When JKP asked me to write a piece on queer joy for Pride season my immediate response was ‘you’ve got to be kidding.’ After these past two years, how can a focus on joy – or pride for that matter – be anything but a deluded kind of ‘back to normal’ dream: a dangerous denial of what we’ve been through, what we’re still going through? On reflection though I began to wonder about receiving the phrase ‘queer joy’ as an invitation. What might it mean to queer joy?

Queer umbrellas

If we take queer as a noun – an umbrella term for our LGBTQIA+ community – then it’s hard to find much joy. At a cultural level, the pandemic disproportionately impacted queer people’s mental health and queerphobic hate crime soared. The recent government U-turns on banning conversion therapy, and subsequent decision to do so only for sexual orientation, reflects the ongoing moral panic against trans folks, and how intersex and a-spectrum people are rarely included under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella in more than name, given that erasing practices for these groups are some of the most extreme and commonplace.

The impact of living through this time has been even greater for those – many of us – whose queerness intersects with other marginalisations: disabled folks who’ve seen COVID policies and practices centre abled people and treat them as disposable; those who the current economic crisis is pushing into ever-deeper levels of poverty; and people of colour – also disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, rises in hate crime, and endless cultural gaslighting of their experiences past and present.

At a community level, this has all taken a massive toll. In the last year alone, my close communities have seen six deaths, all related to mental health struggles rather than COVID itself.

While we might want to tell joyful stories of queer communities drawn closer during a time of crisis, the truth – for many of us – is the opposite. Understandably, given our experiences of both cultural trauma, and frequently the developmental trauma of not being fully accepted by our close people growing up, many of us have fallen back on our unconscious survival strategies: attacking outwards – blaming and ostracising those who seem to be hurting, abandoning or endangering us; attacking inwards against ourselves, or crossing our own – or others’ – boundaries in attempts to get our needs met; withdrawing into smaller and smaller zones of safety; and/or avoiding pain by distracting ourselves, distancing from those who’re struggling, and rushing ‘back to normal.’

These reactions have bumped up against each other painfully, often resulting in irreparable rifts and ruptures, which only exacerbate our levels of isolation and distress. It’s been hard indeed to face other’s limited capacities to hold us through this crisis, perhaps harder still to face our own tendencies to default back to habits which hurt ourselves and others.

So where is the potential for queer joy in all of this?

Queer seeing

Queer activists generally use the word queer as a verb: a doing word. The doing is a radical questioning of normative understandings of gender and sexuality, but also way more than that. Queering challenges all the interwoven axes of oppression that position one group as more valid and valuable than another, and all the culturally accepted ways in which we relate to others and ourselves.

Under this definition, we could find queer joy in a refusal to go ‘back to normal,’ recognising that normal has never worked for marginalised people like us. We could find it in insisting on being radically honest about what’s going on in the world and in our communities right now: understanding the links between our own individual trauma patterns and the traumatised and traumatising forms of relating we’re embedded in, including social and climate injustice.

We could find queer joy – and solidarity – in this kind of clear-seeing (or queer-seeing) of what we’re all up against, and in our determination to find better ways, knowing that our experiences actually make us some of the best-placed people and communities to do so.

Queer feeling

Another meaning of the verb queer is troubling the binary understandings that so much normativity is founded upon. In addition to the heteronormative binaries of straight/gay and man/woman, we could extend this to include all those binaries that render one group of people centred and another marginalised, one intelligible and another invisible, one valuable and another disposable.

From this perspective we might also question the valuing of certain emotional states over others. I read the request to write this piece as an invitation to focus on the light for a moment, because haven’t we all had enough darkness? But what if we can only have light by also embracing the darkness? Pride by acknowledging our (cultural, community, individual) shame? Joy by making room for all the feelings that are not-joy too?

There’ve been many attempts to identify the fundamental emotions. For our purposes, I’m going to say there are seven (mostly because it fits the nice queer metaphor that I’m planning to shoehorn into this section). These are joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, and some kind of category for loving/peaceful/powerful feelings (opinions vary on this one).

Emotion wheels illustrate these seven feelings, and all the other feelings under each category, in rainbow colours (see where I’m going with this?) As with rainbows (the actual kind and our LGBTQIA+ kind), emotion experts from ancient Buddhists to present-day psychologists emphasise that we need all of the emotions/colours. Instead of our common cultural binary that renders some emotions ‘good’ and others ‘bad’, and tries to maximise the one and avoid the other, such approaches invite us to become intimate with all seven, and all shades within and between them, embracing them as we would dear friends. Indeed, many would argue that it’s only to the degree that we’re able to flow through all of these feelings that we can fully experience any of them. In trying to eradicate sadness, for example, we would also lose joy, as in the movie Inside Out.

Queer kindness

So bring on your queer rage, your queer terror and grief and shame. All are welcome here. It’s only through learning how to feel the full rainbow of feelings that we’ll be able to experience queer joy, and to see how we hurt ourselves – and others – when we repress these feelings, or react from them in order to get out of them as quickly as possible. Only with the full rainbow of feelings can we really understand what we – and others – are up against, and find some understanding and kindness for that.

To me that’s the message of the wonderful recent queer film Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is all about how we might stop passing trauma on from generation to generation as we’re currently doing. The tortured – and torturing – character, Jobu Tupaki, who has (queerly) seen it all, says that she was just looking for someone who could see what I see, feel what I feel. While admitting their human smallness and stupidity, the other characters find their way to give her that, if only for fleeting moments. I’ll leave it here with another quote from that movie:

“The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don’t know what’s going on.“

Find out more

More on how to feel all the feels in my zines Welcome Monster Feelings, Staying With Feelings, and blog post on Staying With The Big Feels.

The post Queer joy appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

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

Here’s a taster…

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

Welcome Monster Feelings

Welcoming Your Monster Feelings

Coming soon! Interview with the artist.

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

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

James: Hey again Ara.

Ara: Hey James. So good to talk with you again so soon.

James: I thought about writing this as a regular post, but I realised I could really do with somebody to bounce off: to ask me questions to help me clarify my thoughts.

Ara: I’d love to do that. I’m aware that in our last post together you asked me a lot of questions. It feels good to balance that dynamic by doing it the other way around.

James: Mm like you are more of the expert around feelings and embodiment, but perhaps I have the expertise on this more intellectual piece: weaving the various theories together.

Ara: I like that.

James: I also feel like I need you as a kind of anchor. I feel so excited about the puzzle pieces that seem to be slotting together here. I want to zoom off in a hundred different directions at once.

Ara: How can I help to ground you?

James: Remind me to breathe, to slow down, I don’t have to do it all at once. You could ask me questions to lead me through one step at a time. Are you up for that?

Ara: Absolutely. Want to breathe before we start?

James: Sure *laughs* *breathes*

Overview

Ara: Okay. Can you start by giving us an overview of the terrain you want to cover in this piece? If the terms we use here are unfamiliar to people, we’ll define them in the next section.

James: Absolutely. It’s something I’ve been building to ever since I did that Bowlby Centre event last month which I wrote up here, about attachment theory. My sense is that perhaps everyone contains all of the different attachment styles – or at least the capacity for them – within themselves. Rather than aiming at some kind of static secure attachment, perhaps there’s more value in getting to know all our different attachment potentials very well. Maybe that even is the way that we get to ‘earned secure attachment’.

Ara: A kind of paradox? We’ve tried to get to ‘secure attachment’ by getting away from ‘insecure’ attachment styles, but perhaps the way to get there is through them, not away from them?

James: Precisely. And there’s this sense that it also maps onto emotions and the ‘window of tolerance’. The only way to expand the window of tolerance and get to a place where you can be with all emotional states is through experiencing (tough) emotions, not by trying to avoid them or get away from them.

Ara: So that’s attachment and emotion, what about plural parts work?

James: We’ve reached these conclusions by getting to know all of the parts of us deeply. I’m suggesting that we can do this work by befriending the three parts of us who map on to the three ‘insecure’ attachment styles, and the emotions that they hold. That’s the way to both earned secure attachment and an expanded window of tolerance.

Ara: Wonderful. So you can explain to us how we now understand our parts having operated together in the ‘old’ system, that we had our whole life. And you can describe how we’re working with them now to reconfigure the system towards more secure attachments in our inner and outer relationships, and towards an expanded window of tolerance. How am I doing?

James: This is really helpful, thankyou Ara. 

Ara: Another breath before we continue?

James: Mm. *breathes*

The faux window of tolerance, faux secure attachment, and faux parts

Ara: So one thing that we read which helped you click together on all of this was the concept of the faux window of tolerance in Kathy L. Kain and Stephen J. Terrell’s book ‘Nurturing Resilience’. Do you want to explain that, and how it relates to attachment?

James: That’s a great place to start, yes. So Kathy and Stephen explain that many, if not most, people develop a ‘faux window of tolerance’ when they’re growing up, in order to handle intense emotions. The window of tolerance is Daniel Siegal’s term for the space in which we can be present with – and regulate – our emotions, rather than being overwhelmed by them. 

Growing up if our caregivers and others can meet us in various emotional states and help us to know that they are okay, understandable, and manageable, then we will develop that window of tolerance. We’ll learn in those early relationships that those feelings are okay, and we’ll learn from experience with others what we can do to soothe ourselves when feelings are really intense. We’ll end up with a nice wide space in which we can welcome a variety of different feelings at different intensities.

Ara: So that’s how it relates to secure attachment? The window of tolerance is developed within secure relationships?

James: Right, a secure attachment refers to that kind of nurturing relationship where we have a ‘secure base’ or ‘safe haven’ to return to when emotions are unfamiliar or overwhelming. As a child, if we learn that we can return there and be welcomed, understood, soothed, have our needs met, then we’ll be more and more able to extend out from that base to explore our world with openness, curiosity, and creativity. We‘ll have more of a sense that we can tolerate any tough experiences and regulate our own emotions, as well as a strong sense of trust in that base we can return to if it gets too hard.

Later in life that would translate into building strong, secure relationships with other people in our lives – friends, partners, mentors, communities, etc. – so that we still have a place to return where people can help us coregulate around the tough feelings, where we can express our needs and have them met, and so on.

Ara: So what’s the ‘faux window of tolerance’.

James: Most of us carry some degree of developmental trauma: a sense of key relationships not being very secure and of not all emotions – or all intensities of emotion – being tolerated and regulated by those around us. Kathy and Stephen suggest that what therapists call ‘defences’ are what we develop in order to have a ‘faux window of tolerance’: the impression that we are tolerating our emotional states, but really we’re defending against them.

