The Many Faces of Fear

When I was a small child, I used to be really scared of the dark.

I wasn’t scared of the darkness itself. I was scared of my inability to perceive the danger that could be lurking in it.

I don’t know when you personally stopped being afraid of the dark, but it took me longer than most kids. And I still experience darkness with a bit of unease from time to time. When I’m feeling good, darkness is fun. There’s a little thrill involved. I don’t know what experience I’m going to find in the cave, the woods, or the attic, and the novelty is exciting.

When I lack confidence in my capacity to handle the unknowns I might discover, the dark becomes disinteresting. I’m not scared. It’s just stupid to go in there. Or it's boring. Why would I explore without my sense of sight, or when I could accidentally hurt myself?

That right there, though? Disinterest? That’s fear in disguise. Rationalization of maintaining my ignorance is one of the faces that fear can wear.

I’m not shaming any version of myself for fear. Quite the opposite. I’m celebrating my capacity to recognize fear in so many forms now.

Adult fear does not always cause us to cower somewhere safe in a way that we recognize. The complex socialization we experience into adulthood makes fear an undesirable experience. If we don’t practice the discipline that makes fear, curiosity, then courage a part of the internal sequence that might lead to discovery, we can find ourselves “bored” and “disinterested,” as well as a host of other things as a defense mechanism. Socially, there’s no real shame in being bored, but there is shame in being fearful-... like a child. Ironically, the virtue of courage requires that we overcome fear. Courage is how we grow, and it gives us agency.

That’s the thing about fear. It forces an evaluation of our agency. Adult fears that typically get consciously addressed are the kind that we can come to blows with. However, choosing conflict is not synonymous with choosing courage. We can confront our spouse about how “shitty” their behavior is, instead of admitting that their attractiveness makes us feel insecure. The very magnetism that might’ve drawn us to them is now a problem. If, instead of confronting our fear of their irresistible charm and our inability to control who's drawn to them or their faithfulness, we resort to shaming them for others' reactions to their presence, we've allowed our fear to dictate our actions.

Shame is important here because shame and guilt are tools that people employ to impact the behavior of the people we engage with. The shame, guilt, pride circuitry of our brain is heavily involved in social correction. We shame children for their fear. We shame girls when their emotions are inconvenient, and we shame boys for their vulnerability. This conditioning teaches us, but men almost as an imperative, to replace vulnerable emotions with aggressive ones or submissive ones, because fighting is a field of agency. Control things with the threat of violence. Submit or risk getting your ass beaten. This conditioning teaches us, but women almost as an imperative, to hide inconvenient emotions until we can express them honestly, and to, in the meantime, appease others whose opinions hold consequences. Hold your tongue. Be passive-aggressive and wily, or be punished for your arrogance. Be so polite no one can blame you for their violence if you survive the assault. If you’re going to be a victim, do your best to be blameless because they will try to blame you. But, remember, no matter how seductive a premise, you can’t out-careful danger.

There are many ways fear can create patterns of limiting thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that we may not even be able to consciously process until someone or something forces them into our awareness.

Pride in our ignorance? Fear. If you don’t know, you don’t know; it’s not your fault, right? We don’t have to face the dangers of failing to grow and change if we never learn that we are the problem or that there is a solution. Even exceptionally bright people fall prey to this. Maybe we were gifted as children and fear failure. If we stay ignorant about best practice, we don’t have to learn or commit to working hard until we succeed. If we deny that something we don’t comprehend could be valid, then we have nothing to learn and can keep demanding people trust our authority in the field in which we are confident.

Disinterest or dismissal? Fear. Boredom is a great subconscious disguise for fear. You don’t have to do the hard work of learning to manage your finances if you just get comfortable with victimhood and fiscal anxiety. Do you fantasize about someone skilled or savvy saving you from your money woes? Are you literally waiting for your hero to come save you? If your initial fear is transformed into a defeatist attitude so quickly you don’t realize you’re afraid, you can even pretend your uninformed pessimism is actually realism.

Envy? When you don’t take responsibility for what you can control and end up bitter about the success of others, your complaints, criticisms, and dismissals can all represent fear. Feigning disinterest when you’re actually envious? Now you’re three layers deep, baby.

That’s a fear of fear.

Anger at people suggesting you’re afraid? Aggression is masking fear of fear.

What if I try to sit with my feelings and I don’t feel afraid or I don’t know what fear feels like?

Check it out, Batman...

Excessive caution or over-planning? Also fear. If you won’t take the action you need to take unless you have everything planned with contingencies? That’s fear. Extra points if you’re procrastinating by planning, hoping that the solution arises so that you don’t have to take action.

Stopped propositioning your partner for sex or starting the conversations that need to be had? “What if I misspeak and instead of getting my needs met I’m made into a monster?” You’re anxious about the consequences. You can’t act. You’ve canceled yourself in your mind before you’ve even begun. And now we’ve stepped into codependency. “If they might be inconvenienced, then my needs don’t matter.”

