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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony: Beautiful huh?

Ara: *smiles* 

Tony: You make an excellent Clarence Ara.

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

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

Concentric Circles of Dunbar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ara: Sure thing.

Culture, Trauma, and Dunbar

Tony: Here goes.

Ara: Oof. Do you want to explain that?

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

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

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

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

Tony: It’s not just me then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dunbar and slow relating

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

Ara: What do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony: Not in hearing distance no.

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

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

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

Defining Dunbar’s levels

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

Ara: Go ahead.

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

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

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

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

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

Connection and protection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hokey cokey

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

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

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

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

Ara: Go for it Tony.

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

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

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

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

Tony: Damn you.

Ara: I see you Tony.

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

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

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

Maximising warmth and openness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving up and down the levels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Returning to our sides of the street

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nurturing inner and outer relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony: Always with Pema!

Ara: I’m so grateful to her.

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

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

Tony: Fundamental okayness sounds so good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ara: Very clever!

Tony: I try.

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

Tony: Go on.

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

Plurality and okayness

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

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

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

Ara: I might suggest 28 rather than 21 Tony.

Tony: How come?

Ara: Each part has a relationship with themselves too.

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

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

Tony: A work in progress then.

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

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

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

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

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

Ara: It so often is.

Limiting the numbers, limiting ourselves?

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

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

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

What about the echo chamber question?

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

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

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

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

Ara: Right! Say more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony: Anything else to say?

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

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

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

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

Tony: Right back atcha Ara.

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

Plural tag: This post was by Tony and Ara.

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

The slow relating post brought the fastest side of myself together with the slowest to have a dialogue. This post sees a return of that slowest side – Ara – but together with my reformed inner critic – Beastie – who is perhaps best placed to interrogate these ideas and practices. 

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

Ara: Hey Beastie.

Beastie: Hey Ara. Ready to talk about the gap?

Ara: I am. I’m interested to hear what you make of it. But perhaps we should introduce ourselves a little more first, so people have some sense of us.

Beastie: I think the kind of dynamic we have was best captured in that Netflix Tales of The City last year: the characters of Shawna – played by Ellen Page, and Anna Madrigal – played by Olympia Dukakis.

Ara: Mm the sage old queer and the young upstart.

Beastie: Not quite how I would have described it. I love the scene where Anna says something characteristically vague and wise-sounding and Shawna says: ‘You know the rule against talking in fortune cookies around me.’

Ara: And Anna immediately replies: ‘And you know the rule against being a smartass around me.’

Beastie: So. No Madrigaling me in this conversation, okay?

Ara: I wouldn’t dream of it Beastie.

Returning to the gap

Beastie: So something curious happened recently. We moved away from doing any kind of meditation or mindfulness practice, and then returned to something which probably looks quite similar but feels very different.

Ara: Right. Reading that David Trevealen book on mindfulness and trauma helped us to see that meditation may not have been our friend in the past. Irene Lyon says something similar: many people with post traumatic stress report that meditation feels like sitting in a small room with a man shouting at them.

Beastie: Sounds familiar. At worst it was like that for us. At best just falling into our noisy thoughts for fifteen minutes each morning without much consciousness about them. We would often feel some shame about it afterwards, although we tried to be kind towards ourselves. It was a relief just to allow ourselves to stop, and to start the day with journaling instead, which we enjoy a lot more.

Ara: Reading the trauma literature helped a lot with that: recognising why our brain was hypervigilantly searching past, present, and future for any sign of threat whenever we stopped. Also why staying in an activated state was making it harder – rather than easier – to stay present and to feel kind towards ourselves and others.

Beastie: But then our therapist said something about how it could be useful – with trauma – to find safety in the sense of the space around us. When she said it, we didn’t want to hear it. We’d just got away from the idea that we should be doing meditation. That place had never felt very safe for us. Why would we go back there? But the next day you tried it.

