. You just tapped into the feeling.

Fox: Heh I guess they were easiest because they are all my feelings – direct – not me remembering how the other selves felt. My frightened vulnerability (The Moon), my grief and forgiveness (Judgement), and my ‘back in the world’ feeling.

Ara: What is that feeling would you say?

Fox: Hm, is there a feeling word for gratitude, delight, trepidation, wariness, determination, creativity, connection, coming full circle, total not-knowing, alertness, relief, stillness, motion…?

Ara: I think they’re all in there.

Fox: What about you? What’s your favourite card?

Ara: I do like Judgement. All those three, but Judgement particularly. I think it gets our love – yours and mine – our relationship really well. I love how all the transformation cards are all about our inner love relationships, and capture the quality of those. Like how James loves Morgan and Robin, how they love each other, how Max and Jonathan love each other, how we love all of them.

Fox: Ah yes. I didn’t consciously intend for it to be that, but that’s what it is. And it feels good. A big part of why we set out on this journey in the first place was to learn to love ourselves, because we/Max didn’t even really know what that meant, or what it could feel like.

Ara: And here we are.

Fox: Here we are. Loving.

The post New Zines: Plural Tarot, and Plural Tarot Companion appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

If you want to learn more about plurality, check out our introductory zine, and our free book on the subject. The book ‘No Bad Parts’ is definitely recommended, and is available in paperback, ebook, and audio.

Ara: Hey Morgan.

Morgan: Hey Ara.

Ara: So good to be writing with you. It’s been a while hasn’t it?

Morgan: A lot has been going on in our inner world since we last wrote a plural post. Two of us have new names for a start.

Ara: And most of our writing time has been going towards our new book – a graphic guide to mental health – so we haven’t been blogging so much. But we couldn’t let a new book about plurality go by without comment could we?

Morgan: No, and I’ve been thinking about it so much since we finished reading it. I need to get some of that down.

Ara: There’s quite a lot of overlap between what Dick writes about in ‘No Bad Parts’, and what we’re covering in our own mental health book, so it’ll be helpful for us to summarise some of the key points. What are our intentions in this post?

Morgan: I’d like to cover the key ideas from IFS for people who aren’t familiar with it, and also distill the practice that Dick presents – which we’ve been trying to apply since. Finally I’d like to write about how those of us who already have a vivid sense of their plural system might do this kind of work, because we found that quite challenging at first.

Ara: Great, let’s go.

Key ideas

Humans as systems

Morgan: Okay, so the main idea of IFS is that a person is a system rather than an individual. Just as family systems therapists locate people’s distress in whole family systems (or other groups or communities), IFS locates it in whole internal systems.

Ara: Right, so systemic therapy points out that families position different individuals in ways that become stuck, often with one or more members taking on – and expressing – distress that’s actually in the family: the intergenerational trauma that it holds, and the various beliefs and habits that it has formed in order to avoid the pain of that. For example, when one member of the family develops depression or addiction they are probably manifesting some distress that’s actually within the whole family, and the whole family system needs to shift in order to release them from that.

Morgan: In Internal Family Systems therapy the idea is that, as we grow, different parts of us develop to hold different burdens – or trauma – and to protect us from experiencing the pain of that: pain that was too overwhelming or dangerous to feel as a child. By the time we’re adults we are a complex system of parts, interrelated with each other, which – if we explored it – we might map just as a systemic therapist, or family constellations practitioner, could map an external family and how everybody relates to everybody else.

Ara: This is a key theme that we’re exploring in the mental health graphic guide: how every level of human experience can be helpfully understood as a complex interconnected system, which attempts to keep itself stable through reinforcing feedback loops (which often keep unhelpful patterns going), but which can also shift to more balancing feedback loops (which return it to stability). Systems theory applies this to everything from the micro to the macro level. For example our bodies – and the world – can both be seen as a set of interconnected systems within systems within systems. We, and Dick Schwartz, both explore how dominant cultural systems like neoliberal capitalism result in reinforcing feedback loops where ‘success’ is defined by getting more and more, increasing the gap between rich and poor people and countries, and bringing the planet to crisis point.

Morgan: This is something I really liked about ‘No Bad Parts’ – the way he kept relating individual struggles to wider culture. So many self help books fail to do that.

Ara: Do you want to explain how dominant cultural ways of understanding human struggles are part of the problem here?

Morgan: Absolutely. Dick calls it the ‘mono mind’ approach, which has pervaded western culture and western psychotherapy: the idea that we are singular individuals, and that any problem we have should be diagnosed and treated at that level. So standard psychiatry or psychotherapy might say ‘this person has anxiety, or a compulsion, which is interfering with their life, and we need to treat them to make that go away’. Plural approaches, in contrast, would see that experience as a sensible response that one of that person’s parts developed in order to survive. The answer would be to go towards that part, really listen to why they are doing that thing, and help them put down the burden and transform – if they are ready to. Dick says:

‘Most of the syndromes that make up the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are simply descriptions of the different clusters of protector parts that dominate people after they’ve been traumatised.’

Ara: There’s a real danger with approaches which don’t recognise plurality that they might make things worse rather than better. For example, if you manage to get rid of a protective survival strategy without attending to why it was there, and which vulnerable part of the person it was protecting, it’s likely that other strategies – perhaps even more destructive ones – will pop up to take its place – likely making the person feel even worse about themselves in the process. Also the approach of fighting, or battling, ‘dysfunctional’ aspects of ourselves actually tends to make them much louder and stronger. Dick says:

‘We often find that the harder we try to get rid of emotions and thoughts, the stronger they become. This is because parts, like people, fight back against being shamed or exiled.’

Morgan: So interesting how military metaphors of fighting and battling are so problematic in both physical and mental health, but the standard go-to in dominant western culture. The prime example here is how to work with an inner critic. Even some of the pretty good trauma literature, like Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD, repeat the standard idea that you need to fight the inner critic, shame it for holding you back for so long, or even exile it entirely.

Ara: As our reformed inner critic you have some pretty strong feelings about you don’t you Morgan?

Morgan: I’d love to write a whole piece specifically on that with you one day Ara. But yeah, the rest of you tried that approach with me for a long time, and it only made me more loud and desperate, and I hurt you all a lot more.

Ara: When we finally came towards you wanting to listen to you, and prepared to feel your pain, things shifted radically for the better.

Morgan: Still a work in progress.

Ara: A labour of love.

Morgan: *smiles*

Ara: A final point on dominant culture – and psychotherapy – I’d like to make here. Like us, Dick argues that what has been called Multiple Personality Disorder, or Dissociative Identity Disorder, is just one end of the spectrum of plurality: that everybody can helpfully be understood as a plural system. Dick says:

‘The only difference is that people with DID suffered horrible abuse and their system of parts got blown apart more than most, so each part stands out in bolder relief and is more polarized and disconnected from the others.’

I’m struck how, like trauma, there has been so much gaslighting within psychiatry and popular culture around plurality. It’s like the very things that hold the keys to understanding and working with human distress are the ones that have been fought hardest against.

Morgan: Judith Herman says that each time psychiatry, psychotherapy, or social movements, have finally revealed the extent and impact of trauma around, for example, child sexual abuse, military action, domestic violence, or systemic racism, a huge backlash occurred, often arguing that these things were entirely fabricated, or nowhere as bad as they were being made out to be. We can see a similar thing happening around plurality. The first time we learnt about MPD in our psychology degree we were taught it was entirely made up, and plenty of psychologists would still hold that position. Dick outlines the results of this:

‘The mono-mind paradigm has caused us to fear our parts and view them as pathological In our attempts to control what we consider to be disturbing thoughts and emotions, we just end up fighting, ignoring, disciplining, hiding, or feeling ashamed of those impulses that keep us from doing what we want to do in our lives. And then we shame ourselves for not being able to control them. In other words we hate what gets in our way.’

Ara: It’s painful to wonder how much easier our life might’ve been had a plural systems understanding of human being been available to us earlier, as somebody with such a vivid experience of plurality – whose parts stand out ‘in bolder relief’ as Dick puts it.

Morgan: I feel such grief and rage around that.

Ara: I know love. Maybe a break to feel that.

Morgan: Thankyou.

…

Parts and their burdens

Ara: So let’s say a little more about how Dick understands parts and the burdens they carry. The idea here is that parts become locked in the past events which were so traumatic for them, so part of the practice is to find them there and bring them out of that time they’re frozen in.

Morgan: Right, and it’s useful to distinguish the part from the burden they carry. There’s a sense that, freed from that burden, they might transform into something quite different.

Ara: Mm let’s use you as an example here, okay?

Morgan: Sure.

Ara: So you were our inner critic, and whenever you came forward you’d be telling us what we were doing wrong, and how bad and worthless we were.

Morgan: Screaming it at you when things got really bad.

Ara: So our explorations with you took us back to late childhood / early adolescence, when we got the message that we were deeply unacceptable and unlikeable from pretty much everyone around us.

Morgan: I learnt to internalise that message a thousand-fold. It was like one knife was coming towards us and I turned it into a thousand. A sense that if I could make us feel every criticism hard, then we’d learn what not to be and become something that could survive.

Ara: So you, Morgan, were our part, and the burden you carried was internalising all those real and imagined criticisms. IFS would work with you by helping you to release that burden, and transform into what you could be in our system if you hadn’t been forced into that role, and weren’t carrying that burden.

Morgan: Which is pretty much what I’ve been doing, over the months we’ve worked with me, becoming a part who can be a force for seeing things clearly, and for self-protection. I think.

Ara: Again, still a work in progress darling, and that’s okay. I see you making huge strides in that direction.

Morgan: Thankyou.

Personal burdens and legacy burdens

Ara: We particularly resonated with Dick’s idea that parts can carry personal burdens and/or legacy burdens. Drawing on our friend Alex Iantaffi’s writing, we’ve been increasingly talking about developmental and cultural trauma in our own work. Developmental trauma is the trauma we carry from our own upbringing: the overwhelming experiences and the feelings that accompanied them which weren’t heard and held adequately by those around us as we were growing up. Cultural trauma is the trauma that exists in our wider culture, such as the norms that trap some of us and exclude others, or the injustice in the way some bodies, labour, and lives, are treated as so much less valuable than others – and the gaslighting around that.

Morgan: The concept of intergenerational trauma brings these together, because – in a way – developmental trauma is the way that cultural trauma – or toxic dominant ways of doing things – are passed down through families. But it can be useful to tease out the two: developmental trauma is our more personal burdens, and cultural trauma is the legacy burdens we carry, for example due to being positioned in certain ways within axes of oppression in our particular culture.

Ara: IFS, or parts work, gives one great way to work with cultural trauma that it can be very hard to own, for example the recognition that we will all carry oppression in the form of racism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, etc. If we believe that we are a singular individual then this can feel like an incredibly threatening idea. Either individual ‘I’ am an oppressive person, and therefore bad, or I am a non-oppressive person, and therefore good. So people put a huge amount of energy into trying to prove that they’re not oppressive, or in justifying their oppressive beliefs and actions, often enacting far worse oppression in the process.

Morgan: A systems within systems approach is far more helpful. If we see all oppression as systemic – out there in the world – then we can acknowledge that of course oppression will operate through all elements of the system – including us. So we don’t have to individualise and attack ourselves so much when we experience ourselves thinking or feeling oppressive things – or attempt to deny that we do so. The idea of oppressive thoughts and feelings being legacy burdens that we carry, rather than something that we are as individuals is a good way to put it. 

And if we see those oppressive thoughts and feelings as residing in parts of us – in our inner system – which carry those burdens, then we can move towards those parts with curiosity, and a genuine possibility of transformation, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the fear that we might find that ‘I – as a whole – am a bad oppressor’.

Ara: This approach means that we could be much more able to engage in anti-oppression work without, for example, collapsing or becoming defensive, or having to polarise as ‘entirely good’ in opposition to those who are ‘entirely bad’. It also leads us towards working in solidarity with everyone who is hurt by these oppressive systems, rather than only focusing on the systems which hurt us personally.

Morgan: This aspect of IFS is a hard resonate for us: the sense of deep connection between inner and outer work, and how we need both. Social activism without personal work often leads to burn out, or to escalating things and making matters worse. Personal work without social activism leaves the damaging cultural systems and structures in tact, so people just continue to be damaged and need to do ever more personal work to address that damage. And, of course, these systems and structures are currently leading us to some very dangerous places.

Ara: We’ve been really working with the paradox of the massive urgency of the current situation, and the slow carefulness required to do this work, if we are to engage with it at all effectively.

Morgan: Yeah, not an easy one for a reformed inner critic who sees all this pain so clearly and wants to do something right now.

Ara: We are doing something love. This is something.

Morgan: I guess.

