Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • Only Connect

    Only Connect

    A recent opportunity to see the contemporary play Nonsense and Beauty, about Edwardian British author E.M. Forster, inspired me to return to my English major roots and revisit Howards End. Having only read this book once, two decades ago, my memory of it was nonexistent other than one of the central epigrams of the protagonist, “Only connect” being her message and aim in life.

    As a young, voracious, American reader who spent a lot of my youth and young adulthood trying to read classics, I had read a great number of English novels without understanding them. The romantic idealism in Forster’s heroes resonated with me as a young man with spiritual inclinations, but I did not understand the class system or the economy that made those young women independently wealthy and able to pursue their philosophical and artistic interests, even in a patriarchal society that demanded marriage.

    Upon rereading the novel, much later in life, I now see how central issues of class, economy, and imperialism are to both the novel and to much of the English classics I loved. “Only connect,” as expressed through our protagonist, is multivalent in calling for the connection of mind and heart, of one’s own responsibility to others, to seeing how others are guilty of one’s own sin and letting that recognition halt the call to merciless judgment. It is also, explicitly, the heroine’s call to connect her recognition of her idealistic liberal ideals and wealth to the brutish world of business, war, and empire upon which her wealth was built. Her Romantic family is set up in contrast to the businesslike capitalists in the Wilcoxes to critique the limits of both and then to literally marry them together, which illuminates and recognizes that these worlds were already bound up as one.

    Because you cannot have plucky, independent heiresses living off their investments and having thoughtful debates about social issues and welfare without the business people who make those investments grow, who make calculated and cold decisions, who see the world as a resource to be harvested and managed.

    More than a century after the novel’s publication, I am struck by how the central conflicts around liberal guilt have only continued to evolve. Forster’s anticipation of the continuing incursion of urbanism into undeveloped land and the rootlessness of people who do not own their own land, merely rent, seems to be well borne out at a cultural moment where more and more “ownership” as an experience seems reserved for the wealthy, and everyone else rents and pays a fee for access to even the technology they purchase.

    Yet even this transformation of property and culture is lain on a foundation where many of us do not belong to the land on which we live, and would not know how to if we desired it, and would be penalized for doing so. We are trees balancing precariously on sawed-off trunks with no roots to hold us steady when the wind blows. But instead of turning toward the grief and horror of this condition, we direct our attention outward, in the pursuit of power over others or the longing to save others from our own suffering.

    One of the most unsettling developments in Howards End is the deft and subtle ways Forster shows a young poor man’s life be absolutely destroyed by the well-meaning charitable interventions of our heroines, who ostensibly put all the blame on their antagonists the Wilcoxes for giving bad business advice and not caring for the outcomes—but the women themselves take on the young man as a project without his knowing or consent. They involve themselves in his life, blunder about without understanding his world or his heart, and lead to his ruin while they move on with their own concerns.

    For the past several years, I’ve grown increasingly wary of the savioristic tendencies within me. As with so many folks in mine and prior generations, I thought to balance my confusion and guilt about my unearned privilege with a dedication in service to the uplift of those less fortunate, without considering what I actually had to offer. My first years out of grad school, working with chronically homeless and mentally ill people, showed me that I knew nothing about their world. All I had to offer were values and disciplines that made little sense to their day-to-day needs for survival. They were of greater help to each other than myself, and many only saw us because we were the gates to resources they needed.

    In Forster’s England, as with today’s America, this ambivalence about privilege and inequality rest upon the trembling foundations of an empire. The urges of seeking power over others and seeking to save them are two edges on Imperialism’s blade, and together they ease the blade into those countries to carve out the resources we exploit for profit, to keep the empire running.

    Of what value is the inner life when it relies upon war and profiteering to exist? And what purpose is business and commerce when there is no soul to harvest its resources and give it meaning? Is there any escape to this dialectic when it only continues and seems to grow harsher with every decade?

    No wonder we become tense, vigilant, reactive toward our neighbors and families, unable to tolerate the wrong word used when it may signify discord and disagreement. Our debates become shallower and emptier of thought and reflection, merely memes and talking points thrown at each other, and a listing of words that do not connect us to each other, and companies that use our anger to sell us more things.

    When I look at the world in this way, it is tempting to imagine there is the possibility of going back, of rejecting empire and its fruits, of even rejecting “whiteness” as an identity and a descriptor. And yet to what could I go back? As a person of mixed-European descent who has always lived in the United States, to “go back” into my heritage would still be an act of creation, of going forward, of curating my various histories and lineages and creating a new identity.

    Increasingly I find social justice discourse to be empty wind rattling litter down the road. I see the “-ism” words strung together like a spell against cancellation, as though naming all of them without explaining what is meant is enough to convey one’s conscientiousness. I see people weaponizing their identity as a basis for the authority to gatekeep and shut down disagreement rather than engage—even when it’s coming from someone sharing that identity. I see white people telling each other that there is nothing we can do to escape our whiteness, and so no action we can take is generative, all we can do is stay lost in our self-reflective white neuroses and know that we’re failing. (And I’ve been that white person.)

    We all want to connect. To belong. Few of us truly want to be harmful to others, while most of us cause hurt because we feel it is necessary to do so in the moment. I do not know how to undo centuries of empire, and increasingly I think it is a paralyzing distraction. What I want is to connect to what’s here in my life. To say hello to neighbors. To nourish and nurture the people I can touch and talk with. To water the plants and keep the floors clean.

    We cannot set aside generations of trauma in an instant, but we can try to take a risk with the person in front of us today. Connect the mind and the heart. Connect one human to another. Connect to the land on which we live.

  • Self-Care is Important, and It’s Not Enough, and You Don’t Need to Apologize for That

    This past month, I was involved in two conversations in my spiritual communities around our offerings of work and the practice of Self-care. In both conversations, in slightly different ways, I noticed an attitude of recognizing the value of our practices while simultaneously apologizing, slightly, for them.

    By which I mean, adding caveats about Self-care not being a replacement for advocating for systemic change, or dismissing suggestions like “take a bath” as belittling of the struggles people experience in this world.

    How I understand and experience this impulse is having been a therapist and spiritual practitioner for several years, having lived through the rise of Self-Care Discourse and the inevitable backlash to it.

    What often irks me about backlashes is the tendency to overcorrect, to dismiss what was important and useful about the movement in the effort to address what is inadequate and harmful about it.

    The backlash to Self-care originates, as is often the case, in its over-popularization and watering down. Important practices become touted as cure-alls, and any threat they posed to the political or economic order quickly becomes neutralized once absorbed into it.

    So the transformative practices of simply sitting and doing nothing but breathing and observing one’s self, or of taking a break from hustling and consumption to relax in a warm bath, feed back into the atomizing culture of making each individual responsible for their own stress and the management of it.

    A Black woman relaxing in a bubble bath.
    Don’t you dare tell this woman this bath is silly.

    I get it. I worked at a place that offered us complementary yoga sessions and back massages once a month or so, and that was absolutely lovely, but it was not enough to make up for the horribly run meetings, the unreasonable workload, and the the covert manipulations and politics. We would be pulled into meetings where we might be asked to provide recommendations of how to improve our work conditions, spend a great deal of time and care crafting those recommendations, and then sit through another meeting where our leader spent five minutes explaining why the majority of those recommendations would not be considered.

