Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Tag: relationships

  • For Nice Guys Seeking Love and Lust

    For Nice Guys Seeking Love and Lust

    While scrolling through Facebook I came across what appears to be a Reddit post retweeted by AskAubry about a male university student who felt spurned by the female lab partner he’d wanted to befriend and love. The post has since been deleted, and its author has likely received enough Internet fame, so I won’t share the text here. But reading it did make me think about Nice Guys and incels.

    My understanding is that an “incel” is a person who identifies as “involuntarily celibate,” who wants love and sex but is unable to find a willing partner. Straight men who come to identify as incels and participate in incel-spaces seem to support each other in their bitterness and resentment of women as a while, expressing a sense of being unfairly denied the love and intimacy they deserve.

    Nice Guys are not necessarily incels, though many of them seem to end up there. They’ve been around for decades. Nice Guys think of themselves as, well, nice. Good men who love and care about women, who want to nurture and protect them, and want to love and be loved. But Nice Guys tend to approach their desire for partnership indirectly, through first befriending women and becoming emotionally close with them, all the while hoping these women will come to see them as valuable romantic partners.

    (There are Nice Guys who are queer, and likely many who aren’t guys at all, but the dynamic tends to be parallel. If you feel like a Nice Guy who isn’t a straight man, you could see what in this post still works for you, or check out my other writings on queer relationships and loneliness.)

    If you’re a Nice Guy, you may think of yourself as different and better than “horny” guys who openly pursue sex and romance, but you they feel aggrieved is that the woman you desire ends up with the horny guy and has no interest in you as anything but a friend. Nice Guys and incels used to call this getting “friendzoned”—maybe they still do, I assume that must be a dated reference by now—officially taken out of the “zone” of potential romance and never considered again.

    As a Nice Guy, you might be idealistic, hoping for that romantic movement of gradually being rewarded for your loyalty and devotion and being the one to rescue or heal your beloved from her disappointments and tormentors. Though this path can lead to dark places, there is a genuine sweetness here. The problem is, this approach tends to fail, and your idealism curdles into bitterness and cynicism.

    My genuine hope is that all of us who want it gets to experience authentic love and joyful, consensual sex. It’s a real sorrow that what Nice Guys do to pursue those desires ends up getting in their way. You might have come to your idealism honestly, listening to the women in your life complain about being hurt and used by men, and thought you were doing something different. You might feel ashamed of your own desires for sex and love because you worry they’re the same as those horny men you learned to dislike. That makes it even more confusing and frustrating when the women you like keep going back to the men who hurt them and not seeing you.

    The reason the Nice Guy strategy fails tends to come down to underlying shame about yourself, your passivity, and your inability to tolerate another person’s boundaries. The loneliness you’re trying to cure through romantic connection becomes your greatest hindrance. Loneliness is true suffering, it is incredibly painful, and makes us more sensitive to rejection from the people with whom we want to connect.

    The Nice Guy strategy tries to avoid experiencing rejection by not being up front about what you want—love, or sex—and instead settle for friendship with the thought that you’re playing the long game and will eventually be seen by your beloved without having to take any risk. But when the game becomes too painful, or you finally make it clear what you want, you’ve created the conditions for a really painful rejection that would have been much gentler if it had happened before you got so invested.

    Men who have not experienced the kind of emotionally intimate friendships that women enjoy tend to get confused when they first encounter it. It feels so special and rare in comparison to the kinds of connecting that younger men do, that it’s easy to sexualize it or confuse it for romantic intimacy. So Nice Guys may feel betrayed when you finally accept that this person only wants friendship from you. The woman you befriended, who didn’t realize there was this other agenda all along, also feels betrayed. It’s not good!

    Men need emotional intimacy, companionship, friendships, and nonsexual touch as much as we need sex and romantic love. When you feel ashamed about any of these desires, you may pursue them with desperation, with resentment, or in these indirect ways that are tantamount to digging a love pit and hoping someone falls in.

    None of which is sexy. What is sexy is confidence. Confidence suggests a person who has strength and resilience, who can respect another person’s needs and boundaries, a person who won’t be easily broken or overwhelmed, a person who has direction. Confidence is willing to put his agenda forward and experience rejections and setbacks because those clear the board for a good partnership. When you’re lonely, confidence may feel impossible to achieve.

    For all my lonely clients, I strongly encourage taking a break from searching for love and romantic partnership for a while and instead investing in cultivating friendship and community. We tend to burden romantic love with too many of our needs for acceptance, validation, belonging, connection, and meaning, which is especially heavy for the early stages of meeting and dating.

    Having a community of friends, having a strong and supportive family relationship, all of these can meet many of your needs and teach you important lessons about the give and take of relationships without being so explosive. It can blunt the sharp edges of loneliness and help you find confidence and cultivate your interests. Some of those men that you think yourself better than may end up being great teachers and mentors.

    End those relationships with women where you’re secretly pining for them—either take a break or come clean. It’s not good for you. Eventually you’ll find love, but you won’t see good partnership if you’re staring at these unfulfilling friends.

    Take six months and focus on friendship and working on your anxieties and shame. Get a journal or a therapist. If you can exercise, do that. Get into your body. Practice flirting in a mirror. It’s probably weirder when you’re flirting with yourself, but watching yourself is a great way to reduce shame and get more comfortable expressing your sexual and romantic desires.

    After several months, try taking risks with women you find attractive. Don’t immediately rush to asking them out or propositioning them, and don’t send them dick pics when they haven’t asked for them. Try a month of just smiling and saying hello, and if that goes well, asking a few questions about their lives. Make that the goal—once this week, I’ll smile and talk to a woman I find attractive. The goal isn’t to get their phone number or find your soulmate, just to start building your tolerance for taking risks.

    Whether they flirt with you or reject you, it’s all part of your strength-building practice. You can practice being with the excitement of success, and you can practice tolerating the pain of rejection without lashing out and blaming her or yourself.

    As you get successes, you can try taking bigger risks. What’s most important is that you are able to hear and work to take care of your own needs. Confidence comes when we can see ourselves being resilient, able to keep going and looking for a person who can really connect with us rather than settling for unfulfilling relationships or loneliness. When your needs know that you care about them and take them seriously, they become easier to bear and to care for. It starts to become clearer when you can take a risk and when you need to protect yourself. And then you really get better at being able to do that for friends and romantic or sexual partners in your life, and accepting only those who will offer that in return.

    If you’re a straight man who has read this far, here are a few additional thoughts:

    • Be wary when you’ve created a fantasy relationship about a woman you barely know. Keep in mind you’ve invented an idealized partner and do not know the actual person. It’s not horrible to do this, but it’s a big problem to forget to get to know the real person.
    • Avoid approaching potential friends and partners with a showing-off, dominant attitude. That is what men do with each other when we feel insecure, anxious about being attacked, and want to establish a place in the social hierarchy. It’s a defense against rejection that it gets in the way of real belonging and intimacy. Pay attention to when you do this, and try being curious about the other person instead.
    • Observe how you behave toward women and ask yourself, “If I were talking to a man I respected, would I behave the same way?” Really sit with that question. It can lead you to unexpected places.

    The paradox of being a grown up is that I need other people to help me meet my needs, but no one else is obligated to do so. I must be responsible for my needs, which means I keep going until I find a relationship where we can meet each other’s needs with pleasure and enthusiasm.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Consent When You Don’t Know What You Need

    Starting to practice consent can feel awkward and clunky, especially in the emotional intensity of the moment. People whose response to a sad story is to want to wrap you up in a giant bear hug may feel it’s awkward and cold to stop and first ask, “Do you want a hug?”

