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.

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

Staying with the Big Feels Theory

James: Hey Ara, a first time for us I think.

Ara: The inner parents blogging together at last.

James: That’s one way to see us. I’m increasingly preferring ‘containing parts’ to ‘parents’ though. For one, we have three such parts rather than two, and for another I’m pretty sure Beastie would question a hierarchical parent/child model, or a normative internal nuclear family model, as a useful basis for anything.

Ara: I imagine she would. In your previous posts with her she pointed out that all parts of us are capable of containing others at times, and all parts struggle at times. That’s important. However there is a sense in us that we have four parts who hold a lot of trauma from our past, and who have been running the show for much of our life – whether more foregrounded or more in the background. That’s Max, Tony, Beastie and Jonathan. Now we also have access to three parts – you, me and Fox – who feel less impacted by the past, and more able to care for, and protect, the others in the present.

James: I think that you and I are still finding our way too: to who we can be in our inner and outer world. Perhaps that’s another blog post. In this one we want to focus on staying with intense emotions.

Ara: We wanted to write this one together because we have been the parts who have done most of the work of containing the other parts through such feelings over the last six months or so – since we last wrote the previous plural blog posts.

James: This is an update on what’s happened during that period, in a way.

Ara: What we’ve learnt during that time. 

All The Feels

James: Let’s start with what happened last August: it feels pivotal.

Ara: Good plan.

James: It amuses us now – when we can take a big perspective on it – that we wrote that Staying with Feelings zine back in 2016. Back then we thought we had a pretty good handle on being up for feeling our difficult emotions – and some great practices for doing so – which we shared in that zine. We had no idea what was coming!

Ara: Everything that we put in that zine still holds though. I don’t want to dismiss how well that version of us back then – mostly Max – was doing: finding ways to stay with feelings at all. And in many ways what we’ve done this past few months builds on the basic ideas in that zine.

1. The evidence is clear that people do best – in terms of mental and physical health – when they can tune into their bodies and feel their feelings, and live their lives on the basis of that self-awareness: expressing their needs, desires, boundaries, and so on.
2. Most of us struggle to do this because our culture discourages any experience or expression of emotions, particularly ‘negative feelings’, and because traumatic experiences growing up give us the message that such feelings are unsafe to express, or even to feel.
3. In order to address this, we can learn practices – like focusing and forms of meditation – which explicitly involve tuning into our feelings, welcoming them, and learning what they have to tell us.

James: This hits very personally for us. Pretty much everybody receives the message  – from the world around them, and in close relationships – that certain feelings aren’t acceptable. But for us – growing up in the 70s – we received specific behavioural training from teachers and caregivers to try to condition us out of crying. There was a strong sense that it was vital to control your emotions and to disallow the ‘difficult’ ones. The message that sadness, fear, and anger, in particular, were unacceptable was very strong. We wrote about that in the emotions chapter of Life Isn’t Binary.

Ara: That’s why we ‘re so grateful for the Pixar movie Inside Out. It shows vividly what happens to a person when there’s an attempt to eradicate any of their core emotions. They become unbalanced when only certain emotions run the show, and eventually end up numb and grey with little access to feelings at all. 

There’s a sense of an inauthentic version of yourself operating in order to survive in a world where it doesn’t feel safe to show how you really feel; to the point that you don’t even know that there is more to you than that, or that those emotions still exist inside you somewhere.

James: We still can’t handle the scene when goofball island collapses.

Ara: In many ways you could see our process in the last few years as one of welcoming back in those core feelings – and the parts who hold them – and beginning to reshape our inner landscape with all present, and working together as a team.

James: Return to goofball island!

Ara: We feel that sometimes for sure. But we were going to start with last August…

James: Right, so I think that prior to that we had thought that we were pretty good at staying with the feelings. But in 2019 things fell apart for us – bringing us back up against a lot of the most painful times of our life which I think we hadn’t really felt at the time. Pandemic saw us locked in with all of those memories, and gradually the really big feels returned.

Ara: I see it in two ways simultaneously James. 

James: Of course you do, you’re all about the non-binary thinking *smiles*

Ara: We can tell the trauma story where we went through a series of events so confronting that we finally had to feel all of the times in our life which those events re-awoke in us. We can also tell a healing story where we were on a journey – for the last few years up till now – towards greater self awareness, more embodied practices, and sharing more vulnerably in relationships. 

It feels like it was both simultaneously. Deliberately opening up space enabled us to feel what happened to us more deeply. Feeling it so deeply enabled us to finally make those connections through the events of our life and to learn how to welcome the various parts of us – and their feelings – more fully.

James: It’s like our experience of the lockdown, that bothness. Was pandemic the final retraumatising experience that cracked the whole thing open, or was it the situation which gave us the space and solitude we needed to finally do this work? Probably both.

Ara: So to August.

James: In August we found ourselves in the grip of one of our regular bouts of post-viral chronic fatigue. It was one of the hottest weeks of the year and we were experiencing pain throughout our body, exhaustion, fever, vertigo… Somehow it felt like the final straw and suddenly all four traumatised parts of us were feeling their feelings turned up to eleven, as if our whole life finally caught up with them. It was a lot to hold. It honestly felt like we were two parents – also with sick bodies! – trying to juggle four sick screaming children during a heatwave.

Ara: And again with the bothness. Before that point we had not had a consistent sense of our presence had we James: you and me I mean?

James: Since then there hasn’t been a single time where we haven’t been accessible to the rest of them when they’ve needed us, and we are a lot more present in our everyday life. Like much of the day it feels like one of us is around, generally with one of the others either getting on with life, or caring for them.