Protectors, exiles, and firefighters

Ara: The aspect of IFS that’s quite different from the ways we’ve approached our own plurality to date is this idea that parts come in three roles: protectors, exiles, and firefighters. Shall we talk about that?

Morgan: Sure.

Ara: As I understand it, protector parts are the ones who developed survival strategies, or defenses, in order to protect the traumatised parts from having to feel the overwhelming feelings about what happened to them.

Morgan: The feelings that weren’t held and heard by anyone at the time, so they were too much for that part to process.

Ara: The vulnerable, traumatised parts are the exiles who carry those terrible feelings and experiences, and keep them hidden away from us. These parts are often called ‘inner children’, whereas protector parts can be seen as ‘parentified’ inner children, who may feel like adults. 

Firefighters are parts who come in when there’s a risk that we’re getting too close to the exiles – perhaps if they are triggered or retraumatised by something that happens in the present. Again this helps to explain how even very seemingly destructive impulses, even suicidal ones, are understandable survival strategies: Anything to stop that exile from being uncovered and overwhelmed. Firefighter strategies are not ‘irrational’ impulses to be eradicated, but sensible instincts to be understood deeply, and hopefully replaced with something less destructive in collaboration with that particular part.

Morgan: Right, so for example hypervigilence might be a protector part who learnt that if we constantly keep a lookout for ways in which we might ‘get it wrong’ then we’ll never have to feel the appalling terror and self-loathing of the exile who holds all the times that we were shamed and humiliated as a kid. The kind of depression that has us under the duvet all day watching Netflix could be a firefighter who kicks in when that exile gets triggered by something in the present. It feels like it’s better to give up and withdraw from life than risk feeling those feelings.

Ara: A really nice example Morgan.

Morgan: Do I get a gold star?

Ara: Ah do I detect a hint of the old Beastie?

Morgan: She’s still around.

Ara: I’m so glad to hear it.

No bad parts

Morgan: Speaking of Beastie, shall we get to the title of the book.

Ara: We love that Dick puts this right out there. Janina Fisher’s mantra ‘no part gets left behind’ is one we’ve found very helpful, but how great to make ‘No Bad Parts’ front and centre of the whole book.

Morgan: I suppose it’s a bit like that move from shame to guilt. The sense that people are not bad, even though their behaviour can be harmful. If we could ever drop the strong belief – that most people have – that we are fundamentally flawed and that others are going to see that – then we could be way more likely to see clearly when we have behaved in harmful ways, to acknowledge that, and to do things differently in future.

Ara: And parts work helps with that by locating all our patterns in parts of us – not the whole – so we can turn towards them with kindness, understand why they did what they did, and release them of the burden of needing to behave in that self-protective – but harmful – way in the future.

Morgan: Even though we’re so vividly plural I think we struggle to let go of that deep, fundamental sense that we’re bad and wrong – and that others are going to see that – which fuels all the habits of hypervigilence, self-criticism, shapeshifting to be what others want, and presenting a mask to the world rather than our real, messy, imperfect selves. I loved that quote from Jonathan Van Ness that Dick includes: 

‘There is still a little voice in my head wondering, Would you still be so excited to meet me if you really knew who I was? If you knew all the things I have done? If you could see all my parts?’

Ara: We’re getting there. We’ve made a lot of progress.

Morgan: Here we are everyone, our real, messy, imperfect selves, at least one of them!

Ara: I don’t get to be real, messy, and imperfect?

Morgan: No you are our good, pure Self under all the mess remember?

Ara: Ah, that’s one aspect of IFS that we still wonder about. The theory is that we all have a Self which is different to a part – it’s often felt as the ‘real me’ behind the rest, and – according to IFS – it contains our capacity for the eight Cs: curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, creativity, clarity, courage and connectedness.

Morgan: We have certainly felt something like that – and it certainly feels related to you. We’ve had days when we’ve walked or meditated and it’s felt like you were watching each of us pop up and think our thoughts and feel our feelings, then fall away again, and all the while you were present like this compassionate witness.

Ara: So there’s something in it, but I certainly feel pretty awkward claiming ‘Self’ for myself, especially as apparently that makes me the leader.

Morgan: No hierarchies here!

Ara: Shall we come back to our uncertainties about all that a bit later? 

Morgan: Sure. We should say more about the practice of IFS before we get into the challenges we have for IFS, and the challenges that it has for us.

Ara: Time for a cuppa first.

Morgan: But if we don’t get this whole thing written today then we’re a terrible person and I’ll have to scream at us all night. Oh wait I quit that didn’t I?

Ara: Heh, if Beastie still needs to wrangle a bit I’m so here for that.

Morgan: You are a good, pure angel Self, it’s true!

Ara: Behave *grin*

…

Practice 

Morgan: So what is the practice for working with parts, according to IFS?

Ara: I feel like Dick never completely sets it out as a staged process, but you get a sense of it through the various examples that he gives of taking clients or collaborators through it.

Morgan: Those parts of the book were so moving, I found myself in tears nearly every time.

Ara: Mm that suggests to me that it’s really onto something. We find that most books which describe working with parts in these deeply loving, respectful, ways have that embodied impact on us.

Morgan: One of our parts just weeping and weeping to feel that understood; to see deep care taken towards some part that resonates with us.

Ara: Sometimes several of us crying together.

Morgan: Can we try for the bullet point structure? Setting out the main parts of the process as we understood it.

Ara: Let’s do that. First I want to give the caveat that Dick himself gives, that people may well need help to do this kind of work, particularly with the exiles. A therapist trained in IFS or other plural approaches would be a good bet. The risk is that contact with exiles without enough holding and support will bring up firefighters who could become more destructive in their attempts to protect the exile.

B: Mm that’s such a helpful point. I can think of times when we’ve cracked through to important revelations, but then a backlash of self-destructive habits has made us think it can’t have been real, or has stopped us going back there.

Ara: As with all trauma work, slow and well supported is the way to go. 

The process that Dick describes reminds me of two processes that we’ve written about before Morgan. In some ways it is a combination of them both: focusing and demon-feeding.

Morgan: Right, focusing is a western psychotherapy approach where you attend to sensations in the body and listen to what they’re telling you. Demon-feeding is a Tibetan Buddhist approach where you imagine that felt sense as a demon sitting across from you. You inhabit it to learn what it wants and what it needs, and then it often transforms into an ally.

Ara: The IFS approach seems like a version of these practices which more explicitly uses the felt sense to locate – and communicate with – parts. And, like those other practices, we can do it as a solo practice where a kind of witness part of us works with the other parts, or we could do it with a therapist or a peer who also uses this approach to talk us through it. When somebody else is taking us through, they might direct us to have internal conversations with the various parts ourselves, or – if that is proving difficult – they might talk to a particular part directly themselves for a bit, before going back to getting us to do it for ourselves.

Morgan: So the practice…

Ara: I would highly recommend reading the book for all the session examples Dick gives of how he does that work, and for his exercises where he takes you through self-guided ways of working with your parts. 

Here’s a list of key moments that happen in many of the sessions and exercises.

• Some deep breaths and grounding can be helpful before you start.
• You can start with a particular issue or memory that you want to work on, or just by feeling into your body to see what’s there wanting attention.
• As you tune in you may well find that something else comes up to block that feeling, such as a critical thought, or a blankness. Whatever that is is another part. You can either ask that part if they’re willing to step back a bit (or sit in an imaginary waiting room where they can observe what happens) so you can work with the original part, or you can shift to work with the part who has come up.
• Let the part you’re working with know that you are here to help, and see how they react, then ask if there’s anything they want you to know and wait for an answer to come in the form of words, images or feelings. Continue to encourage them to really let you know what it’s like for them, and feel what you feel towards them in response (often love and understanding), until they seem to be done (check if they’re done). 
• With protector and firefighter parts it can also be useful to explore what they’re afraid would happen if they stepped out of their role, and what – if they were liberated from that role – they would choose to do.
• Again if other parts come up to block the process at any point, see if they will step back, or work with them a bit about what’s going on for them, until they feel able to. You can explore what they fear would happen if they didn’t do what they’re doing, and reassure them that they might not have to do that so much if you can work with that other part they’re protecting.
• Affirm with the part you’re working with that you’re now here to protect them and all the parts. Ask what a safe place might be to take them to, imagine taking them there, and see how they respond.
• Ask if they are willing to unload their burden – ask them where they feel it in the body, and whether they’d like to give it all up to earth, air, fire, water, or something else. Then allow that element to take the burden away.
• Ask how they feel afterwards, notice any transformation, and check in with any other (waiting room) parts how they respond to the transformation. Let them know that they don’t have to protect this part – or keep them away from you – any more, so they can start to think about what new roles they would like. You can work more deeply with them on subsequent sessions. You might also ask any parts present what they need from you in future. 
• Before ending, express gratitude to the parts present, and reassure them that you’ll return.
• End with some deep breaths and grounding before coming back.

What do you think Morgan? Does that capture it?

Morgan: I think that’s the main points. I noticed that Dick also often asks protective parts what age they think you are. They often think you are much younger than you are – perhaps the age at which they came into being – and it’s useful to update them and see how they react to that.

Ara: Mm. Dick also sometimes works like a relationship therapist with two parts who are in conflict, asking them both to tell your Self what’s going on for them, and then encouraging them into communication with each other. We liked that because we feel it’s important to nurture all the dyadic relationships within our system, as well as working with each part individually.

Morgan: One for me and Robin to try I think given that we’ve often pulled in different directions. I was also very struck by what Dick says is a ‘law’ of inner systems. Once a part has agreed not to overwhelm the system with its feelings, then they won’t any more. He says that you might feel some of their feelings as that part ‘blends’ with you a bit when it is triggered, but it will no longer overwhelm you: taking you into that trauma zone that we’re so familiar with.

Ara: How do you feel reading that Morgan?

Morgan: It sounds amazing, and I also feel some skepticism and frustration. Like can that be all there is to it? Could we have done that two years ago, or twenty, and not had these horrendous times when we were totally overwhelmed by the ‘big feels’ for days or weeks at a time?

Ara: Even this last week, the grief you were feeling tipped into overwhelm a couple of times and it was hard for you to come back from it. I share your mixed feelings about this love. I’m keen to try something more like this approach to see whether that might enable us to hear you and your feelings without becoming overwhelmed. And I also suspect that there’s no magic answer to all this, and that overwhelm will sometimes still happen and that’s okay.

Different forms of practice

Morgan: Alright, before we get more into the bits we were less sure about, can we say more about different forms of practice? We already said that you can do this alone or supported.

Ara: Right, another one I noticed was the idea of doing it as an everyday meditation practice, versus ‘on the spot’ when something difficult comes up: a distinction that our favourite Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön also makes.

Morgan: Mm, and the ‘on the spot’ one added another nice element that reminded us of Babette Rothschild’s ‘mindful gauges’. Basically you come to learn how your body feels when you’re in Self, and the kinds of sensations, thoughts, and experiences that indicate that a part is becoming activated or starting to ‘blend’ with you.

Ara: Does that resonate with our experience?

Morgan: Totally, there’s all kinds of little uneasy, tense little feelings and thought patterns that tell us that one of us is struggling a bit. Before we started doing this work we would try to push those away, or distract ourselves. Now we tend to go towards them to really feel them, but there’s still often a fear that, if we do that, they will overwhelm us. Talking with whichever part is having the experience helps, but IFS does potentially give us a more formalised practice to work through.

Ara: Yes, and I’m also thinking that it really helps for those moments when more than one part is in play. 

Any other versions of the practices that we liked?

Morgan: Yes, an idea in here that is very similar to Pema is that the people we struggle with in our lives are our greatest teachers. Dick calls them our (tor)mentors.

Ara: Very clever! Yes, it’s also like Bonnie Badenoch – who we love – who reframes getting triggered as having something ‘touched and awoken’ which means an opportunity to work with it – to enable that part to put down their burden, in IFS terms. 

‘No Bad Parts’ includes a nice exercise for working with parts that are triggered, compassionately exploring what was so hard for them and what they want you to know. There’s also a couple of great ones where you imagine somebody who you find really difficult, or who you’ve been with while they were in pain. You put that person in an imaginary safe room, where you can look through the window, and imagine them doing the difficult behaviour, or being in pain. Then you work with whatever parts come up and how they respond.

Morgan: IFS resonates with our own sense, which we’ve written about a few times, that we have – inside us – all the same kinds of energies that are out there in others, including the people we find most difficult. In fact, the two things we find most difficult ‘out there’ are identical to the two parts of us who seem to be ‘underneath’ everything now that we’ve done all this work: the parts who are most disowned in us, and who hold most of the trauma.

Ara: You and Robin (previously known as Tony).