Ara: That resonated for us.

James: So much. This last year or two we’ve often wondered how we’ve done so seemingly okay in life despite clearly carrying so much developmental trauma, such that we’ve been plunged into intense trauma periods and overwhelming emotion several times over the years. The idea of a ‘faux window of tolerance’ makes so much sense. It might have looked like we were handling difficult experiences and the emotions they brought up pretty well, but really it was more that we were adept at various defences, or survival strategies, to avoid or sidestep them.

Ara: I think that fits well with what we discussed last time about emotions James. The sense that we thought we were pretty good at ‘staying with feelings’ but have lately realised that there were several vital emotions that we were barely feeling at all.

James: Exactly. So what we were generally doing was repressing feelings, or reacting out of survival strategies in ways which made the difficult experience and/or feelings go away. Part of why the last year or two have been so intense is that we’ve finally been feeling many of the feelings – and the experiences they resulted from – which we hadn’t allowed ourselves to feel along the way.

Ara: And you think it may be useful to conceptualise this as a ‘faux secure attachment’ as well as a ‘faux window of tolerance’?

James: I do. We – and I suspect many, many people – were able to do a pretty good impression of functioning in the world, and relating with ourselves and others, for much of the time because we’d developed pretty remarkable defences and survival strategies. However, the ‘faux-ness’ became apparent any time something retraumatising happened – beyond the capacity of the defences and survival strategies to cope with – which put us into periods of intense PTSD where the feelings were terrifying and overwhelming and we couldn’t function. 

The ‘faux-ness’ was also revealed in most of our close relationships because eventually it became apparent that we – and the other person – weren’t really securely attached – in ourselves or with each other – and the relationship ended. Maybe they became more insecure and needy over time and we had to get away, or vice versa, or the level of conflict became unbearable to us. Often it was revealed how much we’d been shaping ourselves to fit that person, and how much we’d lost ourselves in the process, and we finally began to struggle with that.

Ara: I notice that I feel some resistance to the word ‘faux’ here.

James: Me too. It does feel rather harsh and judgemental, and there’s also a sense in it of having been a ‘false self’ covering up a ‘real self’ which is something that I would question.

Ara: Being seven selves all of whom are a work in progress definitely raises questions around any sense of a real ‘authentic’ self!

James: It does indeed.

Faux selves?

Ara: Do you want to say how all this relates to plurality?

James: Well, if we were to use those terms, we would say that we developed a ‘faux part’ – Max – who was to the fore for most of our life. She was the one who formed that ‘faux window of tolerance’ and who formed those ‘faux secure attachments’. She would likely have looked pretty happy and successful from the outside, except for the few times – when traumatic things happened and/or relationships ended – when it became very hard for her to maintain that facade.

Ara: We find it so interesting that we chose the name ‘Max’ for her, given that it sounds a lot like ‘mask’, which is kind of what she was.

James: And her survival strategies were to dissociate a lot, not that she realised that at the time. Throwing herself into work, and into helping others, both enabled her to keep our own intense feelings, and traumatised parts, very disowned and buried. Busy-ness and distraction was her main ‘faux window of tolerance’. Focusing on becoming something for others – rather than bringing herself openly and vulnerably to relationships – was her main ‘faux secure attachment’.

Ara: And this is why we don’t love ‘faux’ for her, although it is accurate in a way, because these survivor parts – in all of us – are something we should be deeply grateful for, and celebrate, not dismiss as ‘false’ or flawed.

James: Agreed. We simply wouldn’t be here now were it not for Max. She protected the other parts of us through some truly horrific early – and later – experiences. And she kept searching for answers to all of the tough stuff that we encountered with our mental health, and in our relationships, and that she saw others around us struggling with too. Ironically if she hadn’t had the survival strategies of workaholism, and trying to help others, we would not now have this huge foundation of knowledge and writing to build upon. 

Ara: We can feel deep gratitude to Max, and huge grief for what she had to go through. One image of her is of the ‘parentified child’: an inner child or teenager who has to act like an inner parent in order to survive and look after the other parts of the inner system who are even more vulnerable. It’s rather like the way a big sibling might have to look after the other kids in a family where parents are struggling, or unable to handle tough experiences and emotions.

James: How it feels at the moment is that we have finally freed Max of that burden and she is off walking in the hills alone somewhere.

Ara: Mm I always think of her when I read the Mary Oliver poem, The Journey. By finding/developing our own inner parents – you and me James – and by working with our three traumatised child parts directly, we have liberated Max.

James: Which brings us on to those parts and how they function in terms of attachment.

Insecurely attached parts under the faux secure attachment

Ara: Go for it James.

James: Right, so this is the idea that all of us have all of the attachment styles present within us. Parts work gives us a nice easy way of working with this. Our experience is that we literally have members of our plural system who map on to each of the forms of insecure attachment.

Ara: I sense a table coming on!

James: How did you guess?

Ara: A lot to unpack there James. How about getting a drink before we start?

James: Hot chocolate?

Ara: You read my mind.

James: I was going to say that’s not so hard when it’s the same mind, but given how poorly parts of us knew each other in the past perhaps I can’t say that.

Ara: We’re getting to know each other better and better now thankfully. Also I feel like we both do and don’t share the same bodymind, given how differently each of us think, feel, and inhabit our body, but perhaps that’s one for another blog post!

…

James: Okay then. So to explain the table. We’ve introduced these four ‘traumatised parts’ before in various places, although our understanding of them – and how they fit together – has definitely clarified over the past year. Mapping onto attachment theory we’d now say that Tony was our anxious-preoccupied part: needy, clingy and desperate for connection. Morgan – who we used to call Beastie – is dismissive avoidant: struggling to trust others and pushing them away. And Jonathan is fearful avoidant: terrified of that other people will hurt or shame him.

Ara: And the ‘okay’ bit of the table?

James: Transactional analysis is another therapeutic approach which seems to map fairly well onto attachment theory. The anxious-preoccupied part – Tony – believes that other people are okay, but he’s not, so he craves others’ love, approval, and attention, and he fears their disapproval, dismissal, and disgust. The dismissive avoidant part believes that she is okay but other people are not, so she tends to blame others and push them away. And the fearful avoidant part believes that he isn’t okay and neither are other people, hence Jonathan’s fear/shame trauma response: other people are dangerous and he is wrong and unacceptable.

Ara: But most of our life these three parts have been disowned?

James: Precisely, which does not mean they haven’t had an impact. Now we understand it that Max was constantly responding to others’ demands inside and out. On the inside she was constantly getting, often rather desperate, messages from Tony, Morgan and Jonathan, about what they needed. She tried her best to balance and meet those needs. On the outside she was very tuned into what other people wanted of her and tried to balance and meet those demands. No wonder she’s off in the hills these days taking a well-earned break!

Ara: So dismantling Max’s defences and setting her free, as we did last year, left us with a much clearer sense of the other three traumatised parts. They have been gradually revealing themselves more and more as they’ve come to trust us. They’re gradually feeling more securely attached to us, and to other people, and they’re gradually sensing that their feelings have a more expanded window of tolerance to be held in.

James: Nicely put. What just clicked with me this morning is that not only did Max have her set of defences – or survival strategies – that covered over the others, but each of the ‘insecure’ parts also have a set of defences that we need to get underneath in order for them to show themselves fully and to feel all their feelings.

Ara: This is so exciting, and it makes so much sense. Do you want to take me through it?

James: Please. The thing that struck me was about Tony initially. He didn’t seem to make sense. On the one hand we experience him as this cocky, hot, humorous part of us: very extrovert and craving connection with others. On the other hand we know that he holds the Deep Yearning of the Soul (). When he does feel his feelings they are often feelings of unquenchable thirst, desperate need, and longing. So how can this seemingly confident part also be the part who feels that he isn’t okay and will be abandoned by others?

But with this sense of defences it all makes sense. If Tony is driven by not wanting to feel the traumatic level of neediness and loneliness that he holds then it makes all kinds of sense that he would fling himself into connections by coming over as charming, sexy, funny and so on.

Ara: Mm yes. As he and I recently discussed, tragically that often fetches him up with just the kind of rejection and loss of belonging that he deeply fears. But it does make all kinds of sense as a defence, just like Max dissociating from recognising just how trapped she’s been in work and relationships. What about Morgan?

James: Again initially confusing. The part of us who holds anger, even hatred, towards others has manifested our whole life as the inner critic, turning that anger and hatred inwards. But if you look at it from the defence perspective that, like Tony, Morgan was disowned all our life, then it makes sense.

Ara: So growing up we learnt that we must never be needy and desperate as Tony can be, or rageful and resentful at others, as Morgan can be. So both of them defended by becoming the opposite – when they were allowed out at all. 

James: Tony faked confidence and made light of his pain, Morgan turned anger in against us rather than ever allowing herself to feel it towards others.

Ara: And our chalkboard boy Jonathan did something similar.

James: I think so. Deep down he holds that incredibly vulnerable fear and shame, and it wasn’t acceptable to admit to those things. So he became the people pleaser who pretended to be fine – in order to keep others happy – and who hypervigilantly figured out what others wanted from him and tried to give it to them.

Ara: Expanding out from our particular experience, do you think there’s something for other people in all this?

James: I suspect so. It probably manifests very differently for different people, but it would be worth everyone exploring what their ‘faux secure’ part looks like, and whether they also have all three ‘insecure’ parts in them somewhere. How do those three influence the whole system? How do they impact how they relate with other people? How repressed or available are they?  What are their defensive behaviours and what are those covering up?

Ara: You’ve done a great job at overviewing the theory, and how it applies to us, here James. I’m wondering if we might dig into practice a little more now?

James: I’d love to. What did you have in mind?

Ara: I’d like to reflect more on how we’re working with this internally and externally. How are we building that ‘earned secure attachment’ with each of the ‘insecure’ parts, and how are we bringing awareness of the three different ‘insecure’ styles into our current relationships? 

We’ve had this radical sense lately that strong relationships are not ones in which we’re just securely attached, but rather the ones in which we can honestly and kindly recognise all the different attachments in play.

James: Yes! 

Ara: A little stretch first?

James: Also yes.

…

Working with insecure parts internally

Ara: We covered some of this territory in our last post James, about how we’re working to help each part to expand their window of tolerance and feel their feelings safely enough, which is also how we’re building our earned secure attachment with each of them.