    When Self-care is offered in these contexts, it comes across as both panacea and dismissal to problems that we aren’t causing and we can’t control. What I wanted was for my voice to be considered and to have control over my work conditions. No free ten-minute back massage can compensate exploitation.

    In the backlash, I have seen calls for more collective, community care. Which is a beautiful vision, and one that I endorse. Knowing there are people out there who will have your back, who can be there for you and you for them, is deeply relieving of stress and buoying of the spirit.

    Yet so many of us have no such community, have never experienced that kind of connection, or wouldn’t know where to begin to invest the effort and trust-building required. So many of our communities are ephemeral—they’re primarily remote, or they depend on shared employment, shared values and interests, or shared neighborhoods, all of which may change quickly and unexpectedly. When we invest in a community and find it dissolving or giving nothing back, that is deeply demoralizing.

    Lonely people need something to hold onto while they’re doing the work of building community or advocating for change. Taking a bath, going to therapy, taking a walk, meditating or praying, spraying a bottle of charged aromatic water—none of these things are enough to transform oppressive and exploitative circumstances.

    Yet those of us who know the importance of these practices need not apologize for that. These acts are not meant to transform the world. They are meant to create enough space and calm for our Selves to be seen and tended. They are meant to help us remember who we really are beyond this moment and this struggle, and to bring that essence into the work in front of us.

    Our work is not to disconnect, but to connect with greater depth and presence over time. Self-care helps us to face the world with an inspired imagination; an open, courageous heart; and the power of our wills.

  • Feelings are gross.

    “Ugh,” I said. “I’m having feelings about that. Feelings are gross!”

    “Aren’t you a therapist?” My therapist asks, gently trying to coax me to shut the fuck up and sit with my feelings, as a good therapist does.

    “Yes! And I’m a good therapist because I know feelings are gross!”

    This disgust response was not one I’d ever felt so viscerally before this past year, but it’s one I recognize from my younger life. Something in me had learned to see my needs and vulnerabilities as shameful, disordered, and needing to be controlled and hidden as much as possible. When I was confronted with the necessity of caring for my feelings, it was often done with as much distance as I could muster, as though I was a disgusted caregiver trying to hold their breath as they rush through changing a baby’s diaper.

    What seemed surprising to me was this resurgence, as I’d spent a number of years feeling enthusiastic about connecting with and caring for my feelings, embracing my needs, being vulnerable and sensitive and letting my sweetness emerge.

    Letting down my intellectualizing, dismissive protectors was a tremendous risk and a scary effort, and I am so grateful I did and got to learn how joyful it is to be soft and loving. And I also got emotionally hurt, and many of my ideals about life and connection proved to have illusions attached to them, and COVID happened, and I retreated back into cynical defeat and detachment.

    Which was okay, for a time, but I knew I didn’t want to live there either. There has to be a path between cynicism and naive vulnerability, and I am condemned to continue to seek it, though the seeking at times means having to find one of those edges if only to know I’ve gone too far in one direction.

    Though you may not relate to my disgust response, I know there are many parts of us who similarly feel unhappy with having needs, vulnerabilities, and tender feelings. We tend to associate these with animals and children, those needy creatures, and identify ourselves with the wearied adults trying to get them to calm down so we can get a moment’s rest. Those parts of us feel embarrassed or exhausted by the needs they cannot quite accept or understand.

    The beauty of our animal nature.

    This style of distancing may be very intellectual, or cynical, or darkly humored, but there’s a tricky style that looks very much like a person who knows all the right things to do and say. They have a robust spiritual practice, or they read Oprah and Brené Brown religiously, and they can tell you with a smile and full eye contact how important vulnerability is to connection. All the while hiding their grossest feelings.

    Brené Brown is actually quite a good role model for this problem, as her public persona has been consistently, brutally honest with her own journey around acceptance and shame. She does not allow herself or us to deify her as some shame-free enlightened person for whom vulnerability is easy.

    Vulnerability is never easy. Even when we expand our “comfort zones” there is always more territory of discomfort to own or explore, and old pains and vulnerabilities that creep back in when we’re busy having other adventures.

    Recently I’ve been listening to spiritual teachers, coaches, and even some therapists who seem to promise that if you work hard enough you’ll reach a state where you are fully healed and un-triggerable. Wouldn’t that be so wonderful?

    Yet I think such aspirations are not only unrealistic but that they become a hindrance to healing and growth in time. We reach a point where we’re feeling the same old disgust and impatience with ourselves, but now it’s dressed up in more refined spiritual or psychological language that boils down to “I don’t want to deal with this!”

    This mindset of healing is quite aggressive—that our needs and wounds must be uprooted, or transformed, or eradicated to reach a particular desirable state of consciousness. When we merge with this perspective, we tend to be uncharitable, condescending, and inhospitable to those parts of us that are younger, shyer, more tender, more unruly. We cannot meet our needs on their own terms, and so we cannot work with them.

    What I am working on is helping my disgusted fixing parts to instead see all of myself as a garden where many things grow, and all these things contribute to the vitality of my ecosystem, and some things may be interfering with the growth of others. Nothing that grows here is a problem to solve, or broken, but it’s a creature that requires my curiosity to learn about and understand so that I can help it to thrive and help the larger garden to thrive.

    Even my disgusted fixer part is a wonderful caretaker who can manage the higher level functions of the garden with expertise, and needs time to sit and relax and enjoy the sun for a while. Nothing helps him to relax better than being confronted by these needy creatures that remind me I’m not a machine, not an angel, not a disembodied spirit—I’m an animal that needs feeding and rest, fun and play, meaningful work and spacious emptiness.

    There is nothing to be ashamed of when we can dwell in the entirety of our gardens.

  • Forgiving Trespasses

    Forgiving Trespasses

    Recently I’ve had cause to reflect on The Lord’s Prayer. As a former Catholic, I prayed it often, and recently I was struck by the phrase “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespassed against us.”

    Younger me took this injunction to God as a goad to my sense of deep shame. I’d better forgive everyone quickly so that God forgives me for all my sin!

    Having stepped away from that practice and returning to the text, the word “trespass” intrigues me. I do not know the original text, or what word was used here, or what it might have meant. But in the English language “trespass” has multiple meanings of crossing moral lines, causing injury, and encroaching on property that does not belong to us.

    In contemporary popular psychology, this fits neatly with the harm as a crossing or violation of boundaries. Most violations of boundaries engender a harm: to break into someone’s house, to assault them without consent, to take up personal or emotional space and deny them the agency to set their own limits.

    As an aside, though I am using “harm” generically here, I think it is deeply important that we make the effort to be specific in our naming of harms. Simply saying that a person has done harm is not workable. Workability may not be your goal, but if accountability is at all possible, it is worth being as clear as possible what the harms have been.

    In reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, I connected to a quoted passage from Hanif Abdurraqib’s column at Pacific Standard, “Why Do We Expect Victims of Racism to Forgive?” There is so much that is worthy in this column, but for the purposes of this post I want to call out the following:

    Of course, to deny forgiveness is not the same as to wish someone ill. Rather, it is denying a perpetrator the opportunity to feel absolved for their misdeeds. Forgiveness is, in part, an internal process, something that each of us arrives at on our own time and through our own means. To express that forgiveness out loud can certainly be healing, but it’s also an exercise that works for the benefit of the perpetrator. There is no honest healing in absolving someone who has done you harm if you don’t feel they deserve absolution from you.