Ara: It’s as if that week demanded us to come forward more fully because the need was finally clear. Or was it that we’d finally brought us forward enough that all parts of us finally felt able to express those long-hidden feelings? 

James: Mm I hadn’t seen it that way before.

Separating out the feels

Ara: Shall we talk about separating out the feelings next?

James: Sure, because one reason that week was so challenging was that they were feeling the feelings of our various parts all mixed together. It was really confusing. Back then we weren’t completely clear on who felt what, so we were working with a huge tangled mass of emotion, and it was loud!

Ara: This is one reason that parts work is so valuable. The more fully that we can get to know the individual parts of us, the more quickly we can locate a feeling in the part who is feeling it and work with it, perhaps at the flicker stage rather than it becoming a fire. Or even if it kicks off as a full blaze, we know who is blazing, and the kind of thing that generally helps them when they’re struggling like that. 

As Janina Fisher says, for everybody it can be more helpful to say ‘a part of me feels…’ than ‘I feel…’ because that enables it to be held rather than taking over. Also it allows for contradictory feelings to be present, rather than the common view that it’s not okay – even crazy – to have both desire for something and fear of it, or both anger at someone and yearning for them, for example. 

Even if people don’t experience themselves as vividly plural, as we did, they could use the Inside Out metaphor of imagining the different emotions as different characters in their bodymind.

James: That separating out the feelings is one of the biggest shifts I’ve noticed since last summer Ara. That sense of more clarity. ‘Oh that feeling is around, that belongs to Jonathan, let’s go check out how he’s doing before we do anything else.’

Ara: Absolutely. I would say that identifying feelings where they reside, and a radically inclusive commitment to welcoming all of them, are the two biggest shifts we’ve made. We may not always know what parts need, and we may still feel that resistance in them to bringing their feelings forward. But we generally have that clarity about whose feelings they are, and we have a pervading understanding that everything is welcome: However we feel is okay, not a problem to be fixed.

James: How does all of this relate to trauma?

Ara: Mm we’ve been thinking about plurality and trauma even more. There’s an idea in some of the literature that being vividly plural is a result of trauma. We’ve written before about the need for caution with that idea. For one thing, few people escape trauma in our non-consensual culture. For another, the sense of yourself as one coherent self is very culturally specific, and could even be the result of trauma where you’ve internalised that strong message that only a certain version of you is acceptable. Many therapies and spiritual practices deliberately help people sense their plural parts as part of healing.

James: It seems that where trauma comes in is in splitting different parts off from one another so thoroughly that they can’t communicate with each other. For some this is to the extent that they have little memory for one part when they are in another. For others there’s complete disavowal that the disowned parts of them exist.

Ara: How would you say it was for us James?

James: There was a strong sense that parts of us split off to hold those feelings which felt both unacceptable to others and unbearable to us.

Ara: Mm well put, and perhaps those go together. When you’ve been taught young that certain parts of yourself – or the feelings they express – are unacceptable then those feelings do become utterly overwhelming and intolerable. You become used to being punished by others when those feelings are around, or to being alone with the huge weight of them because you know it’s not okay to share them. For kids that kind of punishment is felt as annihilation, and that kind of aloneness as abandonment. Both can be felt like the danger of death, because a small child can’t survive if they are unacceptable to those around them and/or left alone.

James: *exhales* a lot of the early memories we’ve been with these last months have been like that. A young part of us alone in bed completely destroyed by the waves of this terrifying feeling crashing over them.

Ara: You’ve done such a good job at holding them through that James, giving them some sense of safety at those times.

James: Thank-you. I love doing it, and I hate them being there.

Ara: You asked about trauma. My sense is that the impact of trauma on us was that splitting off – not the dividing into different parts, but splitting off to the extent that those parts – and their feelings – were hidden to us. It was as if they’d all gone to different rooms in our bodymind in order to hold those feelings: to keep the part of us who was carrying on with life safe from feeling them.

James: But that meant that we weren’t able to get the important things that humans need from those hidden feelings. We were operating in life without a lot of key information about ourselves and the world. And when the feelings did leak in or break through, they often did so in damaging ways.

Ara: Let’s take those two pieces one at a time James…

Why are the feelings so vital?

James: So the big feels that surprised us in August were these ones:

• Max (flight): Trapped fear and deep grief.
• Jonathan (fawn/freeze): Terror of dangerous others and of being plunged into shame.
• Beastie (fight): Furious rage.
• Tony (fasten/attach): Desperate yearning for love/connection.

So I guess we’re saying that, previously in our life, we hadn’t really allowed feelings of fear, sadness, shame, anger, and loneliness. We tried to avoid those feelings, or at least some aspects of them. Like maybe we’d allow sadness in ‘appropriate’ situations, but not inexplicable waves of grief. We’d let ourselves be – often very – angry with ourselves, but not with others. That kind of thing. To be honest I think our story of ourselves was that we barely ever felt angry feelings, or any of those yearning feelings like loneliness or jealousy.

Ara: And that maps onto the sense of those feelings being held by our most disowned parts: Tony and Beastie. A bit like when feelings are cast out of the control room in Inside Out. We were more familiar with Max and Jonathan. Max was our foregrounded ‘getting on with life’ part who tried to work hard and be ‘good’ in order to protect Jonathan from ever having to feel that deep fear and shame that he holds. But even Jonathan was split off because Max wasn’t aware that she was protecting him, just that she had to be good and keep busy. 

A lot of Max’s grief now is the realisation that she was dissociated a lot of the time – whether in the busyness of work, or going into a kind of ‘faking through it’ mode when dangerous things happened. There’s a sense of her as a kind of puppet performing through everything, hence her horror of being trapped now.

James: How would you say the hidden feelings are valuable Ara?