James: You’re doing the big space ‘drop the storyline and feel the feeling’ work with them, and I’m trying to hold them close, love them and hear them when they’re struggling. We’re also checking in with the ‘insecure three’ at least twice a day to see where they’re at with everything. Because they’re so used to hiding themselves and their feeling, it’s important to keep encouraging them to deliberately tune in and share where they’re at.

Ara: So what else do we need to say here?

James: I guess the new piece is recognising those defences that each of those three holds. Perhaps it feels obvious to go to Tony when we feel yearning, Morgan when we feel anger, and Jonathan when we feel fear, to help them really feel it and be held and heard in it. But there’s now this extra piece of recognising that we need to go to them at least as much if Tony is pinning that yearning onto somebody else or falling into over-excited connection or fantasy, if Morgan is going into inner critic anger-inward type noise, or if Jonathan is chalkboarding.

Ara: Those experiences often feel more dissociated – now that we understand what that means. It often doesn’t feel so apparent that there is a feeling present. There may not be clarity around which part of us is doing their thing, or what has triggered them. There’s just a general sense of unease, confusion, or of being a bit scattered or vague.

James: That’s right. I think we got it first with Jonathan because we clearly identified him with hypervigilance and chalkboarding. Last year whenever we found our brain going over and over things in that familiar way, I would go to Jonathan and encourage him to go closer to the ‘traumado’ of fear/shame feelings instead of desperately trying to solve impossible equations. It had to be very slow and gradual, but eventually we could sit together in the eye of the storm and let it swirl around us, finding a way to settle him there instead of trying to figure everything out which usually made it worse and worse.

Ara: And lately we’ve taken any – even fleeting – ‘noisy’ anger in/out thoughts as an opportunity to go to Morgan and encourage her to sit with her feelings of anger. Tony can be very dissociated, but again we’ve been noticing the kind of thing that’s likely to make him feel rejected or lonely when it happens, and encouraging him to drop down into the yearning feeling, with one of us holding him through it.

James: From a trauma-informed perspective it has to be gradual doesn’t it? Feeling the feelings in the times when it feels possible to do so, gradually expanding the window of tolerance so more and more of it is possible to feel. Slowly these parts can drop the defences more and more, creating a ‘secure base’ of more gentle time with us every day to return to. And very gradually they can share those feelings with trusted others too.

Ara: More on that in a moment. Anything else to say on the inner work?

James: One thing is how each part’s go-to fantasies helped us to understand their resistance, as well as the feelings they covered up. There’s a lot more to write about how we us our erotic imagination for such exploration. We sketched out some of it in this zine with Justin. 

Lately we noticed that Jonathan, Tony, and Morgan kept going towards a fantasy where they were welcomed into a home with me. But the way that fantasy played out was very different for each of them. With Jonathan it was about being in a terrifying situation, rescued by me, and taken somewhere safe where he had a lot of time to recover before having to do anything else. With Tony it was about coming to live with me but being convinced that he would mess up and be sent away. He kept acting out until he could admit those feelings and believe my reassurance. With Morgan she came to me very reluctantly. She kept wanting to fight me and walk away, struggling to trust me to really be up for being with her rage.

Ara: So fascinating how those fantasies – and many of the dreams we’ve had too – echo the processes we’re going through in our outer life. Anything else?

James: I guess that the process feels reciprocal. The more the ‘insecure’ parts learn to trust us, the more of the previously disowned ‘unacceptable’ feelings they can bring. And the more they bring those feelings, the more trust is built. Welcoming them in those feelings seems to help all of them to become more real, more fully fleshed out. That is partly why Morgan wanted a ‘real name’ rather than being called ‘Beastie’ which felt like a caricature. 

But on the way towards that more ‘secure’ attachment with us they often balk at it. They try to resist those feelings, like they can’t really believe it’s really okay to say that they hate somebody – or us (Morgan), or to beg not to be left (Tony).

Ara: Mm which is perhaps why they have to practise in fantasy before they’re able to do that in reality. We’ve described it as encouraging them to bring the whole palette of feelings, not just the not palatable elements of themselves.

James: We like a bit of word play don’t we? 

We also find it useful to notice which old experiences keep returning to our mind, and which current ones. With old experiences we can ask where each part of us is at with those. Often it seems that one of them needs to return to that memory and to complete it somehow – by really feeling it, or by saying how they wish they’d been able to respond, for example, if they’d been more available back then. You and I can hold and hear them through that process, instead of our old pattern of despairing that we kept churning round and round old memories. 

With current experiences it’s similarly important for all of them – or the one who is particularly struggling – to be heard and heeded. For example recently we deeply listened to Morgan’s angry response to how someone treated us and found a response that sat well with her. After that she felt a lot more welcome and ‘at home’ in us.

Ara: It’s not about directly reacting to any ‘insecure’ impulse they might have, as Max might once have done. Rather it’s about engaging in conversation, taking them very seriously, and thinking together how we might respond – giving ourselves a lot of time around it.

James: Right, so instead of Tony leaping into a connection with someone the minute he feels drawn to them, we can notice that feeling and consider how we might move cautiously towards that connection, or whether it’s really speaking to a general desire for more contact, or to be looked after internally. Instead of Morgan deciding never to engage with somebody again we can investigate what she’s responding to negatively in them, and what might be a safe-enough, boundaried way of relating with that person, given what they bring up in her.

Ara: I’m thinking that all these ways of being with them are about demonstrating how loved and respected they are.

James: Which is very easy to do. It’s when parts or feelings are hidden that they feel murky or threatening or hard to love. Brought to the surface and into the light they become far easier to love and understand.

Ara: Which brings us onto the final part because I suspect the same is true in relationships with others. When parts of us – and their feelings – are hidden and murky, others may well respond to us with aversion, or by trying to grasp onto the more appealing defensive versions of us. When it’s all available – and clear – to ourselves and others, we stand a better chance of having mutually nourishing, open, relationships.

James: Right. But so hard for the parts of us who have survived for years by employing those defences to believe that.

Bringing all our parts into relationships

Ara: So let’s explore this. How is it useful to bring the ‘insecure’ parts into relationship with others? I can imagine people thinking that doesn’t make much sense. Surely the last thing we want to do is to relate with others in an insecure way?

James: Mm well part of it is that Pete Walker bit we find so useful: reparenting ourselves and reparenting by committee. We can’t do all this work alone because humans are relational, interconnected and interdependent. There’s only so far we can get as an individual (albeit an individual who is also seven people!)

Ara: There’s only so far our inner relationships can take us.

James: Right. I’m thinking that therapy is like an in-between between the inner work and the work of relating to the people in our life. We can gradually bring our ‘insecure’ parts into the therapeutic relationship in order to notice how they relate with another person, and to experience a different response to the damaging ones they’ve received in the past.

Ara: It often feels like that doesn’t it? That me, you or Fox is taking Morgan, Jonathan or Tony to therapy to give them an hour of practicing doing this with another person.

James: Right, they practise with us at home, and with our therapist in that room. Doing similar things. Like the therapist will point out their defences and encourage them to drop into their body, communicate how they’re feeling, etc. They can practise revealing the things that they assume other people will reject in them – because that’s what’s happened in the past – and experience somebody just being okay with them.

Ara: Maybe a couple of examples?

James: Well like whenever Morgan allows herself to talk about what she’d really like to say to somebody who has treated us badly, our therapist clearly enjoys her energy and her capacity to see through people’s bullshit and protect us. And Tony is gradually feeling safe enough that if he shows up in therapy with the energy that he’s scared will be ‘too much’ for people, she’ll help him to stay grounded. She’ll be up for seeing the vulnerability he’s covering over, while encouraging him to go slowly instead of revealing ‘too far too fast’ as he has in the past.

Ara: And you’re thinking that this kind of therapy is a bridge to bringing those parts into more open relation with others?

James: I think that’s where discernment comes in perhaps. Who is it safe enough to openly engage with from those parts? Who might we be able to speak about these parts with, without actually bringing them out? What situations might we want to be cautious around, perhaps only bringing you or me to Ara, at least while this is all so new?

Ara: I’m thinking that maps nicely onto what Tony and I wrote about Dunbar’s number too. Discerning where a relationship is at, in our life, and what that means in terms of how open and vulnerable we’re able to be in it.

James: Heh our computer just told us it was ‘establishing secure connection’. I thought, ‘you and me both mate’!

Ara: *laughs*

James: What were we saying? Oh yeah. So we’re finding it hugely useful to recognise that Morgan, Tony, and Jonathan are already engaged in all our relationships – of course. And now we continually check in where they’re at with them. There’s a sense that, instead of denying that we feel any anger, yearning, or fear towards the people in our life, perhaps it’s more useful to assume that we will feel all of those things – to some extent – in all our relationships, and to name that – to ourselves, and even with that person.

Ara: Absolutely. There’s this paradoxical sense that the more we can allow all of that, the better we’ll be able  to love that person.

James: The more we know how we hate them, fear them, and want something from them, the better the relationship will be! It is surprising indeed, but it’s true. We’ve navigated recent potentially tricky moments in relationships much better, I think, being able to name to ourselves what those attachments – or potential attachments – are with that person.

Ara: Again an example?

James: Well with one friend we noticed how Tony wanted to fling himself into closer relationship with them, while Morgan had flickers of anger that perhaps they weren’t being mindful enough of how vulnerable we are. With another we noticed Tony wishing for more time with them, and Morgan wanting to dismiss them for not making more time for us. 

Those two things happened with friends who we talk about this stuff with all the time so we could name it, and they could reciprocate naming the multiple different parts of them in play. It makes it much easier to be able to say ‘this part of me feels…’ because there’s no blame in it. Not ‘you’re treating us badly’ but ‘I notice that part of me longs for more time with you and another part of me wants to distance from you because we’re not getting it. Can we talk about how we might do time together in future so those parts can have a bit more clarity about where we’re at?’ 

Ara: Mm that’s a good example because it turned out that it wasn’t that we really wanted lots more from them, or to reject them, we just wanted to understand where they were at more clearly, and what we could expect from them.

James: Discernment is important in knowing who will be up for those kinds of conversations and who won’t. Sometimes it’s more of an implicit sense – once we’ve named it all to ourselves – that we need to pull back a bit from this person, or to have a different kind of conversation, perhaps just from one of us Ara.

Ara: Yes, in the deepest relationships we might encourage Tony, Jonathan or Morgan to have the conversation directly, in order to experience that part of us being met well. In less close ones we could report on where our parts are at. In even less close relationships – like a professional exchange – we would talk from one of us as if we were a unified ‘I’, once we’d come up with our boundary, or request, or whatever it was. It feels important to have at least some relationships where all parts of us are welcome, just as we welcome them within ourselves.