    – Hanif Abdurraqibg

    If trespass is a metaphor for harm, then there is little merit in forgiving a trespasser who remains in your territory without your consent. Such forgiveness tends to be more from the self-preserving impulse of people pleasing, or “fawning,” to survive by trying to align one’s self with the will of the one who harms you.

    When the harmer pressures the harmed into forgiveness or reconciliation, that’s often a sign that they still do not respect the harmed one, or understand the harm done. Reconciliation without genuine accountability from the harmer tends to set one up for being harmed again.

    When the trespass is corrected—everyone is back within their own appropriate boundaries, and respecting each other’s—then the harmed person can have the space to work through their feelings and determine whether forgiveness or reconciliation is worthwhile.

    Forgiveness is never owed, but the person harmed may one day find it to their benefit to forgive, if only to let go of the pain and anger, which can be their own hooks that keep us bound to the harmful person. Whether through vengeance, pleading, pleasing, or desperation, our efforts to repeatedly have our hurt recognized, validated, and understood by a person who repeatedly demonstrates their inability to do any of those things becomes a form of self-harm.

    When I think of forgiveness, I think of accepting the person as exactly who they are, accepting myself for the ways I participated, and finding the right boundaries I need to have peace within myself and between myself and the one who hurt me.

    Reconciliation is not required for forgiveness. You may decide reconciliation is the right move, or you may never welcome that person into your life again. Whatever brings you to peace and security is right.

    And now I feel I can offer that forgiveness and want the same in return—for those hurts I cause to be forgiven in a way that allows space and distance needed for the hurt person to be at peace, and to make amends and take accountability as needed.

    If the person who caused harm is struggling with not being able to control whether forgiveness and reconciliation will happen, the best practice would be to continue to work on themself and explore how their behavior contributed to these circumstances, and to respect the boundaries of the person they hurt. Eventually they may prove themselves to have become a safe and honorable person, but if all you can do is never cause that harm again, that would be a beautiful rose growing from the pile of manure of what happened between you.

  • You Don’t Have to Be Miserable Because There is Suffering

    You Don’t Have to Be Miserable Because There is Suffering

    A few years I was on the phone with a close friend and talking about things that were going really well for me, and I found myself prefacing it with, “I know I’m privileged—”

    And my friend, who in the cube matrix of privilege might be said to have “less” than me, said very soberly. “You don’t have to do that.”

    After reflecting on it for a moment, I said, “I feel like I say that reflexively. Like it’s a superstition. A spell against cancellation.”

    Writing that, it reminds me of various wards against the evil eye. In my understanding of the evil eye in Italian cultures, it’s an almost instinctive curse one might draw from envious people if you do too much bragging and showing off. Among the practices of protection against the evil eye, one is to disown any responsibility for one’s fortune and lay it in the hands of your God. So the people who thank God or Jesus for their Oscar or football victory are engaging in a long tradition of protection against the envy and resentment of others.

    “Owning one’s privilege” is not the same as thanking God—the feeling behind it is much more of repentance and shame than gratitude, for one. But it feels related to a parallel formulation I keep hearing myself and other people say—”The world is on fire, but I’m doing okay.”

    When we say this, it’s often with a mixture of embarrassment, confusion, or perhaps guilt. How can I be okay when the world is on fire?

    Not to be cute, but I think this question and confusion itself is an expression of living with a measure of privilege. Many of us have been lucky enough to grow up in periods of relative stability and abundance, though we may not have understood it at the time. We didn’t have the context.

    Whatever your life is when you’re growing up is your “normal.” You literally know nothing else other than your conditions, unless you are educated through family lore or school to put your experience in a larger context. So perhaps your great grandparents lived through the Depression, or came to the United States as refugees with little more than the clothes they wore, but by the time you came around your parents were able to afford a house where you had your own room and always had enough to eat.

    Perhaps you hear stories about hardship, war, unrest, deprivation, but it’s hard to connect those realities to your experience. Some of us have families that share the stories of hardship and survival and help us to keep in living memory the awareness that things could get worse. In times of peace and abundance, those families may get spurned as being too stuck in the past. But for many of us, those memories have become deeply relevant again.

    Yet whenever there is unrest, poverty, war, droughts, pandemic, life continues. We have children. We work. We find time to dream or celebrate. We age and die. There are many among us who die early, or who suffer horrors, who may or may not survive to continue life.

    It’s a sorrow for those of our families who didn’t pass along the stories of struggle and sorrow along with the joys. Without those roots, we get frozen in a strange guilt-anxiety as we imagine all the horrors to come and uncertain if it’s okay to enjoy or celebrate the moment.

    But this moment is all we have. That’s a trite saying, said so many times, but it’s trite because it’s true and we have to keep reminding ourselves. Some horrors are happening and will happen regardless of whether we sit here and worry about it or feel upset.

    Blocking out those horrors entirely doesn’t serve, because there is merit in standing against them and fighting. But fighting is a part of being alive; we’re not alive only to fight.

    Suffering, too, is a part of living, and our joy can contribute to others’ suffering. When that happens, it’s important to discern how we are responsible and what we are willing to do to alleviate or remediate the harm. Yet living in suffering, self-denial, and self-deprivation is not necessarily a balm to others’ suffering.

    What do we do when we say, “The world is on fire”? We imagine a world tiny enough that it can be engulfed by a totalizing event, yet we distance ourselves from it, as though we and our lives are not of the world.

    If our lives are okay, then the entire world is not on fire. Or, even if there is fire, there are places of safety and respite, joy and generation within it.

    Whenever I find myself caught in a totalizing vision of catastrophe—and there are so many opportunities to do that—I acknowledge and honor that a part of me cares deeply, a part of me wants to not cause harm, and wants everyone to be okay. How awful for those tender parts of me that this can never be guaranteed.

    Then I feel my feet on the ground, look at my immediate environment, align my mind to what is occurring to me in the moment. Then I find what is within my power to do, to bring more kindness, more agency, more ease into the world. I offer gratitude for those blessings and privileges I do have, and I grieve the suffering that my blessings or privileges may contribute toward, and then I look at what I can do about it.

  • For Queer Men and Others Seeking Love and Lust

    For Queer Men and Others Seeking Love and Lust

    In my practice, I work with many men and nonbinary folk with longings for partnership and sexual fulfillment. Being both a therapist and a human being, I have both subjective opinions and informed perspectives on the joys and struggles of this journey, and I wanted to share common observations and advice that come up in these discussions.

    In the ongoing pendulum swing of the culture wars, the energy seems to be turning against gender and sexual minorities and the culture of sexual openness and consent we’ve cultivated for decades—and here I include those straight, kinky, and polyamorous people who are part of that culture.

    Some of the rising critiques have merit and are worthy of consideration, as every movement includes people and positions that overreach and cause harm. Yet it would grieve us to lose what wisdom, beauty, and joy we’ve made in this culture, so that is another motivation to document what I’ve learned both living and being a therapist in these communities.

    I address this to queer men and enbies because that is the culture in which I am most immersed, but I believe at heart there are similarities in the experience of seeking connection that cross identity categories. So if you find something in here that resonates with you, claim it! If it doesn’t, brush it aside!