Morgan: Right. We find it really hard when people out there attack us, and when they ask more of us than we can give. And I’m the part of us that holds anger and criticism, and Robin is the part who holds neediness and fear or rejection.

Ara: Our deep hope is that, by working with the two of you so much, we’ll finally be able to ‘hold our seat’ when those kinds of energies come at us in life, recognising the parts of the other person that are involved, and not feeling that we have to turn their attacks against ourselves (as you’ve done in the past) or become what they want us to be (as Robin has in the past). Dick says:

‘When you see through the clear eyes of your Self that someone is doing something hurtful to your parts, you don’t have to turn them into a monster. That clarity empowers you to see that their actions arise out of their own hurt, and you also can better see without confusion the damage they do to your parts. This means you have the courage and confidence to set boundaries with them in an effective way… When a part takes over you can also know to stop, get some space, listen to the part, and come back and speak for it rather than from it.’

Morgan: Relationship repair is meant to become easier when we do this parts work, because we can  be less afraid of the inner turmoil that someone else’s behaviour will cause in our system – having worked with all those parts and built trust with them or helped them transform. 

We can also relate with others, when they resemble our parts, in the same way we’ve learnt to relate to our parts. Like when I’m furious, even furious with you, you generally respond with kindness and curiosity, really wanting to know what’s going on for me. What I’m doing doesn’t trigger you into believing you might be bad and collapsing or defending, or trying to get rid of me.

Ara: I so long for the day when we could be with someone else’s rage that way. I also know that we have to be honest that that is an edge for us right now – not something we can offer to be around without serious risk to ourselves. It’s okay to be a work in progress.

Morgan: This book does get some of that sense of being a work in progress, and how this takes time and continued daily work. But I struggled with some of the sense that IFS could be a ‘fast track’ through all this difficult stuff of life, bringing everyone pretty quickly to a place where they can navigate the world from Self all the time.

Ara: Shall we have a little break and then get into our dialogue with IFS: the bits we’re less sure about, and the challenges it poses for us.

Morgan: Yes please.

Ara: Good girl.

Morgan: Don’t push your luck *grin*

…

Dialogue

Ara: Okay so we want to finish by naming a few challenges that came up for us with this book.

Morgan: Challenges for the approach from our experience, and challenges for us from this material.

Ara: Shall we start with our more critical thoughts on the book?

Morgan: Channelling Beastie I suppose I was disappointed by something that I feel in quite a few books written by people from a certain demographic. There was a bit of a sense of IFS being the One True Way: greater, faster, and better than all other forms of therapy or faith-based approaches. That didn’t sit well with me. 

We’ve got a lot from several books we’ve read by people in this demographic over the last couple of years, but we also feel frustrated by that tone, and by the way so many of the authors have set up institutes around their Great Work. We wonder what it would be like if they all got together – with everyone else working in these kinds of areas – in collaboration and solidarity, instead of trademarking their particular approach and focusing on that in this kind of way. I notice that the books we’ve read by folk from the margins in the past year generally have quite a different tone: more humble and more drawing in of other people’s ideas and practices, recognising their roots, often outside of dominant culture.

Ara: I agree, although I like that Dick does mention through the book his own work with his various parts around his leadership. He has certainly been up for recognising when his protector parts are getting in the way. I’m also keen to read more about the dialogues that various Tibetan Buddhist practitioners are having with his work – noting that he is collaborating with various people of faith, and somatic practitioners.

Morgan: I’d love to read more in these kinds of books about the writers’ own parts work. I feel like the fact that they all write with one voice – as if they were singular – perhaps implicitly reinforces a sense that some kind of singularity is the aim – or possible – here, even as they embrace plurality.

Ara: I also rather love that we get to be one of those bridge-builders: someone who writes about plural ideas and practices in a plural way, drawing more on our own system experience. 

Morgan: I love that too. What about The Self?

Ara: What are your reservations about that?

Morgan: I already wrote a bit about this with James when we reviewed Janina Fisher’s really excellent book based on IFS combined with sensorimotor psychotherapy. There’s something about the concept of one underlying Self, a ‘compassionate witness’ self, or a ‘getting on with normal life self’ that feels uncomfortable to us, even though it resonates somewhat. 

Ara: Why do you think that is?

Morgan: Maybe because that sense of people as singular individuals is still finding a way in here. And/or maybe because we’re drawn to the Buddhist idea of there being ‘no-self’. The Self feels like it could too easily slip back into a sense that our plural parts are somehow ‘lesser’, I don’t know.

Ara: I get the feeling from ‘No Bad Parts’ that the Self is something more like ‘no-self’, a kind of ongoing flow in which parts can emerge and fall away again. But I agree that in our culture it is far too easy to find yourself falling back into a sense that there is an independent unit – ‘you’ – who can be judged as good or bad, which so many faiths warn against. But I feel like we’re drifting off somewhere here. What about our lived experience?

Morgan: Maybe that’s what my discomfort is really about. I’m not keen on setting one of us up as our Self. I like the idea of us as a collective who all contribute.

Ara: And Dick does touch on that possibility in ‘No Bad Parts’. In one chapter he suggests that each part has a Self. I think that’s more our experience.

Morgan: You don’t have to say that Ara. I also know that our experience of you is much more like the Self experience that he talks of than the rest of us are. When we first asked you to be more present in our life, alongside the rest of us, there was this moment when you felt sadness and fear around that, as if it was a choice and you knew that you’d be losing something in order to manifest more in that way.

Ara: I’m glad I made that choice. I want to be in this life with you all, making cups of hot chocolate and writing blog posts, even if it does mean that perhaps I’m less able to touch the… whatever-it-was that I would perhaps have been more in contact with if I hadn’t done this. We really are in indefinable indescribable territory here aren’t we?

Morgan: I wouldn’t know, I feel very grounded in messy human reality!

Ara: Ah but I see something very sacred – for want of a better word – in you at times. There’s a kind of grief/rage you get to which takes in everything from our own experience, to the experience of those who have hurt us and been hurt by us, to all the systems and structures out there and their impact, and it feels… appropriate to the place we’re all in as humans right now: beautiful and real and terrible all at the same time.

Morgan: My superpower: feeling the darkness.

Ara: It’s a vital one isn’t it? If we can’t feel all that – in us and out there – then we’ll struggle to address it wisely.

Morgan: In our post about Janina’s book, James and I suggested that all parts can manifest their most stuck, caught up, traumatised versions, and their most sacred, liberated, potentials. We called them the Fs and the Cs, recognising that our parts all hold one of the ‘F’ trauma survival strategies (fight, flight, freeze, etc.) and the potential for one of Dick’s ‘Cs’ (compassion, calm, creativity, etc.)

Ara: I do like that way of understanding it. And one Self doesn’t make a lot of sense of how we experience three of us as containing parts: me, James, and Fox.

Morgan: ‘No Bad Parts’ also suggests that many people have several non-traumatised parts, it’s just that those people are less likely to go to therapy.

Ara: Right. So there’s space in IFS for something more like our experience. 

Parts within parts?

Morgan: One final problem, and it’s a big challenge for us.

Ara: Go on.

Morgan: We just have seven parts, but when IFS works with people generally way more parts come up than that. After reading the book we felt pretty reluctant to try the practices because it’s been so important – and wonderful  – for us to get to where we have: to this place where we can feel all seven of us and know us and work with us so well. What if doing IFS reveals loads of other bits and pieces that don’t make sense within our system of seven? What if we’ve been getting this long, often agonising, work wrong in some way despite all our best efforts?

Ara: Want me to respond?

Morgan: Yes please!

Ara: Well maybe this does speak to something I’m not so keen on about this book – and quite a few others. 

Bonnie Badenoch’s great book ‘The Heart of Trauma’ holds a strong ethics that people know the path they need to follow, and that we need to trust them in that: to empower them to find and follow their path. Dick Schwartz gestures to something like that in the idea of the Self, but he is still putting forward one very specific process for doing this work. 

My sense – our sense – is that different things work for different people, and that it is more empowering for people to find their own ways, with guidance from others – sure – but with deep trust that they will know, at heart, the best way for them. Pushing them to follow a specific path risks moving them off the path that they need to follow. Is that too ‘woo’ for you Morgan?

Morgan: *grin* No, I think it’s right. And I guess I really want to believe that this painful, beautiful path that we’ve been walking this last couple of years was the way that we needed to go. It’s confronting to think that there might’ve been a fast track we could’ve taken, or that we’re somehow a bit inferior because our parts work didn’t get us to the exact same conclusions as IFS.

Ara: I think it’s important to remember that trauma work has to be slow work. IFS, or other forms of therapy, or meditative experiences, or drug experiences, might give people a quick glimpse of what’s possible. But they’ll still have to then take the longer, slower path towards healing – towards developing connection and trust between all their parts.

So where does that leave us with applying IFS ourselves?

Morgan: Well we’ve been experimenting with it and I think we’ve found a way that works. I’m not sure yet whether it’ll become our go-to practice, or just one in our toolkit for when it seems the most appropriate. 

‘No Bad Parts’ does introduce a way of understanding parts that resonates with our experience, without implying that we need to drop our sense of the core seven that we have identified. Can you describe it Ara?

Ara: The head of garlic model! Dick talks about parts within parts. He says that people are like a head of garlic, within which there are many cloves which cluster together in threes, fours, or fives.

Morgan: That helps us to understand something else: how some plural systems we know identify hundreds of parts while we – and others – remain at a smaller number.

Ara: So just as each part contains their own Self, they also contain other parts in a mini system-within-the-system: a protector, an exile, and a firefighter, for example, or more than one of each. Another way Dick presents it is that we might have a cluster of parts around each traumatic memory – or perhaps around each particular arena of trauma.

Morgan: Like mine cluster around learning to self-hate, while Robin’s cluster around learning to shapeshift to please others, and Jonathan’s around learning hypervigalence and the sense that he could never ‘get it right’.

Ara: That seems like a good way to understand it, which honours what we’ve found on our journey with this, but opens us to be able to use the IFS approach. 

Morgan: Right and we’d kind of got there already. 

Ara: Do you want to give your example?

Morgan: Sure, well with me there was the original raging inner critic screaming at the rest of you, then there was Beastie the reformed inner critic who was a force for clear-seeing anger and self-protection, then we realised that there was me – Morgan – under Beastie who was the girl who had learned to internalise all those attacks and hate herself.

Ara: Our sad girl.

Morgan: Yes. And at times we’ve contacted memories of her/me at different ages, perhaps where those things happened: an infant alone full of pain and rage, a child trying to express a boundary and being overruled and attacked for it, a depressed kid dragging through a life where she was getting the message she was unacceptable everywhere.

Ara: And all of those aspects feel like you.

Morgan: Very much so, there’s no sense that they are new parts, or aspects of our other parts, even when their feelings are quite different. 

Ara: I agree, they all feel Morgan to us: Morgan’s embodiment; Morgan’s energy. Just as how the seemingly contradictory feeling of Tony (cocky, funny, sexy) and Robin (needing, scared, desperate) are definitely the same part.

Morgan: The cloves of garlic actually helps to explain that, and gives us a way in to working with aspects of each of us that might’ve been tricky before: like how inner critic thoughts can still come in when I have ‘reformed’.

It also explains something else… how each of us doing our work have had a sense that we want to go back and look after those younger versions of us, rather than you or James being the ones to go back. It’s like we want you to look after us now, but we want to be the ones who hold the younger versions of ourselves.

Ara: Right, and that’s something Dick writes about too I think. He says that if you visualise going back and you can see both yourself and the younger part then that means another part of you is in the mix. You want to actually be able to embody the part of you who is approaching the younger part. I remember times when I could watch you with younger Morgan, but you could be the one actually talking with her, or holding her.

Morgan: That feels right. So with the bullet point process we described before, we tried it with me a couple of times, because I’ve been struggling the most this past week or so. You’ve taken the role as Self (or at least Self-of-Ara) walking me through it.

Ara: D’you want to say how it’s gone?

Morgan: Good. Today felt particularly good. I woke up in thinking, thinking, thinking mode. I remembered what we’ve read in a couple of books lately about obsessive thinking as a trauma survival strategy: what we learn to do as kids when connecting with others to support us doesn’t work. And Dick says that Self is that openness we experience under all the thinking, which Pema also talks about – the wide open space which we absolutely were not experiencing this morning.

Ara: So… may I?

Morgan: Please.

Ara: I encouraged you to go towards the thinking, thinking, thinking part, and what happened?

Morgan: It was so unexpected. Suddenly I went kind of blank. I couldn’t contact the thinking at all.

Ara: So we remembered IFS and figured that was another part.