Resisting authentic expression for fear of consequences is not just fear, but likely complex trauma from past rejections.

Check yourself. If your strategies are anxiety management strategies because anxiety is fear out of step with the presence of danger, then you already know you’re afraid, even if you’re not thinking of it that way. You’re braced for the inevitable, whether or not it actually comes.

There is nothing wrong with being afraid. It’s natural. There is nothing wrong with acting out of fear. That instinct is meant to keep you alive and to help you survive. When you’re fighting your loved ones and running from important conversations when you chose each other to connect and collaborate to build something beautiful, something is wrong. When safety first goes too far and all you can think about is how to survive when you have the space to live and thrive, then you’re robbing yourself of the life that mechanism is meant to protect.

And that’s the real shame.

That and the fact that it’s slowly killing you, but toxic stress and anxiety disorders are getting handled some other time.

Thanks for making it this far. I hope this helped you. If you think it could help you start a conversation, feel free to slyly send it to someone, pretending you didn’t read this part. But in all seriousness, the best things you can do to help me if this helped you are share this with someone you think it could help and leave a comment letting me know how it affected you if it did.

Therapy language: Boundaries & Agreements v Expectations & Demands

Many would assume this is a no brainer, but:

Boundaries and agreements are different than expectations and demands.

I wouldn’t really have anything to say about this, but now that it’s hip to use therapy lingo to talk about our relationship issues… it’s become a problem when specific terms are confidently misused. (this was discussed this in the Trauma Bonding post I made previously.) Sometimes people invoke therapy language in controlling or deceptive ways, but sometimes it goes far enough to constitute enabling abuse by or against other individuals.

For example after those leaked Jonah Hill texts, people realized that the man was misusing the term boundaries. But where a lot of people were mad at him for his expectations and demands they missed the forest for the trees.

Mr. Hill has the right not to be ok with anyone’s behavior… But he doesn’t have the right to control it. He has the ability to make agreements with other people, but they don’t have to honor those agreements. And it’s his responsibility to find appropriate consequences for the breaking of trust if an agreement is in place.

Wearing bikinis and having male friends has less to do with his boundaries and more to do with his expectations of his partner’s behavior. Those are not his boundaries, they are the demands he wants to make about how she dresses and acts. If you don’t want your hot surfer girlfriend to talk to men, that’s a you problem. That’s about the insecurity within yourself. If you both made agreements not to flirt with people or seduce them, and she does so anyway, that’s when it’s a “her problem.” That’s about failing to honor the trust that makes your bond secure and healthy.

He has every right to have boundaries. Boundaries can be about our behavior:

“I don’t drink”

or 

“If you start yelling, I won’t engage until you’ve regulated yourself. Of course you can be angry with me, but I won’t tolerate that kind of aggression.”

As well, boundaries can be about what kinds of things we allow into our lives:

“I want to have a satisfying, sexually exclusive relationship with my partner.” 

It’s about what you want and how you plan to engage with others. When you add others to the mix, you can create an agreement with them: “We agree to be sexually exclusive with each other, and to be open about how to make sure that each of us is fulfilled. If it seems like that’s not possible, we agree that we will find a mature way to de-escalate our physical relationship and figure out how we fit into each other’s lives.”

Boundaries and agreements allow us to create the relationship architecture that is correct for us with people who are willing participants. We can see who views a boundary as an obstacle to intimacy or their needs being met. We can see who views a boundary as a guide to loving us well. Agreements allow us to see how well we and others honor our word and how it feels when things don’t work out. Sometimes we find out we don’t want what the agreement offers, or that we don’t want to do our part. That’s ok. We just need to be willing to be mature about the changes that life requires since the agreement isn’t working out. Sometimes we discover that in certain contexts of dynamics, certain agreements are easy to keep and we thrive within the bounds of them. We can work together to solve the problems of our agreements so that they serve us well.

Expectations and demands on the other hand are ways we subconsciously absolve ourselves of responsibility. They can frequently create oppressive and repressive patterns in our relationships. If you have expectations and don’t discuss what they are or where tehy came from, you’re setting yourself up for conflict when those expectations don’t match the other party’s. If you have demands and you don’t make sure that other person can fulfill them or wants to, we set ourselves up for conflict when our desired outcomes are not achieved. Expectations and demands set us up to punish ourselves and others when we find ourselves disappointed or frustrated because much of life can’t really be controlled. If we expect people to behave in certain ways and they don’t, we give ourselves permission to project meaning onto their behavior. We make them responsible for conflicts we set them up to trigger when we opt for expectations and demands as the way we interface with actualizing our relationship fantasies, goals, and ideals.
—

Key Points:

1. Boundaries and Agreements vs. Expectations and Demands:

   • Boundaries are personal limits or guidelines regarding one's own behavior or what one allows into their life. They are about self-respect and self-care.

