The interview covers:

• How developmental and cultural trauma impact our relationships
• How to interrupt trauma cycles and have healthier relationships
• The importance of honesty and kindness

The conference airs on July 21st to 27th. You can sign up for the conference from today, using this link.

The book is out now and you can order it here.

And this zine also covers some of these ideas around relationship struggles.

The post Reset Your Nervous System Super Conference appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is slow relating?

Ara: *smiles*

Tony: What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does slow relating work?

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

Ara: And why d’you think that is?

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

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

Tony: Well I definitely need slowness in complex conversations.

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

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

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

Tony: What are our examples of slow relating?

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

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

Tony: And a great podcast was born! 

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

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

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

Tony: Pray for us Saint George, yes please!

The risks of fastlove

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony: It’s not what I expected.

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

…

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

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

Slow relating and trauma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ara: What is it like Tony?

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

Ara: Good description.

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

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

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

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

Slow relating and access intimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slow relating and kindness

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

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

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

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

Tony: When might it be particularly important to slow down

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

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

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

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

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

Balancing slower and faster desires in relationships

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

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

Ara: I’ll take that compliment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Googles*

Oh looks like someone already thought of that.

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

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

The Slow Love Manifesto

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

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

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon.

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

The post Slow Relating appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The research on trauma and mental health suggests that a huge part of the way we generally got into them was non-consensual treatment at the hands of other people and/or the world around us. So whatever we do to recover, heal, or otherwise address our issues, it has to be done differently: from a place of consent, care and friendliness for ourselves instead of a place of fear, shame, and harshness.

The master’s tools

Audre Lorde famously wrote that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. This means that we can’t dismantle systems and structures of oppression using the same kinds of mechanisms and tools that were used to put them there in the first place. If we try to do it that way we generally re/create corrupt systems rather than finding our way to some genuine alternative. 

We can see many mental health struggles as a set of inner systems and structures which were put in place when we were treated non-consensually during our lives, often in childhood, but also through traumatic experiences which happened later on. Most of the main therapeutic approaches agree that when we’re taught that we have to be a certain way in order to receive care and protection – or to avoid punishment or rejection – we develop survival strategies in order to cope.

Trauma and survival strategies

It’s these survival strategies – in the form of habits and patterns like addictions and compulsions, fear and anxiety, depression and distancing, anger and acting out – which we end up addressing as adults, when we realise that they’ve become a problem. They may be rooted, for example, in physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect at home, in particular traumatic events that happened to us, in the discrimination and hatred we experienced due to being part of any marginalised group, and/or in being repeatedly sent back into unsafe situations such as bullying or otherwise hostile school environments.

In our current culture few of us escape such experiences entirely. Few girls reach adulthood without experiences of sexual harassment and assualt and without learning the ways they will be denied agency and regarded as second class citizens throughout their lives. If you are part of an oppressed group you will soon come to realise how differently you are treated: how your body, labour and life are valued less. School is a pretty non-consensual situation for even those who escape the more obvious forms of trauma there, much of which is normalised. Most families pass on messages that children should override their self-consent in order to conform to normality, hide their feelings and/or meet others’ expectations. 

All of this occurs within a wider culture which rests on teaching people that they are lacking and should be different to how they are in order to ensure docile and productive citizens, and in order to sell everything from drugs to diets, fast food to fashion, soft drinks to spirituality.

Treating ourselves non-consensually in the name of recovery

The problem is that – once we become aware of our mental health struggles, our habitual patterns, or our unhelpful survival strategies – the way we go about trying to address them often mirrors the very way they were put there in the first place. We try to fix ourselves, we push ourselves too far too fast, and we force ourselves to do all the things we’ve been told will help, punishing ourselves we don’t find ourselves improving as quickly as we felt that we should.

This has been brought home to me recently in a few ways. I’ll share my own experiences here and then give a few further examples where this might apply.

Trauma work

First I’ve been struggling particularly in the last year or so with what I’ve learnt are called emotional flashbacks: quick plummets into fear and shame which result in feeling very small, fragile and incapable of anything. I realise I’ve experienced these at greater or lesser intensity throughout my life, but the literature on cPTSD has helped me put a label to them. After reading a few books on trauma I fixed onto an idea – also common to many schools of therapy – that it could be useful to use current triggering experiences to connect back to earlier memories of traumatic events, and to revisit those in some way to loosen their grip.