Morgan: Both parts felt like me, for sure. You asked if blank could step back a bit to let us work with thinking but she really didn’t want to, so we decided to work with her. We explored how she felt and it was very tired indeed. She wanted to lie down and never get up. We contacted that early part of me who was internalising criticism at all times, trying to avoid doing or saying anything deemed unacceptable by the world around us, and how the only break from that was when we were sick and got to be alone in our room and rest.

Ara: It was wonderful to talk with that part of you, and recognise that inner tension in you too: one aspect of you needing to be constantly awake and thinking critically, and the other aspect so weary and needing rest. It explains some of the difficulty we have in allowing ourselves to be sick.

Morgan: We explored her feelings for a while, and then we asked where she wanted to be, and she went for a hammock on the veranda of a little beach cabin, with lots of cushions and blankets and nice gentle food and drink to hand. And she released her burden down into the earth. 

Ara: And what happened to the thinker?

Morgan: She decided to write this blog post with you! It felt good to put all that thinking towards this – rather than getting all caught up in the current tough stuff of our lives.

Ara: And when that kicked back in we had a sit and acknowledged it.

Morgan: Mm right, and that time we didn’t do the whole process, but when you spoke with me directly, rather than me spinning off into all those thoughts alone, I got this image of us and our ‘traumado’ of burdens that we haven’t managed to let go of yet (like the cows and houses and debris caught up in an actual tornado). And I got an image of everyone else in our life, and theirs. It lifted that sense I’d been spiralling into of me being  uniquely messy and bad. There was more sadness for how these traumados keep knocking into each other and making even bigger storms.

Ara: So maybe we can adapt IFS, as we have other practices, in ways that work for us: quick on-the-spot dips like that, as well as longer meditations. And we can bring it together with some of the other practices we’re finding helpful with the big feels.

So I think there is room in IFS for having a core few parts – as we do – and systems within systems. Dick says that research suggests that infants rotate through five or six states, which are perhaps the basis of parts in everyone. Bonnie Badenoch describes a similar sense of a core six or seven states. And that’s important because we wouldn’t want people to miss out on the kind of thing we’ve gone through: finding this inner family and learning to flow between them and work together as a team, even as they open to the full range of parts in their whole system. As Dick says:

‘If you can establish a new, loving relationship with your parts and help them transform, they become wonderful companions, advisors, and playmates…it becomes a lovely life practice just to spend time with them.’

I’ll say.

Morgan: Thankyou! Are we there?

Ara: I think so. One more plug for ‘No Bad Parts’ by Richard Schwartz. Janina Fisher also has a new book out which is a workbook for trauma survivors themselves, unlike her previous book which was really for therapists. We’ll be reading that with great interest next as we love the way she weaves plurality together with somatic approaches.

Morgan: And if people want more of our (many, many) thoughts on plurality, here’s our free book of previous blog posts, and our original zine.

Ara: A sequel to which is currently a slow work in progress when Fox is allowed to get creative, while James (with assistance) works on the mental health graphic guide.

Morgan: Heh we should also thank Jonathan for all his administrative work on the free book – and this blog post – if we’re name-checking all of us who are involved in these processes.

Ara: We certainly should. How funny that the two of us who presented the first plural zine – Max and Robin – are actually the least involved in our work these days.

Morgan: It is. And I’m so grateful to be so much more present these days than I was back then. Thanks Ara.

Ara: Any time love.

The post ‘No Bad Parts’: Some Plural Thoughts on The New Internal Family Systems Book appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out my Plural Selves zine, and my previous post about plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the relationship related content here useful.

Ara: Hey Tony, so good to get another chance to talk with you.

Tony: Over a year since our last post together Ara. So much has happened since then, I can’t even.

Ara: Seismic shifts out there and in here. How does it feel to come back to write with me after all of that?

Tony: Vulnerable. We haven’t written one of these plural conversation posts for a while. But there are a bunch of topics that we’d love to hash out together in this way – to get a better handle on them ourselves as much as anything.

Ara: So let’s do it that way. Just talk together here on the page, and we can think later about whether – or how – we want to share this.

Tony: I’m more cautious than last time we wrote huh? Less fastlove leap-before-you-look than I once was.

Ara: We’ve learnt a lot in the past year about what drives that way of relating haven’t we? 

Tony: I thought I had a handle on it back then, but it was still kind of intellectual I guess: surface level stuff. Since then we’ve all learnt how to really feel the underlying feelings; to connect them back through the events of our lives. But that’s for another blog post.

Ara: Perhaps it’s enough to say for now that you are the part of us who is strongly motivated to connect with others, so much so that you’ve often prioritised that over other things.

Tony: Like whether it’s a safe-enough connection for the more vulnerable, frightened parts of ourselves, whether it’s nourishing for everyone involved in the relationship, and what that connection means for the other relationships and projects in our life.

Ara: Some of the territory we covered in our last post.

Tony: And you are the part of us who values slow moving and spaciousness: creating enough gaps and space around everything to really understand what’s going on in ourselves and in others, in order to be able to act as wisely and compassionately as is possible for everyone right now.

Ara: Potentially a valuable alliance Tony: a part who is driven to connect with others, and a part who can remind us to go slowly and intentionally.

Tony: It’s hard to feel valuable sometimes, knowing how my old habitual way of relating has hurt us, and other people. And how it sneaks back in without me realising it and risks doing that again.

Ara: I know love. Not to get all ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ on you, but maybe it’s helpful to imagine what we would be like without you: without that drive to connect.

Tony: Hm, well I guess many of our other parts are mistrustful of other people, so if they weren’t balanced by me we might get pretty withdrawn and isolated. Either that independent Max way of relating, not really letting anybody in or being vulnerable with other people. Or a more fear/anger driven Jonathan/Beastie mode where we tried to keep safe by staying away from others, or pushing them away from us.

Ara: There you go. It’s not about eradicating our beautiful connection-driven boy – as Janina Fisher says ‘no part gets left behind’ – but it’s about getting to know him very well and finding ways to connect, together, which work for the whole team.

Tony: Beautiful huh?

Ara: *smiles* 

Tony: You make an excellent Clarence Ara.

Ara: Thankyou. So now you’re feeling a little better, shall we get on to Dunbar’s number?

Tony: Right, that’s what we were planning to write about. Let’s do this.

Concentric Circles of Dunbar

Ara: Do you want to say what Dunbar’s number is first?

Tony: Absolutely. It’s a theory of this anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, who reckoned that the human brain can only handle around 150 people in our network of relationships. When we try to exceed that things tend to conflict and crumble. Nested within the 150 meaningful contacts that we can manage, there’s a sense that we have an optimum number of around 5 close people, around 15 good friends, and around 50 people we might call friends. And beyond that we can maybe manage 500 acquaintances, and 1500 people in the world who we can recognise. People can read more about the idea here. Not everyone agrees with it, and it’s unlikely that those numbers fit exactly for everyone. Culture, neurodiversity, trauma, how outgoing or introverted you are, and a bunch of other stuff probably comes into it too.

Ara: Right. It might be more useful for each person to reflect on whether a nested model works for them, how they might name each level of closeness, how many people they like to have in each level, and what defines that level, for them. It could be a very helpful thing to share with other people in our lives so that we can see how aligned we are in our ways of doing relationships, and where we might locate each other.

Tony: Right. We’ve included something like this in a few of our books and zines. But applying Dunbar’s number to it is new for us.

Ara: Shall we talk about how it works for us?

Tony: Yep. So here’s a diagram: how we find it useful to visualise it.

Ara: So anyone could draw something like these nested circles and then populate it with names: the people who would go into each level for them at the moment. It can be helpful to do this regularly. We notice how it shifts over time, and how it feels like people have a direction of travel inwards or outwards, for example.

Tony: We find it helpful to check the photos and contact lists on our phone and message apps to remind ourselves who we’re in contact with, and think about where those relationships might go right now.

Ara: Shall we think about what defines the levels for us Tony?

Tony: First I’d like to say something about what the model used to look like for us, mostly driven by my particular way of relating.

Ara: Sure thing.

Culture, Trauma, and Dunbar

Tony: Here goes.

Ara: Oof. Do you want to explain that?

Tony: Well thinking about Dunbar’s number really helped me with this. I feel like I – and perhaps lots of people – pay very little attention to nourishing their 5, 15, and 50 relationships because they are so focused on The One and The Multitude. Like I think in the past I was highly focused on finding one, or perhaps two, really close people who would love me forever in the ways I’ve always dreamed of: partners and/or best friends for example. Sometimes that has also mapped onto the dream of finding a family or community where I got that kind of love. Those few people I valued more highly than myself, so I’ve put them in the centre of the diagram. Like I would put far more emphasis on their opinion of me than on my opinion of myself, and often try to shape myself to be what I thought they would most approve of. That’s why I’ve put a dotted line between me and them, because I could get pretty enmeshed and entangled – losing myself in that relationship.

There’s a big gap between the inner circle and friends because I would tend to only really be vulnerable, open and authentic with The Ones.

Then the other group I put a lot of emphasis on were people ‘out there’, hence the other dotted line on the outer circle. It didn’t really matter whether somebody was a friend or a stranger, I would listen to their opinion of me equally, and I would want people I didn’t know to validate me, and take it to heart if they attacked me or told me something was wrong with me. 

Ara: It sounds like a very common model in our culture at the moment Tony. Searching for The One true love, best friend, or group to ‘complete us’ and make us feel acceptable – when we’ve been taught by neoliberal capitalism to believe that we’re not. And also looking for our self worth to be affirmed online by the number of likes our posts receive, or the number of friends or followers we attract.

Tony: It’s not just me then?

Ara: Absolutely not. I would say that our current – rather toxic – culture meets trauma in a pretty devastating way here. Indeed Alex would argue that the culture is traumatising so perhaps we can’t even tease culture and trauma apart. 

What we know about developmental trauma is that it leaves us – perhaps unconsciously – searching for the kinds of care and protection that we lacked, or lost, as children. Hence we tend to project all of that yearning onto specific others – often partners or family-like groups – hoping that they will give us that, and that we’ll finally feel fulfilled. 

At the same time, trauma leaves us highly vulnerable to attack from others. We’re hypervigilant for anything that feels like judgement, and we find it very hard to discern between fair criticism and bullying behaviour, and between people whose views are worth listening to and those where there’s good reason to be suspicious. Pretty much any kind of criticism – from anyone – will plunge us into shame and self-hatred.

Tony: So it makes sense that people become very focused on The One and The Multitude.

Ara: And so tragic really, because that yearning for connection is such a valuable impulse. As many therapists have pointed out, when we’ve been traumatised in relationship it is in nourishing relationship that deep healing can occur. Also human beings are interconnected and interdependent, so that sense that connection is vital is accurate. 

The problem is that culture and trauma channel all of that impulse for connection into a very small number of individual people who can never live up to all of the hopes and fears that we project onto them. And they also channel that impulse into a vast number of strangers who have built no kind of relationship with us, and will therefore find it easy to treat us in dehumanising ways – such as dismissing us as bad, wrong or unacceptable – as they’ve been encouraged to do by this highly toxic culture and by their own trauma.

Tony: So we keep getting retraumatised in relationships, which repeats the earlier traumas that put us there and perpetuates a culture of cruelty where everyone is attacking and defending themselves ‘out there’ all of the time…

Ara: …instead of focusing on the kinds of relationships that really could hold us and help us.

Tony: It’s tough Ara. Even though I totally buy this now, I still keep finding sneaky ways to turn somebody – or somebodies – in our life into that projection of hope. If only they would love me in that way, or tell me that I’m okay, then maybe I could believe it. And we still find ourselves instantly believing any negative thing that anybody says rather than running it through a filter of whether that person actually knows us.

Ara: My sense is that if we really knew anybody – like their whole history and what makes them tick – then we would find understanding and compassion for them.

Tony: We call it the backstory effect. Like watch any of the medical or firefighter dramas that we’ve been binging during the pandemic and you’ll see characters acting in outrageous ways that other characters attack them for. But we – the viewer – know their backstory, so we just feel for them deeply even as we’re yelling ‘no, don’t do it!’ at the screen.

Ara: One thing that Dunbar’s numbers do for me is to get me thinking about whose opinions we value. In the first diagram we shared, our self (or in our case selves) are in the centre. We are always the person who knows us best. Tibetan Buddhism has a slogan ‘of the two witnesses, hold the principal one’, which means that whatever anybody else thinks of us, it’s the view of the principle one – ourselves – which we need to prioritise.

Tony: Mm, of course within this culture, and this experience of trauma, our views of ourselves can actually be pretty skewed.

Ara: So the emphasis is on building a deep friendship with yourself (or selves) in order that the principle one actually does become the most trustworthy. And around that, building trusting relationships with others such that we can know that what they say is likely to be coming from a place of care for us and care for themselves. 