    Below are mini-essays that offer strategies for enjoying love and sex with responsibility, maturity, and respect for yourself and your partners. The following links will take you directly to each section:

    Seeking Lust, Seeking Love

    In my early twenties, when I was freshly out, I was one of the guys who “hated the gay scene” and imagined I was the rare soul who wanted true romance and connection amidst a group of shallow and hedonistic, vapid people. Unfortunately, this attitude made me haughty and judgmental of a lot of decent, authentic people who had a different relationship with their sexuality and gender than was comfortable for me.

    Essentially, I was deeply insecure, terrified of being excluded from a community I’d just joined, uncertain of my place in it, and hiding behind self-righteous superiority rather than risking authenticity. Not every queer man goes through this phase of coming out and joining the community, but it’s quite recognizable when it happens.

    So many queer men say they truly want a connected, monogamous relationship, and are utterly uninterested in open relationships or the promiscuous gay culture—yet so many of these same folks have sex with guys they barely know, and sometimes guys in open relationships. What I’m saying is, their behavior does not seem to align with their stated values.

    Being in an open relationship is not mandatory—more on that later—but what I’m pointing toward is that sex and romance are not simple desires that yield to moralistic declarations and rigid rules. When we feel loneliness and shame, being sexually desired may feel like a balm, an ego boost, even if acting on it only leaves us with more loneliness and shame later. When seeking sex or love is primarily motivated by escape—wanting to be rescued from loneliness and shame—we’re going to have a hard time being authentic and making meaningful and enduring connections.

    When looking for connection, you might be looking for sex that’s just about play, fun, ego gratification, or exploration; or you might be looking for sex that’s about connection, intimacy, building closeness and partnership. In practice, of course, we aren’t always clear what desires are driving us, and they may overlap or blur together or disguise themselves as each other. But, whenever possible, it makes things much easier in the long run to be clear with yourself about your motivations when you’re pursuing sex or romance.

    When you meet a guy, I encourage you to approach it with openness and curiosity about where the connection will lead, without burdening it with intense expectations. You may be meeting your partner for the next several decades, or a person you’ll never want to see again, or a potential new friend, or a person with whom you’ll have a pretty good relationship that helps you grow but eventually ends. Needing to know right away which it will be puts too much pressure on a relationship that you are actually creating together with your choices.

    Stay Centered in Self-Respect

    No matter what connection you’re forming, and with whom, come to the person with respect for them and yourself. One way I know I’m in a place of mutual respect is from the feeling in my body and heart when in relationship with the other person.

    When I am centered, grounded, and in self-respect, I can feel myself standing completely supported by my feet and heels. My shoulders are back and down, so my heart is open. My core is engaged but not tight or tense, so that my spine lifts upward. Even sitting, I feel myself sitting back on butt with core engaged and posture lifting up, supported by the seat.

    Mature, supportive, connected relationships foster a mutual experience of this centeredness and groundedness for all involved. From this posture, we can reach out to connect with each other, or let go of the connection and remain in balance. We can move toward or away from each other as needed.

    Sometimes, however, a relationship might elicit a feeling of leaning too far forward, reaching toward the other, arms collapsing around the heart and belly and losing one’s center of gravity in the extension. We may be reaching out to comfort or be comforted, to please, to control, to hold—regardless, we feel we have to reach before they move completely away from us.

    In these relationships, you may experience a sense that the other person is frequently stepping back, withdrawing slightly, perhaps occasionally moving toward you in flirtation or connection, perhaps inviting you to follow, but never quite staying still and showing they want to be connected to you. Often these folks are gorgeous, ego-validating, alive in some way that you deeply desire, but more often than not you feel the sense that you have to keep pursuing to keep them in your life. Perhaps you have one magical date, and then they don’t respond to texts for days, if at all; or they keep changing plans or dropping them; or they keep complaining about the ways you’re not doing enough for them.

    When we reach out too far, we compromise the ability of our shoulders to support us—when our shoulders are down and back, our arms can pull the other toward us and us toward the other simultaneously. Unsupported, we can get ourself in a position where we fall on our face when they’re not there to catch us.

    Should you find yourself reaching out too much, what helps is either to drop your arms or take a step forward. Dropping your arms is about letting go of the overreach and pursuit and allowing them to come to you. Pay attention to what feels like pursuit —texting with no response, flirting with no flirt back, buying expensive things but never feeling considered, showing up for dates and getting stood up again—and instead match your effort to the energy they’re giving you. So if he says, for the fiftieth time, he’d like to grab coffee without offering any concrete plan, just say, “Great, let me know what works for you.”

    Stepping toward in this situation means, to me, risking vulnerability and honesty about what’s going on here. When reaching but not moving our legs, we’re usually trying to protect ourselves from rejection or disappointment by not being direct about what we want and what we’re doing. If you state, clearly, what you want, or what you’re noticing, it’s a vulnerable confrontation that can finally invite clarity to the situation.

    Neither of these strategies guarantees that you’ll get the person you’re pursuing. It’s not impossible, but the goal is not to win, the goal is to find a partner who can give back what you’re giving out.

    The other posture is that of leaning backward, closing our arms over our bodies to protect the heart, turning our faces away while staying rooted in position. Relationships that elicit this tend to be with people who seem to be coming in way too close, way too quickly, wanting way too much. These folks attach faster than you do, and seem more comfortable expressing their needs and wants and their big feelings when they aren’t getting what they want. They also seem to run away with the same intensity that they run toward you, which makes honesty feel too risky.

    In this posture, our body tries to indicate its presence and connection by staying in place, but create space for ourselves to think and respond by leaning away and back. This is actually quite a confusing posture, with mixed signals, even if internally you feel like your disgust and frustration must be apparent.

    This, too, threatens to overreach into a collapse backwards, and all efforts to accommodate and avoid conflict may come to nothing when we fall on our asses and they simply watch us fall, or walk away.

    When you find yourself leaning back too far, you could try either pushing back or stepping back. Pushing back is not a shove, though your early efforts might feel like one. (Keep in mind I mean this metaphorically. Don’t shove your partner.) Instead, it’s keeping that upright, centered, grounded posture and putting your hands firmly but softly against your partner, letting your arms and shoulders establish the space you need to stay connected while centered.

    Pushing back is giving feedback, communicating both your desire to be with your partner and what space you need to be your best self with them. In practice it’s about being authentic and honest about your needs and feelings. If you’re feeling tired and overwhelmed and your partner wants to stay over for the fifth night in a row—leaning back would be to let him stay over but quietly and sullenly withdraw the entire time. Pushing back would be to tell him that you’re exhausted and need time for yourself to recharge so you can be present with him.

    Stepping back in this situation is fairly intuitive. Let the person know you’re stepping back and for how long. Give yourself the space you need to look at what’s been going on and whether this connection feels right for you. If you want to continue the connection, reset expectations so that you can both know how close you need to be to keep your posture.

    Again, neither of these moves guarantee the relationship will stay intact, but they will either improve the connection or provide the clarity you both need to make good choices for yourselves.