James: I think we’re nearly there with this piece Ara.

Ara: One more breath to feel whether there’s anything more to add?

James: *breathes* Okay yes I want to say that it’s important to give these processes a lot of time. That’s why slow, spacious relationships are so essential for us at the moment. Often we need time to notice that an exchange with somebody has brought some of those ‘insecure’ feelings up in us, to find the part – or multiple parts – in us who are triggered, to fully drop into what they are feeling, and then to consider together what kind of response, if any, is necessary. We tend to keep ongoing notes on our phone about each of the current situations in play, and keep returning to them over days, or even weeks, until we have a clear sense of the appropriate response.

Ara: Mm right, and not jumping too quickly to that last stage is so important. As we’ve said, it might be that the feeling just needs to be held and heard inwardly, or that some kind of communication or clarification is important, or that we need the relationship to shift in some way. We often can’t tell which it is till we’ve had time to go through the whole process. And the more we do this – giving it time, and asking that other people give us time – the more those parts of us relax into the process instead of freaking out and trying to solve it immediately.

James: Criticism and conflict are a particular challenge of course. Morgan, Jonathan, and Tony would reactively go into a blame, shame, or tame response – respectively.

Ara: I like that. Blame the other, collapse in shame, or tame the situation by glossing over it or making it okay for the other person without attending to our needs. But taking time, as a team, helps us find more of an ‘I’m okay, you’re okay’ response, where we value ourselves and the others involved equally.

James: This whole thing also helps us to see much more clearly when we’re on the receiving end of other peoples’ reactivity: when they are foregrounding their equivalent of Morgan, Tony, or Jonathan – or their Max cover up. We’re not there yet of course, but there’s a strong sense of building compassion for others – even when they do react against us – because we’re so familiar with those parts of ourselves, and we know the incredibly tough feelings – and the painful experiences – that they come from. On the way to that compassion, though, we need to fully feel our attractions and aversions to those things in other people.

Ara: The sense I’m left with is that ‘earned secure attachment’ requires us to hold – and even share – all of our ‘insecure attachments’. Without that it would just be ‘faux secure attachment’ again.

James: Which meshes nicely with Bonnie Badenoch’s ‘radical inclusivity’, Janina Fisher’s ‘no part gets left behind’ and Richard Schwartz’s ‘no bad parts’. The answer is never to try to eradicate any part, or the less palatable elements of any part. The answer is to welcome them all fully, reach an inner secure attachment with them, and bring them all to all of our experiences in a safe-enough, secure-enough way.

Ara: Nicely put James.

James: Thank-you. And thank-you for doing this Ara. I’ve loved it, and your reminders to pause have definitely helped me both to enjoy the process throughout, and to not stray into the unwieldy lengths of some of our blog posts.

Ara: Mm there’s definitely more to be said about applying this same approach to our relationship with work James, but not for now. Let’s keep it a succinct little piece (for us!) at under 7000 words. Time for a walk *smiles*

More on this:

For more exploration of these themes check out our recent pieces on attachment, slow relating, and big feels and the other work on trauma and plurality on this website.

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

Plural tag: This post was by James and Ara.

The post Attachment, emotion and plural parts work appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The last couple of months I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on about trauma, particularly cPTSD (complex post traumatic stress disorder). This post is my attempt to summarise what I’ve learnt so far. First and foremost this is for myself, so that I can bed this knowledge in, and weave it together with my existing understandings of how people and relationships work. But hopefully the summary of what I’ve read so far will be helpful as a starting point for others who see themselves in this idea of cPTSD. 

Largely I’m drawing on Pete Walker’s book cPTSD here, but also on Judith Herman’s classic Trauma and Recovery, where she first came up with the idea of cPTSD. I also find Steve Haines’ graphic guide Trauma is Really Strange, David Treleaven’s Trauma-sensitive Mindfulness, and Sarah Peynton’s Your Resonant Self helpful. I’m very grateful to my co-creator, Alex Iantaffi, for their podcast on cPTSD – and for our conversations over the years – which helped me to find this literature.

Why is this useful to me?

When I was in my twenties I read every book I could find on depression, and went to see the authors speak whenever I had the opportunity. Several times I remember going up, in some desperation, to the speaker at the end of the talk and describing my experience, in the hope that they would say ‘absolutely, that’s a legit kind of depression. Welcome to the club. Here’s how to cure it.’ Actually what they said was that they’d never heard of what I was describing and it certainly wasn’t anything like their experience of depression. I was left feeling confused and ashamed.

The experience I described was something I’d been going through for years: a swift plummet into an utterly hopeless place where I felt panicked and utter hatred towards myself. Sometimes it became so desperate that I self-harmed, which seemed to alleviate it. Sometimes it eventually lifted by itself. It often only lasted for hours, although it could last days, and it happened against the backdrop of a generally highly self-critical way of treating myself.

This is the way I depicted it when I tried to draw it, some years later.

I was confused because ‘depressed’ seemed a good way to describe this horrible place, but the sudden plummet was different to the long periods of dark moods described in depression memoirs. I could get out of bed. In fact I couldn’t allow myself not to, driven as I was by this highly self-critical perfectionism. And although I often longed to eradicate myself for being unacceptable, somehow for me that came out in the form of beating myself – literally and metaphorically – rather than in the form of suicidal ideation.

Between then and now I’ve read a lot about mental health, reflected critically on diagnosis and treatment, and trained in forms of psychotherapy that generally see suffering as a more universally human – or existential – experience. 

However, reading Pete’s book on cPTSD was the first time I read a perfect description of the plummet, tied to a legit mental health label. What I’ve experienced my whole life is called an ‘emotional flashback’, and it’s a sign of having cPTSD.

What is cPTSD?

cPTSD is also called developmental trauma. Steve Haines’s book suggests that one-off traumatic events, developmental trauma, and stress in life which becomes overwhelming all work in similar ways through the body and brain. They have similar impacts on the nervous system, and result in similar somatic experiences, flashbacks, dissociation and the 4Fs.

My understanding from Pete’s book is that cPTSD – or developmental trauma – occurs when we internalise a sense of ourselves as unacceptable as a child due to how we’re responded to by the world around us. He talks of a shift from a child believing ‘I make mistakes’ to ‘I am a mistake’ (behaviour to identity). The shaming we experience from others – whatever form that takes – becomes an inner sense that we are shameful. Such children develop a vicious inner critic voice which they’re always trying to please. Judith suggests that the imagining that we are bad, wholly responsible for our trauma and could learn to do better is preferable to the alternative that we were helpless and weren’t being protected or cared for in the ways we needed by others.

Often emotional expression is punished or shamed, meaning that children don’t learn how to regulate their emotions or to experience them in a positive way. They can also find other people’s emotions overwhelming and frightening too. There is often a sense of not being loved or liked by those around them, and/or of love disappearing suddenly, and/or of it being very contingent on only behaving in some ways and not others. Because it’s too risky for kids to believe that those around them are in any way dangerous they tend to protect those people by taking all the responsibility for what’s happening on themselves.

According to Pete, cPTSD is characterised by the following kinds of experiences:

• Emotional flashbacks
• Being highly critical of ourselves and/or others
• Toxic shame
• Abandoning ourselves
• Anxiety and/or struggles around social situations or relationships
• Loneliness and/or feeling abandoned
• Dissociation (feeling checked out and/or distracting yourself/numbing with food, drink, worrying, working, social media, TV, etc.)
• Feeling bad about ourselves from low self-esteem to self-loathing
• Big mood changes and struggles with feelings
• Difficulties with relationships 
• Being easily triggered into the 4Fs

The following kinds of somatic (bodily) experiences are also common: 

• Hypervigilance, constantly scanning our lives and worlds for any sign of danger, convinced it will happen again, trying to figure out how to avoid it
• Shallow breathing
• Feeling adrenaline a lot of the time
• Feeling physically ‘armoured up’ and braced for trouble: muscle tightening, back pain, etc.
• Wear and tear from how much we’ve rushed at everything and/or armoured up
• Struggling to be fully present, relaxed, and grounded in our bodies
• Sleep problems
• Startle responses, twitches, etc.
• Digestive problems
• Forms of self harm which jolt the body out of the painful panicked desperate out-of-touch with self place that trauma puts us in 

OMG Pete, it’s like you’ve seen into my soul!

Emotional flashbacks

Emotional flashbacks are like standard flashbacks – where people respond as if they’re right back in a traumatic memory – but without the clear memory of what is being replayed: just the emotions and bodily responses.

Emotional flashbacks involve sudden drops into debilitating fear and shame. It’s like we’re right back in the overwhelming feelings that we experienced as a child, and we are: our nervous system has literally been put right back there. We often feel small, fragile, young, desperate and helpless in these moments. We may panic and flail or we may shut down and give up. We generally feel like we’re unacceptable and bad. Everything feels way too hard, being seen feels excruciating, and it feels like a matter of life and death. We go into survival mode and fear we will not survive.

Pete suggests that often retraumatising experiences as adults – such as deaths, losses, or going through something similar again – put us into extended periods of flashback. This is what I’ve been experiencing recently.

Also flashbacks can be triggered by all kinds of things – internal and external – which we may or may not understand at the time. In the past couple of months, for example, I have been triggered into flashback by: a stranger looking away when I smiled at them; a message from someone asking something of me which I didn’t want to do but didn’t feel able to say ‘no’ to; a bad dream; a memory of someone being critical of me; trying and failing to write this blog post; and not being able to decide what to watch next on TV that would be both distracting and soothing enough (the answer was This is Us).

These things seem so small, but the point is that they plunge you back into the place you were in as a child. One of the books I read suggested that evolutionarily the sense that we were being abandoned by the people around us as a child was life and death, because without their care we’d be eaten by woolly mammoths or similar. I’m always a bit suspicious of evo psych explanations, but this makes some sense of why a stranger looking away from me can feel like a life or death scenario. Pete says kids learn to register the looks on the faces of those around them and connect them with being punished or rejected. It’s certainly a powerful one for me in relation to shame: being monitored by others, or others being so disgusted/embarrassed that they don’t want to look me in the eye.

The 4 Fs

The 4 Fs are the four different responses that all animals go into when something traumatic happens: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Fight is when we attack back. Flight is when we try to escape. Freeze is when we go still and frozen. Fawn is when we try to appease our attacker to get out of the situation.