Being somebody whose survival strategy tends towards the overfunctioning end of the spectrum, I grasped this idea and ran with it. One day, for example, I decided to write down all the traumatic memories I could think of in order to start revisiting them as a regular practice. Needless to say the result of this was not in any way pretty. I’m learning that the only way to do this kind of work is slowly and gently. If you try to push through, or force it, you end up retraumatising yourself and doing nothing to loosen the grip of the habits you’ve developed in order to survive.

Mindfulness

Another example is mindfulness. As regular readers will be aware, I’ve always been skeptical of the mindfulness movement from a social justice perspective, and a lot of my work involves attempting to weave Buddhist thinking and practices together with social understanding and engagement. 

However, I definitely bought the Buddhist mindfulness idea that it was generally a good idea to put time aside every day to sit, to notice your thoughts, and to keep bringing yourself back to the present. I figured that should be helpful to enable me to become more present to everyday life, to learn how not to get carried away into reactivity when hard stuff happens, and to notice forms of oppression acting through me and working to dismantle those as much as is possible.

What I actually found was that my fifteen minute meditation at the start of every day ranged from – at best – sitting with my noisy mind carrying me away for fifteen minutes and feeling a bit bad that I hadn’t come back to the present at all by the end to – at worst – taking a fifteen minute journey into precisely how bad I felt about myself.

I’m now reading an awesome book by David A. Treleavan called Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness which brings mindfulness into dialogue with trauma-informed therapy and social justice. It’s helped me to make sense of these meditation experiences. As someone with regularly recurring cPTSD symptoms, meditation like this can be counterproductive unless engaged with in a trauma-informed way. In fact many – if not most – people experience some mild to major re-traumatising when they try to just sit with themselves without having any awareness of how trauma works. In pushing myself to meditate every day like this, with the idea that it must be good for me, I think I’ve been making things worse, and certainly not better.

Staying with feelings

A final example is staying with feelings: something that I’ve always been a big advocate of, as you can tell from my zine of this name. But engaging with the work of blogger and trauma-informed counsellor Love Uncommon showed me a vital missing piece of these practices. It’s only a good idea to stay with your feelings when they are in the manageable range. When they have reached a high intensity – or tipped into reactivity – then it is far more helpful to soothe yourself until they are manageable again. As with the other points, trying to stay with feelings when they are overwhelming is often retraumatising and unhelpful, making the feelings more scary and harder to stay with, rather than less so.

A similar thing is true for conflict and staying with each other’s feelings. A lot of people have the sense that the best thing to do in conflict is to stay and hash it out. But if any of the people involved has tipped into high intensity reactivity – or a trauma response – then that is a really bad idea. Far better to take time out, self-soothe, and cool down, perhaps making a time to return to whatever the conflict was about when everyone is in a good place to do so. Staying when one or more of you is in a place of trauma is again a recipe for retraumatising yourselves, acting out your survival strategies in ways that tighten rather than loosening them, and making further painful conflict between you more, rather than less, likely over time.

Other examples

Other examples where people often take a non-self-consensual approach to addressing their mental health struggles would include forcing yourself to go to a form of therapy or support that doesn’t feel right for you, staying with a therapist who doesn’t feel good, insisting to yourself that you must ‘be better’ by a certain point, anything which rests on the idea of ‘pulling your socks up’ or ‘getting over it’, and engaging in any form of self-help which is based on the idea that you are broken and need fixing rather than that you are okay as you are and deserve support. 

I’ve also had some interesting conversations with people recently who’re moving away from abstinence and restriction approaches to addressing addiction, self-harm and self-soothing to models where you allow yourself all the things you want, but engage with them consciously and intentionally with curiosity. One person said that any habit that harms us is oppression acting through us, so we cannot and must not respond with further self-harm and oppression.

It may seem paradoxical that some people experience way more radical shifts when they move towards the latter model, but it makes sense from the perspective that progress is only possible when we stop treating ourselves in the way that put the survival strategies or unhelpful habits there in the first place.