    Apps

    Hookup and dating apps are no better or worse than other kinds of technology. They serve a purpose. When engaging with them, keep in mind:

    1. They are designed to bring profit and ongoing income to the company that created it. They are incentivized to draw and keep your attention for as long as they can. They are not incentivized to help you find your own true love or, as the guys say, “a reason to delete this app.”
    2. There is a piece of guidance around not going to the grocery store when you’re hungry, because you’ll end up buying food you don’t really want or need and not prioritize the food you wanted and needed. Think of being on an app while horny in the same way.
    3. You may be using apps and the pursuit of sex or romance as a way of covering over other needs—for friendship, for rest, for play, for adventure, for emotional solace, for self-esteem. Pay attention to when and how you use it, and look for other ways to meet those needs.
    4. When talking to a guy on an app, imagine that you were at a party having the same conversation. Would you keep having this conversation?
    5. Try not to let your entire schedule get stalled while waiting for a guy to tell you if he’s interested and available. You don’t know what is going on over on his side, and you’ll feel worse about yourself if you blew off plans and nothing happens.
    6. Sometimes it’s better, and kinder, to directly tell the person you’re not interested. Often the honesty is appreciated. When it’s not, you can block them. Some guys will accept your honesty and then keep hitting on you. You can block them too.

    If You Can’t Find Your Match, Become Him

    Often we want or expect things from our partners that we actually want to cultivate in ourselves. We may feel shame or inadequacy about our sexuality and want the other person to give us permission to feel sexy, desired, and alive. We may want them to offer the structure and discipline we lack, or to have an athletic body, or dress a certain way.

    If you want what you don’t have, consider cultivating those qualities in yourself instead. Invest in your own physical, emotional, and social fitness in the ways that are right for you and grow those capacities that are underdeveloped.

    One of my friends taught me that if you want to be a guy who looks hot and confident in fetish wear, practice wearing it around the house and doing things so that you start to feel comfortable in it. That wisdom offers many applications. Rather than waiting for someone to give you the permission or validation to wear a speedo or a jock strap or whatever, practice being in it and then risk wearing one in public. After the initial feelings of anxiety and vulnerability, often it ends up feeling normal and almost like a non-event. Most gay men are more preoccupied with the condition of their own abs than whether someone else has them.

    Similarly, if you want to get more comfortable expressing yourself sexually, practice it while watching yourself in the mirror or taking video of yourself. This practice dissolves shame and awkwardness and may help you learn how to turn yourself on. Don’t underestimate the value of this. This isn’t simple narcissism. Being confidently turned on is a real turn on for others.

    Often I counsel guys who have empty lives and feel frustrated that they can’t find a partner. They’re in limbo, imagining that romance will give them permission to finally start living. If you feel empty and lonely in your life, take time to explore your interests, find friends, join a group or a sports team, get involved with your community. Build your life and focus on your goals instead of making partnership your primary focus.

    When love comes, then, it will be a compliment to a life you already love, and you’ll be grow the relationship with authenticity and deliberation rather than rushing into something that seems okay because you’re lonely.

    And if love doesn’t come, you still have a life you love.

    Look for Potential, Not a Project

    When you start connecting with a potential long-term partner, pay less attention to whether you’re immediately certain about them, and more to how the connection grows and deepens with more acquaintance. If you’re sold on the guy early on, great! But it’s normal to not be a hundred percent sure, but to enjoy spending time with them enough to want to keep doing it.

    It’s not wise to expect an immediate soul connection and mutual understanding without communication in conflict. Nor is it wise to front load your first dates with an introduction to your trauma history and all your problems. Let the relationship build in trust and intimacy through the dance of taking a risk, seeing if it pays off, and working with it if it doesn’t.

    Relationships that continue to grow, deepen, become more interesting, and remain enjoyable show the potential you want, even if they’re not completely perfect. But if your potential partner is in a place in life that’s very different from yours, and seems to require all of your energy and effort to develop, that may not be sustainable long term.

    If your partner is unwilling to allow you to have your own life, alienates you from your friends and family, demands you constantly accede to their wishes and preferences, physically assaults you, threatens self-harm when confronted on problems, pressures you into sex you don’t like, steals your belongings for drug money, or constantly belittles you and makes you feel bad about yourself and your wants and needs—these are abusive dynamic that won’t get better with your energy and investment.

    There is a common belief that abusers tend to be the more powerful partner in the relationship, which does happen, but it is also quite common for the abusive partner to have a more unstable life and depend upon the partner they’re abusing for emotional and financial support.

    The message I want to give, over and over, is that you deserve to be in a relationship of mutual connection, investment, and support. If you’re not in one, you deserve the chance to find one.

    Health and Safety

    The following are unpleasant considerations. You don’t have to live in fear, but reasonable precautions and a safety strategy go a long way to make life easier. That said, no safety strategy is a hundred percent effective, so if you find yourself scammed, hurt, or infected with an illness—don’t beat yourself up. But do reflect on what you learned from the situation that could help you refine your safety strategy.

    Keep informed about the trends of infections in your community, and mindful that queer men go all over the world to connect with each other, so we have quite a large community. If you want to have sex with a lot of people, get whatever preventative care you can, like vaccines and PReP.

    Whatever sex you want to have, whatever precautions you want to take—get in the habit of communicating these up front. Do not assume that you are on the same page without communication. Do not assume that, even when you’ve communicated, your partner will respect your boundaries, unless they show their trustworthiness. If your boundaries are not respected, end the situation and get out if you can.

    If you get diagnosed with an illness, inform your recent partners as quickly as possible. It is never a pleasant conversation but it is the responsible one to take care of your community. Try to avoid getting bogged down in blame or figuring out who gave it to whom, unless you are in a monogamous relationship and you’ve been faithful. Otherwise, getting sick is a risk you take when having sex, so it doesn’t serve to get caught up in blame.

    If you’re meeting a stranger for sex, avoid bringing anything that you don’t want to disappear. Try to meet in a neutral public space beforehand, or make sure someone knows where you’re going and when to check in on you.

    Do not accept a drink from a stranger that you didn’t watch being poured or opened. Avoid leaving your drinks unattended at a party or a bar. Occasionally unethical people will drug your drink in an attempt to take advantage of you. This is never okay.

    Trust building is ongoing and begins in the first seconds of contact, and trust is about revealing yourself, seeing if the person responds well, and then seeing if they reveal themself in kind. When a person reveals too much too quickly, or fails to reveal anything about themself while demanding more of you, those are concerning signs about their ability to respect you.

    People who claim to have no boundaries, or who insist their partners cannot have boundaries, are a danger. Everyone has limits and boundaries. It’s okay to not be sure what your boundaries are and explore them, but you need an atmosphere where it’s safe to communicate about these things and check in with each other.

    People who will only interact with you in a “role” are similarly worth caution—it is the definition of objectification. Whatever you do, you need to be able to step out of your roles and check in with each other when things come up.

    If a stranger seems very pushy, eager, insistent, reticent to share important details with you (like a face picture), and you get a strange feeling you don’t trust them, listen to that.

    I don’t have much advice about drugs and sex. I’d be concerned if drugs became the center of your sex life, or if your intoxication consistently overwhelms your judgment, or if you need to be drunk or high to have sex.

    I would encourage you to avoid meth altogether. It has ruined a lot of decent people.

    Etiquette for Open Relationships

    Many long-term gay couples and throuples have a version of open relationship, but it’s not universal nor necessary for a fulfilling life and relationship. Don’t agree to it just because you feel pressured or expected to do it.

