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.

It takes the form of an interview between the self who created it – Fox – and another self – James. 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: Poached eggs, avo, halloumi brunch, with black americano

TLDR: Fox has made a new zine about plurality and they’re very excited about it. You can find it here.

James: It has been a while since we’ve done one of these.

Fox: Like a year and a half. You interviewed me about the Welcome Monster Feelings zine I made back in Spring 2022.

James: So I did. Readers could be forgiven for thinking that our plural experience has lessened since then, given how most of our blog posts have been written from a collective ‘I’, rather than as dialogues between us.

Fox: Not at all. If anything, our plurality has become even more vivid, and more of a central part of our everyday life, work, and relating. But we’ve been working deeply with our two most traumatised selves – Robin and Morgan – in the kinds of ways we wrote about back in 2020 and 2021. It felt too vulnerable to share from – or about – them very openly while we were doing that work.

James: An important aspect of ‘no part gets left behind’: ensuring that everyone feels comfortable with the level of sharing. But you did manage the Plural Selves 2 zine this time last year, and now this new zine: Triangles (and Circles) of Selves.

Fox: I did! It feels helpful to us to track our own plural experience through these zines: from 2017 to 2022 to now. And it shows how we’re all always a work in progress: all of us. Hopefully it’s also useful to share with others what we’re learning about plurality, which might be helpful to them as well: whether they have a vividly plural experience like us, or just as sense of containing different parts or subpersonalities that they want to explore more, and everything in between.

James: I want to ask you more about all of that. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Fox: That can happen with me!

James: Very true *smiles* So help me out here with a bit of a plan before we begin.

Fox: Okay.

James: I want to ask you about the zine: why you wrote it and what it means to you. Then I want to ask you about your creative process because I know you love that.

Fox: It makes me feel like a proper creative type!

James: Which you are. Plus I’m intrigued about the directions our creativity is going in with you. And finally I want to touch on the picture we’ve used to illustrate this blog post: your latest image of our plural system.

Fox: Yes!

James: Alright then.

Fox: Let’s do this!

The Triangles (and circles) of selves zine

James: So tell us about your new zine, Fox. What motivated you to write this? And how does it differ from our previous plural selves zines?

Fox: Okay. So the Plural Selves 2 zine, which we wrote this time last year, was a very visual comic-type zine about the kinds of selves we’ve found in our system, and how people might explore whether they have similar kinds of selves themselves. But since then, we’ve come across a number of plural ideas which have helped us to understand ourselves – how we were formed and the roles we play – even better. 

James: It’s not a completely different set of ideas to Plural Selves 2 then?

Fox: Not at all. But it has this idea of a core triangle of selves at the heart of it, which a lot of people have found helpful when we shared it with them.

James: That’s why you wrote this zine really, because so many people in our lives kept asking if there was anywhere they could point people to, to explain these ideas.

Fox: Right, and there is this book Being and Becoming, by Franklyn Sills, which is where we found out some of these ideas. But that’s quite a dense book aimed at therapists, and it also doesn’t cover all of the different ideas I wanted to explore.

James: Basically you noticed that these kinds of triangles kept showing up in many of the different things we were reading: from literature on developmental trauma, to writing about relationships, to Buddhist teachings, to recovery community resources, to autism articles, to books about the politics of trauma and traumatising cultures.

Fox: Yes, so I wanted to make a zine to show how all these triangles map onto each other, at all levels of experience from existential, through sociocultural, relational, and internal bodyminds.

Image Description: A series of concentric circles, the outer circle labelled ‘existential/spiritual’, the next one in ‘sociocultural’, the next one in ‘relational’, and the inner circle ‘internal’

James: This is the post-humanist kind of model you were playing with in your Queering Creative Health zine: the idea that we’re always inevitably embodied, entangled with other beings, and embedded in the wider world. So we need to understand everything about ourselves at all those levels of experience.

Fox: And we’re existential: because we’re beings who know they exist – and have to figure out how to be given that – or something!

James: Something like that. You explain it all very well in this zine.

Fox: Thank-you.

James: So you’re saying you were motivated to put something out there explaining all these triangles and how they map onto each other, because others were finding it helpful when we shared about it.

Fox: Exactly. That’s why this zine is really a long essay with pictures. Or a lot of little essays. Not a comic like most of my zines are.

James: We’ll get to that shift in a moment. Could you just explain the main idea of the triangle model simply, so people get a sense of it.

Fox: Okay right. The idea is that – for all kinds of reasons existential, sociocultural, relational, and internal – people tend to create a singular self, who they present to the world, who is trying to perform everything they’ve learnt to think of as ‘good’. But doing this means pushing down into the shadow or unconsciousness, two selves who are seen as ‘bad’ in different ways: A needy/vulnerable self who is constantly yearning for love and connection, and a rejecting/rejected self who holds all our ‘bad’ experiences and sees the ‘bad’ in others.

Image description: A triangle. The top corner labelled ‘central/performing self’, the bottom left ‘needy/vulnerable self’ and the bottom right ‘rejecting/rejected self’

James: And where do the circles come in?

Fox: *laughs* you know where they come in! It’s you: You and Ara.

James: For our readers!

Fox: Okay. So our sense is that we needed two other selves, in order to bring those unconscious selves out of the shadow, and to free them to enable them to be what they’re capable of. We see the two other selves as the top and bottom halves of a circle which can go around the triangle, containing it.

James: And how would you describe these two halves?

Image description: A triangle within a circle. The top corner of the triangle labelled ‘open self’, the bottom left ‘sensitive self’ and the bottom right ‘clear self’. The top half of the circle labelled ‘witnessing self’ and the bottom half ‘holding self’

Fox: The top half is a kind of witnessing self. She can hold the others in a big enough space for them to bring themselves in fully, and she can see them with a loving gaze.

James: And that vital bottom half? What’s that like?

Fox: Oh I don’t know. Nothing very important really.

James: Behave!

Fox: Okay, the bottom half – who we might or might not call James – is like a grounding self, who can hold everyone steady. He can do the everyday life stuff while the top half of the circle is helping everyone to feel their old pains, and free themselves of their old patterns.

James: He sounds great.

Fox: Doesn’t he though?! Obviously the genders of these selves will be different for different people. But in us the witness is a she and the grounding is a he.

James: Right. And the zine explores a whole bunch of different ways in which we might understand the triangles, and the circles.

Fox: Yep. This zine is really focused on the ideas, while our other plural zines were a lot about the practices we use to get to know, and love, all our selves.

I guess we had struggled sometimes with all the different models of how people work and relate. You know like the trauma 4Fs, and the shame compass, inner child understandings, attachment theory, and all of that. I saw the triangle as a kind of constant through all those ideas. Maybe, like us, people might find it a useful touchstone to draw on all of those understandings – and others – instead of getting freaked out about which one is the ‘right’ one or something.

James: I see. It’s a way of weaving together all these understandings, so they stop competing with each other and start working together. Any of them can then be a helpful way into this overall understanding of how people work.

Fox: Exactly.

Unique or Universal?

James: That brings us to something I know you’ve struggled with. Is this a universal theory that applies to everyone?