Ara: Right. Something in what she said chimed with me. And of course our main Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön, describes something similar in her work. It was such an interesting experience Beastie. It was as if we’d approached this thing that we’ve been thinking and writing about for decades from just a slightly different angle, and our perspective on it had completely changed.

sitting not Sitting

Beastie: What d’you think was different?

Ara: I think we finally let go of the attempt to make it this special thing. Which is, of course, what wider culture has done with mindfulness and meditation also. I’m thinking of the shift as a move from Sitting (with a capital S) to sitting (all lowercase). I literally just sat in a chair in the window of our flat and hung out with everything that was going on: sounds, sights, smells, sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories: whatever happened I was there with it.

Beastie: There was a sense of welcoming too right?

Ara: Yep. Whatever came up I tried to embrace it with warmth as part of the whole experience, even imagining saying ‘you’re welcome’, but not treating it as any more important than anything else that was going on. 

Beastie: Not grasping it, not trying to get rid of it: That’s the Buddhist idea.

Ara: Yes. The overall feeling, by the end, was of sitting in this current moment of our life, within a wide open space, and anything could come into that space: like there was room for everything. It wasn’t about aiming to reach any particular state, or have a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ experience, whatever that would mean.

Beastie: Just being present.

Ara: That might be how a fortune cookie would describe it, yes! It’s hard though isn’t it because even these kinds of words – ‘presence’, ‘being’, ‘spaciousness’ – hint at something special. And as soon as we imagine in that way it becomes harder to do. I like Pema’s word ‘gap’, or the idea of hitting the ‘pause button’, or sitting lowercase. They are much more everyday and straightforward words. It really is just hanging out for a while with whatever’s around – internally and externally.

Varieties of sitting

Beastie: So since then we’ve started doing this a lot more. Again it amuses me. Before we’d do it once a day and feel a bit bad about that. Now we can’t seem to get enough of it. It just makes sense to keep returning to the gap several times a day.

Ara: I guess it tied in to a wider process we’ve been in about self-consent: noticing how easily we override our consent in relation to others, and work, and ideas of what we should be doing. This sitting provided an opportunity to make a gap between one thing and the next, so we could return to a kind of neutral, and check in with ourselves what we actually felt drawn to doing next.

Beastie: There was a challenge to that as well. We noticed that when we had done one thing we often wanted to crack on with the next for fear that, if we stopped, we wouldn’t be able to continue. That’s our Max’s flight tendency. We also noticed that when we were feeling a little edgy, uncomfortable, or uneasy we wanted to go to some kind of work, or escape into TV or a novel, rather than hanging out in the gap. We feared that if we sat still the feeling would get worse: perhaps overwhelming.

Ara: I think that’s another reason why pausing is so helpful. It gives us this regular reminder that escalating of tough feelings doesn’t have to happen. In fact I think trying to avoid those edgy feelings with work or escapism much more frequently leaves us feeling worse than when we started. That’s not at all to say that there’s anything wrong with working or chilling out, but it seems that we enjoy those things much more if we’re not going into them trying to drown out tough feelings. 

Beastie: It’s wild. Many times lately we’ve actually chosen the gap over work or distraction, knowing it tends to leave our nervous system in a better place than those things. We’ve even started making a regular small gap between the different elements of a work task, episodes of a TV show, or chapters of a book, so that if we continue we know we’re in self-consent.

Ara: Such a relief to finally feel the gap as a good place to rest.

Beastie: I guess we’re now trying to do what Pema calls ‘on the spot’ and regular sits. Regular ones – after we finish one activity and before we start the next – allow us that ongoing consent check-in with ourselves, and remind us that this space is always available to us. ‘On the spot’ is when we notice that we’re having a difficult feeling, thought, or sensation, and deliberately sit then-and-there in order to welcome that into this space. If we can’t sit then-and-there then we at least make a promise to that feeling, thought, or sensation that we’ll return to it as soon as we have the time.