The role of fear and shame

Another part of this clicked for me after reading Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD (yes I am becoming a trauma nerd). He puts a lot of emphasis on the fear/shame feeling combo as being the key feature of emotional flashback and also – I realise now – a low level everyday backdrop to life for most of us with these kinds of past experiences.

Related to the idea that we can’t help ourselves using the same non-consensual approaches that hurt is in the first place, is the idea that fear and shame will not get us out of fear and shame. When we’re struggling we often try this kind of approach. We feel that we are bad people for struggling in these ways so we try to shame ourselves into addressing them or sorting ourselves out. We try to frighten ourselves into action by pointing out all the terrible things that might happen if we continue to employ our survival strategies.

There’s a whole additional post to be written about how fear and shame-based strategies don’t work for changing other people’s behaviour in a world where these seem to be the go-to strategies everywhere. Justin and I recently podcasted about this in relation to the fearmongering and shaming responses we’re seeing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fear and shame tend to make people frightened and defensive, and therefore more – rather than less – likely keep right on doing the things you don’t want them to do. The same is true with ourselves when we’re struggling. Like what could be a worse strategy for trying to cure ourselves from fear and shame than giving ourselves a load of fear and shame about our fear and shame. Think about it.

So what can we do?

So what I’m saying here is that if we treat ourselves in the ways that put our survival strategies, habits, or stuck patterns there in the first place this will solidify and tighten them, rather than dissolving or loosening them. 

What is the alternative? Well it is a massive challenge within our current cultural context because it involves us treating ourselves – and each other – in the radically different ways which intersectional feminists from Audre Lorde onwards have been encouraging us to do: valuing ourselves and others equally, practicing self-care, sitting with the places in which we are oppressed and victimised and the places where we oppress or hurt others. 

Such thinkers also point out that individual and systemic shifts need to happen alongside each other, given our interdependence. It’s hard – if not impossible – for individuals to change their inner landscape if the non-consensual outer landscape remains the same, and the idea that we should be able to do so harms us more. Engaging with others to share our experiences and work collectively is vital if possible.

For me a key starting point is self-consent. I’m trying to slow down my everyday life sufficiently to notice every time I’m drawn to override my self-consent. This is proving easier to notice now that many attempts to do so result in an emotional flashback plummet into fear/shame (trauma humour). But I’m also trying to notice the micro-moments of overriding my consent, the flickers of fear/shame that come up when I do that. I try to pay attention to what happened to elicit that response, to bring self-compassion to the situation to understand why that was my response, and to consider ways in which I might engage with whatever happened differently, in ways that don’t override my self-consent.

Slowness is another key here. This just can’t be done fast. Speeding up inevitably involves pushing through and getting overwhelmed. It’s helpful to tune into when I’m stepping out of my comfort zone into my stretch zone, and ensuring that I pull back into the comfort zone before I hit overwhelm. I was having a lot of quiet nights in before they became the default.

If fear and shame are a big part of the problem, then the solution is the opposite: cultivating protection and care to counter the fear and shame. Pete Walker talks about reparenting yourself and reparenting by committee. Other authors talk about cultivating a compassionate witness within yourself or befriending yourself, often alongside receiving a safe-enough and kind-enough therapeutic relationship to model what this might be like. 

I’ll be writing more about how I’ve gone about this from a plural perspective, but basically it’s anything you can do to be kind and protective towards yourself rather than shaming or frightening yourself, and to treat yourself consensually instead of non-consensually. 

Useful questions to ask yourself are: ‘what do I usually/habitually do under these circumstances?’ and ‘what would the opposite of that look like?’ You may find that there are several different ‘opposite’ options to play with. They may also be the ‘opposite’ of the experiences that resulted in your stuck patterns or survival strategies.

At this point you can bring those other practices back in. For me it’s not about stopping addressing traumatic memories, meditating, or trying to stay with my feelings. All those practices are immensely valuable, but only if done consensually, gently, gradually, and in ways that feel good rather than bad, and stretching rather than overwhelming.

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 Beastie.