Ara: Well putting it simply it’s something like this:

• Fear enables us to know when a situation or relationship is risky for us.
• Anger enables us to protect ourselves from non-consensual or unsafe behaviour.
• Loneliness, longing and related feelings move us in the direction of connection with others, which is a vital human need.
• Sadness and grief help us to process the painful things that happen to us so that we can move through them rather than holding onto them tightly forever.
• Shame – when we are able to feel it as regret, rather than collapsing in the unbearable sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with us – enables us to look at our potentially harmful behaviour and make changes to act with more integrity and compassion.

The first two feelings are vital for protection. Without fear and anger we are at great risk of continually placing ourselves in harm’s way, because we find it so hard to discern when things are unsafe, and so hard to protect ourselves when they are. 

Yearning and sorrow are vital for connection: without them we won’t relate with other people and can’t handle the loss of those relationships. 

And if shame can’t be felt safely – without the sense it will destroy us – then both connection and protection are very hard because other people feel dangerous (they might see that we’re fundamentally not okay) and we don’t feel deserving of protection (because we believe that we’re fundamentally not okay).

James: Ah that makes sense of our feeling that shame is at the heart of everything. We had to work on shame for a long time before it felt possible to welcome in anger and yearning particularly.

Ara: The trauma literature is really helpful for understanding the terrible impact that not feeling the feelings – and therefore not being able to connect and protect – has on mental and physical health. But I’d love to get onto the process of how we actually go about welcoming the feelings James. I feel like we’ve learnt so much about that during this period. 

First though can we briefly touch on the other reasons why it’s so important?

Leaking out and breaking through

James: What you said about how otherwise those feelings can leak out or break through?

Ara: Right. Now that we know our parts – and the feelings they hold – so much better, we can see that they didn’t stay completely split off throughout our life. Rather they leaked out in ways we didn’t recognise, and occasionally broke through in ways that were extremely confusing and destructive.

James: Tony’s yearning leaked out by propelling us towards connection in ways that weren’t very conscious or considered, to say the least. Beastie’s rage – unable to be known or expressed – reflected back on us in the form of a vicious inner critic, and occasionally leaked out in the form of a desire to ‘tell the truth’ about things, which got us in trouble more than once. And Jonathan’s terror of shame meant that we’d often act in hypervigilant and people pleasing ways which were exhausting for us, and probably felt as inauthentic by others.

Ara: Again I’d emphasise how valuable all of those parts and feelings are. Even in their hidden/leaking forms it has been wonderful that we’ve been so driven to connect with others through our life and work. That truth-telling impulse has been behind much of what we’ve written about the problems with cultural norms and oppressive systems, which has been helpful to other people as well. And the care and compassion for others inherent in our little people pleaser is a beautiful thing.

James: The sense is that the more we can welcome them – all of them, and all their feelings – the more we may be able to connect, to create, and to care, without getting ourselves in the kinds of trouble that come with doing those things unconsciously.

Ara: Our other past experience with those feelings was that they could come crashing in in ways that were disorienting and overwhelming for us and for others. I expect it’s a common experience when you hide these things that they break through in situations when your guard is down, or where something intense enough happens that you can no longer hold them at bay.

James: Right. So common ones for us were that when we really let another person in close – or spent a lot of time with them – generally a partner, we would start to have melt-downs where those huge intense feelings suddenly spilled out.

Ara: It was terrifying when we had no understanding of it, like a sudden plummet into overwhelming fear, rage, shame, and/or yearning. That’s why it felt so hard for us to be around another person 24/7: the horror that they might see that, and that we might hurt them with those feelings.

James: It’s been incredibly hard to finally be living alone and to experience those kinds of plummets by ourselves, without much access to support. But it also feels like a vital part of the process of finally learning how to be with those moments, rather than desperately wanting somebody else to make it better, at the same time as being deeply ashamed that they saw us that way, and terrified that they’ll abandon us – or harm us – because of it.

Ara: There you go, right there is a great example of why it’s so helpful to separate out the feelings and to feel them in the various parts of us. All those times we did plummet with another person we were also having all those contradictory feelings about it at once: Tony clinging and desperate for them to prove we were loveable in spite of it, Max full of shame at being seen that way, Jonathan fearing attack, Beastie expecting abandonment.

James: Ah yes, I hadn’t seen that. No wonder it felt like such an impossible spiral of emotion to be stuck in. 

Ara: When parts and their feelings are very disowned, the other impact is that any situation that triggers old trauma can bring them up very vividly. 

James: And that would be what we experienced as periods of post traumatic stress in our life: times when something so terrifying and shame-inducing happened that we couldn’t hold those feelings at bay and they crashed in for a while, making everyday life incredibly hard. Basically we’ve just been going through the fourth period like that that we’ve had in our life, but this time with the gradually increasing capacity to tease out the different parts and to hold them through it.

But even now it is incredibly disorienting, because we know that we are this person with all our experience, knowledge, and support to draw on, but – because the parts are still to some extent split off – we can quickly drop into feeling like the terrified child again, for example. It’s very hard to navigate life at such times, or to plan for the future. Hard to know whether to ask people to treat us as they always do, or to treat us as an extremely vulnerable person.

Ara: Because we are all of that, trying to learn how to hold all of that! Onto how we’ve been trying to do it…

Staying with the Big Feels Practice

How to feel the feels

Ara: Okay so that’s the theory – and how it works for us. Shall we get to the practice?

James: Let’s. Usual caveat that different things work for different people at different times. This is what we’ve found useful during this period, but other people will need to find their own path through it I’m sure.