In fact one of the things that would define those closest relationships for me would be people who deeply trust our own wisdom to know how we need to be and what we need to do in our life. They would also prioritise our own knowing of ourselves over their knowing of us, and would prefer us to do what felt right to us over what served them in some way.

Tony: That’s the kind of love we’ve written about before, which thinkers like bell hooks and Erich Fromm refer to.

Ara: Nice to see you’ve been listening to our more philosophical parts Trouble *grin*

Dunbar and slow relating

Tony: Okay so how does Dunbar’s number relate to the kind of slow building of relationships which we covered in our last post Ara?

Ara: What do you think?

Tony: Always turning the question around. Alright, well it makes me think that nowadays I would want somebody to hang out in the 150 for a while before moving into the 50, and then there for a while before the 15, and definitely there for a good while before moving into the 5.

Ara: Not so much what we used to do huh?

Tony: We… well I… used to move people right into the 5 on the basis of one connected conversation, or an erotic or romantic attraction. Like more than once I said ‘I love you’ after a few weeks of messaging with someone, or moved in with them a few weeks or months into a relationship.

Ara: So we now think of connecting with people erotically, cohabiting, having everyday contact, naming ‘love’, and developing a close creative collaboration, as all things we’d only want to do with folks in the 5 or 15. Although of course for other people the kinds of connection that are specific to those inner levels may be different. We would want that sense of having gradually developed trust and closeness with a person – probably over a number of years – before they were at that level.

Tony: Right, those are the things that spook our ‘fraidy parts: sudden declarations of love, crush, or friendship, or people slipping into expectations of regular contact, physical touch, or requesting crisis support, without having developed that trust over time, and having an explicit consent conversation.

Ara: Our ‘fraidy parts’, is that what we’re calling them now?

Tony: Not in hearing distance no.

Ara: Heh. It has been very useful though, to understand that we have – in us – parts who are driven by the fear of annihilation by others and the hope of safety, and parts – like you – who are driven by the fear of abandonment by others and the hope of belonging. And those parts can often feel in conflict as you prioritise connection over protection and they do the opposite. We’ll come back to that shortly.

I’m also thinking about how this model opens up the possibility for what we might call more intentional – or conscious – relating. Instead of people assuming what makes a partnership, a close relationship, or a friendship, for example, this enables there to be communication about what these things mean to each person, and whether there’s a good fit between us in our understandings and expectations. 

It feels important that nobody is assumed to be in a specific place in our life due to something like being part of the same community or family, having erotic or romantic attraction, or having known each other a long time ago. The important questions are more like: ‘is this relationship mutually nourishing for us both?’ and ‘at what level of connection is it most mutually nourishing?’

Defining Dunbar’s levels

Tony: Can I say what defines each level of closeness for us? It’s still a work in progress but we’re finding it useful to articulate – to ourselves and others – what makes something a friendship, or a close relationship.

Ara: Go ahead.

Tony: I’m going to try to make a list. These seem to be the defining features of friendship for us:

• We’re invested in supporting each other in our projects and in our other important relationships.
• We share a commitment to being as kind and caring as possible with each other, assuming that we’re doing our best.
• We can each bring all of ourselves to the relationship, including our vulnerable parts (more explicitly in a plural way with our closest people).
• We value each other’s freedom over what they might be for us. For example we’d rather they were in consent than overriding their consent in order to be in contact with us in some way we might like.
• We each trust the other person to know themselves best. When we don’t understand something that they are feeling or doing we assume that it does make sense.
• We each respect where the other person is on their journey – and their sense of what their path needs to be – rather than believing they should be in a different place or follow a different path.
• We share a commitment to doing The Work with ourselves, and seeing that as a lifelong journey (that might manifest in engaging in ongoing spiritual/therapeutic practice, for example, and continuing to cultivate a supportive network of people).
• We’re up for being transparent about the relationship with each other and with our other good friends, so that problems don’t get hidden, and we have other people to support us through any tough times.
• We try to notice when we’re reactive and refrain from communicating when we’re in that place. We try to acknowledge the impact it has when either of us does communicate from a reactive place, as well as having a lot of kindness for where that comes from in terms of trauma, and for how incredibly painful it can be when we realise we’ve hurt someone else with our reactive habits.
• We’re up for the relationship changing and shifting Dunbar position over time depending on what’s working for us (if it’s not working for everybody, it’s not working for anybody).

I guess that people in the category of ‘friend’ would tick most of these, and ‘close people’ would tick all – or nearly all – of them.

Ara: Right. Maybe it’s the case that the closer in somebody is on the diagram, the more aligned we are in terms of these values and ways of relating. And we’re interested in spending the most time – and having the most overlapping lives – with those who are most aligned. In those cases we’re most engaged in supporting each others’ projects, and doing ongoing practices to nurture the relationship.

Tony: With the 150 – or the 50 – it may be more that we have shared interests – although with us this geeky stuff about how we relate with ourselves, each other, and the world, is always a pretty important one. But the closer in relationships need to have more of a shared way of understanding and doing relationships, for us. 

Connection and protection

Ara: I’m thinking that there’s two different components here, aren’t there? It’s about both connection and protection.

Tony: Right, the closer relationships are the ones which feel more connected, and so it feels most enjoyable and meaningful to hang out there, like we can be ourselves and belong. And those relationships are also the ones where it feels we’ve built up enough trust to feel safe enough there. We feel protected enough that we don’t have to worry that the person may suddenly lash out at us, or try to constrain us, for example.

Ara: And we’ve gone through enough relationship ruptures and repairs with them to know that we can get through – at least some of the – challenges that might come up together.

Tony: I feel like I used to prioritise connection way over protection. If it felt like a good connection with somebody I would ignore or accept it if they hurt us or tried to restrict us. Almost like I thought that was the price of entry for connection. That’s the big shift I’m trying to make now: to value myself enough to believe that I can have both connection and protection.

Ara: Meanwhile our ‘fraidy parts’ work on taking the risk of connection where there is evidence that the relationship can be protective enough. 

Tony: And the part of us who is best at clear-seeing and boundaries helps us to discern which relationships those are, and to articulate the level of relating we’re up for with various people.

Articulating that does risk us feeling like we’re letting someone down if we can’t give them what they want. That’s something which often brings up a lot of fear (that they will overstep our boundaries) and shame (that we should be what they want us to be regardless of what we want). It also risks us feeling rejected if the person doesn’t want the level of closeness with us that we think we’d like with them.

Ara: Back to annihilation and abandonment. Again this is why slowly deepening closeness feels better to us, because we can get a really good embodied feel for the relationship before getting closer, as well as having explicit consent conversations about what getting closer means for us, and for them.

Tony: Going back to my old way of relating, with this model it makes sense to invest the most time and energy in the closest-in relationships, ensuring that we’re being relatively even between all of the 5, and all of the 15, rather than focusing on just one or two of them. We can usefully ask ourselves what relationships at this level need, in order to nurture them, and check if we’re continuing to do that. That’s pretty different to the wider cultural model where you take good existing relationships for granted and focus all your time, energy and specialness on the shiny, new ones.

Ara: Which we would now see as at the outermost level. I’m also thinking about something we spoke about last time Tony, what one of our friends calls the hokey cokey. 

The hokey cokey

Ara: The hokey cokey is the sense that it’s okay – vital even – for relationships to get closer and more spacious over time: to move up and down the levels in our model.

Tony: In out, in out, shake it all about!

Ara: And that’s something that we – and others I’m sure – struggle with. That’s down to a combination of culture and trauma too I suspect. 

Tony: Right. This feels exciting, I haven’t really thought this through before.

Ara: Go for it Tony.

Tony: So the cultural piece is that we tend to equate closer in with better. Like those in our innermost circle have won the game of MJ or something! Like somehow it’s winning for them to be so close in, and someone it’s winning for us to have them there. So it’d be losing for them to move further away.

Ara: A kind of neoliberal capitalist model: more equals better, and perhaps a sense that they have us or we have them if they’re in that close. That ‘having’ ownership model of love.

Tony: And the trauma piece relates to abandonment – my stuff – like someone moving from closer in to further away can easily be read as rejection of me, triggering that sense that there’s something wrong with me, people always leave me, blahblahblah.

Ara: Which in turn triggers your defense of self-deprecating humour perhaps?

Tony: Damn you.

Ara: I see you Tony.

Tony: *grin* alright. So what’s the alternative to closer in equals better, and moving away is bad?

Ara: I think it’s something we’ve recently explored with a couple of friends where we’ve explained that deliberately keeping the relationship spacious and going slow is a sign of how deeply we value it, not of it being of lesser value. Better to keep a relationship in the 50, or the 15, for long enough that we can mutually evaluate whether it feels good there. And by then we would have become familiar and practiced enough with each other to explore whether moving closer might be something that would work well for us both, and what that would look like if we did. We would also feel able to discuss how we’d enable each person to step back again if we tried it – got more information – and realised it wasn’t working for us.

Tony: It’s about fit really huh? Where on this model is the best fit for this person – with us – at this point in time? And that gets us to that ‘warm and open’ question we’ve been asking a lot lately.

Maximising warmth and openness

Ara: I’m finding that so helpful. The question we ask ourselves goes something like ‘what container does this relationship need in order for us to be as warm and open as possible within it?’ In that sense the relationship ‘goal’ shifts from ‘as close in as possible’ to ‘wherever we need to be to maximise warmth and openness’.

Tony: That feels a bit like that consent shift from the goal of a date being sex (whether or not consent happens), to the goal of a date being mutual consent (whether or not an sex happens).

Ara: And it helps in letting other people know why we’re suggesting certain boundaries – like a certain kind or frequency of contact. We explain that, for us, it’s about trying to find the sweet spot where we can be sure of being able to feel really warm and open with them. We notice that when we find – and articulate – our boundaries, we often feel much more fondness for the other person, and more able to open up to them. When we feel pressure to be something more for them – either from them or from our own internal sense of how we should be – then we often feel frightened and withdrawn, or resentful and brittle, for example.

Tony: I’m also thinking that the capacity to hokey cokey with people is potentially less likely to retraumatise everyone. The culturally normative model tends to have people going suddenly from the inner circles to the outer limits if there’s any kind of conflict or rupture. That’s often felt as a total abandonment – and annihilation I guess because we can take it as evidence that there must be something terribly wrong with us. It’s so much more helpful – and less retraumatising – if each relationship can become more close or more spacious – if it can expand and contract in that way over time. 

Ara: And we’re up against a lot in trying to do that. Like you say culture and trauma, because there’s a lot of external and internal pressure to completely sever a relationship when there’s a rupture, to either label the other person bad and reject them entirely, or to label ourselves bad and be so swamped in shame that we can’t handle their presence. And trauma makes us more likely to experience increased spaciousness in a relationship as abandonment, and either to push the person away entirely because we’re so hurt, or to try to cling on in a way that makes them distance themselves more.

Tony: I’m sure that nobody round here would ever do any of those things Ara.

Ara: *chuckles* like I said we’re up against a lot with that interwoven culture and trauma piece. All of us are.

Tony: Is there anything else to say about the hokey cokey?

Moving up and down the levels

Ara: I suppose I’m wondering whether – in addition to putting more time and energy into the closer-in relationships – we might also put particular time and energy into relationships when they are moving up or down a level, to ensure that that is as caring and consensual a process as possible.

Tony: Mm I notice that relationships in those kinds of places, perhaps with a question mark around whether they might need to move closer in, or further away, feel kind of edgy. There’s an impulse in me to put too much time and energy into them too – like in a rush to figure out where they should be and pin them down.

Ara: Mm good point, it’s about the quality of the time and energy more than the amount of it perhaps. I like the idea that we have an honest sense – at any point in time – about what those ‘on the line’ relationships are for us. And we keep slowly, gently, exploring in ourselves what’s going on there, until we reach some clarity around what the issues are for us, in a way that feels possible to communicate with the other person.

Tony: It’s another way that I want to leap huh? Leaping to clarifying it, rather than staying with the uncertainty for long enough to get clear.

Ara: Again a pretty common struggle. But patience is important here, and getting more information. Like contact with that person – or space from them – will help us to get clearer on what’s going on here that might mean we need to move closer together, or further apart.

Tony: An example for me would be that it can take some time to tease out whether the desire for more closeness is coming from my Deep Yearning of the Soul () or whether it’s coming from a recognition that the relationship meets a lot of those criteria we mentioned and might work well for both of us at a closer level.

Ara: And for our ‘fraidy parts’ the question might be more whether the desire to move further apart comes from a clear sense that the level of closeness isn’t working for us, or more from old stuff that’s been triggered in us, which we might find a way to communicate with the other person.