In cPTSD one or more of these generally become our entrenched survival strategies: the ways we learn to relate to ourselves, others, and the world. We use these strategies to try to meet our yearning to experience the kind of love we always wanted, to avoid getting abandoned, and to try not to feel the overwhelming feelings. Needless to say they are not helpful strategies for achieving these aims, but even pretty smart people will continue to employ them regardless…

• Fight involves learning to control others and to demand things from them, to blame others for any relationship problems rather than ourselves, to try to fix them and/or to criticise or attack them.
• Flight involves perfecting ourselves, trying to make ourselves worthy of love, and/or working very hard.
• Freeze involves hiding, retreating, keeping intimacy at a distance, dissociating and distracting.
• Fawn involves people-pleasing, focusing on others’ needs rather than our own, trying to make ourselves into what we think others want us to be.

All four strategies have something that’s helpful for us, if we can cultivate them all and go into them all appropriately. Fight enables us to be assertive and hold our boundaries. Flight to disengage and to be industrious and endure things. Freeze to retreat and be mindful and present. Fawn to love and serve people, to compromise and listen.

Pete suggests that they can be best seen as spectrums: Fawn to Fight, and Freeze to Flight. If we’re at one end of the spectrum we need to cultivate the capacity to be at the other end. For example as a fawn/flight my tendency is to do whatever it takes to keep people happy with me, and to go into ‘doing’ mode (for example writing long blog posts about cPTSD). I need to work harder on fight (assertively holding my boundaries) and freeze (valuing just being and not always needing to be productive). For other people it would be the opposite. A good balance is to be able to be vulnerable/open and assertive/boundaried; to be able to do and to be.

Repeating patterns

The fucker of cPTSD is that it sets us up to repeat the very kinds of situations which caused the cPTSD in the first place, because our survival strategies fetch us up there time and time again. This can lead to further trauma, which can retraumatise us and tighten those survival strategies even more. Pete calls it ‘the awful gift that keeps on giving’. This can mean – like me – that we end up with cPTSD and the regular garden variety PTSD.

Judith refers to people sometimes driven by desires to return to familiar dangerous dynamics with the hope of putting them ‘right’ this time: perhaps an attempt at healing. She also says that trauma puts people in double binds where they both want to withdraw from relationships and seek them desperately.

For me one example of this is where my ‘flight’ desire to work really hard has put me in situations where whatever I do is not enough to meet the external/internal criteria for success, and I’m further shamed or bullied for not measuring up, which makes me work even harder. Another example is where my ‘fawn’ desire to please others and get their love means that I shape myself to fit others, and end up having to pull away because I’ve given up too much of myself, fueling further shame. It can be that I specifically seem to pick the kinds of people and situations with which these strategies are most likely to fail – because that is so familiar to me.

Why do something about it?

Perhaps this should be a no-brainer, but sadly it’s not. When the thing you struggle with is feeling toxic shame and believing yourself unacceptable then it’s pretty hard to allow yourself to (a) acknowledge that it’s real, and (b) allow yourself to get support around it. 

Also those 4F strategies are often entrenched in ways that get in the way of addressing this. Fighters are going to keep believing that everyone else is at fault and not them, flee-ers are going to be far too busy to make time for healing, freezers are going to struggle to stay present with themselves when distracting and dissociating is more comfortable, and fawners can’t stop hoping that they can find someone who’ll prove to them that they are okay really, if they can just be pleasing enough.

I feel fortunate in a way that my particular combo of flight and fawn has eventually led me here. I’ve become so focused on working hard to figure out how all this stuff works and be better for others that I end up reading all these books on how people and relationships work, and synthesising it for other people in ways that (hopefully) gets through to me too. However knowing this stuff still doesn’t make it easy to do the things I know I need to do, because they go against the grain of these survival strategies so much. 

Here’s some reasons to do something about it if you need them:

• This stuff is probably getting in the way of you getting good, loving relationships of all kinds even if it feels like the way to get them.
• It’s also probably making you abandon yourself and treat yourself non-consensually.
• You’d probably feel a lot better if you could lift out of that toxic shame and inner criticism.
• It’s not great for the other people in your life. You’re probably hurting others with these strategies, especially if you’re unaware of them (for all my fellow fawners).
• You’ll get a lot more done and do it better with all the energy you free up (for all my fellow-flee-ers).

What to do?

Pete says you need to work to become an ‘unflinching source of kindness towards yourself’. Sound good? He also warns us to let go of any ‘salvation fantasy’ that we’ll never have another flashback, to focus on progress not perfection, and to recognise that some flashbacks will probably happen as we try to shift our survival strategies and do the things that are less familiar to us (like fighters listening and recognising how they’ve hurt people, flee-ers trying to just be, freezers getting out and about, and fawners asserting their boundaries). He likens this to going to the dentist when we have a sore tooth: we need to go to a bit more of a painful/scary place in order to not be in such a painful/scary place.

Pete talks about education, grieving, and relationships as three key aspects of the process. I would add safety as an important initial one. These things could be seen as linear stages – one following from the other – but probably we all oscillate between them. For example, feeling the feelings might help us to recognise what feels safe-enough – and not – for us, which may lead to us making more changes there. Or addressing our relationships might bring up more information which we then want to go and find out more about.

I think every person will develop their own versions of this work, bringing these ideas and practices into dialogue with other understandings or spiritual practices they already engage in, for example, or the things that they find soothing, or the kinds of relationships which are most supportive for them. It will also depend on what you have available to you, of course, in terms of time, money, resources, and other people. 

Don’t be afraid to develop your own version of safety, education, grieving, and relationships. I’ve said a bit here about how they work for me to give you an example.

Safety

Something that Judith emphasises but Pete doesn’t go into much is the importance of being in a safe-enough place to address this stuff. It’s incredibly hard to do this work if we’re still in dangerous situations where we’re being re-traumatised frequently or playing out our 4Fs on the daily. A good first step would be to ask yourself how you can create a safe-enough home, relationship situation, and work-life to do this process, and what support you might need in order to do it. 

Safe-enough means safe-enough for you to be able to look at some painful stuff, feel some tough feelings, and shift some stuck habits. It is also means safe-enough for others around you. For example you might well be particularly prone to getting triggered in certain kinds of relationships and need to pause or slow down these down while this is going on. You need to be careful that the people you’re asking for support from can offer it consensually, and are held and supported enough themselves in order to be able to give it.

For me this creation of a safe-enough container has involved slowing down work significantly, deciding to live alone for a time, taking time out from any erotic/romantic relationships because my stuff tends to play out in these particularly, accessing a therapist and support group to help hold me through this, avoiding big group socialising, embracing quiet nights in because I realise I often feel overwhelmed at the end of the day, cultivating morning rituals which get me into the day gently, and communicating with close people about what kinds of contact I’m capable of – and not – through this period (however long it lasts). 

To some extent that’s about decreasing the amount of triggers coming in to a manageable level, although the aim isn’t to avoid triggers long term. That just makes our life very small indeed, as I found out in my twenties when I employed this strategy and wound up too scared to leave the house a lot of the time. It’s about retreating a bit and slowing things down sufficiently that you can learn how to navigate triggers and flashbacks when they occur, so you’ll become more capable of doing so, and able to expand out again eventually.

We need what Pema Chödrön calls a ‘cradle of kindness’ to do this work in, which is real fucking hard to develop when you’ve learnt that you’re an unacceptable person and you can barely hear anything through the noise of the inner critic. Anything that you can do to cultivate kindness for yourself will make it more possible for you to do the other parts of this process. Check out the literatures on self/community care and self-compassion for help with this.

Anybody helping us through this also needs to be safe-enough and kind-enough. Judith emphasises that because survivors have been so disempowered then they have to be in control here. Any therapist or other supporter has to be an assistant to the person on the journey they are on, trusting their process, not taking control from them, telling them what to do, or trying to fix them.

Educating ourselves

This part is about learning about cPTSD from the outside-in: reading books, watching vids, listening to podcasts, or whatever works for you. We can then apply what we’re learning to our experience and apply the various approaches to find out what works for us. For me it’s also about bringing this literature into dialogue with the Buddhist teachings I’m already familiar with, and the plural selves literature.

It’s also about learning about ourselves from the inside-out. Mindfulness type practices, journalling, and therapy can help us to notice how flashbacks or the 4Fs tend to work for us. We can slow down and notice what happens when we get triggered, what kinds of things trigger us: the anatomy of a flashback. It’s great if we can eventually start to get curious and take each tough experience as an opportunity to learn from, instead of something to avoid or beat ourselves up for.

Grieving and feeling the feels

Grieving is big here. We need to grieve for the stuff that put these habits in place back in the past, and for the ways it has impacted us and others, and constrained our lives, since then. A major part of that grief for me – and perhaps for all of us – are the ways in which those early traumatic experiences set me up for yet more traumatic experiences in the future. 

The early tough experiences – for me – were mostly emotional rather than physical or sexual, but because they resulted in patterns where I struggled to experience my feelings, felt everything was my fault, and learnt to put myself back in dangerous situations rather than asking for help, they set the scene for the physical and sexual forms of assault that I did experience in later life, and how much I minimised the impact of those later traumatic experiences.

Pete talks about four different kinds of grief: angering, crying, speaking/writing, and feeling. These are all useful and may be available at different times. Sometimes you can feel rage at what’s happened to you and the impact of that. Sometimes you can let out tears and mourn. Sometimes you can speak or write about it to ventilate the emotions that way. Sometimes you can just stay present to whatever your internal feelings are via the sensations in your body without having to let them out, or repress them, or tell any stories about them. Because the origins of cPTSD often involve our feelings being disallowed or punished we often feel afraid or ashamed of them. The process of reconnecting with anger and sadness can help unlock our capacity for the kinds of self-protection and self-compassion that we’ve struggled to give ourselves.

Grief can involve time-travel: another thing I want to blog about separately at some point. We are grieving for ourselves past and present. Present trauma responses can put us in touch with earlier feelings and we can feel for them both simultaneously. Linked to this I’ve found it helpful to feel grief for the intergenerational nature of trauma: the ways in which the traumatic stuff that happened to us was generally the result of patterns put in place by other peoples’ trauma, and the ways in which playing out our own trauma has impacted on others: perhaps tightening their own trauma habits. That can be a lot to face, but for me it can result in a lifting of feeling isolated, a recognition that we’re interconnected through this, and that our attempts to shift this stuff can have a much wider benefit than lifting our own individual suffering.