Ara: That’s vital. So easy for hearing somebody else’s experience to become yet more fodder for the inner critic – like somehow we should be doing everything that everyone else suggests. We’ve found that it’s vital to adapt suggestions to work for us, to reject those that don’t work right now, and to trust our inner wisdom to guide us on our path, which will be different to everyone else’s.

Where would you like to start James?

James: I’d love you to help me think through some paradoxes that are really confusing to me in all of this.

Ara: I’m so up for that.

Big space and close up work

James: Okay so a major one for me is that you and I seem to approach being with the big feelings in very different ways, and I’m wondering how they can both be ‘right’.

Ara: Go on.

James: The way it’s shaken down between us is that you’re ‘in charge’ of holding our parts – and their feelings – in the big space, or the gap. I’m ‘in charge’ of what we think of as ‘close up work’: holding and hearing the parts in their feelings, exploring them in that more ‘focusing’ or therapeutic kind of way.

Ara: Both approaches involve ensuring that whatever part we’re in – and whatever feelings they experience – they are now accompanied, which is the vital piece I think. But you’re right that my approach and yours towards accompaniment feel very different James. 

James: Do you want to say a bit more about what you do, and I’ll do the same?

Ara: Certainly. So it seems that I’m around when we meditate – which is something we’ve come back to, having struggled with it in the past. In an average session what that feels like to me is that I’m sitting in this wide open space, and then one of our parts will surface and I can observe them, and notice the feelings they are having and how they’re responding to those. The whole thing is infused with the sense that anything that arises is welcome, and that we can simply notice it together and come back to the present moment – perhaps the sunlight on the roofs opposite, or a bird flying past.

When a much more intense feeling is around, my big space approach is to take the part who is feeling it on a walk, maybe sit up in the hills, and we keep noticing how they go into big spirals of tough thoughts and feelings, and how it’s possible to recognise that they’ve been swept up in that, and return to right now.

James: I remember you doing that with Jonathan one time and it was eventually even possible for him to get quite excited at the next spiral: seeing it as an opportunity to practice this new superpower of getting swept up and coming back to ground.

Ara: Several nights with him we sat looking out at the night and just focused in on one small lit up window and the way the telephone wire moved across it. Somehow we could return to that in brief moments throughout the tumultuous mass of traumatic feelings.

Do you want to describe your approach James?

James: Sure. So when I feel any part of us having strong feelings I engage in conversation with them. If they’re feeling bad I often lie down – so it feels like I’m lying holding them, even with a hand on their belly, or stroking their arm. Hm I notice that this feels way more vulnerable to describe than your practices Ara.

Ara: Interesting. We’re not encouraged to love ourselves in such close, tender ways are we? Talking with ourselves or giving ourselves nurturing touch? Meditation is somehow more culturally palatable. What kinds of conversations do you have? 

James: I guess it’s something like focusing – which we described in the feelings zine – or the ‘befriending questions’ that Janina Fisher uses. I try to tune into what that particular part needs on that occasion. So I might ask them to describe the feeling, to tell me where it is in their body, to do a stream of consciousness about what comes up with them around it in terms of images or memories. Sometimes it stays in the present, exploring what fears are going on for them, and reassuring them, or reminding them how we’ve got through such things in the past. Sometimes we go back in time remembering all the times we’ve felt this feeling before. Occasionally we’ve zeroed in on an earlier time and gone over that memory in our mind, maybe bringing you or me in to act it out differently in our imagination – what it would have been like if we’d been there to hear and hold them back then. We got that from Sarah Peyton’s work.

Ara: Maybe we can say a bit more about how we use some of these tools later James. For now d’you want to say what you’re aiming for with your approach?

James: It’s what some authors call regulation, but we’ve preferred to call attunement. There’s often a click moment with ‘close up work’ where the struggling part feels really held and heard in their distress. We’ve heard people compare it to the ‘attunement bliss’ or ‘coregulation’ that can happen between a parent and child, or between therapist and client, or close people when they feel really understood by each other. It can happen, for example, if the part finally feels able to express their feelings and I hold them as they cry. Or it can happen if we get to an understanding of what happened that has eluded us before. Or it can happen if we remember that we’ve been here before and what got us through.

Ara: Going back to our earlier understanding of the big feels residing in split off parts, each moment like that seems like welcoming that part home, even more, and demonstrating to them that nothing that they bring with them will be rejected or unwelcome – quite the opposite. Some call it a kind of ‘soul retrieval’: fragmented off parts of us being brought back into the whole. We think it’s also what can give us that ‘earned secure attachment’ over time: welcoming all those parts back into us fully and sharing them with safe enough others in our life.

James: And it seems to be a gradual process. We know all of our parts now (unless we’re in for another big surprise!), but it seems like each of them is slowly bringing more and more of the feelings they’ve been keeping to themselves, perhaps as they trust more than those feelings can be held and heard here.

Ara: We often feel an initial resistance. They are so used to having to repress those feelings, and so scared that they will ‘ruin’ things for us by bringing them. But the more you encourage those conversations, and the more they end in that ‘reward’ of attunement, the more it feels safe – even good – for those parts to bring their feelings.

Which approach to take?

James: I’m still confused though Ara. Our approaches seem so opposite to one another. Is it better to hold feelings in the big space and watch them bubble up and drift away, or is it better to go towards them and explore them in the way that I do? I guess I worry that my approach encourages our parts to be in these incredibly tough feelings more, when they could just have let them go if they’d gone to you.

Ara: Mm, my strong sense is that both approaches are necessary and that they work very well alongside each other, whereas one without the other might be risky.

James: Say more.

Ara: Can we touch on the theory behind them first? I guess my approach is rooted in the Buddhist / mindfulness theory that suffering happens when we struggle against what’s happening: either our outer circumstances or our inner experiences. The big space is about welcoming all of it, and noticing how pain of any kind passes if we don’t escalate it with storylines about how bad it is, or with our struggles to escape it.