Self-talk and sitting

Ara: That regular vs. on-the-spot distinction relates to another one. When we’re feeling relatively calm it’s possible to just sit quietly and notice the sound of the birds and traffic, the feeling of the breeze, a memory flickering up, a fleeting feeling. When tough feelings are present – particularly those we connect with trauma – that’s much more challenging. I guess our response to this is a bit like the distinction between doing a guided meditation on an app or something, and one where you just sit there quietly without guidance.

Beastie: So we sit quietly when there isn’t anything particularly challenging present. But if there is something, we try to sit in whichever part of us is struggling, and another part guides us through the sitting: often you or James being the more parental parts of our psyche, but really any of us can do it for any other.

Ara: Yes. James and Jonathan recently documented our process in this blog post. But where we’ve got to now is perhaps even more simple and straightforward than what they described. The guide part of us just imagines holding the other part of us while they say – out loud – what they are with. Perhaps reminding them to come back if they drift into noisy thoughts.

Beastie: Like ‘I’m with that seagull arcing through the sky… Now I’m with the thought that I fucked that thing up… Now I’m with the feeling of my throat being all constricted… Now I’m with the sunlight shining on that building… Now I’m with the sound of the seagulls… Now with the fact I just got lost in trying to plan what I’m going to say to that person…’

Ara: If Tony were here he would point out how lately it’s shagging seagulls we’ve mostly had the opportunity to be with.

Beastie: I endeavour to have a little more decorum than Tony.

Ara: Shall we say a bit more about what this means for us now?

Beastie: Yes please. I think that safety and befriending are the main themes. I’ve just noticed how they map onto what we’ve been exploring around protection and care. The counterbalance to the fear/shame feeling of trauma is a combination of protection/care. Protection alleviates fear by keeping us safe enough. Care alleviates shame by befriending ourselves and our experience. 

As a non-binary person we’re a little embarrassed that our parental parts are quite so gendered but James does a good number in protection and keeping us safe, and you are good at kindness, care, and connection.

Ara: I like to think that we both do both, but I see what you mean. 

The gap and safety

Beastie: So safety?

Ara: Yes. Well the thing about post traumatic stress is that it feels like a very unsafe place to be. Even things that used to leave us unphased can now feel like a big threat. And, after the multiple big stressors we’ve been through in the past year, we’re left feeling that we couldn’t handle anything else.

Beastie: Like a global pandemic or something would just be too much to cope with.

Ara: Heh, that was our feeling before that hit, yes.

Beastie: So we’ve been feeling very unsafe, largely because we’re so fragile and easily triggered. It’s hard to predict what we have capacity for, and what will tip us into overwhelm.

Ara: And those fear/shame feelings can easily feel intolerable: impossible to stay with. So this is where the gap comes in. If we can show ourselves that this space is a big enough container for any and all feelings, then we can finally feel safe to ourselves: at home in ourselves.

Beastie: How does that work?

Ara: Well now that we know more about the physiology of trauma I guess a big part of it is that, in the gap, we’re attending to the whole of our interior and exterior experience: not just the traumatic feelings or thoughts that may be around. 

By tuning into everything about how our body feels – our feet on the ground, the air on our skin, our hand on our belly – we ground ourself in it, reminding ourselves that our body is safe enough to occupy. 

By orienting to the environment – what we see, hear, smell, touch, taste – we’re reminding ourselves that we’re safe enough here-and-now. 

Most trauma researchers and therapists suggest strategies for grounding in the body and the environment. They also emphasise reminding ourselves that we’re not in the traumatic experience any more: that it is over and we can put that ‘ended’ time stamp on it. We have survived.

Beastie: We’re not there yet. There’s still a lack of trust in the gap to hold more vivid trauma responses or emotional flashbacks. 