    For them, getting wrapped up in a hug while having big feelings may be exactly the medicine they crave. For others, though—me, for example—when I feel upset and vulnerable, a giant hug feels smothering to me. My parts don’t hear “I love and care about your suffering,” what they hear is “Your sadness is too much for me and I need it to go away.”

    This is made worse should I dare to say I don’t want the hug and the hugger feels rejected, upset, and hurt. Then the message I get is that my feelings and needs aren’t important and I need to put all that aside to make them feel better. Thanks for the support!

    I get that for the other person it may be a genuine expression of love and caring, and to have that refused feels like a personal rejection. I also get that asking for consent feels cold and unromantic.

    Our romantic ideal of love is a relationship in which we intuitively perceive and meet each other’s needs without having to talk about it. Not only is this unrealistic when we each have vastly unique terrains of what it means to love and be loved, it makes minor and inevitable miscues explode into huge questions about the relationship. Our immediate response isn’t: “Oh, this person doesn’t know I need a hug because they come from an emotionally distant family, so I’ll ask for what I need.” What we think is something like: “How could this person be so cruel as to deny me a hug when it’s so obvious I need one?”

    It is possible to achieve that level of trust, understanding, and intuitive connection, but the important word here is achieve. We earn that through the efforts of lots and lots and lots of communication, asking for clarification, and growing in understanding of ourselves and our loved ones. Practicing consent gives us a structure and motivation to do this work, to be mindful to check in and make sure what we’re offering is what the other person wants. 

    Yet there are times when the person we want to love or care for is unable to be clear about what they need from us. When we reach out to loved ones and say, “Let me know what you need,” that expression of caring might not be enough to get an authentic answer. The person we want to support may not know what they need; may not know how to ask for what they need; or may feel shame and terror at the vulnerability of asking. These three states are obstacles for establishing consent. For the rest of this post, I’m going to discuss each obstacle and offer suggestions for ways we can work through that not-knowing and learn together what is needed.

    I Don’t Know What I Need 

    Giving and receiving help is one of the ways we thrive as social beings.

    There are hundreds of valid reasons why a person may not know exactly what they want or need. Many of us may have been raised to be self-sufficient and simply have no practice for asking for and receiving help. Many of us have not experienced families or communities that showed us what’s possible for mutual caring in times of crisis. Some of us may not understand our bodies or hearts well enough to know what “a need” is.

    For you as the person wanting to help, you don’t need to know the backstory or the deep psychological root. What matters is simply that what they’re needing is help knowing what they need.

    I notice this not-knowing often happens in moments of unexpected crisis or loss. When we have a crisis for the first time, we lack any kind of history to rely upon to help us think about what we need, and our brains are using a lot of resources to manage the emotional and logistical shock and overwhelm. There is both so much need and so little structure to identify the need, and we may simply go into whatever survival strategies are most familiar to us. Even when people we love and trust offer us help in this state, we may feel grateful but unable to identify anything they could do to help.

    If you, the person wanting to help, can’t get traction with “What do you need?”, try asking a version of “How are you doing with all this? What’s been hard for you?” Try letting your loved one talk, let them know what you’re hearing, and give them time to open up and vent about the difficulties and hardships. After a while, you may be able to see places where you can suggest ways you could help: “Oh, your license expired? I’d be happy to drive you to the DMV next week so you can get it renewed, if you want.”

    People who’ve experienced a similar kind of crisis tend to be really good at this because they’ve lived through it and have the benefits of hindsight to know what would’ve been nice for them. So they can be more assertive in offering a range of options of ways they could help, and let the person they want to support decide what they want: “I could bring a lasagne to your house, I could walk or your dog, I could help you clean the house, I could help you do paperwork.”

    If the person is still unwilling or unable to accept the help, it’s okay to let them have a break and decide later if the want to come to you. If the person needs more help than you can give them, you might offer instead to help find more help. “I definitely want to make a lasagne for you tonight, and maybe after I could make one of those YouCaring sites to ask other people to help with the dog walking and house cleaning.” 

    I Don’t Know How to Ask for It

    There are times when the person needing help does know exactly what they need but the act of asking is overwhelming. We may have heard messages throughout our lives that if you need help, you don’t deserve it; or that if you receive help from another person, they can hold it over your head to shame or manipulate you into doing whatever they want, indefinitely. You may have experienced a person helping you with resentment, or bringing up the help later to shut you down in a different conversation.

    In these ways, asking for help feels quite dangerous. You may feel like asking for help means risking not having support when you “really need it,” so you have to be sure this crisis is worth it. With this mindset, we tend to make our problems smaller and miss opportunities for getting help.

    Giving and receiving help is one of the ways we thrive as social beings. Being grateful to each other for the help we’ve received is a balm against resentment.

    At the same time, if you as a person begin to resent others for how much they ask of you, it is your work to say no and set boundaries. Resentment is inevitable when you feel you must help out of obligation and have no option to say no or prioritize your own health.

    Giving care to those who have cared for you is a part of healthy connection, but you don’t have to help hide the bodies at three in the morning when you have a job interview at nine.

    If they really need your help, they can wait till your interview is done.

    Shame and Terror of Vulnerability

    Asking for what we really need is vulnerable and we risk being judged or ridiculed. We have so many reasons to be concerned about vulnerability, and often we’ve experienced moments of invalidation, ridicule, abandonment, or neglect in critical moments that give us reasons to avoid being that vulnerable again.

    These intense feelings tend to reflect the world of the young person who lacks the power to take care of their own needs. Our parts that fear ridicule, abandonment, or neglect may still feel like small, dependent children who are unable to get their needs met.

    Their responses make complete sense in this way, but also these parts may not recognize that we have grown and become older, wiser, more powerful, and more competent. This part may fear abandonment from a lover but be unable to recognize that you’re surrounded by family and friends who will be there for you even if this relationship ends.

    I encourage my clients in distress to make a list of three to five people to whom they can reach out for help when in need. Three to five is intentional. If you only have oner person, there’s a danger of overwhelming your support or having no one if they’re sick, unavailable, or otherwise unavailable.

    With three to five people, though, there’s more room for consent and generosity without resentment. You don’t have to invest all your urgency into one person, and your support people can feel at ease knowing if they’re not available you’ve got more options for care.

    First, of course, you have to admit it’s okay to have needs and that asking for help is worth the experience of shame and vulnerability. Asking for what we need may always feel like a risk, but we can practice getting more comfortable with taking the risk.

    If you’re used to ignoring your needs or putting off hard conversations, you’ve probably experienced at least one moment of overwhelming emotion when it all comes out with explosive force. This feeling may be rage, or it may be despair, and its urgency and force breaks through all our barriers to vulnerability.

    Unfortunately, that same force blasts the person we’re turning to for help. It can make a giant mess, which then reinforces the story that we can’t ask for help, which then leads to another build up of intensity that comes out in a blast.

    If you like, think of this like a geyser or a firehose where all the accumulated tension suddenly erupts with power. A more earthy and relatable metaphor would be the explosive urgency of waiting too long to get to the bathroom when your body has an urgent need to expel whatever’s in it.

    The temptation, when states of rage or despair are over, is to feel some relief and hope it never comes back. But these aren’t embarrassing or silly blips in consciousness to leave behind, these are expressions of deep needs gone unaddressed that require attention and care.

    We need to learn to identify the subtler signs of the tension building within us before it finally explodes in rage or despair. Asking for what we need before the explosion feels much scarier, because we’re more present with the experience, but that presence also helps us in speaking up clearly and hanging out with the difficulties of the conversation.

    What we need to practice is identifying the subtler signs of need that pop up before we get to the point of rage or despair. If we can start the conversation before we get there, then we tend to be better able to advocate for ourselves and handle the difficulties of the conversation.  