The post The master’s tools and mental health: We can’t get out of our struggles the same way we got into them appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Kindness / honesty

The second tension which emerged, for me, over the weekend was perhaps less explicit than the other one, and harder to capture. It is about whether we prioritise kindness or honesty in our interactions with others (and with ourselves).

Of course, again, these categories are not mutually exclusive. Indeed one understanding of mindfulness could be as a form of kind honesty, or honest kindness. It is not there in the early Buddhist definitions of mindfulness, which focus on open attention (which could, perhaps, be viewed as a form of honesty with ourselves), but recent western mindful therapies – for example – often bring together concepts of awareness with those of compassion or acceptance. And the kind of awareness which is advocated in mindful meditation, more broadly, is a gentle or kind one. For example, when we meditate we are encouraged to be aware of the thoughts and feelings that bubble up, but not to become too attached to them. However, we are also not meant to squash them or try to eradicate them. Rather the aim is to be compassionately aware of them, and to gently bring our attention back to our breath or other focus of meditation. This kind of practice reminds us of the sorts of stories and habits that we can get easily become caught up in.

When it comes to our interactions with others it seems that a prioritising of kindness can take us away from being honest, and a prioritising of honesty can take us away from being kind. For example, a mindfulness activity which I brought to the weekend (based on some writing I’ve been doing with Jamie Heckert) was about two different common strategies for dealing with situations of conflict where one person or group has more power than the other because of their social status. One of these strategies focuses more on kindness, where we try to compassionately understand where ourselves, and the other people, are coming from in the conflict and focus on reaching an understanding, being gentler with each other, and perhaps forgiving and accepting. The other strategy focuses more on honesty, where we look at what is going on in the conflict (perhaps explicitly and implicitly) and we name it publicly, drawing attention to the power dynamics which are at play and the privileges which one person or group has which means that their voice may be more heard than the others.

As I see it now, the dangers are that kindness-focused strategies may fall into ‘niceness’, whilst honesty-focused strategies may fall into ‘rudeness’.

When we are trying so hard to be kind that we prioritise compassion over honesty, we may find ourselves ignoring or avoiding tensions which are there in order that everybody gets along. We might fail to see the power dynamics and marginalisations that are happening because we do not want to have to face difficult conversations, or even irresolvable conflicts. We might lose our critical awareness of the complexities of the situation, and the differences between us, in a comforting sense of our shared humanity and connection which may well not be there for everybody. We might find ourselves accepting what we take for granted rather than questioning it in a critical way. In our attempts to be kind we might end up causing harm as we silence some voices and flatten the hierarchies that exist. If our aim is to increase kindness in the world, we may find ourselves doing the exact opposite as people feel even more hurt and raw and less inclined to engage with one another, or we ourselves behave passively-aggressively because we are suppressing any difficult feelings.

When we are trying so hard to be honest that we prioritise awareness over kindness, on a very practical level we may find that others are unable to hear what we have to say. The privileges, oppressions and power dynamics which we clearly see, and the problematic behaviours which we want to highlight, may well be so hard for others to own up to that they just respond defensively and shut down. This may particularly be the case if we communicate with them in an accusing or insistent way which doesn’t include listening to their perspective at all. If our aim is to improve awareness and to encourage honest exchange, we may do the exact opposite as people feel far too unsafe to speak openly, and put up their defences such that it becomes even harder for them to see the problematic things that they are doing. It may be much easier for them just to dismiss us as rude people, or over-the-top activists, and walk away from the exchange. We may, ourselves, become so aggressive in our manner that others are scared or hurt by the exchange, meaning that we are perpetuating the very violence which we were trying to address.

There is a danger, in mindfulness, that we prioritise compassion to such an extent that we close down debate and difference and – unwittingly perhaps – prevent ourselves from seeing some of the problems that we are so keen to address. There is a danger, for those of us who are critically socially engaged, that we fall into judgement of others and shoring up our own sense of ‘rightness’. Without compassion we may be unable to see our own potential for harming others (because it is too hard to face when we aren’t being kind), or the personal and painful reasons which may lie behind other people’s actions.

Perhaps this is social mindfulness: the attempt to be honestly kind, compassionately critical, and gently aware.