    In general, it’s helpful to cultivate a sense of partnership in which you both want happiness for yourselves and each other, and are willing to do the work to support each other in that happiness. Mismatches in desire is not only normal, it’s inevitable, and it’s a dynamic you need to work with whether the mismatch is in how much you want sex, how clean you need your place to be, whether to go on vacation this summer, or whether to have an open or polyamorous relationship.

    When a mismatch of desires arise, avoid the pitfall of making it one person’s fault. Neither of you is “causing” the mismatch, but it’s a problem for both to work on together. The desire for monogamy and the desire for an open relationship are both valid in their own ways, all rooted in your histories and dreams, and equally rife with blessings and pitfalls.

    If you have such a mismatch and choose to commit to monogamy, polyamory, or an open relationship, let the person who didn’t want it have time to find their own reasons to accept and find value in the new shape, without rushing or guilting them.

    Should you open your relationship, take some time to explore individually and with each other your fears and concerns about it. Let those fears and concerns help you shape the agreements that work best for both of you. Do not use rules as a way to cudgel or control each other.

    Expect these agreements to be renegotiated and evolve with time. You will encounter gray areas and unexpected situations that bring up feelings and concerns you didn’t think to have before. When these happen, try to honor each other’s feelings but see if you can avoid blaming each other for not knowing what to do before you knew it would be an issue. Then figure out together how you want to handle it if it comes up again.

    Early on, agreements in open and poly relationships tend to be rigid and legalistic. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s an important step, but every law has unexpected consequences to manage. If you will only have sex with other guys when you’re together, you may discover that it’s hard to find a third person that you’re both into and who is into both of you equally.

    The process of making, honoring, and revising agreements builds a stronger sense of trust and partnership, along with understanding of each other’s desires and vulnerabilities. This may lead to the rules becoming simpler and more flexible over time. Power comes from your partnership and trust; the rules are simply an exercise to cultivate it.

    If you begin to find you resent one of your agreements, do not break it without talking to your partner and renegotiating it. Breaking your agreements without consent is a form of cheating and will deteriorate the trust you have in each other, which will make it harder to renegotiate.

    If you’re in an open relationship and have sex buddies, treat them with hospitality. Your sex buddies are not responsible for knowing and upholding your agreements; that’s your and your partner’s job. If your sex buddy wants something off limits, it’s your job to communicate the boundary without framing your partner as this awful person keeping you from joy. Simply saying, “I don’t want that,” or “That’s not something I can do” is enough.

    Sex buddies are also not responsible for keeping your secrets, hearing all of your complaining about your partner, or being the communication go-between for you and your partner. Consider them guests unless you all decide to deepen the relationship.

    If you’re the sex buddy and you’re hooking up with one or more guys in a relationship, you have the right to your own boundaries and to not be put in the middle of their conflicts. Neither should you feel responsible for solving or managing their problems, keeping their secrets, and you definitely should avoid playing one against the other.

    In all relationships, we each have our own unique relationship with one other person. Charles and Chuck may be lovers; Charles and Patrick may be husbands; Chuck and Patrick may be friends. When Chuck and Patrick are having a conflict, Charles should let them work it out without making it his responsibility.

    If you have an open or polyamorous relationship, you will experience feelings of jealousy, disappointment, envy, and occasionally feeling rejected or left out. These aren’t signs of being unevolved or weak or inferior, and they’re not necessarily signs that an open relationship is wrong for you, they’re simply human feelings worthy of care.

    Open relationships and polyamory are like relationship graduate school. Before you begin one, you might imagine this amazing world of unfettered sex and love. What you forget to imagine is how much it will bring up all of your old wounds around being left out, rejected, or unwanted.

    When they come up, take time to reflect on the feelings, journal about them, and then share them when you and your partner(s) are rested, sober, fed, and available for a conversation. Acknowledging the feelings is often enough, but they may also be signs that you are needing more time, energy, and attention from your partner, or to renegotiate an agreement.

    Closing Thoughts

    Once I got past my initial fears and insecurities about the gay community, I became entranced by this vision of mutual caring and love for each other expressed in all its forms. What I aspired to has been a culture of love without coercion, and love that exalts and brings out the best in each other while honoring our individual selfhoods. Experience has taught me that ideal is not universally shared or even known, and love and lust are as potent in bringing out the worst of us as the best.

    We make too much of sex and love. Not that these things are unimportant or not worth pursuing, but we burden them with so many unacknowledged fantasies and fears and desires that these activities really cannot accomplish for us. There is no one hot enough in the world that their desiring you will make you feel free of your insecurities. There is no moment when you finally achieve the sexiness you’ve always wanted and become clear of your sense of inadequacies. There is no lover or partner for whom being in relationship is an endless easy ride where you never have to feel bad or hurt or have hard conversations.

    In life, there will be seasons of great activity, and seasons of quietude. You may find yourself not as interested in sex as you once were, or very interested and struggling to find partners, or beset by interest from people that don’t interest you. In long term relationships, there may be seasons of great connection and seasons of coolness. Don’t imagine any of these seasons will last for the rest of your life or your relationships.

    When I was coming out, the joke was that gay men functionally died after the age of 25; there was an obsession with the beauty of youth, looking young, and having younger partners, or bemoaning not being attractive to young partners. This can’t be divorced from the context, in the late 90s and early 2000s, of being at the tail end of the worst of the AIDS epidemic that killed most of the men who would have become our elders and mentors, who might have shown us ways to age and find beauty in aging.

    I know the obsession with youth continues to exist in some parts of the community, but it’s been fascinating and heartening to watch as men live into their later life and discover a whole new phase of being desirable to those who are attracted to maturity.

    Even in times of horror and hardship, living and loving in all its forms offers us joy. There is still merit to living toward an aspiration—toward cultivating maturity, responsibility for self and community, honesty, integrity, and the capacity not to be taken for a fool; all the while continuing to grow our capacity for open-heartedness and speaking to the best within each other.

    I want us to have all the joy that’s possible in this world while we’re also experiencing the struggles and the greater purpose. Listen to yourself, respect yourselves and each other, be smart, and don’t let yourself believe you have to be stuck in misery.

  • Crab Season

    Crab Season

    Astrology is one of my hobbies of study, something I find fascinating and rich but not enough to make my profession. From an archetypal, depth perspective, the wheel of astrology offers a clock of the movement of energy and themes that rise up in our personal and collective experiences. Currently, the sun is moving through the sign of Cancer. Each of us has every sign in our natal charts, so Cancer is within some domain of life, and the sun invites us to look at how these themes play out and could transform within the house that Cancer rules for you.

    The astrological sign of Cancer encompasses an energy of exquisite sensitivity and ferocity. The shell of the crab is tough, giving the creature protection and structure as well as arming its pinchers so that anyone who dares to startle, transgress, or overpower a crab when it’s not prepared may find itself missing chunks of flesh quite quickly. As a water sign, Cancer would seem in its element, yet by its nature it learns to defend against the world of water with strict protections and defenses. Yet if the crab is to grow, it must husk this shell and learn to accepts its with complete vulnerability and tenderness, until it can form a new, more spacious protection.