James: Whereas my approach is rooted in the therapeutic understanding that we lock trauma in our bodies when painful things happen which are not regulated – or heard and held – at the time. I’m ensuring that they are heard and held now – both present pain, and the past pain that underlies it.

Ara: So I think the risk of my approach without your approach is a kind of spiritual bypassing James. We could take every tough feeling to the big space that way, but perhaps we would then never have fully felt it, understood where it comes from, shown it that it is welcome now – that we can hold it and hear it. I can imagine a me-centric version of us who got attached to spiritual practice but still struggled to be back in the world with other people, where these things got triggered, because they hadn’t really been dealt with.

James: I’m trying to think what the equivalent is for me. What does a James-centric version of us look like?! I’m thinking that, in recent times, parts have got edgy when a flicker of a tough feeling has come up – like it means that they’re due another two hours on the couch with James looking into it! Occasionally we’ve had a shorter meditation at those points and sensed that it didn’t need such intense work, just to be acknowledged and move on. I wonder if my approach without yours could get quite heavy going, or keep us quite mired in the pain of our life past and present.

Ara: I don’t know for sure, but I think that might be part of the need for balance. And of course our third ‘containing’ part does something different again. 

James: Fox. They are the part who can simply delight in whatever is going on right now. They don’t go towards the feelings at all. They’re just with the immediate sights, sounds, smells, sensations around us – being present. They can bring that sense equally to a walk where they notice everything, or to gentling up and enjoying a good meal and a TV show. When another part is around and struggling they welcome that part alongside them with whatever is going on, sharing the wonder with them.

Ara: Pema described something like this in a recent talk we heard: accessing a part of yourself who is patient and kind, another part who has deep trust in your capacities, and a final part who can appreciate those fleeting times of contentment in the moment.

James: We should say it’s taken nearly 50 years for us to have full access to those three. Five years ago we’d only experienced the tiniest glimmers of these parts of us. Somehow we patchworked ‘us’ together from those glimmers, from other people who modelled this for us, from fictional characters…

Ara: So going back to your question I don’t think that any of those three approaches – mine, yours, or Fox’s – is ‘better’. It’s more about tuning into each time feelings are up and asking what they seem to need. And being up for trying one thing, and then another, if that doesn’t work.

James: Rupture and repair is important too isn’t it? Where we try something and it doesn’t help, and we can acknowledge how painful that is to a part who is feeling desperate, and suggest trying something else. We actually build trust between us through such moments.

Ara: Being up for acknowledging our imperfection, and having got it wrong, rather than making them feel bad for not feeling better. Again that’s healing for times in the past when people have protected the blame onto us when they haven’t been able to be around our feelings, or have felt inadequate for not being able to help.

James: Mm, and I’m also thinking there’s something here about us being alongside our other parts rather than doing this for them. There’s a sense in which rage is Beastie’s, grief is Max’s, longing is Tony’s, and terror is Jonathan’s. It’s important that they get to learn what works for them, and to apply it, with us helping them, but not taking over for them. Does that make sense?

Ara: Yes, empowering each one rather than taking over for them. On an inner level it mirrors the outer level. Bonnie Badenoch says that people need others to believe in them and support them in finding their path. It can be really damaging if a therapist, friend, or other person decides they know better, or gets into ‘fix it’ mode because they can’t handle being around the pain.

James: Right, but again with the paradox, because it’s also felt helpful to remind those four parts that they don’t have to do anything – like figuring things out or fixing them – they just have to be: bringing their feelings when they are around and trusting us to hold and hear them, and eventually act upon them if need be.

Escalating emotions or taking them seriously?

James: Okay here’s another one for you, related perhaps. We were just reading Pema’s ‘Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change’, which references a finding that feelings only last one and a half minutes unless you fuel them. The idea is that the thing to do is to let them pass through, to recognise their impermanence. You do that by ‘dropping the storyline’ you tell yourself about them. You try not to escalate the feelings with your stories about how bad they are, and how that means you’re bad, or somebody else is bad, or something like that. All those thought spirals somehow make the feeling fixed and solid, instead of allowing it to pass like a cloud in the sky.

Ara: Mmhm.

James: How does that fit with the trauma therapy idea you shared earlier that these emotions are vital motivators towards connection or protection, and that our problem in the past has actually been not feeling them enough?

Ara: I wonder whether there’s almost two phases to feelings-work James. There’s the phase of just being with the feeling – whether in the big open space, or in the kind of close-up description work that you do. Then there may be a second phase for more exploration of what the feeling brings up. Sometimes all that’s necessary is to welcome the feeling, fully experience it, and let it go to get back on with daily life. Other times the feeling is pointing to something important that requires more attention. 

James: Right, I’m thinking about how therapy tends to have components of helping clients to finally feel their feelings, and components of talking about the events of the past and present, for example. Or how Buddhism emphasises mindfulness practice and also applying the teachings to your everyday life.

Ara: So, for example, I recently meditated and Beastie was there feeling angry several times. Afterwards I chatted with her and we thought through together what the different angry feelings were about – why they were of value. We were able to see some that were a response to having repressed anger for so long – turned it in on ourselves. Some were about injustice – others having access to freedoms we don’t have. Some were about the specific pain of people offering something they don’t really have to give, and we could link current examples of that to early experiences. 

Beastie is very concerned, at the moment, that the capacity to feel anger more vividly doesn’t flip us from turning it in against ourselves to turning it out against others. We wondered about how we might ensure that it remained more of a counterbalance to shame. In the past we’ve too readily accepted others’ stories of everything as ‘all our fault’. Perhaps we can use the opportunities of Beastie’s anger to see other people’s stuff that might be in the mix, and wider cultural stuff.