The main thing to emphasise with all of this is the importance of going slowly. Being such a good flee-er I always want to barrel into this stuff at a hundred miles an hour in order to have it all sorted. This is coupled with being a fawner who wants to sort it out quick so I can go back to being better for others than I’m being while so much of my life is taken up with this process. 

But one of my big lessons is this will not be rushed. In fact rushing it tends to have the opposite effect of re-traumatising you such that it’s even harder to do this work, and may well take even longer to reset some of this stuff. Love Uncommon has a helpful suggestion for navigating this territory. She suggests taking your emotional temperature on a scale of 1-10. Feelings up to 7 or so are ones to move towards and stay with in the ways Pete describes. Feeling from 8-10 are too intense – maybe a sign you’re heading into flashback territory – and it’s better to go into soothing activities to bring them down a notch, or maybe wait till the next day or whenever you feel back in the 1-7 zone.

Steve Haines and many of the major writers on trauma – Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, Babette Rothschild – emphasise the role of the body in trauma, and the importance of somatic practices for releasing trauma and navigating trauma responses. Steve says that it is all about ‘meeting the body’. I’ll mention a few of these practices in the next section on flashbacks. As with their emotions, people with cPTSD often struggle to be in contact with their bodies very well, so this is both an important and challenging area.

Relating with others

Pete has a great concept in his book that cPTSD work is about simultaneously reparenting ourselves, and getting reparented by committee. We may well have spent our lives using our 4F strategies to try to get the kind of love, protection, and kindness that we so long for, and this may well not have worked out so well. Now it’s about learning to get those things on the inside (developing self-protection and self-compassion as mentioned above), and developing relationships which can help us to feel loved, protected and nurtured on the outside, through being open and real with others rather than employing those old strategies. 

For a lot of people a therapeutic relationship can be a safe-enough container to start that work – if we’ve struggled with relationships in the past. Support groups can also be great, so can relationships with companion animals, although it’s worth getting support around that too of course. 

Also it can be helpful to develop several friendships slowly over time, ideally with others who are up for doing this kind of work, so that we have a network of mutual support rather than one or two intense relationships where we’re likely to find ourselves drawn back into trauma patterns. Basically it’s all about going slow and steady and learning how to relate in sustainable ways which are kind towards ourselves and others.

Coping with flashbacks

As Pete says, we will keep getting flashbacks. At first one of the hard things is that old stuff – like realising we’ve over-ridden our self-consent or letting someone treat us badly – may well trigger flashbacks, but new stuff – like treating ourselves consensually or holding our boundaries – may also trigger them, because this is new territory and we’re going against our survival strategies, which feels scary. Damn this is hard.

What I’m finding is that if I can slow things down a lot then I can notice the flickering of the kinds of feelings involved in a flashback (fear and/or shame usually). It’s a bit like the aura people describe before a migraine happens. The feelings are around but haven’t set in yet. If I can catch it quickly enough then I can do something I call circling. It’s like the water circling a drain rather than going down the plug-hole (which would be plummeting into a flashback). That metaphor works for me anyway.

Here’s a list adapted from Pete of how you might be able to circle rather than sink with a flashback, and how to lift out if you’re in one. 

• Name that you’re having a flashback/pre-flashback feelings. I find it really helpful to say this out loud. To another person if I’m with a friend, or to myself – in my kindest voice – if not. If it’s pre-flashback I try to stay with those feelings and remember what they are, that they make sense (whether or not I understand what triggered them right now), and that I don’t have to plummet. I can circle for a while until the feelings shift.
• Remind yourself that you’re not in danger and/or that you can leave any dangerous situation if you are in one. For me this is about getting myself to a safe-enough place. This means getting home if I’m out. It means getting alone – or with a safe-enough support person – if I’m in a dynamic with somebody else where we’re triggering each other. Once there getting as warm and cozy as possible is great. Blankets, hot water bottles, and hot drinks can all be excellent. Remind yourself that you’re in a safe-enough place to get through this.
• Remind yourself that this will pass. It often feels like this feeling is all there has ever been and all there ever will be: that it is the default that you always return to. This happens because when you were younger it probably felt very permanent. As with the idea that you are safe, it may be hard to believe the impermanence when you’re in a flashback, but you can at least say this to yourself and remember that such feelings have passed before.
• Practise feeling safe in the environment. People often find it useful to focus outwards, for example saying everything you can see in the room of a certain colour, or going through each sense saying what you can see, hear, smell, touch, etc. I find it can help to look at things in my room and remind myself where they came from or what they mean to me.
• Practise feeling safe in your body. Returning to feeling grounded in the body is also really helpful. Here people can find it helpful to hold a particular object and really feel it, to feel every part of themselves, to put their face in cool water, to do a minute of vigorous movement/dancing to shake it out.
• Respond to any critical thoughts with kindness if you can. Over time developing a kind inner-parent voice to talk you through this stuff is really helpful. Reaching out to friends who get it can help to access a voice like that if you’re struggling yourself. However, it’s worth talking in advice about which people in your life you can offer that with and receive it from and how it’ll work, so you feel reassured in the moment that it is okay to ask, and what any limits might be. Generally it’s best to avoid people who you can get caught up in mutual trauma responses with easily.
• Allow any feelings or grief. See the different ways of experiencing/expressing this mentioned earlier.

Trauma denial

It is hard writing this post. Even though I’ve wanted to write it for some time, there’s been an equal and opposite sense of blockage to writing it. What’s that about? Judith Herman’s book gave me a useful perspective on this. Culturally, and personally, we’re trained to deny and minimise trauma and its impact.

Judith points out that each time psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy have begun to take trauma seriously, it has been shut down by people denying that it’s even a thing, and suggesting that those who are traumatised are making it up or exaggerating its impact. When Freud first published a paper pointing out that most of the people with mental health struggles he was working with had experienced childhood and/or adult sexual abuse and assault, he was ignored and shut down. He went on to shift to a theory that suggested his patients had fantasised those things: they couldn’t possibly actually had happened. This is pretty terrifying now that we know the statistics on the prevalence of abuse and assault.

After the world wars there was a movement to take ‘shell shock’ seriously as a mental health condition. This was shut down with a cultural belief that soldiers who struggled in these ways were just morally inferior, or seeking attention, in some way. Judith writes about how veterans in the US are still treated: how the culture simply can’t face the horror of what they’ve been through – or their role in putting young men through that often for dubious reasons – so it pushes them back into ‘normal life’ and doesn’t allow them to tell their stories or express their feelings. 

Judith also points to the backlash of victim blame and minimisation the follows each movement to take domestic abuse and sexual violence against women seriously. I also think about how common it is for those in positions of privilege to deny or minimise the trauma experienced by those who are marginalised in any way. Judith says that each time psychology has had a wave of researching and theorising about trauma, it has been followed by a wave of silence, as if even the scientists and therapists can’t face the extent of it and it’s ongoing impact. I certainly experienced this myself as I studied psychology and psychotherapy. There was very little about trauma on any of my courses, and I certainly learnt several theories which were skeptical about the whole idea.

The cultural denial of trauma itself could be seen as a form of intergenerational trauma in itself. And it is internalised. One of the key features of cPTSD that Judith and Pete describe is constantly doubting whether you’re really traumatised, whether what happened to you is bad enough, whether you’re really just a bad person. 

This makes it confusing territory to think and write about indeed. It’s possible that the things that happened in your life were actually way worse than you’ve ever given them credit for, because a feature of trauma is downplaying and minimising your trauma. But simultaneously it seems possible that they are not as bad as you’re now thinking they were, because you want to reach some arbitrary standard of ‘bad enough’ to legitimise how hard you’re finding things.

As Pete says, this can be particularly hard for those whose traumatic experiences don’t match the ones that are usually ‘counted’ by wider culture or online checklists. One of the important things about his book is that it includes emotional abuse and neglect as pivotal in cPTSD, whether or not they go along with more physical and sexual forms of trauma. 

I would add that we should include those that happen outside the home as well as within it. School bullying is normalised and there is still the sense that the most vulnerable people – children – should put up with treatment which might well be the subject of workplace dismissal or police investigation if it happened to adults (although of course it is often overlooked in workplaces and relationship settings too). This is true whether that takes the form of ostracisation, shaming and hatred, coercion and control, unwanted touch/physical violence, and/or sexual harassment. 

The trauma literature can also focus too heavily on individually traumatising experiences, leaving out the collective trauma of being in an oppressed or marginalised group and/or forms of historical trauma. I’m now focusing my reading on authors like David Treleaven, Tada Hozumi, and Alex Iantaffi who bring trauma-informed perspectives together more explicitly with social justice thinking.

Here’s some useful counters to denial of trauma in yourself / from others:

• You don’t have to locate the causes of your cPTSD in order for it to be legit. Some of it may well have occurred before you can remember, or be lost to memory now.
• If you’re experiencing trauma responses like emotional flashbacks, dissociation, bodily responses, or going into fight, flight, freeze and/or fawn responses, that’s enough evidence that it’s there and it’s worth getting support around it.
• People respond differently to events. It’s okay for you to be traumatised by something which didn’t traumatise another person who a similar thing happened to. Steve Haines uses the example of an everyday person being punched versus a boxer. Traumatic experiences also land differently in us if they’re taken seriously and supported by those around us when they happen, or if they aren’t.
• It’s a spectrum, not an either/or. Few of us escape childhood with zero trauma, and pretty much everyone develops survival strategies (like a tendency to fight, flight, freeze or fawn). We mostly have things that particularly trigger us from the past, and become reactive or activated when that happens. The ease with which we are triggered, and the intensity of our reaction, varies between people, and maybe within the same person over time. If we’ve recently been retraumatised we’ll probably be a lot more fragile and prone to trauma responses. Wherever you are on the spectrum, it’s fine to take your trauma seriously, and to work to ease/shift your responses.
• Working on this stuff will make us better for ourselves, each other, and the wider world, and that requires taking it seriously.
• There’s a strong urge to deny/minimise trauma in wider culture which gets inside us and inside others (particularly those who might fear they had a role in your cPTSD). Anyone who says they have been hurt or traumatised is usually told that: It wasn’t that bad (or as bad as stuff that’s happened to other people); It shouldn’t have impacted them as profoundly as it has; They are probably making it up or making too much of it; They probably brought it on themselves (these are the basis of rape myths, for example). It’s understandable if you find yourself thinking these things yourself.

cPTSD superpowers

I’ll end on an upbeat note with the list of superpowers which Pete lists as potentially coming from working with cPTSD (and a few of my own):

• We understand trauma really well, in ourselves and others
• We’re capable of deep intimacy, emotional intelligence, and really feeling the feels
• We can live an examined life, make good choices, follow our own path and rewrite the rules
• We’re not covering over or hiding this stuff any more
• We can handle pain and suffering
• We have increased joy and it feels So Good when it’s been so unfamiliar
• We see complexity
• We’re badass: we’ve done all that we did in life even though we had cPTSD

This is the quote from Pete which will stay with me the most:

‘Shame and self-hate did not start with me, but with all my heart I deign that they will stop with me.’