    My observation of those with strong Cancer energy tends to be this surprising mixture of sensitivity and ferocious protection. They may enjoy joining in on sarcasm and shit-talking until someone hits a sensitive spot, and then out come the claws and the withdrawal to safety.

    As a fresh wound is so sensitive that our bodies instinctively move to protect it, so too is the emotional world of Cancer, and perhaps all the water signs—what some might experience as an accidental jostle, or maybe a mild bruise, the Cancer experiences as a deep physical and emotional injury. So intense is the experience of pain that the first response may be that of outrage, of believing that they were hurt on purpose, and to express their hurt directly to the person responsible would only make them vulnerable to more torture. So the anger comes out crabwise, sideways, indirectly through other conflicts, or through passive-aggression.

    Those who are within the Cancer’s circle of trust and love experience an almost overwhelming outpouring of love, nurturing, and sweetness. The sexual, sensual, romantic, and nurturing nature of Cancer is intoxicating. They will shower their loved ones with affection and extravagance, often to their own detriment, and when they do not experience sufficient gratitude for their efforts this can cause another injury that brings out the defenses.

    Yet what the Cancer nurtures tends to be an expression of the image of the person whom the Cancer loves. Should this image be authentic to the loved person, it is wonderful. If the Cancer’s image is distorted by denial, wishful thinking, or illusion, it’s a setup for great suffering and pain on all sides, for the loved one hears that they are being loved in a way that doesn’t feel like love, and it is the loved one’s fault for not understanding the loving nature of the Cancer’s efforts, rather than the Cancer’s obligation to reconcile their image with their loved one’s true needs and nature.

    Once I heard that Cancers made great sales people and business folks, which surprised me at first, but at their best Cancers intuitively sense what others want and need and know how to position their wares and services to meet those needs. Cancer wields love and money as currency and leverage to maximize their own comfort and success. Their opposing twin, Capricorn, is all about the hustle and the long game, while Cancer is much more adept at navigating the waters of changing fortune and playing the odds to their favor.

    One of the Cancerian blessings I’ve come to value is expressed through its association with domesticity and cooking. The gravest insult you could serve a Cancer is to have a dinner party of all their friends and not invite them. Home cooking, with its investment of love and attention, is an expression of that Cancerian nurturing energy. It’s also, I’ve found, one of Cancer’s powers. When one is cooking, one can run multiple projects at the same time with the right timing. You can get a roast in the oven and two pots on the stove and let heat and time do its work, occasionally checking in to stir things up or let things settle.

    This model of effort—letting things move in their own time, with occasional focused attention—also speaks to me of Cancer season. After getting your seeds going and planted in the spring, birthing your children, starting your projects, there is a period of time in which you need to learn how to balance the amount of caring you invest. Too much fussing can keep things from growing and cooking the way they need. Plants need time in the heat and weather to grow hardy, just as kids need time to play and explore and have their own problems. Yet they’re not in a place where they can be left to their own survival. Things need tending. The plants may need more water in the heat of July. You need to make sure the roast isn’t cooking too long and dries out. The kids need a soft place to run to when life gets scary, so they can work through their feelings and get ready to go back into the world.

  • Coming Out is Courageous

    For Pride I want to say what has been on my heart for years. There has been a thread in Queer Discourse that seems to be comparing the conditions of “coming out.” Some people, it is said, have the “privilege” to be out, while others experience too much oppression or precarity. People who come out late in life likely experience some scorn and criticism for waiting so long, while recently I read a dear friend suggesting that youth have an easier time coming out than those later in life, who have to deal with the complexities of coming out with a career and sometimes a family and children that do not align with their sexuality and gender.

    Multiple conflicting things are simultaneously true. No one should be pressured to come out if they’re not emotionally ready or if their life circumstances are too precarious. And the challenges and heartbreak of coming out late in life is certainly much different than the risks of coming out young. What rankles me, however, is the way these perspectives seem to subtly invalidate the courage and risk-taking of those who do come out, whether early in life or at all.

    The truth is, you do not know if you have the “privilege to be out” until you are out. When I came out to my parents, I had no idea whether they’d be accepting or affirming or even allow me to stay in the house, as kids my age at that time (and today) are at risk of being thrown out when they come out to their parents. My own friends made jokes about beating up queers.

    What prompted my disclosure, at age 15, was going to church with my mother and listening to yet another homily from the priest about the sinfulness of homosexuality and the Catholic love that wants to call them home (to be straight, or celibate). By this point in my life I’d been wrestling with my sexuality consciously for three years. Catholicism was deeply important to my identity and the culture of my family—our extended relatives would pray the rosary together with my grandparents during out family vacations.

    I was fully aware of the Catholic teachings on homosexuality, and after much prayer, contemplation, and painful efforts to change, I’d come upon my own knowing that God was not the one who had the problem with me or my desires. What made me feel like my heart was being ripped in half was not knowing how I could honor my truth and my religious and family identity.

    So while I had no reason to believe I would be shunned, I also had no idea how my parents would react. All I knew was that I could no longer live with it being a secret. That took courage. That was a risk.

    Feet standing in the center of a series of rainbow-colored circles.

    Coming out is always courageous, always risky. Every time I’m in a new situation that requires me to come out, there is always a moment of assessment—how safe is this situation? Am I in a condition where I’ll be able to deal with a negative reaction? And every time, you don’t know how they’ll respond until you’ve done it.

    To cope with the anxiety of this, I made a practice of finding ways to come out as quickly as possible—mentioning a boyfriend or husband, or otherwise giving a tell. As an adult, it’s possible that being openly gay closed certain doors to career opportunities or other forms of social acceptance and privilege that would be available to those who kept their queerness hidden. And it’s possible that my being out allowed me to be an advocate and an influence on culture that wouldn’t have been possible.

    The fact that I was able to stay afloat and make a good life for myself is of course a result of the support, community, and privileges I had, including a family that did not reject me and was willing to do the work to understand and accept me.

    And there is also a privilege in receiving opportunities for wealth and status that are only available because you’re not out of the closet. And that kind of privilege is its own kind of hell, to live a life experiencing daily discrimination against LGBTQ+ folk, knowing that the life you’ve worked to build could be ruined by an accidental discovery or a disclosure.

    What I want to say is, for Pride this year, in a year when the tide of the law is turning against queer people, can we honor that it’s always a risk to come out? That it always takes courage to make visible something within you that could be hidden or repressed? That there is a cost to being out, and a cost to staying hidden?

    There is also a power in coming out that our queer elders and ancestors knew. When you are visible, you are a target, but you are also a force. The people in your life can’t have bias against a strange, foreign entity; they have to reconcile their beliefs about this class of people with the person that you are, and the relationship you have with them. Your love for each other makes you both irritants to each other’s worldviews.

    It’s comfortable and sometimes necessary to reject the irritant and surround yourself with comforting reassurance and shared beliefs. And it contributes to the polarization we find ourselves in in our culture, where we move more and more toward extremes because we cannot tolerate the irritation of loving someone whose life does not reconcile with our beliefs.

    But when you stay with that irritant, it becomes a pearl. My grandmother, with whom I prayed the rosary so much, and who said unkind things to me about gayness when I was young, came to my commitment ceremony to my husband. She was a powerful woman of sincere faith and diligent practice, attending Catholic mass daily and doing regular acts of service. She was the real deal. And as she approached the end of her life, she shared, “I just don’t think it’s that hard to get into Heaven anymore.”