Tony: Right, we have a few examples lately where those parts of us have felt that fear, taken the risk of naming what felt scary to them, and the person has responded really well, leaving us feeling way more warm and open towards them.

Returning to our sides of the street

Ara: Again trauma is such a big part of all of this. One of our close people has a great analogy for those periods where a relationship requires more spaciousness or stepping back. They say that a relationship is like walking down a street: we can both be on separate sides of the street, or we can be in the middle of the street together. When there are ruptures, or when we realise that we’ve become too entangled and lost ourselves, or the other person has, or we both have: those might be the moments to move from the middle of the street to the separate sides again, at least for a while.

Tony: Right. From opposite sides we can find our individual path again if we’ve lost it a bit. We can also look over and get a better sense of them, and their path. It might be that we’ve forgotten that in wanting them to be something for us, or in wanting them to be on the same path with us for some reason. 

In my mind it looks more like two people finding different paths up a hill than two sides of the street.

Ara: Nice. And it can be great to be alongside each other on the same path for a while, but we can also be alongside each other on different paths when… I don’t know…

Tony: …when one of us is fitter than the other, or more scared of heights. And sometimes their path may take them onto a different hill and that’s okay too. Are we stretching this metaphor to breaking point yet?

Ara: I like that it’s a similar one to the different paces metaphor we explored last time Tony.

Tony: Anyway it’s about recognising that both closeness and spaciousness are valuable in relationships, and that the important question is what Dunbar level this relationship needs to be at in order for us to be as warm and open as possible. 

Ara: And that it’s okay – in fact vital – to hold that question open for a while, when relationships are in an uncertain place, rather than leaping to try to locate them again, or putting them under pressure to be in a certain place.

Nurturing inner and outer relationships

Tony: Okay onto the last bit we wanted to mention. In our Dunbar model our very innermost level isn’t a relationship with another person – or people – any more, it’s our relationship with ourselves.

Ara: Yes and we’ve stuck a number on it because we have a consistent sense of 7 selves – or parts – but this could work equally well for those who experience themselves as singular – it’d just be their relationship with themself. For those systems who have far more parts in their inner world it’d be a larger number.

Tony: It might seem obvious to put ourselves in the middle but, as I said before, for much of our life I don’t think that we did – not really. If you have that sense that you have to shape yourself in order to be loved by others, or to belong, then you’re putting them at the centre, not you.

Ara: I think so. And in that sense you are prioritising connection over protection rather than holding them in balance. It makes me think of what bell hooks says about valuing ourselves and others equally.

Tony: So just to be provocative, isn’t putting yourself at the centre valuing yourself over others?

Ara: Just to be provocative huh Trouble? It’s actually a really important question, and again I think it comes down to the quality of it. There’s a way of centring yourself that is really bad for you, and for others. In that mode we see everybody else through the lens of what they are for us, and we take everything that others do and say very personally.

Tony: Familiar. That’s such a painful place to be. Like other people are hurting us all the time because they don’t want to be as close as we do, or because they want to be closer than we do. And when people come at us with their stuff we internalise it and use it to beat ourselves up with. In that mode of relating other people feel very dangerous, and yet we also can’t seem to stop ourselves from churning over all the relationships we’ve struggled with in the past – and are struggling with now. Perhaps we find ourselves obsessing over this person, while trying to eradicate that person from our mind. And none of it works and we feel worse and worse.

Ara: You’re so good at describing these things Tony. 

Tony: I surprise myself sometimes. I wasn’t expecting to go there. In terms of our inner system that’s when the whole thing seems stuck. It’s me, Max, Jonathan, and Beastie all struggling simultaneously. I try to grab onto people who might prove I’m loveable and give us connection. Max tries to do a bunch of stuff to make other people respect and approve of her. Jonathan recalls every criticism everyone’s ever made of us and tries to predict what we might ‘get wrong’ next, wishing we could hide away from everyone. And Beastie judges everything we’re doing, and everyone out there. And we feel disconnected from ourselves and from everyone else.

Ara: Putting ourselves at the centre of Dunbar’s model is about something very different to that, for me. I’m thinking about a quote we heard from Pema recently, in her new audio ‘Journey to Fulfillment’.

Tony: Always with Pema!

Ara: I’m so grateful to her.

Tony: Me too. I don’t know how we’d have got through this last couple of years without her.

Ara: Agreed. She says: ‘It’s that attitude about ourselves that actually we are worthy and we are basically decent and good people, and we could begin in our life to get that sense of fundamental okayness, fundamental wholeness, completeness. And the result of that would be very beneficial. That’s the most benefit that you could possibly give to another person.’

Tony: Fundamental okayness sounds so good.

Ara: I know. We’ve been far from that for much of our life, and lately experienced being about as far from it as it’s possible to get.

Tony: Almost like we had to go further away from it to get closer to it. So much paradox.

Ara: Indeed. Anyway the point is that putting yourself at the heart of the concentric circles in order to work on feeling – on knowing – that you are okay, is the opposite to that painful way of centring yourself that you described. 

Tony: Right, because that painful kind of centring is not really about putting yourself at the heart is it? Because you’re actually super focused on other people: still trying to get their approval, and still really scared of their disapproval.

Ara: It’s such a strange one isn’t it, like it’s both far too much ‘all about me’ and far too much ‘all about them’.

Tony: Instead of being all about love. See what I did there?

Ara: Very clever!

Tony: I try.

Ara: Anyway I think what we’re endeavouring to do here – in our life at the moment – is to find that sense of okayness in ourselves. And part of this whole Dunbar’s model thing is about that too. 

Tony: Go on.

Ara: Because it’s about learning which kinds of relationships – with which people – help to nourish that sense of okayness in us, and which don’t, and being open about that. And it’s about a desire to be that for others too: noticing where we’re not that person for somebody – at least not at the moment – even if we, or they, might want us to be. And being up for retreating in those cases.

Plurality and okayness

Tony: Yeah. I see. And for us plurality is a huge part of how we’re doing that.

Ara: A key way in which we’re learning to feel more okay, more complete even, is making an explicit task of befriending each part of us – when they’re struggling and when they’re doing okay – letting them know that they are welcome no matter what, loved no matter what.

Tony: So a lot of time and energy goes to that, because 7 parts means 21 different relationships to nurture. It’s not enough to just have one part loving all of us, we all have to love each other.

Ara: I might suggest 28 rather than 21 Tony.

Tony: How come?

Ara: Each part has a relationship with themselves too.

Tony: Ah shit I missed that. And that’s the hardest one too. I actually feel all 6 of you loving me now – although you certainly demonstrate it in different ways! But I still struggle to love myself: to feel that I’m okay.

Ara: All four of you – Max, Jonathan, you and Beastie – hold that sense that you ‘ruin things’ for the rest of us, that you are the part that isn’t really okay. 

Tony: A work in progress then.

Ara: Yes, probably a lifelong one. And my sense is that the more we can love all of us – or know that all aspects of us are okay – the better able we will be to love other people out there. It’s something that Max and Beastie touched on in their post last year about accompanying ourselves. When we see each part of ourselves with kindness and clarity – because we know how they came to be that way, and why they feel the way they do – we can see all parts of other people with kindness and clarity too. 

And when we do that we are far less likely to internalise other people’s attacks and abandonments, because we’ll know where they come from: that sense in them that they are not okay, or that parts of them are not okay.

Tony: This model reminds me of something that we got from Pete Walker’s book. He says that trauma healing requires ‘reparenting ourselves’ and ‘reparenting by committee’. We’re nurturing our inner relationships in order to reparent ourselves – like you and James caring for and protecting all of us, and all of us being able to grow up because of that. But we’re also nurturing these close relationships and friendships as a kind of committee of people out there who are invested in supporting us, in reflecting back our okay-ness, maybe even when we don’t think we’re okay.

Ara: It helps me to weave together the Buddhist writing we read which emphasises the importance of inner work in solitude, and the trauma literature which suggests that healing can only be done in relationship.

Tony: To quote Forrest Gump, ‘I think maybe it’s both.’

Ara: It so often is.

Limiting the numbers, limiting ourselves?

Tony: Okay so provocative question number 2, how does this Dunbar model of only relating in a small ‘village’ of relationships relate to the spiritual aim to be of benefit to all beings. Like that Rumi guest house poem: aren’t we meant to be striving to welcome everyone? And in limiting ourselves to relationships that feel good to us aren’t we just creating an echo chamber of people who’ll tell us we’re awesome, so we’ll never have to address our limitations?

Ara: Well I think Rumi’s poem partially answers your question Tony, because it’s actually about welcoming every part of yourself in, not other people. Again it takes us back to the sense that only in so far as you can befriend every part of yourself can you really befriend others. I don’t think that it helps other people if we fling open the door to everyone and then find that we can’t be alongside them without freaking out.

Tony: It’s window of tolerance stuff isn’t it? Knowing our limits. And the concentric circles are about that too. What level of relationship we can be in with people and stay grounded – so we’re able to be warm and open? We’re not of much benefit to ourselves or others when we’re going into an overwhelmed or retraumatised state on the regular. 

What about the echo chamber question?

Ara: It’s a similar point I think, that repeatedly plunging ourselves into overwhelm by engaging with people, opinions, and ways of behaviour that are very jarring to us doesn’t actually help us to expand our window of tolerance, or our horizons. 

I do think it’s very important that we learn to be alongside people who are different to ourselves – and have different views – in a world where polarisation and ‘us and them’ thinking is such a problem. But from what I’ve read from social justice and from various spiritual traditions, the only way to do that which seems to work is in relation. 

The practices which work for bringing people together who have very different views – or who are in conflict – involve nurturing trusting relationships between them which are held and supported by those around them, and helping them foster understanding and compassion for each other. Only at that point can people really hear those differences without trying to make the other person bad, or rejecting them.

Tony: I’m thinking that again it comes back to seeing connection and protection as a both/and rather than an either/or.

Ara: Right! Say more.

Tony: The ‘echo chamber’ idea stems from the assumption that if relationships are protected (safe enough) they won’t be connected (honest enough). That’s the same idea that we can only get connection or protection, never both. If we have real connections with people they’ll end up being too dangerous, and if we have safe enough relationships they won’t be real.

But what we’re trying to cultivate are relationships where the safety comes from the level of trust and deep knowing of each other that we’ve built, so it’s the connection that gives us protection. And, feeling that level of protection, we can afford to risk greater connection: like telling somebody when we are struggling, or feeling a tricky dynamic come up between us.

Ara: Such a good way of putting it. So at the moment we’re building one group of people in our lives to support each other in being ethical and accountable in our work. Recognising that this would inevitably involve vulnerable conversations about the times we’ve messed up, the group is working to slowly develop trust and deep knowing of each other, so when something does come up we’ll understand how it is hitting the person concerned, and know how best to support them through it.

Tony: That’s a great example. We’re also thinking about slow moving towards staying – and potentially living – with various friends – and their people – for periods of time post-lockdowns. There’s a question of how we nurture safe-enough conditions to do that, again probably with gradual shorter stays – and/or in-advance conversations – so we can be connected enough when we are there, rather than feeling we have to go back to hiding parts of ourselves, or they do.

Ara: In these examples we’re explicitly attending to protection in order to allow more honest and vulnerable connection (both/and), rather than protecting ourselves by avoiding connection, or moving towards connection with little thought to protection. And we certainly notice that in relationships where we’ve already done this, conversations that might feel very hard elsewhere can feel relatively easy.

Tony: Absolutely, like recognising the places where we rub up against each other, or pin our hopes on each other non-consensually, or where our history together throws up certain dynamics. In those relationships it seems easier to spot, and name, those things, as well as being alongside each other in addressing the things that scare us, not hiding away from those things in a mutually reinforcing echo chamber about how great we are compared to everyone else.

Ara: Mm there’s something about similarity and difference here too isn’t there. Our old ways of relating required us to believe that we were very similar to partners in all kinds of ways, and any difference was felt as threatening. Whereas this way assumes people are inevitably both different and similar, and aims for an approach where we can meet each other well in both. Like Audre Lorde says, ‘It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences’.

Conclusions

Ara: 8000 words probably means time to wrap up Tony!

Tony: Mm, I’m left with a concern that it’s still so easy to ‘pin’ my yearning for protection and/or connection ‘out there’. Even with this model there can be a hope that it might finally provide us with relationships that are completely safe, and where we totally belong.

Ara: I think that it does get us closer to safer, more connected, relationships. And, at the same time, you’re wise to be wary, because once we start seeing it as the one true perfect model of relating that will give us all we ever dreamed of, we’ll quickly learn that it isn’t!