Fox: Ugh, it’s such a paradoxy question. Like absolutely not, because nothing good ever came from imposing universal theories of how people work on everyone. And, at the same time, kinda yes, maybe, because there are some similar patterns that seem to show up in all these different understandings of how people work – from micro to macro – and across very different philosophies, faiths, and spiritualities.

James: It’s something we think about a lot isn’t it? What’s unique and what’s universal?

Fox: Right. It goes back to the levels model really. If we think about our experience of plurality: that idea of creating a ‘good’ self and disowning the ‘bad’. Some of that – we reckon – is an existential thing that many – if not all – humans do in order to deal with things like the fact they are going to die, and the way that the world around them tells them how they should be. But some of how it works for us is due to our cultural context: growing up, and living now, in a white imperialist country which bases pretty much everything – laws, education, healthcare, media, etc. – on this rigid set of ideas about what it is to be a ‘normal’ ‘successful’ individual self.

James: Right, so some of how we experience ourselves could be really different from how people experience themselves in other cultural contexts: Less individualistic cultures, for example, or cultures which readily accept that a number of selves, souls, or spirits, can share a body/mind.

Fox: Exactly. And then, going down another level, some of how we experience ourselves is due to the specifics of the way we were treated growing up in this culture. Like the kinds of developmental trauma we experienced, or what it was like to be a being who didn’t fit neatly into many categories.

James: Like?

Fox: Boy/girl, gay/straight, working/middle class background, northern/southern, and – related to our undiagnosed autism – abled/disabled, stupid/smart… So many really.

James: Mm. 

Fox: So some of our experience will likely only resonate with others who grew up in a similar time and place, or those with similar kinds of developmental trauma and/or neurodivergence, or those who have similar experiences of being between or beyond binaries, or of challenging normative classification models in some way.

James: And that relates to the inner level.

Fox: Exactly, some aspects of our plural experience are probably completely unique to us: to the ways in which our particular bodymind has been shaped – and continues to be shaped – by all these things.

James: So what does that mean for how we present these ideas?

Fox: I guess I always want to ensure that we present them in an invitational way. I think it is helpful to present our particular experience of plurality, because it does seem to resonate with a lot of people we speak with, and because it brings to life how people might do this kind of plural work themselves. So much writing on plurality doesn’t really ‘walk the walk’ in that way. You can be left, after reading it, wondering: yeah but how does it actually feel to be plural? How do you actually relate with each other? How could I explore my own plurality if it’s all unfamiliar to me?

James: Those are the kinds of questions we’re trying to help people with, by showing them how we work, and telling them about what’s worked for us.

Fox: Right but invitational. Starting with that sense – always – that some of this may be helpful to everyone, some to people only of a similar cultural context, some to people only of a similar relationship background, some – perhaps – only to other autistic, plural systems, who carry the same kinds of developmental trauma that we do.

James: And some is just our own unique team MJ way of experiencing stuff.

Fox: Our own particular weirdness.

James: Exactly.

Fox: I guess I hope that even that could be helpful. Like it could give people permission that of course it will all work in particular weird and wonderful ways for them too, and that is something to be celebrated, not resisted. That’s part of the problem, isn’t it? The idea we should all conform to some universal, or cultural, or community, ideal of ‘normal’.

James: Right. And one gift of plurality is that you know that – even internally – you can’t possibly conform, because you are however-many-number of different selves, or parts, who see the world in radically different, often contradictory, ways.

Fox: Exactly.

Incorrigibly Plural

James: Okay, so nearly done with the zine. Just tell me something about how it relates to our book project.

Fox: Right, so we hope to write a book, over the next year or more, called Incorrigibly Plural. In a way the zine was my first attempt to write the core of that book: The set of ideas that we’ll be playing with there.

James: How will the book differ?

Fox: Well, I hope – if you all feel up to it – that you’ll each write from yourselves, about what it’s like to be each of those selves: the needy/vulnerable self, the witnessing self, and all that.

James: So there’ll be all of our voices in there, maybe some dialogue between us all too.

Fox: Right. Telling the story of how we’ve done this: each self’s journey, and how we relate together.

James: Anything else?

Fox: Well the book will also be more practical than the zine, including a lot of the creative, therapeutic, spiritual, relational, and somatic practices that we’ve found helpful for doing this kind of selves work. And pointing people at other people’s work as well.

James: And I guess we’ll cover this universal/unique issue in more depth.

Fox: Absolutely. One thing I want to do is to emphasise this sense that both complementary-ness and contradictory-ness are helpful: That we can hold sameness and difference. So, like, we – our plural selves – have a lot of similarities in our values, passions, that kind of thing. But, like you said, we’re also very different. One thing we’re learning together is how to be alongside each other in that difference instead of in opposition. 

James: Nicely put. What do you mean?

Fox: Well like, we could see it as a problem, when we contradict each other. Like pulling in opposite directions, someone’s always going to lose out. Or we could see it as a gift of plurality, that we can always see every situation from at least five different perspectives. That enables us to get a way fuller picture of everything that’s going on. And then we go through a process of deciding how to engage with whatever-it-is which brings all of us along with us. That feels amazing, when we can do that. And it maybe helps us learn something about how people, or groups, could manage to be alongside each other in their sameness and difference too.

James: So being with where we complement each other and where we contradict each other.

Fox: You’re looking very dapper today James, but I don’t completely agree with your choice of socks.

James: I see what you did there. Personally I think these socks are an excellent choice. Very cosy for a Winter day.

Fox: Not colourful enough.

James: Sadly a problem with so much of our wardrobe when you are the only self in our system who likes bright colours.

Fox: Sadly, sadly. I’m still campaigning for more orange.

James: You want to do the same thing with ideas in the book right? Complementary and contradictory.

Fox: Yes, thank-you. The zine could give the impression that all these ideas – all these triangles – just complement each other perfectly. But there are also contradictions between them. I want to get those across in the book. Like, again, it’s not a problem that there are very different stories we could tell about the way our plurality manifests. If we can hold multiple truths as valid then we can learn from the dialogue between them, instead of getting stuck trying to find the one right, true answer.

James: How’re you planning to do that?

Fox: I think we’ll present the zine ideas in the book, and then give – like – twenty different stories through our experience, from different perspectives. To show how it can be helpful both to find those common threads – like the multiple triangles that map onto each other – and to voice all the contradictory stories and hold all of them as valid and valuable also.

James: I like it.

Fox: Thank-you.

The creative self?

James: Okay moving on from the zine and the book, I can’t help noticing that you seem to be leading on all of our creativity these days.

Fox: It does seem like that doesn’t it?

James: What d’you make of that?

Fox: Good question. I guess I need to start with a bit about who I am.

James: Please.

Fox: Our sense is that, when we stopped trying to present a singular ‘good’ individual self to the world, that made space for me to come forward more in our system. I feel like the self we were – or maybe could have been – without trauma: just open to experience, curious, present to whatever is happening.

James: Mmhm.