Where is the social?

I hope that these explorations may go some way to answering my colleague’s question about ‘where is the social’ in mindfulness. To summarise, I think it is (or can be) in there in the following ways, and probably many more:

• In recognising the inherent socialness even of our very internal experiences: the ways our interactions with other people throughout our lives have shaped who and how we are, and how much of our internal life is devoted to our interactions with others and the wider world.
• In employing meditation, and other practices, to ‘swim against the stream’ – noticing how wider assumptions and accepted behaviours operate through us, and committing to do otherwise.
• In mindfulness as a methodology – individually and in group processes – for understanding the complexities of how social aspects such as power and privilege operate through us.
• In mindfulness practices which are explicitly social. One example would be writing about how we, ourselves, experience being on two sides of an opposition (for example when we feel marginalised, or when we marginalise others), in order to understand the other perspective better. Another would be mindful dialogue, when we have conversations with the explicit intention of listening, hearing the other, and being aware of what we bring to the situation. A further example is in ways of making people’s stories available in ways which illuminate what their lives are like within the current social context (e.g. of healthcare systems, or global politics).
• In ‘retreating’ in ways which leave us more able then to engage, rather than feeling too ragged ourselves to intervene in ways which may be useful to others.
• In using mindfulness to bring an ethics to our work on social issues which might mean that we make more of a difference, because we understand better how to communicate what we are saying in ways which can be heard and acted upon by others.

Find out more:

I’ve written another post on kindness and honesty here.

• Thich Nhat Hanh‘s community of interbeingrepresents one very social version of mindfulness.
• Gregory Kramer’s ‘insight dialogue‘ is an example of a social mindfulness practice.
• Steven and Martine Batchelor’s website is another interesting way into mindfulness which considers many of these issues.

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Collaborative relationship therapy

The approach is the ‘collaborative couple therapy’ of Daniel B. Wile, a US therapist. You can read all about it on Dan’s website here. Personally I prefer the term ‘relationship therapy’ to ‘couple therapy’ as it recognises that not all relationships are couple relationships.

Dan’s first idea is that the aim, in relationship therapy, should be to ‘solve the moment, not the problem’. This takes the pressure off trying to fix the whole – often seemingly overwhelming – difficulty that people are having. Instead, the emphasis is placed on addressing each interaction that comes up as something that can be ‘solved’, or engaged with more helpfully. Dan shares my view that conflict isn’t a problem in relationships: it is inevitable, and it can be helpful depending on how we engage with it.

Practicing this ‘solving the moment’ approach again and again means that another way of addressing issues becomes more and more available to the people in the relationship. They will also come to understand each other better in ways that will no doubt be helpful in addressing whatever they are struggling with.

The ‘moment’ is solved in the following ways:

• The therapist regains empathy
• The relationship regains connection
• The individuals in the relationship regain their voices

Dan’s idea is that, when we have a conflict, we generally do not voice our real feelings about the matter. These often feel too vulnerable and exposing to express; and perhaps they are too difficult to identify in the heat of the moment; and we have deeply embedded habits which lead us to respond in ways other than opening up.

Instead we retreat to fallback measures which save us from voicing our feelings. The two most common are blame and withdrawal. Either we lash out and attack the other person for causing the problem, or we withdraw into ourselves and close off. Dan lists a further fallback measure where people rush to fix the situation in ways that don’t address the feelings involved.

So, for example, if we’re having an argument with a partner or housemate about who does the washing up, our underlying feeling might be of being taken for granted and devalued each time they ignore the pile of washing up: maybe they really don’t care about us. However, rather than voicing this we are likely either to blame them (lashing out at them for being lazy), to withdraw (retreating from the painful conversation and just not saying anything in future despite being upset about it), and/or rush to fix (apologising for arguing with them and suggesting we watch a movie together or something). Similarly they may well not voice the feeling they have of guilt and embarrassment at being called on their, rather entitled, behaviour. Instead they respond with blame (attacking us for making a big deal out of something so trivial), withdrawal (going quiet or leaving the room), and/or rushing to fix (giving us a bunch of flowers the next day).