Tony: I’ve done this so many times, letting go of an old partner in the hope that a new partner will be everything, swearing off monogamy in the hope that polyamory will meet all our needs, swearing off fastlove in the hope that slow relating will do it for us.

It’s realising that no other person – or people or relationship style – will ever make us entirely safe or give us total belonging. And, at the same time, it is worth working towards relationships which are safe-enough and connected enough.

Ara: Paradoxically dropping the hope/fear approach to relationships may give us more of the connection we hope for and less of the risks that we fear. It certainly makes it more possible to navigate when our hopes and fears crop up.

Tony: Anything else to say?

Ara: I think I’d just emphasise the importance of being where you are with relationships, not trying to be ‘further along’ than you are. When we’ve tried to be somehow ‘more’ for people than we’re capable of, that’s when we’ve wound up pushing – or even retraumatising – ourselves in ways that aren’t actually helpful for anyone. It takes courage to be that honest with ourselves and to recognise our limits. Offering what we really can, at each level of relating, is far better for everyone than trying to offer more than we can, or to bring people into a closer level when we aren’t ready for that, or don’t want it. 

Interestingly we’ve found with Max that a similar model applies to work. We can create Dunbar’s rings of our various projects to consider where we want to invest our time and energy there, rather than – for example – putting most of our time into projects that don’t nourish us, or believing we have to focus entirely on ‘one true project’.

Tony: I’ll let you and her get into that one someday.

Ara: It’s been good talking with you again Tony.

Tony: Right back atcha Ara.

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Plural tag: This post was by Tony and Ara.

The post Working Dunbar’s Number and Other Adventures in Slow Relating appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Something I’ve been reflecting on a lot recently is the pace of relationships. In fact I’ve been reflecting on the pace of everything, but I’m going to focus on relationships here.

After all the big changes in my life last year it feels like I’ve received a huge message that I need to slow down on everything – in the form of what I’m now understanding as cPTSD symptoms.

At the same time – and very fortunately – I have the opportunity to slow down, because my work and living situations have changed in ways that allow me way more space around everything. It’s chicken and egg really of course. Have these symptoms intensified because I’ve slowed down enough to notice them finally, rather than distracting into busy-ness with work and people as I used to do? Or is it because of the intensity of the symptoms that I’ve finally slowed down? Probably both/and.

Whenever I write or talk about self-care practices with my co-authors Alex and Justin, we’re very careful around the question of time. I’m well aware of the huge privilege I currently have to slow everything down. Many people simply can’t afford to do this given the commitments in their lives. We always try to focus on practices and processes that are affordable and possible around a 9-5 job and family relationships, and/or around managing chronic health conditions, for example. 

However, perhaps slowing down relationships is something that is more possible for everybody given that in many ways it requires less time, rather than more. For this post I thought it would be fun to put the fastest side of myself (Tony) in conversation with the slowest side of myself (Ara). I figured he could best interrogate her about the value of slow relating, given it’s definitely not something that comes easily to him (think the George Michael song Fastlove for Tony). If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out my Plural Selves zine, and my previous dialogue post about plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here useful.

Tony: Well this is going to be interesting: the fastest talking with the slowest. Shall I just leave a question here and come back next week to see whether there’s an answer yet?

Ara: I think I might manage it a little quicker than that Trouble, but I would appreciate some time to consider my answers.

Tony: We’re so different on that, you and I. I’ve learnt that if I allow myself to respond spontaneously in the moment often what comes out is pretty good, way better than the old pattern of monitoring every little thing we say and do. Certainly the times when I make people laugh – which I love – the funny line just comes out, without any thought about it.

Ara: I suspect it’s not about fast versus slow – which is good and which is bad – but more about recognising the capacity for both in all of us, and knowing which situations call for which. That kind of realness you’re speaking about: that can come both from allowing yourself the immediate response, and from slowing right down before you respond. Both approaches can be a useful way around the attempt to predict and control everything.

Tony: Woah this is getting deep already. But I expected no less from you Ara. Can we dial it back a bit? What exactly do you mean by slow relating?

What is slow relating?

Ara: *smiles*

Tony: What?

Ara: Well you just did it, didn’t you?

Tony: Oh… yeah I guess I did! So asking to slow it down in conversation would be an example of slow relating.

Ara: It would. A micro-moment of it I guess. I like that. We were planning to focus here on slowness in relation to the whole trajectory of a friendship or partnership, but perhaps it’s useful to consider the pace of relating at all levels: micro to macro. And, again, it’s not about saying that fast or slow is better, more about ensuring that nobody is being forced to go faster than they feel comfortable with, and that everybody feels able to say if that is happening.

Tony: We thought of a metaphor yesterday when we were watching This Is Us. Randall and Kevin were running together and felt like they had to keep pace because of the competitiveness between them. Pace in relationships could be seen like that. If person A runs regularly, and person B doesn’t, it would be really bad for person B to try to keep up with person A. They’d likely end up injuring themselves and being unable to run at all.

Ara: Right, and to extend the metaphor, it may be that those who have reason to struggle more in relationships need to go slow rather than fast, just as people with health problems may need to walk rather than run. But it’s also not intrinsically better to be a runner or a walker right? Runners may well be fitter in some ways, but they also run the risk of more injuries.

Tony: Hm I’m now mentally comparing the intoxicating feelings of fastlove to the runner’s high, and heartbreak to those injuries.

Ara: Hurts a little more than shin-splints huh? Tony I’m aware that you started by asking me for a definition of slow relating. I guess it means taking any and all stages of any kind of relationship – including the one with ourselves – intentionally slowly.

That might mean deliberately choosing to see people at a certain frequency, or to spend certain amounts of time with them when you do – a couple of hours rather than a whole weekend perhaps. It could be about frequency or amount of contact between time spent together: phonecalls, messaging and the like. 

I like the word ‘spacious’: it can be about having enough space between contact to reflect on any conversations or dynamics between you. But it’s probably not just about time. Slowness can also be about intensity, trust, or closeness. It can be about consciously building those things gradually rather than leaping into a certain level of intensity, trust, or closeness without much sense of whether each of you – and the dynamic between you – can support that.

How does slow relating work?

Tony: Hm we’re getting into some of the reasons for slow relating already, but can you give some real life examples before we jump into that?… You’re smiling at me again.

Ara: And why d’you think that is?

Tony: Because I’m the one who keeps slowing down this conversation. I certainly wasn’t expecting that.

Ara: Perhaps we’re not at opposite ends of that spectrum after all Tony. Maybe we just need speed and slowness in different aspects of life.

Tony: Well I definitely need slowness in complex conversations.

Ara: I hear you. Please say if you need me to slow down at any time, and I’ll try to keep checking in with you whether you’re comfortable with the pace. I think it’s generally on the person who is in a position to go faster to do that kind of ongoing consent checking.

Tony: Like in sex, to be consensual it has to go at the slower pace of the people involved. If one person wants a BJ and another wants to kiss, you default to kissing.

Ara: A vivid example. Thank-you for that. But yes, precisely. And if a relationship was gradually moving in an erotic direction you’d need to go at the pace of the person who wanted to take that more slowly for it to be in consent. I’d say that should be the case for any kind of relationship, not just erotic ones. Go at the pace of the person who wants to do it slower, and it’s on the faster person to keep ensuring that the other person isn’t feeling rushed or trying to keep to a pace that doesn’t feel comfortable for them.

Tony: What are our examples of slow relating?

Ara: Well I think they highlight the benefits of slowness. I’ve been thinking recently that the enduring close relationships in our life – and in the lives of our friends – are often those are the ones which started slow. Also they’re the ones with the flexibility in them now to adjust pace as needed.

Justin is a great example of how we like to develop relationships. The two of us attended the same events a few times over maybe a couple of years, so we had the chance to connect in a completely no-pressure way. Then we had a one-to-one coffee and chat, but with no expectation that would be more than a one-off. We both felt a good connection so we had a further coffee a few months later I think, but whoever suggested it did so in such a way that it would’ve been easy for the other person to say ‘no’ if it hadn’t been for them. Gradually we found our way to a joint project together where we met up every week or so for a year. At the end of that project, again, there was a lot of room for us to slow it down if we’d wanted to, but we agreed that we’d like to work together more.

Tony: And a great podcast was born! 

Ara: Alex is a good example of both the pitfalls of fast and the potentials of slow. Alex and I have talked openly about how – when we met at a conference 15 years ago – we jumped straight into bed, and into a romantic partner-type relationship. That didn’t work out for us, but a year or so after breaking up we found our way – very slowly over many years – to the extremely close creative partnership we have now.

Tony: I’m looking at our close people in our photos app and pretty much all of those relationships started slow like that. The siblings are an exception of course, but even with them we distanced quite a bit for a period of years, and have recently more slowly developed a new kind of close relationship, very different to what we had before.

Ara: That’s right, and another point about slow relating: it allows for periods of greater distance and closeness. I think with fastlove – is that what we’re calling it?

Tony: Pray for us Saint George, yes please!

The risks of fastlove

Ara: With fastlove it can be hard not to default to the relationship script: the relationship escalator as Amy Gahran calls it. Once you’re moving fast towards more time together, more enmeshed lives, or greater intimacy, it can feel like a betrayal or failure if you want to slow that down. Also putting the brakes on can need to be quite extreme because you were going so fast. If you were developing more slowly, and if you’re familiar with having a slower pace at times, it can be easier to slow it down a bit and speed it up a bit depending on how connected you’re feeling, what else is going on in your lives, etc. One of our friends calls it the hokey cokey!

Tony: Also with all our close people we’ve slowly developed the kind of intimacy where we can talk pretty openly about such things, and trust that we can navigate change.

Ara: Right, and it’s very hard – if not impossible – to have that with people who you don’t have a relationship foundation with: an agreed set of values – and experience of consensual relating between the two – or more – of you – which lets you know that it’s possible with them.

Tony: I’m also struck by how many relationships that have ended started very fast.

Ara: True. I mean I would want to question the idea that longevity is any measure of ‘success’ of a relationship. Relationships which only last a decade, a year, even a day can be extremely valuable. But it seems like relationships begun quickly can really struggle to de-escalate if necessary, without it being read as an ending – with all the cultural baggage that entails. Cohabiting quickly or leaping into erotic contact or declarations of love seem to be particular red flags. Deciding to do a work project together, or spend a lot of time together, immediately would also be risky I think.

Also, we can question what a relationship begun quickly is built on, as we wrote about in that hot love post.

Tony: Hot love and fastlove huh? Slowing it down at the beginning can mean we take more care over creating the foundations of the relationship, so we don’t come to a point where we need to collapse the building and put in new foundations – because the old ones weren’t very stable.

Ara: Right. And it’s about informed consent too. When we move very quickly at the start of a friendship, romantic relationship, or work partnership, we probably don’t have enough information about that person to know whether they’ll be a good fit for us. If we’re strongly drawn to the relationship it simply can’t be because it’s a good fit, because how would we know that? So it must be other stuff that’s driving it: probably a combination of social pressures and projections we’re making onto the other person of the kind of friend, partner, or colleague we long for.

Tony: And we probably take note of every sign that this relationship meets those longings, while trying to ignore any sign that it doesn’t. So we’re objectifying the other person, and kind of ensuring that at some point we’ll have to dismantle the building and rebuild the foundations.

Ara: It’s fascinating to me that our closest people now are not generally ones who we felt instantly drawn to.

Tony: Sorry guys, you’re awesome but not overwhelmingly attractive!

Ara: Behave yourself. I’m saying that perhaps it’s a good sign when we can notice all sorts of things about a person in the first period of knowing them: it means we haven’t fallen into objectifying or pedastalling them. Again slowing down might enable us to do that: to not get caught up in the heady biopsychosocial experience of falling in love – of whatever kind.

Tony: Yeah because it can totally happen in friendships and work relationships too, especially if we’ve been yearning for a best mate or work partner. However perhaps erotic/romantic relationships in our society come with the biggest combo of cultural pressure plus full-on chemical chaos.

Ara: How’re you doing Tony? It’s a lot what we’re talking about right now.

Tony: Oh yes, I notice I just sped up. Started checking emails and thinking about a bunch of other stuff.

Ara: Noticing that speeding up can be a good sign you need to go even slower I think. How about a break and finish this another time?

Tony: Yeah. Thanks. I think I’d like to read over what we already said and think about what else to cover too.

Ara: Thank-you Tony. I’ve enjoyed having this chance to talk.

Tony: It’s not what I expected.

Ara: I’ve enjoyed that too, surprising you.

…

Tony: Okay then, we left it a couple of days and we’re back.

Ara: Another win for slowness. We wanted to wait till we were feeling it instead of trying to write when it wasn’t really there. But slow writing is a whole further blog post.