Fox: At first we mistook that for me being some kind of ‘child’ self, because I have childlike qualities. So I kind of took the lead on drawing pictures, like in the monster feelings zine. I still feel very committed to the idea of presenting ideas in formats other than words – and explaining things simply, and visually. But more and more I seem to have been the one of us who gets excited about all kinds of creativity. This year I wrote that Queer Creative Health zine that we were commissioned to produce. Then I was the one who wrote this plural selves zine, even though it is much more writing than my previous zines. And just recently I wrote a purely written chapter, for Alex’s new anthology: Trans and Disabled.

James: Which also explores some of the ideas we’ve been discussing here.

Fox: Out next year!

James: I guess writing used to be the job of our central/performing self, back when we thought we were a singular self.

Fox: Right, and there were risks with that. Like it might come from a singular voice and perspective, when now we know the value of drawing on all of our voices and perspectives. Also the central/performing self is very invested in demonstrating they are ‘good’. There’s a risk that writing from that place could come across as too self-deprecating, or too defensive, or as having something to prove. All of that gets in the way of that invitational way of writing that feels so important to us now.

James: A style where people really feel permission to read it if it resonates, and not if it doesn’t. And where they can feel able to take what works for them and leave the rest – as Alex says – no implicit pressure from us for them to agree with us.

Fox: Right. And that’s all the more important now we recognise that everyone reading our work will also be as multiplicitous and contradictory as we are. Different people may relate to our work, or not, but also different parts of the same person, or selves in the same system. In the book I want us to directly speak to different selves – or parts – in the reader, as well as speaking from different selves in us.

James: Nice.

Fox: Thank-you.

James: You’re welcome.

Fox: *Grin* What was the question again?

James: Um, oh yes, so you were saying that we used to write from the central/performing self. What happened next?

Fox: After our plurality became more vivid, I gradually took over the picture-based kind of stuff, and we did a bunch of those blog posts as dialogue that are now in our plurality free books. But when we had to do serious writing, you mostly took that on: as our everyday life kind of self.

James: Mm.

Fox: How was that for you?

James: It was okay. I liked that I was writing informed by all of your experiences. It felt like a way of honouring what you were all doing. And you know I have a sense of myself as in service to the rest of you. So it kind of fit with that.

Fox: I sense a but coming!

James: Heh. Yes, I guess it didn’t feel like my forte. I think I enjoy being of service in other ways more. I enjoy doing the practical life things so the rest of you can get on with your spiritual, therapeutic, and creative work, and with connecting with other people. And I enjoy looking after you in that grounding way when one of you is struggling, and gentling you up in the evenings, hearing about your days.

Fox: You’re excellent at all of that James.

James: *smiles* Writing felt like… I could do it, but it wouldn’t be as heartfelt as if any of the rest of you were doing it. I’m not so big on feelings.

Fox: Except feeling for all of us.

James: I am big on those feelings.

Fox: Morgan tried doing some of our writing too. It probably means the most to her because she is the one who is so committed to truth-telling: the one whose voice has been so silenced through our lives. But she’s also the one who holds the inner criticism so it can be so painful for her. It’s hard for her to not keep questioning whether it’s good enough, or to struggle with the contradictions, or with being invitational rather than imposing.

James: You and I are more relaxed about such things.

Fox: We just sit down in a cafe and write about all the weird stuff that we think about all the time!

James: Exactly.

Fox: Sometimes we have the image of me with a clipboard. Like I’m running around everyone else watching what they’re doing, jotting down what they’re saying, and then I can write a report on it all.

James: Which is kind of what you did with the monster feelings zine. Most of them were not your feelings.

Fox: Except for the fizzy creative feelings!

James: Except those. You listened to Robin and Morgan describe their feelings and then turned them into pictures. It was a lovely process.

Fox: And now I’m expanding that, to write for others based on all of the things I’ve jotted down on my clipboard.

James: So do you think you’ll be the key author of our plural book?

Fox: I’m not sure. Ara wrote for the first time the other day – just her – and it was beautiful. Like she can write from that place of seeing us all, and everybody else, with that loving gaze. And. of course, in the book I’m hoping that everyone will tell their own stories, and write in dialogue together too.

James: Watch this space then?

Fox: Exactly.

The Picture

James: Which brings us to the last thing I wanted to ask you about. This picture you drew of us all yesterday.

Fox: Yes! I loved drawing that!

Image Description: A comic-style drawing of five people under a movie-style title ‘Incorrigible Plural’, with character names: Morgan, James, Ara, Fox, Robin written above it. The people are clustered together in a group and include an angry looking girl, a man with glasses, a kind looking woman, a person with Fox-style ears and tail, and a somewhat anxious looking boy

James: Tell me what it means to you.

Fox: Well I’ve drawn a few comics and cartoons of us in the past – or we have – but I guess I took it on after a while as the main drawing self.

James: Right. We even wrote a whole paper about comics and plural selves before that didn’t we?

Fox: Oh yes we did! Anyway, we hadn’t drawn ourselves for a year. And there have been a few important changes in our system since then.

James: Tell us about that.

Fox: Well a huge one is we’re now five instead of seven.

James: What happened there?!

Fox: Heh you know.

James: For our readers.

Fox: Well, as we focused on Robin and Morgan’s journeys we had the sense of the self we called Max gradually emptying out. We could still talk to her but it was like she was up in the hills somewhere most of the time. She always seemed very relaxed and okay with it. Like she was the previous central/performing self who just didn’t have to be anymore, and that was a huge relief. We also felt the self we called Jonathan around less and less, only really coming forward to do the cooking, and even then he didn’t really like it if we asked him how he was doing or anything.

James: Mm.

Fox: It struck us that perhaps Max was an aspect of Morgan and Jonathan an aspect of Robin. Like trauma had split Morgan into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ halves (Max, and the one we used to call Beastie), and Robin into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ halves (Jonathan, and the one we used to call Tony). It felt like the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in both of them were coming back together. Like we could feel how Morgan encompassed the kinds of energies we used to associate with Max and Beastie, and Robin those we associated with Jonathan and Tony. It took a while, and it was sometimes confusing – and sad – to lose those selves who we loved so much. I guess that’s one of those contradictions, James. It’s true to say that we lost nothing, because we still feel them in Morgan and Robin. And it’s also true to say we have lost them, and that we feel the grief and sadness of that loss, alongside a relief that the five-system feels more balanced and ‘right’ than seven ever did.

James: At one point years ago we thought we might be nine. There was a similar relief when we realised it was seven, not nine.

Fox: Mm, which does not necessarily mean five-forever. We always want to be open to different selves emerging or merging. We still sometimes have a sense of these wispy fragments of Robin and Morgan’s shadow selves: like the worst possible versions of them floating around a bit untethered. And we feel it is vital to welcome them wholeheartedly every time we feel their presence, even though they’re very into trying to scare us with just how monstrous and unacceptable they are. 

James: No part gets left behind.

Fox: Exactly, and it is so important to us to recognise that – just like everyone – we contain the capacity to be harmful, to do the worst things that humans are capable of. The path towards causing less harm comes from accepting that with great honesty, not by denying it and shoving those little ghosts and demons back under the rug.

James: Well put. More of that in the book I suspect.

Fox: Oh definitely.

James: So you were saying. One big shift in our system was to being five instead of seven, because we recognised Robin and Morgan as incorporating the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ boy and girl, respectively.