James: I sense another blog post coming on! But if I can draw something out of that for emotions in general, you’re saying that it’s another both/and. There’s a place for noticing how we escalate emotions, and practicing doing something different to that. And there’s a place for getting curious about the feelings that come up regularly – and what triggers them – and using that as an opportunity to learn.

Ara: About ourselves and others. The first time Beastie felt hate outwards vividly she had a huge flash of understanding for those who have hated us. Previously we’d struggled to connect with how horrific hatred feels, and how people can act so violently out of it.

I think the difference is intentionality James. Taking emotions seriously is very different to escalating them. Instead of letting the storylines spiral round and round we’re deliberately reflecting on the feelings. And we also try to refrain from speaking or acting out of the feelings until we’ve reached a better understanding of them, and considered whether such speech or action is the wise and compassionate thing to do in that situation – for us and the others involved.

Different practices for different intensities?

James: I realise I’m asking a lot of questions here!  Another one I’m with is about the intensity of feelings. When we wrote ‘Staying with Feelings’ we didn’t have much trauma understanding so we just suggested practices for staying with feelings no matter what they were, or how intense. 

Since then we’ve come across trauma-based understandings which suggest that it’s all about the intensity of the feeling. Ideas like the emotional thermometer or zones of feeling suggest that we might want to do very different things in different zones.

Ara: A helpful way to see them is concentric circles with the comfort zone in the middle, the challenge zone after that, and the overwhelm zone as the outer circle. The trauma idea of ‘expanding the window of tolerance’ encourages us to keep moving from comfort zone into challenge zone and back again with our feelings, without pushing into overwhelm. In overwhelm we retraumatise ourselves – which may well shrink the window of tolerance – which is how spacious the challenge zone is.

James: We learnt that one well before we read any trauma literature. We decided to list all the traumatic events of our life so we could go through them one after another. That’s a fast track to overwhelm right there!

Ara: It can be really hard to learn that we have to go slowly, and that pushing into trauma tends to make it a lot worse. It’s much more about learning how to tune into our bodies so that we have a much better awareness of where we are in those zones. What are the signs that we might be heading towards overwhelm? Can we learn to notice those and pull back at such times? Can we learn what we need when we have tipped over to bring ourselves back?

James: So we shifted our perspective, last year, from ‘always feel the feelings’ to ‘feel them in the challenge zone’, but in overwhelm just focus on bringing yourself back to a more settled nervous system: using grounding practices and that kind of thing.

Ara: But you have a question?

James: I suppose it’s sometimes felt more complex than that. Like a big feeling has come up and been with us for several days, and by continuing to be with it – gently but thoroughly – we’ve eventually got to some major revelations about our life, and a huge sense of relief.

Ara: It feels like the process Brene Brown described in ‘Rising Strong’: being prepared to be with the messy middle.

James: It’s happened for us when it simply doesn’t feel possible to ‘bring ourselves back’, the feeling is so intense, so it’s more about weathering it and trying to have faith that it will get clearer at some point: that it likely has some pretty important learning for us if we can just hang on in there with it.

Ara: I don’t think those views are incompatible James. What we’re committing to is to not repressing feelings or trying to resist them.

James: Is the overwhelm zone what happens when we resist them? 

Ara: Sometimes I think so. They get louder and scarier when we resist them, in an attempt to be heard. But sometimes it’s more that we’ve reached an experience which is too much for us to deal with – at our current capacity – and it’s tipped us over.

James: Non-resistance then is more about recognising we’re in overwhelm and that’s okay, it happens. And being as gentle as possible with ourselves while we’re there, trying to remind ourselves that there probably is a big learning here: about what things are still an edge for us in the present and/or about how things were for us in the past.

Ara: We’ve found ‘reminding ourselves this is okay’ to be gold in all this. Instead of punishing ourselves for having got overwhelmed again, we remind ourselves that this is just okay. Even on the worst days there are moments that are calmer, or more connected.

James: I remember one time I held Beastie and we found this dot. Like the comfort zone had shrunk to a tiny dot, but if we stayed on that dot she could feel okay. Any attempt to think about what we were going to do next, or how we were going to handle some situation, would tip her directly into overwhelm, but we kept coming back to the dot over and over until eventually there was some buffer zone around it again.

Ara: I like that sense of all the concentric circles expanding and contracting over time. Long term, and even over the course of an hour or a day.

James: I wonder if it’s ever possible to convey this to those who haven’t experienced trauma feelings so starkly. Like we had whole weeks when Jonathan kept being pushed into overwhelm by the thought that our IPad battery might not last the whole day for an event we’re doing in several months time. When the comfort zone and challenge zone have shrunk that much, we’re in incapacitating overwhelming emotions for much of the time and anything can re-trigger them. Sometimes the whole day’s work is just bringing ourselves back from overwhelm for a moment or two. It is exactly like being a terrified child stuck in an adult’s body, but still as convinced – as he was back then – that terrible danger is about to befall him.

Ara: And there’s another huge paradox to all this. While it was agonising and debilitating, there is also a sense that it was a helpful thing to go through. For example it stripped away all the strategies we used to use to avoid painful feelings – like working too hard or wanting somebody else to ‘make it better’. It made those vital feelings far more accessible to us than they ever were before. 

James: I do feel a sense that when those young/traumatised parts of us are around it’s a kind of miracle, that we kept them safe enough all this time that they can now be here and share their feelings. And we’ll be able to live our life so much more wisely and compassionately now we have access to them. Also this whole thing has given us so much empathy for other people who are collapsing under the weight of these big feels. And for all those who are racing around in various ways trying like hell to avoid them.