    I don’t believe that change was entirely about me and my coming out, but I do believe that my choice to be openly gay and to stay connected to my family was a part of this great process that held us together. And as her beliefs changed, over time I was finally able to begin to heal my relationship with family and religion and find, for me, how my heart can be whole even if the ideologies tell me it should be divided.

    Whatever privileges I had or didn’t have, all of this has been work, and it has been hard. And it comes in the wake of the work that my queer ancestors did of coming out and being loud in even more dangerous times.

    Coming out is courageous because it’s scary. It’s powerful because it is so risky, no matter who you are or when you do it.

  • Loneliness Can Make You a Jerk

    Years ago, when The Dog Whisperer was having his era of fame, I saw an episode in which he was introducing a poorly socialized dog into his rehabilitative pack. It was a tense moment, where both pack and outsider made threatening gestures at each other, and as I remember it there was an implication that the pack might attack and destroy the outsider if it couldn’t relax and submit to connection. The pack was a unit of dogs with social cohesion, affection, and safety, and they weren’t going to let this stranger come in and screw it all up.

    Since learning about the consequences of chronic loneliness, I’ve found myself frequently thinking about that moment. People who have been lonely too long tend to be more on alert to signs that they’re going to be rejected, and they’re more likely to protect themselves in ways that end up being hostile or off-putting to others.

    Those lonely people are desperate to connect, and terrified of the emotional pain of being rejected. But none of that is apparent from the outside except to those who have been through it or who are unusually emotionally sensitive and aware. From the outside, it looks like a person abruptly turning into an asshole without any clear reason. Or the lonely person abruptly canceling plans and severing relationships, or sending out aggressively self-deprecating comments that no one can argue away.

    A pack of wolves playing in the snow.
    A pack of wolves playing in the snow.

    I think about that outcast dog with its likely history of trauma and ostracism, so keyed-up and tense that it can’t relax and connect with the pack even if it that’s all it wants. It feels unfair that the pack would reject it for its struggles with rejection. But that comes from my own over-identification with the outcast dog. From the perspective of the pack, which had clearly absorbed and rehabilitated many dogs over the years, it could only tolerate so much resistance. Being too fixated in the anti-social consequences of chronic loneliness could threaten the coherence of the group.

    When I was at my loneliest, I was also at my most toxic—self-righteous, condescending, withdrawing into stony silence when hurt, being self-consciously weird, making very cruel statements about myself as though that’s what others thought of me. Now I can see how much I was caught in my own suffering and setting up an obstacle course for anyone who was trying to connect with me, to keep myself safe, but that safety only perpetuated the loneliness.

    I identified more with the lonely, misunderstood, bullied outcast, but as I found belonging I also participated in cruelly teasing other young folks at school who were more outcast than I. I regret that behavior now, and have since felt sensitive to the dangers and cruelty of those who belong against those who are experienced as different.

    What disquiets me lately is considering the merits of protecting the boundaries of your group against people who cannot tolerate connection and participate meaningfully. The “lone wolf” shooters whose apparent loneliness and lack of purpose makes them vulnerable to turn their anger and hurt into murder. The person who always speaks up about how terrible the group is, and tears relationships apart with triangulation, but never accepts compromise and never comes to the meetings where you can actually address their problems.

    Having spent years trying to build inclusive, equitable, just community, I believe that this will always be an aspirational project. There will always be more work to do, but also there is a way in which it is impossible to be a group that includes and accommodates every single person. Every group forms a culture, and part of being in that group means absorbing and being absorbed by its culture.

    For example, some groups make plans and begin promptly at the time stated (at least, I imagine this must be true. Could you tell me where they are?) while others start their meetings when everyone shows up, even if that takes an hour. Neither of these are wrong in an objective way but both create their own inconveniences that you have to learn to live with if you want to be a part of things. Being an on-time person in a late group may mean learning how to be flexible, to accept this is how things will go, and to start planning for the lateness. Being a late person in an on-time group may mean learning how to organize yourself to get there on time, or to accept that you’re going to miss things. But it means learning to accept this is how the group works, it’s not personal to you, and you’ve either got to adapt or work really hard to change the group culture.

    There is absolutely an unfairness when people who are struggling emotionally, socially, or mentally have difficulty connecting in a community that does not understand them. But it’s also unfair to expect everyone in your world to be prepared to be a therapist at a moment’s notice, to intuit the conflict happening inside and intervene in a way that means the lonely person feels totally safe and never has to take a risk. That does happen, once in a great while, and it’s absolutely beautiful. But the beauty is defined by its rareness.

    We have to learn how to connect, and connection is a living, ongoing process of taking risks. We have to honor that risk-taking is hard and dangerous and we need to have a plan and resources for taking care of ourselves when the risks go poorly. But we also have to honor that nothing happens without our risk-taking. We can’t expect everyone we meet to know the right language to use that makes us feel safe, or that people will meet our needs without our having to ask for it, or that people will know or respect our limits without us standing up for them.

  • We Must Remember to Advance

    Reflections upon the eclipsed moon in Scorpio under the rays of Algol.

    The other night, I dreamt I was in a game, and every time I was on the verge of progressing to a new level, I needed to remember everything that happened before. This happened multiple times, and in the dream I felt a sense of “Of course this is how it must be.” The review of what has been must occur moving to what is next.

    After waking, it made me think about reports of near-death experiences and the now-pervasive trope of seeing one’s entire life in the moments before death. Then, surprisingly, it made me think of the role of witnessing in Internal Family Systems therapy.

    In IFS our “parts” may be so developed and discrete that they have their own story, their own memories, their own experience of our life. One part of us, concerned with protecting ourselves against financial setbacks, carries formative moments of scarcity or fear, all the threats that could have or did take us down. Another part of us, carrying an essential terror of being abandoned, carries every moment that we were hurt or terrified and reached out for support but no one reached back.

    Every time we felt alone in suffering, or learned to survive hardship, waits for us to be capable of returning to witness that pain. Our suffering deeply longs to be felt and understood fully; that’s why it seizes upon us in our weak moments when we don’t have the strength to push it away. Or it lashes out at loved ones, hoping they have the strength and capacity to hold it for us. But when we are too vulnerable to give it the caring attention it seeks, we only feel mired more deeply in it, and caught in the battle of those parts of us desperately trying to keep it hidden.

    Our parts carry us in ways we forget to notice. Image of a hand sculpture holding up a tree trunk. Photo by Neil Thomas.

    There’s no shame in any of this and no urgency—to witness suffering before we’re ready is not useful. Nor can we expect others to recognize this suffering for what it is when it arises, for it often reaches out in the guise of an accusation, an attack, an explosive reaction that seems far bigger than merited by the situation.

    Sitting with the dream, and this work, I imagine there is a psychic law: a thing must be fully witnessed for it to become ready to surrender to transformation.

    What is therapeutic is when we can separate out these wounded parts from a place of calm, supportive, wise listening, and then attend to them as they show us all the memories and feelings they’ve been carrying alone. When we can stay with it, the Self’s calm caring and understanding helps that part of us to finally feel understood, to feel deeply felt. Once it has been felt all the way through, it will let us know it’s ready to release that pain and move to the next level.