Fox: Mmhm. The other big shift is even more recent. Ara came in way more fully.

James: She did!

Fox: We weren’t expecting it. She’s been available all the time since summer 2020. Like if any of us wanted to be with her we could, any time. But we visualised her as sitting in a field somewhere that we could go and visit, or on the stoop of our imaginary house. She wasn’t quite one of us, in the way the rest of us were. I guess we thought it’d always be that way, given that she’s the witnessing self. Maybe she needed all that solitude and space in order to be able to hold us when we went to her.

James: But she started to be more present, on long walks particularly.

Fox: She walks. A. Lot. More. Slowly. Than. The. Rest. Of. Us.

James: *Chuckles*

Fox: Then she had a session with our therapist, talking as herself: as Ara. And after that it was like she was embodied fully. One of us. Hopefully she’ll share all of that more in the book, but for us it was like we could engage with her way more readily in our everyday life, and she was having a lot more of her own experiences.

James: And I could let go of some of the holding and hearing that I’d been doing. She took it over.

Fox: You’re, like, a gentleman of leisure now right? I do the creativity, Ara does the holding…

James: There’s still plenty to do. And also, someone has to hold you and Ara when it’s been a lot.

Fox: You’re doing brilliantly. You know that right?

James: I do okay. You know me, just steady steady, step by step through the day; through the life.

Fox: Brilliantly.

James: So this picture.

Fox: *Grin* So I guess we’d never really known what Ara looked like before. I’d drawn her in a certain way, but it was kind of a mash up of people we’d felt compassion from in the past, rather than a real sense of what she feels like – the way I draw the rest of us. When I did the latest picture she came out looking like she feels. She’s a bit more like I used to draw Max, with the short white hair, but her face conveys the feeling that I used to convey in the more mash-up pictures of Ara.

James: She also has a nice cosy looking coat on.

Fox: That just felt right somehow.

James: So why this picture this way?

Fox: Well people might have noticed that it’s a riff on the poster from the 1980s movie ‘The Breakfast Club’. We were out walking the other day – fast not slow because it was me walking and listening to our tunes – and ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ came on, which is the song from that movie. And suddenly I thought we mapped onto the characters in that film, now that we are five.

James: One of our favourite games: who would each of us be from this movie, or that TV show, or that book?

Fox: It is one of the most fun plural games.

Image description: The same picture from before next to the movie poster of The Breakfast Club, which depicts five people in a similar cluster who represent stereotypes of US high-school kids: A recluse, a rebel, a jock, a beauty and a brain (according the the movie description)

James: So what appealed about ‘The Breakfast Club’, exactly?

Fox: Well it wasn’t precisely the characters. I mean a little bit in the way there’s a character who is a sad, angry girl – the way Morgan can be – and there’s a character who is a scared boy – the way we can experience Robin. But the other characters, not so much.

James: So you don’t think you bear any resemblance to a princess then…?

Fox: Hey! I mean I guess I am here being treated by you to brunch and an extra hot chocolate. But other than that not at all. I mean (1) I’m not gendered, and (2) I wear orange, not pink. At least when I’m allowed to…

James: Alright, alright. So what was it that amused you about us being the characters from ‘The Breakfast Club’?

Fox: Well the set up is that they are five school students who are all shut in detention together, and they are completely different: ‘A brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel and a recluse’. And by the end of the movie they’ve learnt how to get along.

James: Spoiler alert.

Fox: Dude it came out in 1984. It’s an iconic John Hughes movie. Anyone who is going to watch it has already watched it.

James: Heh you’re feisty today.

Fox: Know your place serving man.

James: *laughs* very well prince/ss? Your honour? Majesterial majestical monarch.

Fox: *laughs*

James: Anyway, you’re saying you like the idea of us as five very different selves locked in together, learning about each other: what we have in common, and how to relate across our differences.

Fox: Exactly. You could say that’s the situation of our lives – born into this bodymind together. Or you could say it’s what happened from 2020 onwards. Like, literally, locked in, the five of us together.

James: ‘They only met once, but it changed their lives forever.’

Fox: Like ‘The Breakfast Club’ if they all decided to move in together after the movie.

James: Personally I like that I occupy the position of the ‘rebel’ in our version of the poster. Looking pretty hunky and moody there too.

Fox: I wouldn’t make too much of it, Ara is in the position of the ‘jock’ which is hardly her is it?

James: Way to burst my bubble: the brooding hero, James.

Fox: Maybe in a parallel universe.

James: I’ll take it. Anything else to say?

Fox: I don’t think so. Just that the title of the picture –  ‘Incorrigibly Plural’ – is the title we’re playing with for the book. And we’ll be writing more about that in a chapter we’re writing for a new anthology on neuroqueer: what it means to embrace being incorrigibly plural.

James: Perhaps we’ll share some of that here when that chapter comes out.

Fox: Plan. Thanks for this James.

James: Right back at you littlest.

The post New zine for the end of the year: Triangles (and Circles) of Selves appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

It takes the form of an interview between the part of me who created it – Fox – and another part – James. 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 our Plural Selves zine, and our free book 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: Halloumi tomato pesto sandwich, OJ.

James: It’s my great pleasure, today, to be conducting an interview with the artist behind the new zine Welcome Monster Feelings. Thankyou for taking the time to speak with me today Fox.

Fox: You’re welcome.

James: Would you like to begin by telling the readers a little bit about who you are?

Fox: Nope.

James: Well this is getting off to a great start.

Fox: I think it’d be more fun if you say who I am and I’ll say who you are.

James: Oh go on then. How best to describe you?

Fox: It better be good.

James: No pressure then.

Fox: *giggle*

James: I would say that you’re the youngest child part of our plural system. Or rather we tend to think of you as who we might have been without all the rules we learnt about who it was okay and not okay to be in the world – without our developmental trauma. You are the most able of all of us to just be in the moment, to find delight and wonder in things, to move through the feelings you have rather than getting stuck in them. How am I doing?

Fox: Why do we call me Fox?

James: Because you often feel more like a creature than a human: a wild little thing.

Fox: Heh I like that. Okay I’ll do you.

James: I’m not sure it’s regular to introduce the interviewer.

Fox: I’m gonna anyway. You’re our James. We call you lots of other names like Old Man and Saint James and Captain Admin and ruder ones.

James: Captain Admin is pretty rude. I don’t just do admin.

Fox: That’s why it’s funny. You are the one of us who does most of the everyday life stuff, particular the bits that the rest of us find boring or scary like emails *shudder* But you’re also the main one who looks after the child parts of us: me, Morgan (aka Beastie), and Robin (aka Tony). You’re really good at that.

James: I’m not sure how Morgan would feel about being called a child part.

Fox: She’s not here!

James: I mean technically, given that we share a body…

Fox: If she was properly here we wouldn’t be doing this interview coz it’s not easy for her to do this kind of thing. But we’ll get to that.

James: Is that enough introductions then? Am I allowed to start the interview proper?

Fox: It’s about time!

The aims of the zine

James: *shakes head* Okay then. First question. What were you hoping to achieve with this work Welcome Monster Feelings?