Ara: Mm we notice how easy it is to go back to that avoidance too. To talk the talk of ‘welcoming the feelings’, but as soon as a flicker of one of the tough ones is around, viscerally that sense of trying to push it back down or pretend it’s not there. And if we manage to do that, there’s this sense of dissociation: being a bit vague or fake or performing.

James: Those times the feeling often comes back with a vengeance afterwards, and in confusing ways so it’s harder to know whose it is or what it’s about. Our sense now is that the more we can go towards all the feelings as soon as they arise, the more we can make our inner landscape safer, so there’s not that sense that we might stumble across something that is ‘too hard’ – because we know it all and are familiar with it all.

Learning from the big feels

Ara: Shall we finish with a bit more about our daily practices with this James, and what we’re learning from them? I’m aware that this changes somewhat week by week for us though. Maybe that’s one of the biggest learnings. One day it feels important – when we can – to be with the feeling all day long. Another day it feels right to get on with life, with pauses to be with whatever feeling is around every now and then. One week we seem to need huge amounts of rest. Another week we have big energy for getting out moving, or for creating things like this.

James: Yes, flexibility to go with that seems helpful, and another way of trusting the feelings – and the parts that hold them – to know what they need.

Ara: But we do have a few standard practices now.

James: Right. Every day you do a meditation sit in the morning and in the evening. After that one of us does a check in conversation with the ‘big feels’ parts to see if they have anything they’re feeling that we didn’t notice in the meditation.

Ara: That seems a great way to encourage regular feeling, and to check if there’s something there we haven’t noticed. If there is a bigger feeling present in that check-in, you might do some close-up work with that before we move on. Or we might journal about it, or go for a walk if it feels like it needs to move.

Another practice that has been helpful for just showing us that we can bear an intense emotion is feeling it in the body as a kind of vibration, trying not to even label it or understand it but just feel it as pure energy or something. Occasionally even an intense feeling has ended up feeling almost soothing when we’ve managed that.

James: And our therapist shared one about imagining the feeling as just one cell of our body and picturing it in front of us – seeing what texture, colour, size, and shape it is. 

Another one that’s been great when it feels stuck is to lie down and breathe in to the chest, then the belly, then exhale. That kind of breathing often seems to allow a kind of release, often tears.

But it isn’t always those more formal kinds of practices that are needed. Occasionally the thing to do has been to find a song that matches the feeling, and listen to it and allow the feeling to come. And we got a lot out of re-reading the Stephen King book, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, so we can flash on the way she went still and steady in the face of fear, when fear comes up for us.

Ara: Again there are so many possible ways to be with feelings. The main point is that we are welcoming them – not resisting them or reacting out of them.

James: It’s moving from resisting to responding, and reacting to refraining (from action) until you feel clearer and calmer.

Ara: There’s a couple of nice metaphors about welcoming feelings and how vital it is. One is the Tibetan Buddhist story of Milarepa in his cave, and how he had to fully welcome all of the demons – or feelings – who came to stay with him there – big or small, subtle or overwhelming. The other is the Islamic poet, Rumi’s, famous poem The Guest House. Again that sense if you can welcome all fully then there’s nothing more to fear in our inner world, and perhaps also in our outer world given that we’re familiar with it all in here. 

Often the parts with the feelings are convinced you’re going to send them away, or become overwhelmed by them, because that’s what’s happened in the past. So it’s a practice of showing them – gradually over time – that you don’t need to eradicate them or merge with them, you can just be with them patiently.

James: A couple of other learnings I’ve noticed. We’ve found that what we learn from one feeling often helps with others. We started with sadness. We did an irreverent reverse version of the behaviour modification of our childhood and decided to award ourselves a gold star whenever we cried! We’ve got really comfortable with sadness, sorrow and grief, where in the past we struggled so much with those feelings. Sometimes when we’re struggling with another feeling we can at least access that sadness about how painful it is, and release it in that way. 

Lately we’ve also found that many of the practices we developed with fear and shame last year work well for being with loneliness and rage too, as well as developing some new practices for those.

Ara: What else did you notice?

James: That fear and shame aren’t the only trauma feelings, as we’d previously thought. Loneliness and rage are trauma-related feelings too, just more about abandonment – for us – than annihilation. And that each part holds a whole cluster of related feelings. Like Beastie holds self-hatred, blame of others, self-protection, and anger at injustice. Tony holds loneliness, yearning and jealousy, but also a kind of ‘high’ joy when he’s pinned that on a particular person or situation, shame around being ‘too much’ and getting ‘sent away’, and a more steady joy when he’s allowed to be himself in the world: open and connecting. 

Ara: It’s useful to understand how the different feelings they hold work together. Like Beastie’s self hatred is often a sign something non-consensual happened to us and we didn’t give her a chance to get angry about it. Tony’s joy is more steady when we help him grieve for the losses of the past.

James: There’s something about the need for a pendulum swing I think. If you’ve tried to only feel ‘positive’ emotions much of your life, or if you’ve repressed and covered over tough feelings a lot, it seems like there is a period where you feel all the feelings you didn’t feel at the time. Perhaps you have to swing into recognising how bad some things were that you didn’t recognise back then, maybe because they were gaslit by yourself and by those around you. 

I think one of the very hardest things is taking that leap of faith, repeatedly, that having done this process things will become easier, now that we have access to the feelings and can act on them. It’s hard to make that leap of faith when right now all you’re feeling is way more pain than ever before.