Ara: Absolutely, and remember it’s not about making the feelings go away, or some idea that it’s only ‘worked’ if we feel nice and calm after a certain period of time. It’s more about holding. I love that phrase of Pema’s: ‘hold it in the cradle of loving kindness’. My sense is that – in time – we might be able to bring any feeling we have into the gap and be with it warmly in that wide open space. The potential then is for a profound sense of being safe-enough with ourselves, knowing that any state we’re in could be held in that way.

Beastie: Practising with the flickers of feelings – before they become a flame or fire – is certainly a good way of working up to it. But yes, you and Pema do seem to be optimistic that, given time, we can hold anything in that gap.

Ara: What we’ve found so far is that, with bigger feelings, particularly shame – which I know you intend to write more about Beastie – we have to keep returning to the gap. Some days it’s been about going back time and again, each time we feel that flicker accelerating into a flame. Pema talks of times she’s sat up all night with that kind of feeling.

Beastie: Again it’s not about eradicating or avoiding the feelings, thoughts, sensations, etc. but being with them along with everything else. There was one day we went for a walk in the woods and I was in a very angry place.

Ara: Getting in touch with our beautiful and long-absent fight response.

Beastie: Heh. It was interesting because it felt like I kept re-igniting – going back into angry ruminations – but at the same time the rest of you were able to be with the green leaves and the breeze. The plural thing certainly helps us to hold multiple states that way: generally one part struggling and one part able to hold them. But it can also feel that the gap is holding the aspects of experience that are more difficult, alongside aspects that are less so.

Ara: I like the bit where Pema says that if you go barefoot and your feet get cut to shreds, you could try to cover every piece of land you want to walk on in leather. Alternatively you could make yourself a pair of shoes. That’s how we’ve been thinking about what we’re doing right now isn’t it? Making ourselves a pair of shoes.

Beastie: Proper, solid hiking boots is the plan. That’s a good analogy for what we’re hoping for from the gap isn’t it. Right now we can easily become scared, because we’ve been so overwhelmed and incapacitated. But the more we sit with each experience as it comes – and learn that we can tolerate it – the more we have that sense of being safe-enough to ourselves. 

Ara: That brings us onto befriending.

The gap and befriending

Beastie: So what do you mean by befriending?

Ara: Certain phrases really lodge in my mind lately. Pete Walker writes about ‘becoming an unflinching source of kindness and compassion towards yourself’. Pema talks about befriending: complete acceptance of yourself as you are, no sense that you need to change or improve. Chani Nicholas writes about building an unbreakable bond with yourself, accompanying yourself no matter what, wanting yourself like your life depends on it.

Beastie: Chani Nicholas being?

Ara: An astrologer. 

Beastie: *Raises eyebrow*

Ara: Yes I know, I know. I have become that queer. At least I have you and James to keep me honest. What she suggests is really good though, whether or not you buy all the understanding behind it… Just like Pete and Pema now that I come to think of it. You may or may not buy that our suffering is primarily located in our childhood trauma, or in the combination of past karma and human attempts to avoid suffering which Buddhism suggests, but you can still find their advice extremely helpful.

Beastie: Fair point, well made Ara. I’ll give you that one.

Ara: Feeling gentle today huh Beastie?

Beastie: Well I have to remember I’m speaking to an old woman.

Ara: Remember Anna’s rule about being a smartass.

Beastie: *grin* If Tony gets away with publicly sassing you then I definitely do. So you’re saying that the gap can help us to befriend ourselves, as well as making us safe-enough.

Ara: I think they’re related. Right now we do not know that we are an okay person no matter what. We don’t want ourselves no matter what. We can’t accompany ourselves anywhere. When we have the shame feelings in particular, we do not feel that we’re okay, or deserving of being accompanied or loved – even by ourselves. And there is also a fear that we couldn’t accompany ourselves in future – if certain things happened like realising we’d messed up in ways which we find particularly challenging.

Beastie: Too right. I’m rarely the part of us who struggles with those feelings, but the couple of times it was my turn it was shockingly hard.