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

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

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Why this means the world to me

Hi. Thank-you so much for having me here today. When Ruby approached me last year saying she would like to subtitle the conference this time after my book Rewriting the Rules I was blown away.

Partly this was because that book has been such a labour of love for me. It was the first self-help style book I wrote and I spent a decade longing to write it but unable to believe in myself enough to do so. When I finally did manage to battle through my inner critic I had to distill years of painfully finding my own way with relationships onto the page. The second edition – which just came out – was no less difficult. It felt like I was co-authoring it with an older version of myself and that was not an easy collaboration by any means.

Also it is a huge deal – as a European writer – to be welcomed to a US conference. A bunch of us have been studying and writing about polyamory in Europe for some decades now, but it often feels like the – often more recent – work coming out of US academia and activism eclipses what we’ve done, and are still doing. Of course this is even more the case for Europeans who sometimes or always write in languages other than English.

This is particularly challenging for me now that I’m working towards making my living as a writer. It’s extraordinarily hard to make any money from that line of work, and it can feel tough knowing that I am – I think – saying something new and important, but that few folk on this side of the pond will know about it. This recognition – and potential to speak to an American audience – means the world to me.

So it was already a huge deal to be invited to speak at this conference. And then I checked out the event online. It quickly became clear that here, finally, was an intersectional non-monogamy conference. For years I’ve been frustrated by the lack of coverage of power dynamics and social structures, privilege and oppression, in polyamory communities, and now I was being invited to an event where these were foregrounded.

It also felt intensely vulnerable. The main reason by far that I wanted to write a second edition of Rewriting the Rules was because when I wrote the first edition back in 2010 I had barely engaged with intersectional feminism. This has been something I’ve done my absolute best to address since then to the point that the vast majority of the thinkers I now engage with come from this approach, but I realise I still have a hell of a lot to catch up on. As a white British author to be invited to speak at a conference alongside the likes of Kevin Patterson, Dalychia Saah, J Mase and Feminista Jones is a huge honour and one I really hope I can do justice to.

This is why I haven’t taken the easy road with this presentation. I could’ve given you my standard hot take on non-monogamy talk that I’ve been giving the last couple of years, but you deserve more than that. So I’m going to heed the words of one of my heroes – Mollena Williams-Haas – from the incredible talk she gave at the Non-Monogamies and Contemporary Intimacies conference in Vienna last year (available here if you haven’t seen it – please do check it out). She said that the gift we need to give to the world is to go into the places we are most vulnerable and to work – whatever our work is – from that place.

I’ve been holding those words close ever since then. It is why I’m finally dropping my academic and therapy work to focus on writing. It is why my writing now includes memoir and erotic fiction as well as self-help: so that I can be transparent about where these ideas come from and why they mean so much to me. I guess it’s about showing my workings instead of just the polished advice that comes out of all that painful experience.

Because if I hide that part of it away I can be just another shitty self-help author holding themselves as a point of comparison to the rest of the world as somebody who has it all together and is going to lecture you on how to get it right just like them. This is one of the things I hate most about self-help and I’m committed to doing something different. A major theme through all my work is that relationships are extremely fucking hard and we all struggle in our relationships with ourselves, with our loved ones, and with the world. I’ve heard it said that your mess is your message. Perhaps the message is stronger if you also share the mess.

So I’m going to give you a short introduction to the key ideas of Rewriting the Rules, and then spend the rest of the talk telling you about what I’ve learnt about relationships since the first edition: by going into the mess.

Rewriting the Rules

Most relationship self-help books make a lot of assumptions about what a ‘successful’ relationship looks like, and how you go about having one. They sell the reader the dream of happy-ever-after, and put the blame on them if they can’t achieve it. That’s why I called Rewriting the Rules an anti-self-help book. Instead of locating blame in the individual it starts with the shitty cultural messages we all receive about relationships, suggesting that they are primarily responsible for the difficulties we come across. Messages like the idea that you have to find The One perfect person who will complete you, that you must hide any relationship conflicts from the rest of the world and pretend like everything is awesome all of the time, that you should have hot sex with this person for the rest of time, and that that must be in a monogamous relationship.

For each theme in the book – love, sex, gender, conflict, etc. – I asked four questions:

• What are the rules that we learn about this aspect of relationships?
• Why might we question them?
• If they don’t work for us, what might we put in their place? and
• What if we went beyond rules to embrace the uncertainty of this thing?

So, for example, in the monogamy chapter I look at the rules that suggest monogamy is the one true way of doing relationships, and how we can question that by looking at the statistics on non-monogamy globally, and on secret non-monogamy in countries like the UK and US. I explore the pressures that the monogamy ideal puts on relationships, and the diversity of monogamish and non-monogamous relationship styles that now offer alternatives to this. However, I also explore the tendency we have – when stepping away from mainstream cultural rules – to put new rules in their place and hold onto them just as rigidly. I suspect we’re all very familiar with varieties of poly-normativity and polier-than-thou tendencies to put forward the one true way of polyamory – or the poly grail, as I call it. Unicorn hunting, treating ‘secondaries’ as lesser human beings, and becoming so poly-saturated that you have no time for friends or self-care are three examples that spring to mind (not that me or anyone else in this room would ever do anything like that I’m sure!)

In Rewriting the Rules I try to steer clear of suggesting that any way of doing relationships is inherently better, more normal, or morally superior. It’s more about appreciating that different things work for different people, and in different relationships. We need to start by unpacking all the cultural rules that impact us all – whether we’re inside them or outside of them.

What I’ve learn about relationships since Rewriting the Rules

So that’s where I got to in the first edition of Rewriting the Rules, and I am still proud of that book because that cultural piece is missing from so much self-help around relationships – even polyamorous relationships.

However it could be argued that I went too far the other way. Focusing on wider cultural messages is also a good way of avoiding looking too carefully at closer-to-home reasons for your own relationship struggles.

Also, while I wrote a lot about the need to look at wider culture to inform our close relationships, I didn’t make enough connections in the other direction. How can going into the mess and vulnerability of our relationships help us make a better contribution to wider society? In the last five years this seems to me the most urgent question as we all try to make sense of a world of Trump and Brexit, to deal with the vital questions raised by – for example – #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and the current moral panic around trans.

Here are four key ideas that I’ve woven into the new edition of Rewriting the Rules which I want to share. Obviously there’s only time to touch on them here – what they are and the implications they have for our relationships with our close people and the wider world. Hopefully they might be a jumping off point for more conversations and reflections though. There are free zines on my website covering most of these themes in a lot more detail if you find them useful.

1. Relationship patterns and intergenerational trauma

The first thing I wanted to include way more of in the second edition was relationship patterns: how they get formed, how they impact us and the people around us, and how we might be able to shift them. That involved taking a long, hard look at my own relationship patterns which have been something like this…

Did you see this show? It was one of my favs growing up. Every week this dog finds a new person and home, he helps them with whatever they’re struggling with, but once things are sorted he can’t stay and he has to head off down the road again. He’s basically a manic-pixie dream dog.

This was what I was doing in relationships of all kinds my whole life. I tried to figure out what people wanted me to be, and then I gave it to them. Initially that resulted in huge validation – I was good, and I was good for people. Once I was polyamorous I could be good for many people. What a good Littlest Hobo! But it’s unsustainable. And it hurt people and it hurt me, a lot. I’ve lost so many homes, people, companion animals. Too much loss. While I definitely don’t think the only relationships of value are the ones that last, I wouldn’t mind the chance at a relationship, home, family, or community that lasted longer than five years.

The cultural piece was part of this of course. The promise of being – and getting – The One definitely had a role to play in my struggles, as did the Hollywood promise that true love is the path to lasting happiness – whether in its monogamous or polyamorous form.

But – as with all of us I suspect – my history was also a big part of the picture. Perhaps the major piece of work I’ve been doing the last couple of years has been on this. Interestingly #MeToo was a huge part of it. My sisters and I started by sharing our experiences of sexual assault – growing up and in more recent years, including in polyamory communities. This opening up led us to sharing stories of our upbringing and identifying the impact of intergenerational trauma and how it had left all of us feeling that we were unacceptable unless we covered over our emotions and pretended to be something we were not. We now talk on Google hangouts between San Francisco, LA, and London every few weeks, committed to building a different way of relating, at least between the three of us.

2. Self and other consent

How can I challenge this pattern – which I suspect many others share – of trying to be what others want me to be? Self-consent is the key here. One of the main books that I drew on in the second edition of Rewriting the Rules was bell hooks’s All About Love.

My main takeaway from this was that love can’t happen – isn’t even love – unless we value ourselves and each other equally. That’s where you get to if you apply the same thought processes to social justice and to interpersonal relationships.

Learning self-consent is every bit as hard as learning how to – really – treat others consensually in a world of massive power imbalances and insidious social scripts, as Zach Budd highlighted at the Poly Dallas conference. It’s still a work in progress for me: a lifelong process I suspect. But it includes noticing when I let desire for approval, fear of failure, or a deep-down belief of my unacceptability override what I really feel. It requires cultivating kindness and practicing self-care: not the neoliberal capitalist bubble-bath kind of self-care but the Audre Lorde long-hard-look-at-yourself self-care that we all need to make a daily practice if we want to stop harming ourselves and others on an interpersonal – and a global – level.

3. The drama triangle

The other idea I brought into the new edition was Stephen Karpman’s drama triangle. If you’re not familiar with it it looks like this.

The idea is that, in relationships, we often get drawn into stuck dynamics where we go round and round this triangle. For example my Littlest Hobo dynamic easily puts me in the role of rescuer – coming in and making somebody’s life all better so that maybe – in the immortal words of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman – they will ‘rescue me right back’. The problem is if you get invested in the role of rescuer you easily put the other person in a double-bind. They must get better so that you can feel you’ve been a good rescuer. Also they mustn’t get better because then you’ll be out of a job. It’s easy then to shift from rescuer to persecutor because you’re actually treating somebody pretty badly. And easy to shift again into victim because rescuers really don’t like people pointing out that they’re actually being persecutors.