Slow relating and trauma

Tony: Talk to me about slow relating and trauma Ara.

Ara: It’s something we’ve been learning a lot about lately.

Tony: From our reading and from lived experience. It’s a lot.

Ara: It is, and again slowing down is a key element: both micro and macro. On the micro level, if we are going slower in general then we’re more likely to notice that something has been triggered, often because we’re aware that some fear and/or shame feelings are happening.

Interestingly our default response to that seems to be to speed up, as if we could race away from it. If we can manage to go in the opposite direction and slow right down – slow the breathing, notice what thoughts and feelings are coming up, talk to ourselves gently about what’s going on – then sometimes we can move through it without it spiralling into a bigger trauma response.

On the more macro level if we have enough spaciousness in our lives then it seems more possible to notice whatever themes are present in those triggered moments, and to reach greater self-understanding through that. It also means that we can pause and wait until we’re past a trauma time before we respond to whatever triggered us. And it opens up the possibility of doing something different to our usual habit: to create a new habit. 

Tony: But that’s more about our relationship with ourselves. How does slow relating with others come into it?

Ara: Well in relationships – for me at least – the aim is to be as beneficial as possible for ourselves, for the other person, and for everyone else in our lives and the wider world. If ‘beneficial’ isn’t possible then at least not causing harm. 

Slowing down on the micro level means we’re less likely to act out or shut down on whoever triggered us – or whoever else is around – which are common responses to being triggered. On the macro level we’re more likely to see patterns and dynamics that are arising in relationships and address them before they get too sticky.

Tony: It reminds me of that Matrix moment we had.

Ara: Ah that was a good example. Do you want to describe it?

Tony: We were with a couple of close friends having a conversation about something hard that had happened between them. They’re people we’re used to being open with, and we were all slowing down and trying to be extremely present and careful. Suddenly it felt like I could see all these paths I could go down in the conversation really clearly. Like I could see the one where I tried to make it okay for everyone. I could see the one where I tried to come off as a person who was great at this stuff. I could see the one where I tried to make this conversation go the same way as a previous one I’d had which went well. It was like in The Matrix where the bullets all slow down and you can duck out of the way of them. It felt like having a superpower!

Ara: Slowness as a superpower, I like it. And I’m glad you had that moment. It’s good when we can see the potentials of doing things differently, given that a lot of the time this path we’re on feels messy and hard, with no guarantees that it’s actually leading anywhere good.

Tony: On the macro level slowing down seems to show us our patterns more clearly, and when we’re falling into them.

Ara: Right, Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD suggests that we all default more to some of the ‘four Fs’ than others as our default way of relating: Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn. When we notice the themes going through the things that have triggered us into that fear/shame response lately, a lot of them have been about going into the fawn response: feeling that we have to override our own consent in order to be pleasing to others, or something terrible will happen. Slow relating has meant we’ve had the capacity to see that, to explain what’s going on to others, and to do something different in expressing what we need. When we’ve gone faster we’ve just fallen into those responses without realising it – often for quite a long time.

Tony: We should be clear that this is not an easy process, at least not for us at the moment. It’s not like ‘hm interesting response I wonder what’s going on, ah yes it must be this old thing, let’s try doing something differently.’

Ara: What is it like Tony?

Tony: It’s more like: ‘regular day … oh fuck excruciating pain, panic panic flail flail, I must be a terrible person, shame shame shame … minutes or hours or days or weeks stuck in that … eventual lifting out of it … oh that’s what that was all about, shall we try doing things differently?’

Ara: Good description.

Tony: Why thank-you, I try. Anything to add about slow relating and trauma?

Ara: Well perhaps just a note that there probably aren’t sharp dividing lines between those of us who are traumatised and those who aren’t: more of a spectrum. We’ve written before about how trauma is relevant to everyone if we consider all forms of intergenerational trauma. Our favourite teacher Pema Chödrön writes about triggers and default responses as things which everyone does. 

However we have certainly found this cPTSD literature extremely helpful. Another thing we read was that fastlove can give people a break from trauma feelings. Early stages of an intense relationship can have biopsychosocial effects which mean that we just don’t feel the fear and shame so vividly at that time. This can explain both why that period can be so enticing, and why it’s important to slow it down given that it might prevent us from noticing important things. Those fear/shame feelings can be horrendous, but if we can be with them rather than acting out of them or trying to repress them we may well find there’s an important message in there.

Tony: Ironically the message lately has been that we were moving too fast: or felt drawn to keep pace with somebody else who was going too fast for us.

Slow relating and access intimacy

Ara: Mm and I like the idea of access intimacy here. When we go walking with friends we try to be mindful of each other’s capacities. It might be that someone needs to walk slow, or to stop regularly, or to only do a short distance, or to avoid sections of walk which feel too high or precarious, or to stay on smooth rather than rough paths. This could be due to disability, to chronic or acute health conditions, to fitness, to anxiety or phobias, all kinds of things. 

If we’re the one with greater capacity then we try to match pace and keep checking in with the person with lesser capacity. And we’ve had some great experiences of being the one with lesser capacity and having the other person treat us carefully around that.

Tony: Like that time with Hannah where the quickest route home involved some potentially scary heights. She helped us name that we’d rather go back the way we came, where we would usually have pushed on in the past because we’d have assumed she’d prefer that.

Ara: Access intimacy is ensuring you know the other person’s needs well and making it your business to proceed with those in mind. I love this as a metaphor for slow relating. Can the person with greater capacity keep checking that they haven’t metaphorically set off on an epic journey when the other person’s only up for a short hike, or look out that they’re not striding ahead while the other person puffs and pants to keep up, or make sure they haven’t begun a climb up a mountain which involves a precarious descent that’s going to give the other person vertigo?

Tony: It all comes back to consent really. Our relationship mantra for a while has been: slow, kind, consensual.

Ara: So the consent piece is about going at the pace of the person who needs it to be slower, whether due to trauma or for any other reason. And, as with the walk, it might be that each of you needs it slower in different ways. Like one person could be up for a relationship being quite quick in terms of amount of contact, but slower in terms of being openly vulnerable with another person, and vice versa. 

Tony: Right. Actually we like to go pretty quick into being vulnerable and open because we prefer big talk to small talk with anybody. But it’s more the amount of time spent together and any move towards any ongoing commitment or enmeshment/entwinedness that need to be real slow. What about slowness and kindness?

Slow relating and kindness

Ara: Well it’s very hard to be kind to others when the trauma stuff is playing out in a relationship much of the time. When you’re stuck in that fear/shame place it can be extremely difficult to be aware of another person or to have anything to offer them. I notice that the relationships where we – and/or other people – have got most hurt are ones which have gone fast in various ways. Mostly that’s because someone has ended up in a trauma place much of the time and has had to pull back for that reason.

I think it’s useful to remember that question of whether this relationship is generally being good for you, for the other person, and for the other people in your life or the wider world. If the answer is ‘no’ to any of those, then slowing down is an important response. ‘If it’s not good for everyone then it’s not good for anyone’ is a helpful phrase to keep hold of. 

It can be hard though in our culture where escalating is seen as a good thing to be encouraged, and de-escalating is often read as break-up or failure. Also those of us with trauma experiences may have been punished for asking to put on the brakes in the past, so might not find it so easy to allow ourselves to ‘hokey cokey’ in relationships.

I’m in a place at the moment where I’d rather go slowly from the outset than speed up and pull back, because it’s hard to feel that’s an okay thing to do, even though it is. I guess the more we can give each other explicit permission to slow down and speed up, the better. We can create micro-cultures of consensual speed in our communities and friendship groups.

Tony: When might it be particularly important to slow down

Ara: I think when tough stuff hits. Again it is so tempting for people to speed up at such times from a sense of urgency, but that often involves overriding a strong sense that one or more people has of not being ready yet. If we can really honour those ‘not ready’ feelings, then we can have a much better encounter once we are ready. We’ve seen that happen with friends who allowed time after a conflict before trying to have a conversation. When they finally did it was powerful because they were both in a position to hear and be heard. And, again, it’s not once and for all. There may be many phases of ‘not ready yet’ and ‘ready now’ in an ongoing relationship over time.

As we’ve said before, living in such a non-consensual culture means that we’re all bound to hurt others, and to be hurt by others. We’ll find ourselves on both sides of those dynamics of having overridden another person’s consent, and having had our own overridden. At such times it’s vital to go at the pace of the person who has been hurt/overridden, to listen to their ‘not ready’ and to respect that. And it’s also important not to go too fast for the other person, because they may struggle to be able to hear if they’re in a defensive place. They may need to do some work before they’re able to sit with somebody who they’ve hurt without collapsing into shame – which doesn’t help anyone.

Tony: It seems like trying to push anyone to go faster than they’re capable of going is never a good plan, and trying to push ourselves to go faster than we can go is also likely to backfire, even if we have really good motivations for doing so.

Ara: That’s my sense, yes. How’re you doing?

Tony: Well it’s not necessarily the easiest thing for me to hear, as one of the faster sides of our plural system. I do fear that my speediness causes problems for the rest of you.

Balancing slower and faster desires in relationships

Ara: I think with internal relationships – as with external ones – it’s got to be about dialogue. We need to go at the speed that suits the slowest sides of ourselves, otherwise they’ll be left behind. Also, in relationships, there’s a risk that fastlove means that other people will only meet the fastest sides of our characters, instead of the whole of us.

Tony: That feels important to me, as it’s the slower parts of us who bring some important kinds of wisdom to the party.

Ara: I’ll take that compliment.

Tony: I guess I’m still left with a question mark though around whether going slow in relationships of all kinds could somehow stifle something that’s positive about faster people, or faster sides of a person.

Ara: I think that’s an important question mark. I wonder if it’s about creating safe-enough relationships and situations so that people can enjoy speed as well as slowness. Going back to our walking/running metaphor, slow-walking with one person doesn’t mean that a fast person can never go for a run: they just need to do that alone or with a different friend. 

Also going slow for a time can mean that speed can happen later on, in a way that feels great because those safe-enough foundations are in place. Like we felt great when we took on book projects with Alex and Justin, even though that meant a big escalation in the intensity of time spent together, and our commitment to each other. That was because we had those foundations in place. It could be like ‘look before you leap, and then enjoy the leaping’.

Tony: Right, and we are finding it feels safe-enough to bring the faster sides of ourselves out in relationships where we’ve built up slowly. Okay I’ll buy it. Slow love is the one true way, and maybe it enables a bit of fastlove too. 

Ara: I’m never sure about the one true way in anything, but I know that I like slow.

Tony: It’ll be a new movement. Slow love, like slow food or slow academia. 

*Googles*

Oh looks like someone already thought of that.

Ara: I guess we’ll have to stay on the slow path then Tony, instead of starting a brand new movement overnight.

Tony: Oh alright then. I’m still going to end with a slow love manifesto though!

The Slow Love Manifesto

• It’s okay to go at the pace we need to in relationships. In fact it’s probably better for everyone concerned that we do so, because it means that we can be kinder and more available to ourselves and to others.
• Pace includes how fast we go with the intensity of contact as well as the amount of various types of contact.
• It’s okay to go at a different pace in different relationships: Just because you go at a certain pace with person A doesn’t mean you have to go at that pace with person B.
• It’s helpful to tune into your body and to how it feels when you’re drawn to go too fast. Then you can become more able to notice that feeling, and to communicate to others that you need to slow down when you feel it.
• It’s okay to do the amount and type of relating each day, each week, each month, etc. that feels right to you. For example, it’s fine to only want to do one social thing per week, or to want some human contact every other day, or to prefer one-to-ones and never do big groups.
• It’s important – for consent – to go at the pace of the slowest person in the relationship, and to have contact with them that enables them to communicate what that is, rather than suggesting things they have to say ‘no’ to, given how difficult this often is. 
• It’s okay to change pace over time in a relationship – to speed up or slow down – as long as any speeding up feels consensual for all involved.
• It’s okay for all of us to struggle with changes of pace in relationships, but never to pressure another person to go faster than they want to, or to try to prevent them from slowing down when they need to.
• It’s okay to say ‘no’ to any relationship if there’s a mismatch in pace and you’d rather find someone who matches your pace, and/or to find additional relationships which match that pace.
• It’s okay to not be ready for contact of a certain kind, or of any kind. We – and others – need to trust that ‘not ready’ feeling.
• It can particularly be a good idea to slow down at the following times: at the start of relationships, when there’s powerful New Relationship Energy, when a conflict or consent violation happens between you, and when a relationship is changing, transitioning, taking a different direction, ending, being rekindled, or starting anew.

There’s a further conversation between Tony and Ara on the value of slow relating and different levels of relationship closeness here.

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Plural tag: This post was written by Tony and Ara (obvs).

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