Ara: So giving ourselves the message that we’re up for hanging with ourselves in the gap whatever we’ve done, however we feel – that’s how we befriend ourselves. Again we can conceptualise it plurally – whichever part of us is struggling, the other parts will be there, tag-teaming in to accompany them through it however bad it gets.

Beastie: Like we always do that if one of us wakes troubled at night: get them a hot milk and talk to them kindly.

Ara: Plurality has been a good way into self-love for us because it is easier – with a background of self-hatred – to love our component parts than it is to love the whole. But I think this gap goes beyond our plural love, to let every aspect of us – and our experience – know that we can tolerate it – even welcome it.

Beastie: Just like embracing me – the inner critic – we can work towards a point where we can embrace anything we go through: any feelings, any thoughts – befriending everything.

Ara: And as with you, I suspect we’ll find that much of what we’ve attempted to avoid or eradicate becomes a fierce ally if we can embrace it.

Beastie: We’ve already found that with the fear aspect of trauma haven’t we? Gratitude for how it protects us against overriding our consent again.

Ara: All part of learning to accompany ourselves rather than abandoning ourselves.

Beastie: The big ongoing challenge is going to be accompanying ourselves through shame. But we have already begun to see that holding shame in the gap, and getting curious about it, are leading us to helpful places, just as we did with fear. For example, when we stayed with shame we got the sense that we may be holding a lot of shame that isn’t really ours – more transferred onto us by others who can’t bear to feel it – the way that wider society tends to blame the person with trauma rather than the people and forces that traumatise them.

Ara: I look forward to reading your thoughts on shame soon Beastie. I’m also now thinking about the gap as past, present, and future protection and care. The gap enables us to be with feelings we have avoided in the past in ways that enable us to tell a different story through our life. 

The gap enables us to be in a good relationship to the here-and-now, instead of fearing what might come up. That’s an antidote to loneliness: knowing that we never have to feel abandoned in the present. 

Finally, being able to stay with feelings like fear, shame, anger, and sadness, means that we can protect and care for ourselves in the next instant, and longer term future. When those feelings become tolerable in the gap we can listen to what they’re telling us – instead of what we might assume they’re going to tell us.

Beastie: So when there is fear we might ask ‘How might I have been in danger of overriding my consent – or allowing it to be overridden?’ instead of just trying to get the hell out of there. When there is shame we could ask ‘Where does this shame belong?’ rather than collapsing into self-loathing. When there is sadness ‘What do we – and others – need to grieve?’ instead of sinking into depression. When there is anger ‘How can I have my boundaries?’ instead of lashing out.

Ara: ‘Positive’ feelings too. When there is joy ‘How can I dance with this – or share it – while it is here,’ instead of trying to pin it on a particular person or situation and grasp hold of that.

Beastie: True, true. That’s one for Tony, our joybringer.

Ara: Anything else to say about the gap?

Beastie: I think we’ve said the rest in our other post. That one deals with slowing down and creating gaps on the macro – as well as micro – scale, and more about the politics of slowness.

Ara: For now then Beastie.

Beastie: See you in the gap Ara.

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Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie and Ara.

The post Mind the gap 1: On slowing down and making space appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is slow relating?

Ara: *smiles*

Tony: What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does slow relating work?

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

Ara: And why d’you think that is?

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

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

Tony: Well I definitely need slowness in complex conversations.

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

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

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

Tony: What are our examples of slow relating?

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

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

Tony: And a great podcast was born! 

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

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

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

Tony: Pray for us Saint George, yes please!

The risks of fastlove

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony: It’s not what I expected.

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

…

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

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

Slow relating and trauma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ara: What is it like Tony?

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

Ara: Good description.

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

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

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

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

Slow relating and access intimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slow relating and kindness

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

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

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

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

Tony: When might it be particularly important to slow down

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

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

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

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

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

Balancing slower and faster desires in relationships

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

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

Ara: I’ll take that compliment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Googles*

Oh looks like someone already thought of that.

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

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

The Slow Love Manifesto

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

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

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

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