    If you’re still beginning to figure out your needs or who you can trust to support you, a reliable practice to help is to journal what’s going on with you. A paper or electronic journal is good, or using a voice recorder to dictate a memo. Anything to get what’s in your head outside of yourself so that you can come back to it later in a calmer state of mind and begin to explore what got you to that point.

    Having begun this reflective work can be really grounding in thinking about could have helped with the upset—was I underslept? Did I have enough to eat? Was volunteering to help a friend move their house on my first day off in two weeks maybe more than my body could handle?

    Along with the physical needs are also the emotional and relationship needs that we may need to address. Having a list helps in having those direct conversations. And we can return to our practice of consent by reaching out to the friend and asking, “Hey, I want to talk to you about some things that I feel vulnerable about in our relationship. When would be a good time?”

    Taking the Risk

    With all that we’ve explored about consent and support, we may find there are times when it’s fine to go ahead and do something for a person without asking. Yes, that contradicts everything I’ve written. As often as I’ve experienced intrusive and unwanted care, I’ve also experienced numerous moments when the person did accurately intuit what I might need and gave it to me without my asking.

    When this going ahead and doing it really worked for me, the giver seemed to be aware and accepting of the risk they were taking.

    They’re not doing something for me so that they can feel better about themselves, or less guilty, or whatever feelings they’re having about myself. The support was given without needing me to have a warm response for their own well-being. They did it because it felt right, and they didn’t punish me if I didn’t immediately like or accept what they offered. They didn’t bring it up later to guilt me. They didn’t get defensive. They did it, and let me decide what I wanted to do with it.

    Being grateful to each other for the help we’ve received is a balm against resentment.

    If I’m going to risk this, usually my first sign is noticing when the person I want to support keeps bringing up the same idea over and over, even when they’re seeming dismissive of it. “She offered me a hug, which felt so weird. Like, what’s a hug going to do? I can’t imagine a hug will make me feel better. A hug doesn’t bring my dad back from the dead. What’s the point of hugging?” There may well be a part of them that desperately wants a hug, and another part that feels mistrustful of the notion or afraid you’ll judge them if they admit they want it. In this case, it may put them at ease to hear your offer to hug them like it’s no big deal.

    When I strongly suspect the person really wants help they keep rejecting, I’ll make it about me. “I get that you’re totally fine and don’t need anyone’s help. But tonight I’m going to make a shit ton of lasagne and I can’t eat it all, and I’ll feel guilty if I throw it away, so I’m going to leave a bunch at your house. You can do whatever you want with it, but it’d do me a big favor if you helped me get rid of it.”

    In Closing

    There’s not one right or best way to have feelings and want support, and practicing consent helps make sure that we’re giving the person we love the support they need. We achieve consent when everyone involved in an activity agrees to what is happening. At its best consent is explicit, voluntary, conscious, and mutual; especially when paired with respecting each other’s autonomy and self-authority in knowing what’s best for ourselves.

    While it may feel awkward and unromantic, slowing down and getting consent offers the opportunity for greater closeness, understanding, and connection. Even when we struggle to know what we want or need, we can help each other in the learning.

  • Post Break-Up Growth

    Heartbreak, loss, protracted and unwanted single-ness, and break-ups bring up the painful side of connection, when we are torn from intimacy and thrown back into autonomy. 

    We form attachments to people, we let them know us and become part of our lives, we form oxytocin bonds, and then we suffer the sundering of those attachments. Sometimes these break-ups are slow, and one person has had more time to prepare for it while the other feels blindsided. Sometimes they happen rapidly and take everyone by surprise, even if in retrospect it becomes obvious this was where things are heading. Sometimes they are circumstantial, sometimes behavioral. They suck.

    We all deal with break-ups differently, and we may deal with different break-ups differently. Some losses feel easy while others may be gutting.  Even for those of us who practice multiple relationships, break-ups may be surprising in their force and repercussions.

    While walking of labyrinth of maturation, we go through periods of looking outward for what we desire, and periods of turning inward to find what we desire, and each turn is a part of the same journey toward discovering and becoming our wholeness. It is true that people need people, and it is true that we can be self-possessed and learn to care for our needs. Discussing this, however, we tend to flatten out connection and autonomy and appear to bias one over the other, when truly it’s more a matter of applying the corrective influence when we become too unbalanced in one direction.

    The one constant companion in our lives is our Self, and the more we can love and care for our selves, the more resilience and generosity we can offer our loved ones. And the more support, love, and caring we can receive from our networks, the more able we are to love and care for self. Break-ups are an opportunity to turn back toward self and deepen our healing, self-love, and self-knowledge.

    Here are some ways we can practice loving ourselves and recentering in Self in ways that will support us as we heal and consider when we’ll be ready to try practicing this kind of love again:

    Lean on your supports, and spend quality time alone

    When any attachment is broken, we experience unique kinds of grief. Surprising thoughts and feelings may arise, or ones that are all too familiar. 

    When we’re less experienced in loving and losing, we may believe those thoughts too readily, thoughts like “Love is a lie,” or “I will always be alone.” As with any multiple choice test, any thought that involves the word “always” or “never” is probably false. But it is hard to uncouple those thoughts and the intensity of pain that we must feel to work through, and we may want the supportive witnessing of other loved ones.

    A break-up is a particular opportunity to look at the ways we’ve depended on this person to meet our social and emotional needs. So many needs for experiences like touch, emotional connection, validation, and togetherness become sexualized because we are led to believe that only sexual and romantic partners can fulfill those. 

    This is particularly true for men in this culture, who are subjected to such scrutiny when they have needs for physical or emotional connection, even when they try to meet their own sexual needs. In other cultures and points of history, men were able to be physically and emotionally affectionate with each other, holding hands while walking in public and writing impassioned letters to each other. 

    Photo by Priscilla du Preez courtesy of Unslpash

    But since at least I was a child none of that is acceptable without others insinuating there being a sexual or romantic component. This complicates the ways gay and straight men understand their own needs for belonging and connection. A desire for sex may simply be a feeling of loneliness and desire for any kind of connection. A genuine emotional connection could be mistaken for a potential romantic or sexual experience. 

    None of these forms of relationship, in practice, have obvious lines drawn between them. Ideally, the relationship would unfold between the individuals according to their wants, needs, and boundaries, and take the shape that supports them both. The problem is simply the inability to reflect upon what needs each kind of connection serves—what does sex mean to me? What kind of emotional support is meaningful? Whose validation “counts”? As we become clearer on our answers to these questions, it becomes easier to talk about these with others, and then to figure out what kind of relationship we’re having together. 

    When we’re not clear or not willing to discuss, then our relationships tend to be riddled with covert tests and games and deeply complex internal dramas that affect the unfolding of the relationship. 

    All this to say, when a breakup occurs, you might consider reaching out to your support network for the kinds of comfort and connection you got from your ex. Even better, reach out to as many people as you can, and think of new people with whom you might want to deepen a relationship.

    Reaching out for emotional support when one is already in pain is very scary, so take some time to identify what those fears are and how you can help that scared part of you plan for risks. You might be afraid of being disappointed, that a person won’t be available to you when you need them. You can make a plan for how to care for yourself when disappointed, but you also might consider that this is an argument to reach out to even more people. 

    Adults have a variety of valid reasons why they cannot be emotionally available to each other the moment a person needs the connection—so if you can reach out to five people and connect with the one who can be available, or if you can reach out and schedule time when your person is able to emotionally available, that is going to help decrease the likelihood of disappointment.