Sound familiar? I think that this triangle has so much to offer what we’re grappling with in our wider communities. When #MeToo 2.0 hit some of the polyamory communities in the UK it took a familiar form. One individual abuser was highlighted, survivors shared their stories of his behaviour, and others aligned themselves with two different forms of rescuing: either becoming saviours for the ‘victims’, or bystander-apologists for the persecutor.

If we’re going to get to grips with the abusive dynamics that inevitably show up in our relationships and communities – in a culture founded on oppression and unequal valuing of different bodies and lives – then I think we have to stay with our capacity to occupy all three positions on this triangle. We need to get to know our inner victim, our inner persecutor, and our inner rescuer. That involves a whole heap of self-kindness, as well as the intensely vulnerable self-care work of staying with feelings.

4. Staying with all the feels in all the relationships

Learning our part in drama triangles – interpersonal and social – involves staying with how it feels to be in all of those places. For example, the work that my sisters and I are doing involves going back into our intensely vulnerable victim/survivor places: recognising that the various kinds of experiences we went through at young ages was not okay, and that the strategies that we developed to survive them made all kind of sense. It also involves recognising how much of that intergenerational trauma came out of us being on the receiving end of other people’s survival strategies, and how our own survival strategies have also now hurt other people.

Staying with our persecutor potential is hard as hell of course. It involves being with the guilt and shame and fear of our potential to harm others and to harm again. It involves going beyond the temptation to focus on obvious forms of abuse and non-consent – that we may not have engaged in – to the micro level emotional gaslighting, manipulation, and non-consensual pressure that we all take part in our day-to-day relationships, and the macro level dynamics of oppression that we all benefit from and are implicated in whether we like it or not.

Staying with our rescuer involves recognising our tendency to focus on obvious abusers and villains to avoid looking at the damage we do – for example by setting ourselves up as saviours, by not addressing our privilege and power, or by failing to acknowledge our limits and taking on too much only to let people down.

It’s hard fucking work, but we have to do it. And it involves developing our capacity to stay with all of the feelings in all of our relationships. So many of our survival strategies, relationship patterns, and non-consensual tendencies comes from endeavouring to avoid feeling the feelings that scare us: shame, anger, fear, sadness, loss. And of course, like a hamster on a wheel, most of these tendencies will fetch us right back where we most wanted to avoid. As Anita Cassidy puts it: ‘Feeling shit doesn’t kill you, but the shit you do to stop feeling shit might.’

An important caveat to this is, of course, with all these things (being present, staying with feelings, being vulnerable) they have to be done in a container of huge self-kindness, self-compassion, and self-care. Those things always have to come first and foremost. It’s easy to do these things because you think you  should, and for them to end up being far too much. So taking it slowly, prioritising kindness over all else, and getting support with it, are all vital.

I think we all have to do this work, and I think that doing this work will look different for all of us. For me it has included a combination of journaling about the hard stuff, sitting with my feelings by the Thames, reading people who challenge me on social media, deliberately practising showing close people my vulnerability bit-by-painful-bit, and – perhaps unexpectedly – tuning into my erotic fantasies and writing erotic fiction.

Right now it involves the painful messy work of acknowledging my relationship patterns with existing – and new – partners, and how far I may – or may not – be able to shift them given how strongly entrenched and sneaky they are. I’m convinced though that this can be a joyful process as much as it is an excruciating one – often both of those things simultaneously. And if it’s going to make any difference it’s one we have to do together in our relationships, in our families, and in our communities.

Further Resources

• Rewriting the Rules.
• My zine on self-care.
• My zine on staying with feelings.
• Meg-John and Justin podcast on staying with other people’s feelings.
• Love Uncommon posts on how to do self-consent.

The post Four things I’ve learnt about relationships for Poly Dallas Millenium appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

In the book, for each aspect of relationships I explore, I invite readers to consider the following questions:

• What are the rules about this thing which are often taken-for-granted (by our wider culture, our communities, the people in our lives, and ourselves)?
• Why might it be useful to question those rules?
• What might we replace them with if they weren’t working so well for us?
• What would it be like to embrace uncertainty and to approach this thing without any rules?

Given that the festive season is nearly upon us, and it’s a tough time of year for many people, let’s apply this approach to that. I’ll work through the questions with some of the common social rules that I’m aware of in relation to the festive season, but you might want to consider different rules that apply more to your situation.

It’s important to be mindful that we all have different experiences of this season based on, for example, our family situation, our faith (if we have one), our cultural background, our generation and age, our mobility and health, past experiences over this period and more. That’s why the intersectional approach (which I’ve tried to take in the new edition of Rewriting the Rules) is a vital starting point.

What are the rules?

The three common cultural rules that sprung to my mind when I thought about the festive season were:

1. You must see your family at this time of year, probably in a very specific way such as staying all together in one place for a period of time, or zooming around making sure you see everyone.
2. You have to show your love for each other through exchanging expensive gifts which prove how much you really know this person and their tastes.
3. The festive season is ‘the most wonderful time of the year’ so you must be happy and have a merry time (and definitely not be a Scrooge!).

Why question the rules?

So why might it be useful to question those rules?

1. In relation to family many, if not most, of us have complicated relationships with our families, perhaps being estranged or distant from some or all of them, or simply not having any remaining family. Some people find that they always conflict with their family in unhelpful ways when they spend an extended period together. Some enjoy spending time with family but just find the attempt to pack all of them in to the same short space of time very stressful, for example if they feel they have to see the families of themselves and their partner or partners, or all of their extended family who live in different places. This is compounded for people who have little vacation time and really need to spend what little they have relaxing.
2. Turning to expensive gifts, this recent article by George Monbiot is a good summary of the toll that – often unwanted novelty – presents can take on the planet and on the human lives of those involved in their production. Also many of us simply cannot afford expensive gifts due to the impact of the extended period of austerity we’ve been living through. And, even if we can, the pressure to find the ‘perfect’ gift to communicate our love can be intense and stressful.
3. Finally, on feeling happy, many of us actually have good reasons to find the festive period emotionally tough, due to the aforementioned stressors and more. The time away from work – and the turn of the year – can get us reflecting on our careers in ways that are challenging, and time with our nearest and dearest can similarly prompt us to look closely on our relationships. Many people have painful anniversaries at this time of year – of bereavements and break-ups for example – and find that the festive rituals, sights, sounds, etc. can trigger distressing or traumatic memories.

What alternative rules are possible?

Given all these reasons to question the cultural rules of the festive season, what might we put in their place if we want to make some changes?

1. We might get more intentional about who we see and how we see them over this period. For example, many people have found ways to shift family rules, such as deciding to see different family members on alternating years; having different days as their ‘Xmas day’, ‘New Year’s Eve’, etc. with different close people or groups; going away alone for the holidays – or doing charity work or a retreat at this time – in order to disrupt an ingrained family habit; or staying nearby but not actually with family so they can dip in and out of the festive fun depending on the parts which work for them.
2. We could agree some limits on gift-giving with the people in our life. For example some people decide to just exchange small tokens, or to do ‘Secret Santa’ where you only have to get something for one person in a group or family. You can share wishlists online so that people know what you actually want, or give money to a person’s favourite charity instead of a gift. You might also consider making handmade gifts instead of buying them, or giving people tokens for an experiences they can have with you in future (e.g. tokens for a day out together, cooking them a meal, or giving them a footrub). You could decide to only ever give ‘I saw this and thought of you’ type gifts, rather than exchanging gifts at a particular time of year.
3. In relation to feelings, all of that pressure to have a happy, merry, wonderful time paradoxically means that we’re less likely to experience the festive season in that way. You’ve probably experienced this yourself: when you put a lot of pressure on a specific day or period to be a positive experience it often feels less so because you can’t be present to what’s happening, and any minor mishap can feel like a crisis. Trying to make it a positive experience for absolutely everyone, and taking responsibility for other people having a ‘wonderful time’, turns up the pressure even more, perhaps meaning that you end up exhausted, or exploding, or missing out on the experience. One alternative to this is to think about all of the feelings that the festive period brings up for you, and to consider what your self-care needs are in relation to these. Do you need to factor in some time alone? What kinds of support might be helpful for you? What might you let other people know about things that you find challenging at this time of year?

Embracing uncertainty

Most of the examples I just gave were about shifting the existing rules, or replacing them with other rules, but still with a sense that we need some rules around the festive period, and perhaps it’s not really okay to step away from those taken-for-granted rules entirely. I want to say here that it absolutely is fine to decide not to see family at all, or not to exchange any gifts, or to refuse to put a happy face on it, if those things don’t work for you. What might embracing uncertainty around the festive period look like, if we stepped away from rules entirely?

1. In relation to family, you could reflect on Armistead Maupin’s concept of logical family. For many people – particularly those in LGBTQ+ communities – biological family are not our closest people. It really is okay to think about who – if anyone – we want to share this time with. Could you then open up an open, consensual conversation with your nearest and dearest about what is important for each of you around this period, and any limits around what you have the capacity for, or want to offer? Harriet Lerner writes very helpfully about how to do this kind of mutual, consensual communication if you find it hard.
2. In the book that Jacqui Gabb and I wrote together, The Secrets of Enduring Love, we drew on Gary Chapman’s concept of love languages. This is the idea that people like to express love, and have it expressed to them, in different ways. Giving and receiving gifts is only one of those ways. Again you could open up a conversation with nearest and dearest about how you each enjoy expressing love and having it expressed, and what your limits are around this. You could figure out between you what will work best for all concerned – whether or not it is linked to the festive period. For example, it might be be about writing a list of all the things you’re grateful to somebody for, or agreeing to share a certain period of time together, or doing something particular with them.
3. Finally, what about making the festive period a time during which all of your feelings are welcome, rather than only the ones our culture labels ‘positive’. Maybe you could share this idea with other people in your life too. You could even make time or rituals around allowing grief, regret, fear, and frustration, for example, alongside the more conventional festive feelings of peace, hope, love, merriment, etc. You could make the movie Inside Out one of your festive favourites because it’s such a great explanation of why this is important. My zine Staying with Feelings, might be helpful if this sounds like a useful approach to you. You’re absolutely allowed to embrace the ‘bah humbug’ as well as the ‘winter wonderland’.

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In this new zine I discuss both why we get so shut off from our feelings in a wider culture which values some emotions far more highly than others, and how we can go about shifting our patterns of avoiding and fighting some feelings, and craving and grasping for others. It covers both therapeutic and spiritual practices for staying with our emotions.

You can download or read the zine here.

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