Fox: Two things I think. The main one was I wanted to help the other members of our system – particularly Robin and Morgan who carry most of our trauma – to find a way to be with their most painful feelings. We’ve been in this big trauma period for the last few years, so our feelings can be very overwhelming at times, especially for those two. 

The other thing I wanted to do was to find a way back to drawing. We made quite a few zines and comics a few years back, but it was something we found much harder to do during the trauma time.

James: Why d’you think that is?

Fox: Well Morgan’s trauma often comes out as being an inner critic – so it’s very hard for her to let us draw without feeling it’s not good enough, or comparing it to what other people do, even though she also really wants us to be creative. Robin’s trauma comes out as fear and shame so it’s scary for him to put stuff out there in the world, in case people are mean about it. Also it’s just generally pretty hard to sit down and draw – or do anything much – when you’re feeling that bad. 

James: I think it was a genius move to find a project that we could do even when we felt rotten, in fact tough feelings were kind of a bonus.

Fox: I know right? And – as we say in the companion zine Welcoming Your Monster Feelings – the practice of making the monsters often helps overwhelming feelings to calm down a bit. So you gradually get this knowing in your body that making a monster will make you feel better, which makes it easier to do it the next time you feel rough.

James: Positive reinforcement.

Fox: Right, and I love that it showed Robin and Morgan that they were vital – to the project and to us. They can both so easily feel that they are ‘bad parts’, or ruin things for the rest of us, and that they should be cast out again – as they both were for so much of our lives. But I couldn’t have done this project without them. It was their feelings I was drawing most of the time. 

Also when we showed our friends, and they found it helpful and said they felt similar things, that helped Robin and Morgan to feel seen, and less alone, and like they were being helpful to others.

A plural project

James: Just brilliant! So it sounds like you see this as a plural collaboration, even though you were definitely the one leading on it.

Fox: Absolutely. Robin and Morgan mostly had the feelings, and told me about them, and then I found the way to draw them that felt most right. But we also got everyone else’s feelings in there somewhere.

James: I particularly like the holding and hearing monster towards the end…

Fox: That’s you! And he looks a bit like Sully from Monsters Inc because that character reminds us of you, and his full name is James P. Sullivan.

James: I also helped as Captain Admin right?

Fox: Yes! You did all the scanning and the making it a pdf, and learning how to make a pdf small so people can download it, and putting it on our website, and all kinds of things that I find an-noy-ing!

James: And conducting this interview of course.

Fox: Of course. Next question.

Feelings, art and monsters

James: Well I was interested in exploring with you the links in our life between feelings, art, and monsters. I know you’ve been reflecting on that.

Fox: I have. It feels like we’ve been trying to do this project our whole life, and it involves going back towards these three things that were all kind of crushed in us.

James: Do go on.

Fox: Well we’ve written before about how we weren’t allowed ‘difficult’ feelings as a kid. People at home and school tried to train us out of them with punishments for unacceptable emotions, and rewards when we made it through the day or week without crying. That’s part of the reason that Robin and Morgan got disowned. They held all the least acceptable feelings: fear and anger, but also loneliness, sadness, jealousy, pride. All sorts.

James: Right. Our feelings get so unbearable during the years in our life when PTSD hits because we’re feeling all the things that were locked inside Robin and Morgan.

Fox: Feeling the feelings they held for us our whole life. That’s it. 

Another thing that got pushed out of us in a similar way when we were small was art. We LOVED drawing. We drew all of the time. Our bedroom wall was full of our pictures.  But gradually people around us tried to make us draw the kinds of things they wanted, and to draw in the ways they wanted us to.

James: For example?

Fox: Like being asked to draw pictures as a present for people’s birthdays. And they generally wanted things like landscapes or still lifes or whatever, which isn’t what we enjoyed drawing. Also when we did art at high school we were shocked because we had to draw things from real life rather than out of our imagination – as we’d always done before.

James: What did we enjoy drawing?

Fox: Mostly people and imaginary creatures. And we drew to tell stories from our fantasy life, or to get down feelings that we couldn’t talk about or express in other ways. But eventually we learnt that wasn’t how you were meant to do art.

James: So, not only were both feelings and artistic pursuits suppressed, but those two suppressions were also related. Losing the ability to draw from our imagination and feelings denied us an important outlet for emotions we weren’t supposed to have. How do monsters fit in?

Fox: Monsters feel like the third leg of the stool somehow. 

We were always fascinated by monsters. Our favourite TV shows as a kid were Rentaghost and Dramarama. Our favourite books were pop up ghost books. Later we read true haunting books over and over and over. We were addicted to Ghostbusters – one of the first movies we saw at the cinema. When we got to choose our own topic to do a project on at school we did dinosaurs every time.

James: We had a huge collection of plastic dinos too didn’t we?

Fox: Yes! Dimetrodon was my favourite dinosaur, but they don’t think Dimetrodon was a dinosaur any more!

James: This may be a tangent.

Fox: Heh. 

James: How did monsters relate to art and to feelings?

Fox: Well they relate to art because a lot of what we wanted to draw was mythical creatures like dragons. 

They relate to feelings because, when we reached double figures and things got really bad, we started reading authors like Stephen King, Dean Koontz and James Herbert. We thought that reading horror books would help us to be less scared in our real life – like maybe we could get used to facing frightening things by reading those books, and become braver.

James: And did our monster love get suppressed too?

Fox: I think so. We once tried to do a book review of a horror book in school and they didn’t like that. It wasn’t a proper book like the ones you were meant to read. When we studied psychology at university – and afterwards – we were always drawn to monster-y topics, like the paranormal, and why people do evil things, and the meaning of fairy tales. But those things were always looked down on as not proper, so we wound up doing our projects on other stuff – somehow making it acceptable.

James: And yet our PhD was on loneliness, our first paper was about goths and Pagans, and the first conference we organised was about vampires. We kept finding our way back to feelings and monsters didn’t we?

Fox: All the way through. Like we did the A levels that people said we should do, instead of the ones we really wanted to do (drawing and stories!) But we spent the whole summer after we finished those exams painting our room with a giant dragon, even though we were just about to move out of there. Then after our PhD we started writing fiction. We were going to do a whole collection of alternative fairy tales and take a creative writing course, but we didn’t get accepted. For a long time we’ve had an idea for a book called Everyday Horrors: a mash up of horror fic and self-help.

James: It seems like we’ve been trying to make Welcome Monster Feelings our whole life, and finally, we’re making it, now that we’re nearly fifty.

Fox: Speak for yourself old man!

James: *Grin* 

Reclaiming lost things

Fox: It’s like reclaiming isn’t it? By reclaiming art, and reclaiming monsters, we’re also reclaiming those feelings and the parts who hold them. No part gets left behind.

James: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And I suspect that many people have a similar history – at least with feelings and with art. The world, and the people around them, tell them that they mustn’t show their feelings, and that they ‘can’t draw’.

Fox: That’s why we love Lynda Barry, who we mention in the zines. She says that most kids just naturally tell stories with pictures, but then they get taught proper writing and proper drawing, and they lose all that. Her books and resources are all about getting it back, by playing with it, using wax crayons, drawing quickly, colouring in, that kind of thing. And lots of drawing from the imagination!