    Along with that, plan time to be with yourself in an emotionally present way. You might decide to spend an evening alone to journal, or a weekend day going on a walk. Think about the things you enjoyed doing that perhaps fell by the wayside with your partner in your life, and see if you can pick those back up. Think about things you’ve always been curious about, and see if you can make time to do it.

    Sometimes people struggle to love and spend time with themselves because of the dreaded fear that this means they are a “loser” or some other variation of being a social failure. Certainly this time is going to require you be present with your pain and these stories, but you might be surprised at how gentle it ends up being.

    Consider instead that you are spending time with the one person who is truly going to be here with you for you your entire life. You might not like that person right now. You might not even know them that well. You might be afraid of them, and have good reason to think they won’t be there for you. At the same time, you can begin building trust in yourself, getting to know yourself, discovering what you appreciate about yourself.

    One possibility is that you may well grow in confidence, self-love, and self-acceptance, which will make your life a lot easier. Another possibility is that you begin to engage in a life you truly enjoy, and increase the likelihood of meeting other people who also enjoy the same things. Then you will find friends and partners who match the life you want, rather than worrying about matching your life to the friends and partners you want.

    Photo by Neil Thomas, courtesy of Unsplash.com

    Cultivate what your ex provided for you

    One implication of Jung’s psychological conception of the Self and its complexes is that we are all capable of wholeness, or are already whole but identified with only small parts of ourselves and blind to the rest. 

    In my adult life, I’ve worked with this suggestion as a practice for finding what in me is unbalanced or missing and working to develop it—or, in many cases, helping my other parts get out of the way for that innate capacity to emerge. “Individuation,” Jung’s name for his process of psychological maturation, actually means “becoming whole” and not “becoming unique and separate” as one tends to assume today, although the process includes both experiences. For it seems that becoming whole doesn’t mean that we all end up the same, exactly, but that we discover the mixture of wholeness that we are. 

    Those whom we desire and whom we hate are mirrors of the wholeness that we are but are as yet unable to own. It’s the enormity of feeling that tends to be a clue. The person who gets under my skin within minutes of seeing them, or the person that I start feeling awkward and insecure around, or the person that I fall madly in love with—I may start by seeing something in them that I despise, admire, or love, but these qualities are also within me.

    We seek to become whole through seeing in others what we want to own for ourselves, or are reluctant to own. In the cases of intense anger and hatred, spending time looking at the ways I practice the same quality or participate in the undesired patterns is how I become whole. When I find someone particularly condescending, a know-it-all, robotic, aloof—I’m skewered. It’s not that I need to like them, but if I can start having more kindness for the ways I’m a know-it-all, I’ll be less irritated by fellow know-it-alls and even better able to stop myself when I fall into the habit. 

    When we have loving acceptance for our parts, our parts begin to trust us more, and so we develop a practice of deep relationship that looks on the outside like control. When we strive to control ourselves, our parts cannot trust us to listen or consider their needs, and so we develop a practice inner conflict that looks on the outside like self-sabotage.

    When it comes to breaking up with our beloveds—or, for that matter, crushes on people we’re too activated to do anything about—it’s worth taking time to explore what it was we desired in them. Why did this person of all the billions of people in the world get me so wound up? What did they give me that I’ve been wanting so badly? 

    This might all be really heady, and your answers might be “sex,” “we went to the gym,” or “I liked their parents.” That’s a fine place to start. Keep going deeper – what did I like about doing this together? What was different about being with them versus another person? What qualities did that experience have? How did it feel?

    This is another process that could be done multiple times and take time to unfold, and will be different as we grow into different relationships. For me, I’ve often found it difficult to relax and have a good time, and I’ve tended to cling to people who seemed especially fun and spontaneous and prioritized enjoyment. I value my steadiness and discipline, so I’ve never been able to fully embrace their ways of being. But after one break-up, I reflected on the ways I loved my partner for taking me to concerts and theater shows, and started making more efforts to track bands I wanted to see live and buy tickets.

    We can and ideally will do this practice in long-term committed relationships as well, for that is one of the ways that we mature together. When we’re still with our partners, it’s easier for us to continue leaning on them to provide the quality we want for balance—but that starts to get wearying and problematic, especially when they’re leaning back. 

    If one partner always feels like they have to be the steady, unemotional “rock,” and another partner feels like they have to bring the passion, intimacy, and enthusiasm, both may begin to feel stuck and resentful in their roles. The passionate ones usually would love to see more enthusiasm from their rocks, and the rocks often would love to trust that they don’t have to be the one to hold it together all the time. 

    What’s scary is that our relationships tend to become less stable when one, or ideally all partners begin to integrate the unowned qualities. Reliable scripts no longer work. Old agreements are up for renegotiation. As our identities are invested in being a certain way, and we learn that we could be many ways, it’s normal to spend time wondering who we really are, and if we chose our partners based on stories that no longer apply.

    When we can do this work in partnership, it feels slower and messier, but each partner becomes freer to grow in a new way, and potentially together they can mature into stronger partnership and new adventures. When we do this after a break-up, we have more ground and freedom to direct our growth and consider the kinds of partners we want in the future. If there’s a pattern that keeps playing out, doing this work could help you break out of that pattern into something new—or help you to realize when you are starting the pattern again with someone new.

    Often I think of this image of partners leaning on each other. If everyone is leaning on each other, there is a collapse when one partner needs to step away. If everyone is pulling away from each other but trying to stay connected by holding hands, again a collapse occurs when one wants to step away or even move closer. But if each partner can support themselves and then reach out to hold hands, there are more options for movement while staying connected.

    Most of us cannot imagine giving ourselves the kind of loving, kind acceptance that we hope our partners will give, and it does take practice and support to develop. We all experience feelings of loneliness and relationship ruptures that require self-reflection, whether we have one partner we spend all our time with, or multiple partners with whom we can connect. We learn the practice of loving ourselves through experiencing being loved, but cultivating this ability to love ourselves as deeply and skillfully as the love we desire is worth at least one hundred partners.

    Create a version of the story in which you are okay

    In a process of grief and especially when there is heartbreak and sorrow, we tend to create a story about what happen. Frequently several stories, contradicting and painful, in which we seek to identify what went wrong. This is a highly productive practice in that it helps us to create structure around our pain and distill the lessons that will help us live into a better future, but we can also get stuck in stories of blame and pain that do not have much room for growth.

    Sad pug is sad, photo by Matthew Henry courtesy of Unsplash

    When our young ones are hurt, they want to find blame. If we think of this as a normal developmental thing, it makes sense. Children need some sense of order and causality for safety, and in the process of learning to navigate the world start coming up with stories and rules to make sense of things. This tends to involve blame, making things someone’s fault. 

    Blame itself goes both directions. Either it’s your fault or my fault. That’s the other hallmark of young thinking, that simple dualism. As adults, we may be able to understand that life is more complicated. We might watch two of our beloved friends’ relationship collapse and understand that both have valid reasons to be mad at the other but feel like it’s impossible to take “a side.” That blame and side-taking is a young need, and in its way it’s valid—my young parts need to know that people will have my back if I need them. 

    My adult self, however, knows that when my relationship with a loved one falls apart, I still have to figure out how to coexist in the same world as them. Our friends and interests may continue to overlap, or simply living in the same town means we’ll run into each other again. For people in very small communities or subcultures, asking people to take sides could be very destructive or backfire horribly. 

    In the process of healing from a breakup, we may need to begin with a blaming story. If you’re like a lot of people I know, you’re likely to go through a lot of blaming stories, sometimes cycling through several in ten minutes. It’s all his fault, if only he’d done this instead of that. But then he only did that because I was so mean to him, so it’s my fault. But then that was actually a lie, I found it, because he did that before I was mean to him so it’s his fault. 