In these ways we tend to get into adversarial cycles (where we blame each other, and this escalates), or withdrawn cycles (where we avoid conflicts and resentment festers). Dan’s idea is to shift such cycles into collaborative cycles through enabling people to recover from fallback measures and voice their real feelings: confiding in each other.

This is the point at which I think it gets profound. Dan notices that, as a therapist, his empathy for one or other person tends to drop when they retreat into fallback measures. At the moment when somebody starts blaming, going quiet, or trying to placate their partner, for example, he often finds himself judging them for how stupid or unhelpful they’re being. His experience as a relationship therapist has taught him that it is in those very moments that he needs to find his empathy for that person – by recognising that they are falling back on those measures in order to defend their vulnerability. His method then is to go alongside the partner for whom he has lost empathy and to voice his hunch about what their real feeling might be, to help them to voice it themselves.

Once such feelings are voiced, the other person often softens and as able to connect with them better, and perhaps to voice their own feelings. However, as we all know, the exchange easily drops back into fallback measures of blame or withdrawal. This is where Dan returns to the idea of ‘solving the moment’. One moment has been solved, now we’re onto the next moment and a new challenge to solve.

Implications

For me there is so much of use in this approach, not only as a therapist but in my own conflicts in all kinds of relationships, and in the wider conflicts that often bubble up in groups or communities.

First the idea of aiming to ‘solve the moment’ rather than ‘solving the problem’ is useful. We can get so tangled up and overwhelmed by all of the history and complexity in play when we conflict, especially with people or groups which we have had long relationships with. The idea that each moment ‘solved’ has cultivated our capacity to engage with each other a little more helpfully next time is a good way of taking the pressure off. Also I like the redefining of the word ‘solved’ as meaning finding a connection and hearing each other, rather than resolving our differences or getting rid of the conflict. That seems a lot more respectful of the inevitable differences and tensions that exist between people and groups.

Secondly, the idea that we fall back into patterns of blame and/or withdrawal when we feel vulnerable resonates with me. So many times a day I notice that I start to become bothered and my reflex reaction is to find someone or something to pin it on, or to find ways to avoid the difficult feelings (for example, by trying to distract myself or by rushing to some kind of quick fix). Dan’s approach reminds me of how useful it can be to notice those patterns kicking in and, instead, to try to stay with the difficult feeling. I can aim to refrain from acting, or withdrawing, until I have a better understanding, and then to try to voice that understanding (to myself and/or to others concerned). Obviously this is extremely difficult and we are likely to fall back into habitual measures time and time again, but we can try not to beat ourselves up for this, and to regard each time that we manage the different approach as cultivating it in a way which will make it slightly easier the next time.

Finally, Dan’s approach alerts me to the possibility that the very moments when I find it hardest to empathise with others are the very moments in which empathy is most required, and most helpful. When somebody attacks me, or withdraws from me, I generally want to blame them or to withdraw from them myself. And such responses are easy because I have good justification. Everyone agrees with me that the other person was out of line, so I am supported in lashing out or complaining about them, or in deciding to cease engaging with somebody so painful, or in trying to insist on that the situation which is hurting me so badly gets fixed immediately.

But all those responses exacerbate the situation, hurting both me and them in the process. As Dan so wisely puts it ‘if you can’t turn your partner into an ally, you are stuck with turning your partner into an enemy or a stranger’. The approaches of blame and withdrawal just leave us – and them – with more and more enemies and strangers in our lives.

So perhaps – again probably only occasionally at first – we can start to notice those moments when somebody attacks us or withdraws from us as moments requiring of empathy, assuming that it has tapped into something so vulnerable for that person that they’ve had to reach for a fallback measure. Dan repeats the famous quote from Philo of Alexandria here: ‘be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle’.

Instead of rushing to defend ourselves, perhaps we can attempt to at least imagine what might have been triggered in the other person, using our own desire to defend, withdraw, or fix, as a way into connecting with them rather than disconnecting. Again the aim here is not to smooth over conflict, to deny difference, or to get rid of difficult feelings that may be present. Rather it is to ‘solve the moment’ by turning it into a moment of potential connection and empathy where we have voiced our own vulnerability, and have opened up space – if possible – for the other to voice their’s (if they are in a place where it is possible for them to do so).