James: I notice that when we can allow you – Fox – to just draw from the feeling (with the odd bit of help from Google images to see what certain things look like) it just comes out looking right.

Fox: It’s amazing. Morgan is often sure there’s no way it’ll come out looking like we feel it, but it really does. It’s all about keeping it simple, not trying too hard, just getting the feeling down.

James: I think Lynda Barry is helping people get back to the child part of themselves who can draw that way, and tell stories too. The part like you that perhaps everyone has somewhere inside.

An early attempt to welcome monster feelings?

Fox: More questions please!

Inspirations

James: Well you’ve mentioned Lynda Barry. Can you say something about your other inspirations for this project?

Fox: I guess there are two kinds of inspirations: other people who’ve used monsters as a way of exploring feelings, and other people who have come up with practices for welcoming feelings. 

For the first one we’re super inspired by Pixar movies. They are something we watch a lot of because they are so gentle, and we generally need that in the evenings. Inside Out and Monsters Inc are the obvious ones, but lots of the Pixar shorts explore trauma and plurality too. Far From the Tree and Twenty Something are great examples.

We also recently watched the movie A Monster Calls, which is all about monsters and fairy tales as ways of dealing with huge tough feelings. Hannah Eaton’s graphic novel, Naming Monsters, is about that too.

We really love this Zen Pencils comic version of Rumi’s poem, The Guest House, by Gavin Aung Than. That poem captures the whole idea of welcoming feelings better than anything else, which is why we included it at the start of the zine.

James: What about the practices for welcoming feelings?

Fox: We wrote about focusing and Pema’s F.E.A.R. practices in our Staying With Feelings zine. Those are about feeling feelings in the body. Our therapist helped us towards the idea of visualising feelings. She suggested imagining the feeling you’re having as just one cell of the body, and picturing it outside of yourself, describing what it looks like: its colour, texture, that kind of thing. That helps it be more manageable – it’s not all of you, just one cell, and it’s outside of you so you can approach it curiously.

James: Externalising the feeling, so it doesn’t feel like all that you are and all that you’ll ever be, as traumatic feelings often feel.

Fox: Right. But cells aren’t much fun. I think that imagining feelings as monsters makes it more playful. And you can do with a bit of lightness and humour when you’re dealing with something that hard.

James: Agreed. And that makes it a bit more like the Tibetan demon feeding practice that we’ve written about before.

Fox: Except in that practice you don’t tend to draw the feelings. Lynda Barry adapts a Zen practice where you draw your demons in her comic One! Hundred! Demons!

James: It’s so cool that you’re now part of this group of comic and animation creators who’ve explored monsters in this kind of way.

Fox: I know, I love that. It’s what I’ve always wanted.

James: We found our long, slow way towards art, monsters, and feelings, didn’t we?

Fox: We sure did!

Monster feeling practice

James: I know that you’ve also made a companion zine called Welcoming Your Monster Feelings. Do you want to say something about that?

Fox: Yes. We wanted to find a way to share our practice with people, in case they might find making monsters about their feelings helpful too. We were going to finish the Welcome Monster Feelings zine with a few pages about how to do it. But our friend H said they thought we shouldn’t do that, because it should stand on its own as art!

James: What did you think about that?

Fox: I think they were right. Because we still struggle to see ourselves as someone who can legitimately draw pictures or tell stories, we often want to wrap those things up in a kind of self-help project, like we used to do with academic projects. Publishing Welcome Monster Feelings as a standalone book of our art felt really important. But we did still want to share the practice, so I made an extra little zine about that.

James: And do you describe your process in that zine?

Fox: Not exactly, because I know that not everybody will work the way that we do. The zine explores all kinds of different ways people might access their feelings and turn them into monsters, and the different reasons they might find that helpful.

James: Can you share a bit more about your process here then. That’s something people often want to know about artists.

Fox: Heh that still sounds funny – artist. What I do is I sit down, usually with Robin or Morgan. That means that we’re… what is it?

James: Co-conscious. That’s the word for when two parts of a plural system are foregrounded at the same time, like you and I are right now.

Fox: Cool. So the other part really tunes into their feeling, and kind of shows me and tells me what it’s like. Sometimes we feel it inside our body, and sometimes we have an image. Like that last feeling in the book from Morgan – we got a strong image of that classic Peanuts comic where Lucy pulls the ball away from Charlie Brown.

After they’ve shared the feeling, I find a way to turn it into a monster picture. And I draw, with a mechanical pencil, whatever comes out. I like to draw in this sketch book we got from WHSmiths, it has a hard cover so it looks like a proper book. And that means you can’t just rip out pages if you don’t like it. It feels important that we keep them all – however they come out. That’s part of the welcoming.

Once it feels like I’ve got the sketch right I go over the pencil lines with drawing pens. I like the ones that have several different sizes. Then I rub out the pencil lines, and we do the colouring in. That’s very soothing and often we do it together. I like these felt-tips which have a brush end and a fibre tip end. It feels good to use felt-tips because that’s more child-like than pastels or pencil crayons or paints I think. And I like the bright colours.

James: We might need to get you some more of those felt tips for your birthday. We’re close to using some of them up.

Fox: I’d like a bigger set because there’s only one grey and it doesn’t come out great on the scanner. There is a really big set you can get, just saying.

James: Heh, that is a whole lot of felt-tips. 

Trauma, shame and monster feeling practice

Fox: Can I ask you a question?

James: Unconventional, but fire ahead.

Fox: Well you’ve written a graphic guide about trauma and mental health, which goes pretty well with my zine, right?

James: I guess I was the main author of that one – on behalf of the whole system and what we’ve just been through. It’s like the grown up version of your zine in some ways – except not that grown up because it’s still a comic with lots of superhero references. Hopefully Jules will be illustrating that one this year and it’ll be out in 2023.

Fox: Grown up books take a lot longer it seems.

James: *grin* I do think they go well together though, you’re right. What was the question?

Fox: I wondered why you think monster feeling practice is so helpful, given all the stuff you’ve learnt about trauma.

James: Ah yes, I do have a few thoughts about that. One thing that we explore in the graphic guide is how trauma is often the result of violence combined with silence: painful things that happen to someone which aren’t heard or held by anyone around them. We realised that many of the things that help with mental health struggles – like meditation, therapy, or activism around social injustice – are about the opposite of violence and silence – they are about kindness and honesty. Make sense?

Fox: Kindness is the opposite of violence, and honesty is the opposite of silence.

James: Right. And drawing monster feelings is all about being more honest with ourselves about what our feelings actually are, and more kind around them – that gentle process of drawing them and colouring them in, and the whole idea of welcoming them rather than trying to eradicate them. 

Sharing those feelings with ourselves is also a great way to connect more with the different parts of us – to really hear what it’s like for them and to hold them in their tough places. 

Fox: The holding and hearing monster! Kind holding and hearing the truth.

James: Yes! The zine also helps us to connect with other people when they resonate with your drawings. That’s a way of healing the disconnection (with self, others, and the world) which lies at the heart of so much trauma.

Fox: But why is it so important for us to be able to feel the monster feelings? 