    This process is really painful and confusing and helps us to really look at what we may call our “parts.” Rather than trying to come up with the “real story” right away, you might consider taking time to journal all these different stories and letting those different parts have their perspectives heard.

    “A part of me feels angry and lied to.”

    “A part of me is desperate for her to take me back and wants to call and beg her right now.”

    “A part of me is relieved that I never have to see them again.”

    Allowing and acknowledging this multiplicity may feel scary and overwhelming at times, but it’s a lot more normal than we think, and giving ourselves permission to have contradictory reactions is deeply soothing. It helps us stop feeling a sense of urgency that we have to figure out “the truth” or “the right answer” and take action. It is, in fact, learning not to take sides within my own internal battles, but to listen to each part of me and understand and validate the feeling, while allowing all these other parts to have validity as well.

    Over time, as we tell these stories, we may begin to arrive at a kind of narrative that is more nuanced and less reactive. It gives us space to have our valid feelings about what happened, but it also creates possibilities for growth and different actions in the future. Blaming feels powerful but may put us in a state of powerlessness—if it’s all something you did then I don’t have any influence. And if it’s all my fault then I don’t have any grace or space to have boundaries. But when I can be honest about how we all participated, I don’t have to own everything that happened, but I can take ownership of my piece of it.

    This story might begin to look like, “I noticed early on that she wasn’t always honest and up front about her feelings, but I thought if I could be kind and patient then she’d start to open up and trust me more. But I wasn’t honest with her about how much I didn’t feel I could trust her, so I started asking these annoying and intrusive questions and had less and less patience with her, so she became even more guarded.” 

    It’s worth checking out our stories with trusted friends or professional supporters who are able to listen in a way that’s nonjudgmental and on our side but also supports our accountability. There are ways we can take blame or responsibility for things that are simply unacceptable, especially when on the receiving end of hurtful and abusive behavior.

    Part of the work we are doing is learning to identify our habits of blame and get feedback on what responsibility we are taking or not taking which ideally would happen with the person in question but often does not. Hearing “you did nothing wrong, this is all on them” is useful and appropriate at times, and we can accept that and continue to dig for a place where we can grow.  

    What’s most important is that we tell a story in which we can be okay in the wake of the collapse. A story like “love isn’t real” or “people will always hurt me” is not a story of okayness, though it may be one we have to tell for a while. A story like, “I got hurt, but I’m okay now,” may be one that takes more work to believe, but we can keep working on it our whole lives.

    Be gentle with yourself

    After writing this, and before its scheduled post date, I had a conversation with a person grieving a break-up who wondered how long the process would take. Writing this post is, in its way, an effort to give us something to “do” while time does its natural process of helping us to heal. It may give the illusion that we can speed up the process, which is wrong but in a way it is right.

    What we can best do is get out of the way of our psyche’s natural tendency toward healing. If all we did was sit in quiet, loving witness, watching our inner conflicts and pain without turning away and without trying to do anything, we could watch ourselves naturally repair and grow. This is very difficult for most of us.

    Trying to “do” or “fix” may end up slowing our process down. When we rush into another relationship, or we try yet again to have a conversation with our exes to get closure but end up re-enacting the toxic communication patterns, we are in some ways getting in our own way. Trying too hard to rush the healing process. But totally checking out and numbing also gets in the way of healing.

    These practices suggested above are, in their ways, practices to help us get out of the way of our own healing. In this recent conversation, I thought of what happens when I pinch a nerve. Part of my body goes numb or loses functioning, which is quite distressing, and may last a lot longer than I want. The parts of me that get nervous I’ve ruined myself or will never get the functioning back may want to obsess about repairing the problem, but there is only so much that can be done.

    While doing whatever therapies are relevant, we still learn to live with the numbness and reduced functioning. One day, I may notice that I haven’t noticed the pinched nerve in a while. Something that caused so much grief sort of disappeared when I wasn’t paying attention. Healing from heartbreak is like that, too. It’s so present, inescapably so at times, and then one day we realize we don’t remember the last time we thought about it.

    Striving for a definitive resolution, unfortunately, does not work. Patience and continuing to live does.

  • Mistrust, Hope, and Meaningful Connection, Part 3

    In the past few weeks, I’ve written about the experience of mistrust and the work of identifying trustworthiness. Today I will talk about repairing broken trust and accessing the virtue of Hope. This is a topic much bigger than a simple blog post, however.

    Repairing Trust 

    As human beings, we will inevitably disappoint, fail, and hurt each other. We will have lapses in attention or ethics. We may cause harm without knowing we’ve done it until someone brings it to our attention. Rather than committing to the impossible goal of being or finding a perfect partner, we can explore the more workable and profound practice of repairing damaged trust in relationship.

    Put simply, the process of restoring trust involves: addressing the upset or harm; re-validating trustworthiness; and then making amends or releasing the upset.

    Address the upset or harm. Oops. Someone messed up, and now you feel hurt, angry, overwhelmed, abandoned, betrayed. Simply ignoring this doesn’t go very well. It may simmer in the background and erupt at the worst times. We may end up looking like the asshole because we’re expressing appropriate anger in an inappropriate context. Then we’re dealing with the other person’s justified anger with our own buried resentments.

    You don’t have to address every single problem at the moment you have it. Indeed, it is okay and sometimes really helpful to take some time away to reflect and then bring up the issue to discuss later, when you’re all in a state to have a constructive conversation. What helps with all this is learning to be with your feelings, validate them, and then discuss them in non-blaming ways. For first offenses, I work on bringing up the issue while giving the other person the benefit of the doubt. “You did this, and this was my experience.” Not blaming the person for “causing” the feeling or accusing them of doing it on purpose, simply giving information so they know how they affected me.

    A brown bear and her two cubs walk a rocky ridgeline. In the background is an expanse of forest and snow.
    photo by Adam Willoughby-Knox

    Re-validate trustworthiness. Now we observe how the person handles the confrontation. If they can take some measure of responsibility and apologize or make amends, that validates their trustworthiness. If they can explain where they’re coming from in a nondefensive way, that validates their trustworthiness.

    If they ignore your confrontation; attack you for bringing it up; apologize but repeat the behavior; or offer a confusing rationalization that doesn’t take any responsibility, that erodes their trustworthiness. These aren’t necessarily deal-breakers but they’re not good indicators for a strong partnership long term unless you can address and improve them.

    If they minimize your hurt, insult you, call you crazy, flagrantly repeat the behavior and taunt you while doing so, or reject your experience outright, those are RED FLAGS.

    Release the upset. Based on how trustworthy the person has proven themselves, we need to check in with ourselves. Is there lingering resentment or hurt. You might ask this part of you: is this all related to the current situation? Is any of this from the past? If it’s related to the current situation, what needs to happen for this part of me to feel okay with re-committing to the relationship?

    Is there mistrust? Ask this part of you what your next step needs to be. Perhaps the resolution is that you’re not okay with re-committing to the relationship, instead you need to distance yourself, change the terms of the relationship, or end it safely.

    Either way, resentment is not a desirable long-term feeling. It is an indicator of unresolved issues.

    Finding Hope

    I have been using “relationship” in the most generous interpretation, because issues of trust and mistrust come up in all of our relationships.

    Once we no longer depend on external caregivers to meet our needs, the most important relationship becomes the one with ourselves. We behave inconsistently, we doubt ourselves, we make promises we don’t keep, we engage in behaviors we know are harmful to other parts of ourselves.

    Becoming trustworthy stewards of ourselves is a journey, and it supports everything. The work is to cultivate more qualities of trustworthiness in how we relate to our parts. How can I be more consistent in response to my needs? How can I be respectful of my feelings? What promises can I honor?