Ara: There can be some nostalgia for the more ‘covered over’ time when things didn’t feel this intense, disorienting, and incapacitating. My sense is strong though that being able to feel the hard feelings will make them less overwhelming over time, and that it will make the other feelings more accessible too. That Kahil Gibran quote: ‘The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.’

James: We experience that in the way long periods of tough feelings often end in much deeper understanding of ourselves, and/or others. Also there’s an intense relief when we crack through to some grief or gratitude, by being up for hanging out with a tough feeling.

Ara: I’d like to end with the multiplicity of learnings that are possible each time a big feeling is present. 

James: Please do.

Ara: We find it helpful to remind ourselves of this when we’re in them:

• This is an opportunity to learn how to be with this feeling more readily, so we’ll be more able to do so in future, expanding our window of tolerance.
• This feeling being touched and awoken right now gives us a chance to go back to our earlier experiences – when we didn’t get heard or held in such feelings – and do so now, perhaps putting that memory to rest finally.
• This feeling gives us the potential to do the general practice of dropping our storylines and being with whatever is present.
• This feeling – if we can allow it – gives us deep insight into what others with similar feelings are up against, and why they act in the ways they do, increasing our sense of compassion and connection.
• This feeling has something of value to teach us about the current situation if we can listen to it without repressing it or reacting quickly out of it. For example, it may be that something has reached the limits of what we can deal with right now, or that a situation or encounter was ‘off’ in some way.

For more on this topic check out my new book with Alex Iantaffi: Hell Yeah Self Care.

Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support my free writing on Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was by James and Ara.

The post Staying with the Big Feels appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

You can read about the other two articles from this year – on feminism and comics, and on queerness/plurality and comics – here and here.

This interview is published in the journal Sexualities. It is an important journal for me, which I still read, and which published two of my papers on non-monogamies here and here.

Here I reflect on a few of the themes that we cover in the interview.

Leaving academia

In the interview, Daniel and I start by discussing what academia is: what does it mean to be an academic, an intellectual, a scholar, and which – if any – of those things am I now? We also question the inside/outside binary, exploring whether perhaps I was always leaving academia, and/or whether I have really now left.

We touch on this post that I wrote last year about failure. People are encouraged to tell narratives about success and/or failure in academia, and also in life more widely. These don’t tend to capture the complexity of our actual situations, or the multiple stories we could tell through the same experience.

Selfhood

There’s quite a bit in the article about selves and selfhood. Building on that theme of telling stories, we reflect on how academia – and wider culture – encourage us to tell singular narratives of ourselves. For example, these may be stories of how we always knew who we wanted to be when we grew up and how our whole life was a process of moving towards that goal, getting closer and closer.

I’ve been questioning this idea in two main ways ever since I wrote Rewriting the Rules. One way is to see ourselves as the unfolding process, not as some end point we are at right now, or aiming towards: the journey rather than the destination. This idea of constant becoming is a lot more fluid and flexible for the unexpected things life throws at you (a pandemic for example!), allowing you to shift and change course more easily.

The other way of questioning the idea of a singular person getting ever closer to being a ‘successful self’ – or failing in that goal – is to see ourselves as plural rather than singular. Daniel and I reflect about which sides of a person may feel welcome, or at home, in academic institutions, and which may not. For example, we consider whether it is possible to be vulnerable within academia, or to bring more child-like and playful parts of ourselves out there. We explore intellectual/rational and emotional/embodied forms of knowledge, and how the former are privileged over the latter in academia, making parts of ourselves who struggle with that feel less welcome. We also talk about the emphasis on ‘doing’ and having over parts ‘being’ and reflecting parts.

Another piece of the selfhood conversation is about relational selves: how our relationships with others have the potential to open up and close down potentials in us. Daniel and I talk about our own relationship and the ways in which we have risked objectifying each other over the years (pedastalling and/or looking to each other for validation), as well as – hopefully – developing a relationship dynamic where we see each other, and feel seen, in our ongoing becoming and our multiplicity.

Finally, in relation to selfhood, we chat about what aspects of identity or experience are welcomed in academic institutions, and how that has changed over the years. Can everybody in an academic setting be equally open about their gender, sexuality, disability, caring commitments, or class background, for example? Does everybody see themselves well represented in the professors, the curriculum, and the research?

Systemic change

Finally, Daniel and I speak about the problems with current academic – and wider neoliberal capitalist – systems, and how these might change. We touch on the need to decolonise curricula and expertise which are founded on certain kinds of white, western knowledge and practice.

We consider how self-care, slowness, and mindfulness, are not possible as an add-on to the existing pressures of ‘productive life’, but only with systems and structures which genuinely support and enable collective care.

We explore how injustices are replicated in the forms of labour and expertise and that are, and are not, valued, and in terms of grading, funding, and publication.

We look at how academic processes – like forms of assessment and publication review – benefit those with certain early trainings and life experiences over others.

Conclusions

This was a vulnerable publication to put out there (when are they not?!) I wanted to do justice to the huge benefits that my time in academia afforded me – and the privileges which enabled me to be there in the first place – as well as speaking openly about the harms of bullying cultures in some institutions, of continued sexual harrassment and gendered injustice, of the current climate of academic transphobia, and of toxic non-consensual academic culture more broadly.

I wanted to ensure that I spoke of the help and support I’ve received from so many valued colleagues and friends of the years, as well as the systems and structures that can make being collegiate, cooperative, and compassionate very difficult.

I wanted to say how passionate I am about academic ideas – so much so that I left academic partly in order to have more time to read about them and get them out to wider audiences – but how I also value other forms of knowledge and learning, and felt there was not enough space in academia for that.

I hope that I managed to capture that paradox and complexity in the interview.

If you don’t have access to academic papers and would like to read the full interview, feel free to drop me a line.

The post Leaving academia appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.