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Lately, however, it seems to me that kindness and honesty are more inextricably linked than I previously thought. It struck me that kindness without honesty is not really kindness, and that honesty without kindness is not really honesty. So whether we are somebody who – in life – prides ourselves on our openness and straightforwardness, or on our compassion and generosity, we have to engage seriously with the other aspect in order to be truly as we are aiming to be (honest, or kind, respectively).

Kindness without honesty is not kindness

The first one is, perhaps, the easier to explain. If we are keen to be good for the people in our lives, and if we strive not to harm anybody, we may find ourselves sacrificing honesty for kindness. We pick up on what people around us seem to want from us and try to provide that for them, whether or not it fits with us.

So, for example, we might take on more work than we can comfortably manage in order to help others, claiming that we’re fine. We might say that we feel more for somebody than we actually do in order to make them feel good. In a conflict we might lie about what we find difficult about somebody in order to save them pain.

These are all examples of kindness without honesty, and they all frequently backfire.

Working too hard without taking time to look after ourselves often results in us working less well and/or eventually having to stop suddenly because we simply can’t keep it up. Such a situation is usually worse for the people around us than if we had been honest about the load we could reasonably commit to in the first place, or if we had said as soon as it was becoming difficult.

Similarly if we offer too much to people in our lives and then don’t follow through on that, they are left confused and hurt. If we keep trying to give what we have offered (in terms of time, emotion, or commitment) even when we don’t really have it, people generally pick up on this, or we end up so resentful that we pull away from them completely.

Finally, if we are never honest about our experience of other people because we want to save their feelings, we prevent them from learning things that may help them in the long term. Or perhaps we ensure that – when somebody does tell them – it is in a less supportive and helpful way which may be too painful for them to be able to hear.

So aiming to be kind rather than honest often ends up being unkind. Real kindness requires us to be honest with both ourselves and others, even if that is painful and hard.

Honesty without kindness is not honesty

This one is a little more difficult to explain and I am still working it through it myself. I think that if we are honest with somebody without thinking compassionately about that person than we are not being fully honest with ourselves, or with them.

So, for example, we might honestly tell somebody who we are struggling with that they are stupid, or lazy, or annoying.  But it is not really honesty if we only see part of the picture and fix that as the truth. Full honesty involves seeing the way the person is being, but also having the imagination to understand the reasons why that might be the case. It also involves honestly looking at our own behaviour and how what has happened emerges from the exchange between us rather than being a matter of isolated individuals who could have internal characteristics such as stupidity, laziness, or annoyingness. Finally, full honesty requires us to see the whole person, rather than only the part of them that we are currently focusing on.

Bringing honesty together with kindness helps us to do all these things. Kindness encourages us to ask ‘what might be going on for this person that they are behaving like this?’, starting from the assumption that it makes sense rather than seeing them just from the self-centred point of view of our own desires and how they are blocking these. Kindness to ourselves enables us to look honestly at what we bring to the situation, without being overwhelmed by  guilt and shame when we realise that we are also being imperfect people and contributing to conflict, confusion and pain. Finally, kindness opens us up to other aspects of the person – particularly the ones that are impressive – when our attention is in danger of being fixed on ‘negative aspects’. It allows us to see that what we are finding difficult may well be inextricably connected to things that we find valuable about this person (stubborness and being committed, for example, or flakiness and being easygoing).

Honesty plus kindness helps us to see more clearly – indeed honestly – the vulnerability which we all share which underlies much of our behaviour. Then, instead of moments of conflict making us feel disconnected, isolated and alienated, they actually have the potential to connect us more fundamentally, as we recognise the familiar fears and dreads, hopes and desires, that drives the very behaviours that we are finding so difficult. But we need at least a little kindness to cut through the sense that we are up against a bad, blameworthy, inexplicable individual who is just getting in our way.

Honesty, without the kind recognition that we are all suffering and defending ourselves against suffering, is not really honesty.

Find out more…

There’s more about conflict in my books Rewriting the Rules and The Secrets of Enduring Love

If you enjoyed this, you might also like my zines, Staying with Feelings and Plural Selves.

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