    I believe this is the virtue of Hope: I trust myself to work through the upsets of living while creating the life I deeply desire. If it is your desire to cultivate this, I wish you strength.

  • Mistrust, Hope, and Meaningful Connection, Part 2

    Last week, I wrote about how we experience mistrust, its value, and the barriers it creates to meaningful connection. This week, I want to write about trust.

    An image of a woman crossing a wooden bridge. The bridge appears narrow, and ahead is a thick forest.
    photo by Michael Hull, via Unsplash

    Qualities of Trustworthiness

    As a Boy Scout, we frequently stated the Scout Law, a series of twelve qualities to which we aspired. The first point is to be Trustworthy.

    What makes someone trustworthy? Think about people you trust and why. Connect to the feeling of trust you have around them, but more importantly think about what it is about them that makes them trustworthy. What did they do or not do that helped you to feel trust?

    In brief, I think a trustworthy person behaves with consistency, genuineness, respect, and integrity.

    • Consistency – This person responds in a way that feels reliable. There might be some fluctuation in mood, and certainly the person will grow and change, but in general you feel confident that you know how they will respond to you. You don’t have to guess and worry about how they’ll act.
    • Genuineness – This person’s words, personality, and behavior all align. They may have multiple facets of Self that vary depending on the situation, but you sense a coherent core that is there in every situation. You know where you stand with them. When they smile, it reaches their eyes. When they are angry, they tell you what they’re angry about.
    • Respect – This person treats you with dignity and consideration. They do not put you down, coerce you to do things you don’t want to do, or take advantage of your vulnerabilities. When you set a boundary, they show willingness to abide by it. They listen to you. Even if they disagree, they do not minimize your thoughts and feelings.
    • Integrity – This person follows through on promises. They do not promise what they are unwilling to do. If they cannot keep promises, they acknowledge this and do what they can to rectify the situation. They don’t engage in confusing negotiating tactics or put the blame on you when they make mistakes. They take responsibility and apologize for problems. You feel that they behave the same whether in or out of your presence.

    These qualities are about character rather than personality. For example, a person who is cheerful and bubbly might be as trustworthy as a sardonic, dour person, or as untrustworthy.

    In the past I avoided sharp-tongued, confrontational people until I met some that were as direct with me about problems as they were about compliments. I found I could trust their praise since I knew they wouldn’t hide their concerns.

    In contrast, I used to love hanging out with gossipy, back-biting people until it occurred to me that we were talking about whomever wasn’t in the room at the time. This meant that I was behaving in an untrustworthy way, and I couldn’t trust my “friends” not to talk badly about me when I was out of the room. This has become a guiding principle for me: pay attention to how my acquaintances treat others, and think about how it would feel if I were treated in that way.

    Trustworthiness is not a fixed, innate quality. We develop these qualities through intentional choice and personal effort. If you picked one of the above qualities to develop and made a commitment to it, you could improve your trustworthiness. Others may not recognize your growth at first, but with continued effort they will begin to notice and treat you differently.

    Next week, I will write about repairing damaged trust in relationships.

  • Some Thoughts on Civil Discourse

    In my communities, and it seems in my country, I have watched increasing polarization and the lines of demarcation run sometimes very close to home. When conversations become polarized, it becomes very easy to forget that you are talking to a human being like yourself and instead imagine yourself fighting a righteous battle against an insidious, cunning, super-human villainous horde. As the climate escalates, it becomes more tempting and “justifiable” to let go of emotional containment, reflection, and dialogue with the desire to understand. Parts of us get activated by the conflict, begin to feed it and feed upon it.

    A reptilian creature poking its head up from the water. Both the reptile and the water are covered in tiny green leaves.
    This guy’s laying low until the argument dies down. Photo by delfi de la Rua.

    As an outside observer listening to a lot of arguments (like a therapist who works with couples, or someone who reads the comment sections on the Internet), and a person who has participated in several arguments (and later wondered “Why was I so mad about that?”), I’ve noticed a few things:

    • 20% of conflict is about the thing you are discussing, and 80% is about the emotional experience of the relationship.*
    • If you are accusing another (person/group) of bad behavior, the likelihood is that (you/your group) have participated in behavior that the other (person/group) perceives as similar.**
    • When you are the person accusing the other of behavior you’re engaging in, it is very hard to stop and admit this.
    • At times both parties will make parallel arguments and accusations of each other, but each will focus on a different facet. To offer an oversimplified example: Republicans and Democrats both share Liberty as a value, because America. Democrats point toward socially liberal attitudes as pro-liberty, and accuse Republicans of being anti-liberty for socially conservative policies. Republicans focus on economic and financial liberty and point toward reduced taxes and free markets as pro-liberty, and criticize Democrats as anti-liberty for taxation and regulation.***

    We need the art and discipline of civil discourse. It is worth reading and rereading about logical fallacies, as they characterize the worst habits of rhetoric. What I want to focus on is what to do when things get heated. My observation is that escalating emotional reactivity occurs when we feel misunderstood, disrespected, or dismissed.

    Think about a time when you felt misunderstood, disrespected, or dismissed. How did you respond? Did you stay in the conversation? Did you stay civil and rational? Did you say something you later regretted?

    Think about a conversation where you felt understood, heard, and treated with respect. What was different about the experience?

    We’re social beings and we are constantly seeking to be understood. Unfortunately, at least in the United States, the dominant cultural norm is to treat other people’s emotional responses as manipulative, irritating, or a sign of weakness. (Whereas our own emotional responses are always completely correct and justified.) It is when we dismiss, ignore, or patronize other’s feelings that they tend to become more intense and reactive. We do it to ourselves, too. But when it happens in relationship, we can give ourselves the plausible deniability that the other person “lost it for no reason.”

    Defensiveness is a great example. We understandably become defensive when we feel attacked, but from the outside it usually looks like we’re attacking, which makes the other participants become defensive. Defensiveness shuts down effective communication and leaves everyone feeling guarded and hurt.

    This makes for bad communication. By which I mean, we actually make it harder on ourselves to be understood when we dismiss and belittle others’ feelings. Instead of listening, that person’s mental and emotional energy goes toward managing their reaction. I find this to be true even for those who seem calm and collected. They might have developed some effective skill and flexibility in coping with their reactions, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have them.

    But you have power to improve communication when things get heated! Even the smallest effort to show consideration and understanding goes a long way to lower the reactivity in a conversation. I’m not making this up. The Gottmans have spent years researching relationships in conflict and they have identified some simple, effective, and difficult practices to improve communications.

    I want to offer some phrases to help you think of ways to try this out. When you read these, you might find these too simple, but I think we need simple, easy go-tos when we begin to get emotionally reactive:

    • “I see your point.” Or, better, try to accurately summarize their points. If they correct you, accept their correction.
    • “I can appreciate why you’d feel that way.” Here, you are not agreeing that the other person’s version of reality is completely accurate and yours is wrong. You are acknowledging that their response makes sense based on where they are coming from—their background, their beliefs, their position in the discussion.
    • “What do you mean by this?” In this moment, you have just caught yourself about to launch into a defensive counterattack and asked yourself, “Am I hearing them correctly?”
    • “I am feeling [a feeling] when you say that.” This is about sharing your subjective experience and helping them to understand the impact of their words and actions on you. It’s not about accusing the other person of making you feel that way.
    • “…” This phrase is the long pause you make when you are about to accuse someone of behaving poorly and stop to reflect on whether there has been a time in which they might have felt that you’ve acted this way toward them.