James: Ara and I explored this a bit last year in our Staying with the Big Feels blog post. One reason is that it’s hard for a person to be authentic – to be real about who and how they are – without all of their feelings. And it’s hard to have real intimacy – or good relationships – with other people too if you’re still hiding some of your feelings from yourself and/or from them. Being able to be yourself, and having good relationships, are both vital for mental and physical health.

Another thing is that the feelings that many people, including us, most often avoid or repress are the most vital for self-protection and for caring for others. Robin has held much of our fear, and Morgan much of our anger. We’ve realised recently how those feelings are so important for keeping ourselves safe-enough and for acting with integrity.

Fox: The integri-tree!

James: That’s right, you drew a few pictures relating to this. Robin’s fear of shame – when it isn’t unbearably intense – helps to guide us in what we take on, and what we don’t, recognising when other people are trying to pull us or push us into things, or when it’s coming from a dodgy motivation inside us. Morgan’s anger – when it isn’t twisted into confusion – helps us to state our needs and boundaries, as well as seeing other people more clearly. Your anger sunshine picture captured this beautifully.

Fox: Thank-you.

James: There’s lots more I could say about this, but the point is that without access to some of the supposedly ‘negative’ feelings, it’s very hard to empathise with others, to recognise danger, and to value ourselves equally with other people, rather than seeing ourselves as worse-than, or better-than.

Fox: For us it’s often worse-than. That’s why a lot of our pictures are about shame.

James: Mm, and it’s very common for shame to be at the heart of people’s tough feelings as Brené Brown has pointed out. We’ve been reading a lot about shame since we did a workshop on the topic last year, linked to the shame and medicine project. 

The book we’re reading right now says that it’s very hard to express shame verbally because it’s often non-conscious and not available to the language parts of the brain. So perhaps you’ve really hit on something with these drawings – giving us a way to communicate feelings that would be impossible to express in any other way.

Fox: Wow.

James: I know right? And it’s vital because so much of what people do that hurts them and others is an attempt to avoid painful feelings – particularly shame and the fear of shame. If we were able to get to a point where we were okay with all those feelings – where we could weather them, if not actively welcome them – then potentially we wouldn’t do those hurtful things. It’s a lifelong journey though, as Pema would say.

Fox: Life long, and many books of monster feelings!

Where next?

James: That’s a great segue to the final question I have for you. Where are you hoping to go next in your creative pursuits, now that you’ve got us here.

Fox: Well I’ve already started Welcome More Monster Feelings, so that we’ll keep going. Most of the monsters in the first book were Robin’s ones, partly because he was foregrounded for a lot of the time we were making it, and partly because Morgan initially didn’t want to do her feelings because she struggles so much not to be critical of them.

James: She really didn’t like the volcano drawing you made of her rage.

Fox: I knew that would happen! It’s the only one where the colours ran, and you can’t see the face very well. But then I did the one of her snake-eating-its-tail, and the sunshine anger, and she loved those, so I think she’s on board now. She has quite a few more monsters to share.

James: Anything else you want to do, or is it all monsters all of the time?

Fox: I would like to make more plural zines now that we all know each other better. I’ve started one about how people can learn to love their different parts, and there’s another one to do about how they can communicate better between them. 

But I also want to listen to H and do some more stuff that’s just about our own experiences – not trying to be a self-help thing. Maybe I could do more plural comics like the Chalk Board one. Also I think Morgan would love to write about our journey of embracing our inner critic, perhaps with fairy tales!

James: It would be great if she could feel free enough to create herself. She has such a powerful and tender voice when she can find it through all the horrors she’s experienced.

Fox: Totally.

James: Okay. Well thank-you very much for sharing some of your precious time with me today Fox, and for joining me at the keyboard instead of the sketchpad for once.

Fox: You are very welcome. I expect extra cuddles later.

James: You got it. And I hear there’s a new Ghostbusters movie…

Find out more

• For more on this topic check out our monsters and feelings zines, and our workbook with Alex Iantaffi, Hell Yeah Self Care.
• Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support our Patreon.
• Plural tag: This post was by Fox and James.

The post On monsters, emotions, and drawing: An interview with the artist behind the zine ‘Welcome Monster Feelings’ appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The team who brought you Staying With Feelings and Plural Selves, now brings you Welcome Monster Feelings – a zine of comics illustrating feelings as monsters – and Welcoming Your Monster Feelings – a zine about how to do the monster feelings practice (if you want to).

Here’s a taster…

You can download the zines on our zine page, or here.

Welcome Monster Feelings

Welcoming Your Monster Feelings

Coming soon! Interview with the artist.

The post New Zines! Welcome Monster Feelings! appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I was particularly struck by Pete’s idea that it could be valuable to reach a balance between these four different ways of being. None of them are intrinsically ‘bad’, but when we can only act from one end of either spectrum we are limited, and perhaps also more likely to become stuck in the ways of reactive thinking and behaviour which hurt ourselves and others. 

It seemed like a useful non-binary approach to ask how we might find a more both/and or in-between approach to fawn/fight and freeze/flight. From a plural perspective I have a great way into this because I can access four selves who map onto each of the four Fs. So I thought it’d be fun to put them into dialogue here to explain what each of the four Fs feels like, what their strengths and limitations are, and how they’re doing the work – now – of operating together to become more balanced.

I’ve written here about how a move from flight and fawn, towards freeze and fight, can represent a shift from being with the fear of making yourself into something for others, to the shame of being for yourself. I’m also struck how, for me, freeze to flight represents that kind of shift around work, and fawn to fight around personal relationships.

This post focuses on freeze and flight. You can find the other conversation – between fawn and fight – here. There’s also more from Max about the challenges of changing the Flight habit here.

Freeze and Flight (Max and Fox)

Max: Looks like we’re up first.

Fox: My first time writing on here as me!

Max: How’re you feeling?

Fox: Excited! How about you?

Max: Terrified, as usual. But I do think you and I have been doing some great work together. I like the idea of sharing that with other people in case it’s useful to them.

Fox: Shall we start by saying a bit about who we are?

Max: Sure, well in our inner landscape it feels like I have been at the front and you at the back for most of our lives right?

Fox: Yes because we learnt when we were young that flight was better than freeze. Flight is when you always go into doing mode, and freeze means you can just be. I guess we learnt from the world around us that we got most approval when we did well, worked hard, and achieved. And it wasn’t very valued to be in the moment, chill out, or play. Everything had to be done for a reason.

Max: Right. As trauma responses, people who flee – like me – try to act right away: do anything to sort it out and make it okay. People who freeze, like you, would go immobile, struggle to do anything at all, maybe hide away.

Fox: Mmhm. And as bigger life strategies, that could map onto what Brené Brown talks about as overfunctioning and underfunctioning. Overfunctioners throw themselves into work, have to be the best and succeed, don’t feel okay unless they’re producing something. Underfunctioners struggle with any of that stuff. They’re often scared of putting themselves out there in any way, and feel safer watching TV, reading books, playing computer games, that kind of thing. What’s it like being a flight type Max?