    You may be so polarized that you feel reluctant to step back from the hard, accusing stance. There is vulnerability in seeking understanding, particularly if the other parties do not offer it in return. It is also true that making this effort will not always result in increased safety and respect, but I believe that a great way of finding out if someone is willing to act in good faith is to give them the opportunity to do so. If you earnestly try this and find that it is met with disrespect and hostility, then of course figure out what you need to do for self-protection.

    I have seen tremendous changes occur when all parties in a dialogue commit to this kind of conversation, particularly when a neutral party supports the process by holding both sides accountable to it. I aspire to the wisdom of Sun Tzu, to whom is attributed the statement: “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.” This quote speaks to me of conflicts avoided, relationships not destroyed, friendships sustained, all because of a willingness to address and resolve conflict before it escalates into war.

    ****

    *Source: I made this percentage up.

    **I have mixed feelings about the way I’ve phrased this bullet point as it lacks nuance with regard to conversations between people in different states of privilege and oppression. For example, some people argue that the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers are equivalent because they are nationalist groups based in racial identity. I fully disagree, as the Ku Klux Klan emerged to preserve white supremacy and the Black Panthers emerged to address the harms white supremacy does to Black people. The problem I am trying to speak to is that we get locked into defending ourselves and our groups at all costs, and unwillingness to acknowledge that the other party has ever been hurt or we have ever acted poorly interferes with finding resolution. For lack of certainty about how best to rewrite these statements, I want to emphasize that this is a perceived subjective equivalence.

    **What’s interesting to think about with regard to the difference in where each group prizes Liberty is that they are also arguing about the shadow virtue of Restraint. Unfettered Liberty is not conducive to a group identity and somewhat implicitly at odds with any kind of centralized government, so Liberty must be balanced with Restraint (or, more negatively, Control). You could look at the argument as a difference in belief about where Liberty and Restraint should occur. Social conservatives say people should be free to spend their resources as they wish, but should also participate in monogamous sexual marriages and be financially responsible for their families. Social liberals say people should be free to live their lives as they wish, but should also be involved in an equitable distribution of resources so that all may be financially supported. Since Restraint is not a well-loved virtue, however, it is politically more effective to focus on where one is pro-Liberty. I think this is worth thinking about in any polarized argument. What virtues do the arguing parties share overtly and covertly, and where do they disagree about the implementation of these virtues?

  • Mistrust, Hope, and Meaningful Connection, Part 1

    “I have trust issues.”

    Have you ever said that? What does that mean to you? Where do those “issues” come from?

    When I explore trust issues with people, we often discuss all the ways they’ve been failed and betrayed by people they trusted, or wanted to trust. They might also talk about the ways they leap into trust with every new relationship, hoping this one won’t disappoint, only to be bitterly crushed again. Others feel terrified of trusting their relationships at all, afraid of that seemingly inevitable disappointment.

    More deeply, they may feel unable to trust themselves. They’ve disappointed themselves, feel they’ve set themselves up to be hurt, believe they deserve the pain, engaged in self-defeating behaviors.

    In every relationship, we must reckon with the issue of trust. How much do I trust? Does mistrust keep me safe? Are the benefits of trust or mistrust worth the costs?

    Trust vs. Mistrust

    Erik Erikson described one of the first Western psychological models of development that encompass an entire life. The first stage he called Trust vs. Mistrust. This begins from birth through infancy, in which the child learns that their environment may or may not respond to its needs appropriately. If the infant expresses need and the need is met, then trust in the world grows. If the infant’s needs are met sporadically, neglected, or punished, then mistrust in the world grows. When both ends of the spectrum are felt and integrated, the virtue of Hope becomes possible.

    Problems reconciling the developmental crisis of Trust vs Mistrust leads to imbalances that affect later stages of development. We can very easily name undesirable consequences of too much mistrust—anxiety in relationships, irritability, paranoia, constantly feeling on guard and reluctant to let someone in due to believing eventually they will screw you up. But those who have lived through mistrust-engendering relationships could tell you the dangers of too much trust—opening themselves up to being taken advantage of, the deep pain of betrayal, and excessive credulity leading to the premature forgiveness of abusive and disrespectful behavior.

    People with extensive relational trauma or deep-seated mistrust cannot simply set these aside to trust in a loving, benevolent universe. They know the universe is vast and includes pain, abuse, and evil. People who have experienced relational trauma often need to learn how to find trustworthy people and repair damaged trust while also maintaining healthy protective boundaries against people who would hurt and abuse them (clinically known as “assholes”).

    An image of a person with long brown hair and a white shirt. Around this person's head is a blue scarf. The arrangement of scarf and hair obscure the person's face, and it is unclear which direction they are facing. Behind is an open sky and expanse of water.
    photo by Oscar Keys, via Unsplash

    The Experience of Mistrust

    It took me a long time to recognize “Mistrust” as more than simply “the absence of trust.” Mistrust is its own attitude with collections of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Mistrust will look differently based on your personality and the experiences that sparked it, but here are some qualities that often appear in some form:

    • Guardedness – Stand-offishness, unwillingness to share your experience and thoughts openly without getting a temperature of the room or other person. Giving brief, curt answers to open questions.
    • Suspicion – Constantly feeling “on edge.” Irritability. Regular concerns that the other person is acting deceptively, setting you up for some harm, or talking about you behind your back. Needing to constantly check out the other person’s claims for truth value. May include some deceptive behavior like snooping or testing the person.
    • Anxiety – Tension in the body. Constantly going through the same cycles of thoughts over and over, regardless of any evidence for the thoughts. Difficulty relaxing, especially around people. Going “blank”, fearful, or hostile when asked direct questions.
    • Holding Grudges/Building a Case – Keeping a mental list of all the failures, abuses, and oversights committed by others. Sometimes you might dwell on these and bring them up to the other person when angry or afraid, even if the other person has apologized and tried to make amends. Other times you may keep this list to yourself, “building a case” not to trust the person, until you finally explode and throw all these accusations against the person who didn’t see them coming.
    • Cynicism – More broadly, mistrust generates a worldview that no one is trustworthy, there is nothing worth aspiring toward, and there is no reason to exert any effort to improve one’s life or community.

    One thing I find interesting is that inwardly the person is experiencing a desire to know if they can trust the other person, but outwardly they behave in ways that undermine their own trustworthiness. Guardedness often elicits guardedness; if I wonder why you’re being self-protective, I may become self-protective. Being suspicious and holding grudges may well inspire the other person to respond in turn.

    This becomes a internally coherent cycle of creating relationships that validate the mistrustful attitude. These behaviors are not conducive to the process of making amends and restoring trust.

    That said, these behaviors and feelings aren’t “bad” and you’re not “crazy” to experience them. If we were to look through your history, we might fully understand why you’d be protective of yourself and why it’s hard to trust. Feelings of mistrust might be completely valid intuitive warnings from the part of your brain that isn’t wholly logical but nevertheless is picking up on subtle signals of danger.

    I do not think eradicating or suppressing feelings of mistrust is useful to grow as a person and forming meaningful attachments. We might need to take some time to befriend and get to know mistrust while also exploring when and how to build trust. Next week, I will write more on the qualities of trustworthiness.