Flight potentials and pitfalls

Max: Right now I’m mostly in touch with how much it has hurt me over time. Looking back in my journals, the start of every summer of my adult life I made a list of all the things I felt I should achieve and produce over the vacation time. It’s exhausting just looking at them. My life was governed by alarms, to-do lists, and deadlines. I’m terrible at holidays: they stress me out. And life easily becomes a series of false hills. When you reach the top of one there’s always another stretching up above you. Ugh even when I actually go for a relaxing walk I have to get to the top of the hill!

Fox: Is there anything good about being a flight type: a flee-er?

Max: I guess I’ve always had a clear sense of purpose. I know people at the freeze end can really struggle with figuring out what they should do with their life. That’s never been a problem for me. And because I put my ‘flight’ instincts towards figuring out my struggles – learning and writing about love, sex, gender, and mental health from every angle – my doing mode has brought us to this point where we at least have a lot of knowledge and wisdom available to us.

Fox: As we go through a massive trauma time.

Max: Yep. I feel like – in a lot of ways – it was my way of being that put us here. My whole life I went so fast into everything with no spaciousness or slowness or caution, and got so badly hurt along the way. But at the same time I did also learn a lot of tools that help now that we are here. What about you though? What’s it like being a freeze?

Fox: It feels so funny because you’ve always struggled to understand people who default to underfunctioning rather than overfunctioning, and now we have a part of us who does that!

Freeze potentials and pitfalls

Max: I know, and one who is here more and more, thank goodness. We see you as the part of us that we were when we were very young: before all the messages about being good and productive kicked in, or even about needing to be a certain way for other people at all You seem so much more able than me to follow what you find fun or pleasurable.

Fox: I still feel like that little kid, even though I’m now in this older body with all the other occupants! It does almost feel like I went to sleep around 5 years old and just woke up a couple of years ago. I think we see me as like an animal or a child because I feel more free and wild. But I probably did pop up at times during our life, like when we just couldn’t overfunction any more – because things got so hard – so we lost ourselves in things like books or TV shows. But because it wasn’t very balanced, that kind of freeze wasn’t so good for us. It was about disappearing into fiction, fantasy, food: stuff that is comforting but isn’t great if you just lose yourself in it and then the world is still there when you’re done.

Max: Plus if your main strategy is flight, you can end up being really hard on yourself about the times when you do go into freeze. So the answer is not to eradicate flight and go all the way to freeze huh?

Fox: No because then we’d lose you, and you’re brilliant, and you got us here because of your survival strategy. In many ways you protected me and I’m so grateful for that.

Max: Thank-you littlest.

Fox: I think it’s about learning how to work together as a team. And I love that we’ve figured out that we’re two ends of a spectrum because it means that you and me are a team, and we didn’t realise that at first. It’s nice having a special relationship with you.

Max: I like it very much too. D’you want to say how it works?

Balancing flight and freeze

Fox: Yes. Well I think if you’ve been way, way, way towards one end of the spectrum most of your life then you probably need to swing to the other end for a while so each end becomes equally strong and forward. That’s what we’ve done anyway.

Max: With a certain amount of kicking and screaming from me!

Fox: Heh it’s not easy for you not being productive. But I think it helped you to see that when you pushed fast and forced yourself to work, in some ways you were hurting me – and all of the parts of us who don’t want to do things that way. 

Max: It was a lot about consent: realising I was being really non-consensual with myself, and other parts of us.

Fox: So now we try to really tune into where we’re at. And it often feels like I’m in charge at those moments because I find it easier to tune in, rather than just doing what you think we ‘should’ do.

Max: And we’ve definitely put you in charge of evenings and other relaxed time. You’re the guru of gentleness!

Fox: And we notice that when I have plenty of time at the front I don’t choose to just watch endless TV – although I do give us that if we’re really sick or struggling. Today I took us out to the rockpools. Often I do feel creative too. I’m just not doing it in order to produce something.

Max: Ugh tell people about the time you got me drawing.

Fox: Hehe that was so funny. I love Lynda Barry who is all about getting back to your child self who loved drawing and storytelling before they’d been told they weren’t doing it properly and all of that. So I got us all doing a Lynda Barry drawing exercise – drawing our monsters – and you found it So Hard. In the end we had to let you do yours in pencil first because you couldn’t handle it if it didn’t look good, even though it wasn’t for anybody else to see except us.

Max: Yep that’s me: Ms. Fun Sponge.

Fox: You’ve been getting much better lately though Max-y. You seem a lot more at peace than you were at the start of the year.

Max: I think I’ve learnt a lot from you. I see how much better everything feels when we flow with it rather than trying to force it. Some things we are doing less of, for sure, but I’m trying to see learning to treat ourselves in a more consensual and friendly way as our main job these days. So it’s okay to not be working on some big project right now. We are the big project. 

Paradox and balance

Max: I also notice paradoxes. All my life I had this holy grail of what kind of person I thought I could be – how productive – if I got up before 7. And I never managed to stick to it even with all the alarm clocks and stuff. You convinced me to finally stop setting an alarm.

Fox: And quite often these days we wake up around half past six!

Max: It’s wild. Also I have a sense that some of what we do produce – creatively – by waiting till it feels live and only going for it then, will be better quality than anything I ever produced from pushing it.

Fox: I guess this is an example. We’ll see what people think. It’s interesting that Lynda Barry, and Natalie Goldberg, and a lot of the people we’re working with as a writing mentor, also find that better writing and art come from a place of self-consent and going with what feels most alive and exciting. Audre Lorde talks about that too doesn’t she?

Max: Yes, we end up encouraging our clients not to write, and instead to focus on finding their younger parts – if they have them – who can still create from that place of delight and playfulness, not worrying about what it’s for, or whether it comes out ‘right’, or what other people will think. It can be intensely challenging though, can’t it, because it involves revealing our more fragile sides to ourselves, and potentially to others.

Fox: Something you particularly struggle with because you also tended to present yourself as bulletproof.

Max: It never felt safe enough for me to be open and vulnerable: I always felt I had to cover that stuff over. And creating in that way – this way – is vulnerable. It involves revealing our smaller, more fragile, sides to the world. Even ‘just being’ is vulnerable because it involves staying with the kinds of feelings I’ve always been running from by ‘doing’.

Fox: You’re doing great Max-y. It is a lot. Can I say something else?

Max: Of course.

Fox: I’m thinking… I’m good at being, but I’ve also made our ‘doing’ thing better. So I don’t reckon it’s just about balance in the sense that now we have me who can ‘be’ and you who can ‘do’; me who can be gentle and rest, you who can be strong and push forward. It’s more like we both become better at both. Like you can now be peaceful sometimes, and when you are ‘doing’ you can let it come as it wants to more easily. And I can now ‘do’ sometimes, in fact I’m really excited about the kinds of projects I might do, as well as helping us know when we need gentleness and what that might look like.

Max: That’s spot on Fox. Enough from us for now? Shall we give our fawn and fight some time to talk.

Fox: Oo yes I can’t wait for this one!

You can find the second part of this conversation – between fawn and fight – here. There’s also more from Max about the challenges of changing the Flight habit here.

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.

Plural tag: This post was written by Fox and Max.

The post Balancing fight, flight, freeze and fawn: A plural perspective 1 appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.