     

  • To Know My True Name: On Identity and Belonging

    do you think
    just like that
    you can divide
    this you as yours
    me as mine to
    before we were us?
    if the rain has to separate
    from itself
    does it say “pick out your cloud?”
    – Tori Amos, “Your Cloud“

    Identity is not who we are, though our English language around identity suggests it points to something essential. There are many identities to claim, as many as there are ways to complete the statement: “I am a/an …” Today I am a son, brother, husband, therapist, and mentor. I might be deeply invested in these identities, deriving significant meaning from them. Is identity who I am, though? There is a Vedic practice known as “Neti Neti” (or “Not this, Not that”) in which one asks one’s self, “Who am I?”, waits for the answer, and then rejects the answer. For example, “Who am I? I am a man… No, I am not a man, that is a gender role assigned to me. Who is the I that is gendered male?” This practice continues until arriving at the answer that feels correct, which for me corresponds with a sense of knowing, a sense of Yes, this is it. (And the answer that was right ten years ago is not the answer that is right today.)This and similar practices lead us toward the Self, greater and deeper than we can fathom, a creative center of each person’s existence that expresses itself in the world. Identities, in this way, are names for various expressions of this Self. Some identities are names for things the Self has experienced—like “survivor.” Others are names for systems of belief that resonate with the self—like “Stoic,” “socialist,” or “Christian.” Identity is how we put our understandings of Self into language, making it possible to analyze, explore, and understand ourselves and communicate with others. 

    Identity is also relational. Those words “son,” “mentor,” infer relationships that “I” have with others—one is not a son without claiming someone or something as a parent. To identify as a “Stoic” is to put one’s self in community with others who ascribe to Stoicism, or have a stoic personality. Here we reach the more complex and political dimensions of identity. To claim an identity is to claim membership in a community of those who share the identity. A lone person who has thoughts and feelings unlike anyone else around them must struggle with feelings of alienation, confusion, shame, or fear that something is deeply wrong with them. The choice seems to be either accepting this alienation or cutting off the parts of them that don’t fit the majority. If those thoughts and feelings have a name an identity, suddenly that person has an opportunity to experience dignity and pride as they are. Thus, the “alphabet soup” of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, asexual, questioning, intersex, and increasingly more identities that are sexually, romantically, or gender non-majority is so vital and continues to expand. Each letter of the LGBTQIA acronym is a declaration of existence and validity for each of those communities, and hope for those who realize their feelings match one of those identities.

    Here, in the facet of relationship, is also an opportunity for deep wounding. If I say I am this thing and everyone around me denies it, undermines it, rejects it, or simply ignores it, then that part of me suffers and collapses. Perhaps I can maintain its health through personal work and sheer willpower, but that drains the energy I might spend on other things. I may become defensive, hostile, fearful, anxious, or overwhelmed when my identity is under attack. Though I am cisgender—I was assigned male at birth and continue to identify as male—there have been times when others have explicitly or implicitly questioned whether I am “a man” because I did not behave or look like what they thought “a man” should. This fostered injuries to my identity—a defensiveness and anxiety that arises when I hear a particular phrase, a particular tone, or someone insults me in a way that resembles earlier insults. Intellectually I may understand “being a man” as a complex, shifting cultural and historical set of norms—but I may find myself manipulated into doing something I don’t want to do, simply because someone implied I’m “not a man” if I don’t do it. (At the same time, there are ways my maleness is not questioned in the ways a transgender man’s might be—most people refer to me by male pronouns without my asking; I can use the men’s bathroom without fear; and peers and authorities accept my maleness without any effort on my part.)

    Photo by Thomas Lefebvre

    As social creatures there is, I believe, an instinctive part of us that needs belonging. We know that babies thrive when they experience touch and warmth from their caregivers. We know that solitary confinement fosters mental illness in prisoners. Threats of exile and abandonment are experienced by parts of us as threats to well-being and survival. I believe this belonging-needing part of us suffers a kind of trauma when it experiences bullying, exile, abandonment, or any experience of being made to feel it is unwelcome. This is one reason why real harm is done to trans and gender nonconforming folk when others refuse to use their names and pronouns.

    As with many psychic wounds, when we get our first taste of exile or abandonment, we develop strategies to avoid ever having to experience this pain again. In some ways those strategies succeed at reducing the pain of exile or abandonment, but they may well become toxic to our selves and relationships. The strategies become problematic to our selves and communities when we:

    • Become deeply invested in identity, trying to be “the best [x] I can” so no one can judge or exclude us. This may get us some mileage, but the trauma is magnified when we lose that identity. Someone who has spent years being “a good son” suddenly becomes utterly lost when their parents die. This is also incredibly challenging in a society in which we may hold multiple identities with widely varying norms and expectations.
    • Minimize the need for community and connection altogether, disavowing any identity that requires others’ validation. A less intense version of this might look like cultivating a kind of critical distance, so one is a member of the community but thinks of themself as on the edges, or outside, or more of an observer.
    • Develop rigid expectations of what someone in “[x]” community should look like or act like; what values they should hold; what politics they should espouse; all of which centralizes one’s own values, attitudes, and behaviors. Doing so, we begin to limit our own growth and development.
    • Express defensive outrage or excessive victimization at signs of criticism or accountability from others within the community.
    • Police community boundaries—enacting rigid identity norms by marginalizing anyone who doesn’t fit through social control strategies such as gossiping, bullying, excluding from social events or positions of influence, or straight up denouncing the person as “not a true [x]”. Thus we become hostile to the natural and productive diversity within our communities.

    Being a member of communities that are composed of socially marginalized people, I observe the above dynamics periodically. I think these come from the trauma many of us experienced growing up in communities where we felt alien or rejected. Once we find a place where we feel accepted, welcome, and seen, that taste of joy intensifies the resolve to never lose it again. (Of course, others feel unwelcome and rejected even in the communities that “should” accept them.) Unhealed, these underlying identity injuries fester, directing our actions more than we might acknowledge without reflection. Much is made of “body fascism” in gay male communities, and I suspect much of that is fed by the shame of childhood alienation, causing some men to grow up and push themselves to prove their worthiness through superlative physiques, careers, fashion, and then projecting their own insecurities onto the less-developed bodies of their peers, who experience that as reinforcing pressure to hold themselves to those standards as well. Then it begins to look like a cultural norm.

    It’s important to note that it is normal and necessary for communities to maintain boundaries and shape definitions for identities. Think of boundaries being as natural and necessary as the shell of an egg, or the edges of a living cell. To foster life, there needs to be some limit that holds in the living organism and keeps out harmful toxins in the environment. That boundary needs to be firm, but porous enough to bring in nourishment and push out what is harmful. All communities develop mechanisms by which this occurs. When these structures are not developed consciously and purposely in a way that allows for flexibility and diversity, then they tend to be enacted in the rigid ways noted above by people who feel most urgently the need to do it, without an accountability structure in place. The loudest voices tend to be the ones of rigidity and exclusion, and the people who recognize and value inclusion and pluralism have to push hard to be heard. Communities with structure have the opportunity to make this polarity a conscious part of their community agreements, recognizing the need for pluralism and boundaries.

    On a personal level, I think it is beneficial to continue developing ourselves as whole people. If one identity is taking up much of our time and attention, then it’s worthwhile to engage in other interests, connect with trusted family, or engage with friends outside of that community. This helps me to get perspective on what’s going on in my community, take it less personally, and re-engage with more of an open heart—partially because I remember that I am more than just this identity. The practice of “Neti Neti” or similar meditations of shedding layers of identity also helps to reconnect with the core Self. When I can validate my identity and also remember it isn’t “me,” I feel less vulnerable when someone attacks it. Becoming aware of what the identity means to me—what I think defines the identity based on my lived experience—I have a stronger base of authority to support me in dialogue or confrontation.

    What about on a community level? I am curious for more conversation about this, and I think it’s needed. One thought I have is to become sensitive to signs of trauma so that I can respond with compassion when I or someone else acts in the ways listed above. These days I am more interested in communities organized around shared values or a shared mission rather than a shared identity. I think that helps us to depersonalize community problems and focus more on developing just and inclusive community systems with effective boundaries.

    What do you think? What practices or policies could heal or manage some of these dynamics?