   • Agreements are mutually agreed-upon rules or guidelines that both parties in a relationship consent to. They help create the framework for the relationship.

   • Expectations are often implicit and can lead to conflict when they aren't communicated. They can create disappointment when they are unmet.

   • Demands are more forceful and may not take into account the other person's consent or willingness, potentially leading to control and conflict.

2. Responsibility and Control:

   • Setting boundaries and making agreements are proactive ways of taking responsibility for one's own needs and desires in a relationship.

   • Expectations and demands can lead to a sense of control over the other person, which may not be healthy or respectful.

3. Communication and Understanding:

   • Clear communication is essential in establishing boundaries and making agreements. It helps both parties understand each other's needs and limits.

   • Unspoken expectations can lead to misunderstandings and frustration.

4. Flexibility and Adaptability:

   • Boundaries and agreements are flexible and can evolve as the relationship grows and changes.

   • Expectations and demands can be rigid and may not allow for the natural shifts that occur in relationships over time.

5. Conflict Resolution:

   • When boundaries or agreements are violated, it can lead to discussions about trust and consequences.

   • Violated expectations and demands often lead to blame and conflict.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helped you. If we want to have more conscious relationships with the people we love, its important that we consume mindful content, but also share it, and if we are able, create it. If you’re looking for a jumping off point for creating more fulfilling dynamics with your friends, family, and community:

Sending you many blessings and all the love.

Relationship Vocabulary List

I made a list of relationship-related vocabulary and definitions. I hope to provide you with terms to help navigate and express your understanding of various aspects of relationships, gender, and sexuality. This kind of vocabulary is essential for fostering inclusive and respectful conversations about these topics.

When you step outside of cishet-amatonormativity, or even just off the relationship escalator, you need more language than is typically used to express the variety of things that could be happening.

Language, as a result, becomes more functional when it is descriptive rather than prescriptive.

When approaching the world through queer theory, identity is about resonance. Instead of having to validate an identity by adhering to the definition of it, it becomes important to recognize that we are all people and that we all exhibit varied behaviors.

There is no need to prove you are straight or gay. And no one really has the ability to deny you your internal reality, regardless of what your external dynamics look like. What you are interested in isn’t always fully encapsulated by who people link you to. And who you want to be, understand yourself to be, and discover yourself to be are living conversations between your internal and external realities.

In a cisheteronormative paradigm, traditionally one AFAB person and one AMAB person pair up (or are paired up) and find themselves traveling up what we, thanks to Amy Gahran, now refer to as the relationship escalator.

There were phases and milestones that they were expected to reach together.

Some of the milestones were considered to be sacred, such as marriage, which besides being an entity-defining contract recognized by the government, was also a sacrament and a rite of passage. Various rules and agreements were made or expected to be made leading up to and after each milestone. Without a relationship escalator and a model for what is healthy and correct, it becomes each individual’s responsibility to learn and decide for themselves what is right for them and their relationship and when. It is important to decide for yourself what things to pursue and what boundaries and agreements need to be made and maintained to be the signposts for healthiness in ourselves, in any given dynamic, and in the community.

Terms Describing Internal Experiences of Others, Dynamic, and Self:

Emotional Attraction: The capacity that evokes the desire to engage in emotionally intimate behaviors such as sharing, confiding, and trusting. To experience life emotionally alongside them.

Emotional Curiosity: the experience of a desire to understand the emotional world of an individual, whether directly or indirectly. (Note: a child who grows up with emotionally available parents typically inherits a healthy relationship with the emotions their parents have, accepting and healthy relationships with. And potentially, a relatively positive experience of their own emotional world and attachments).

Emotional Availability: The capacity of an individual to emotionally connect with another. In a relationship, the ability of two people to share a healthy emotional connection. Informs the emotional and unified qualities of a relationship.

Emotional Unavailability: The patterns of difficulty one experiences getting close to others, practicing emotional vulnerability, committing, and connecting on a deeper, more intimate level. Engenders feelings of emotional distance, disconnection, loneliness/isolation related to the experience of the unavailable party.

Emotional Intelligence(EI): The ability to manage and understand both your own emotions and the emotions of people around you. There are five key elements to EI: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

Physical Attraction: the personal experience that evokes the desire to engage sensually with another person. A desire to experience touch, hugs, kisses, cuddling, roughhousing, play-fighting, nibbles, cute aggression, etc. To smell, touch, taste, hear, or see them. It could involve sexual arousal, but it might not at all.

Physical Curiosity: the experience of a desire to understand the physical experience of an individual, whether directly or indirectly. It can include sexual curiosities.

Physical Availability: The capacity of an individual to connect physically with others. This is determined by many factors, such as their interest in touch, their experience of trauma and pleasure (physical or emotional), their energy levels, distance, knowledge and skills (e.g., someone doesn’t know how to hold a baby), social norms, and commitments (both sexual and nonsexual).

Romantic Attraction: an experience that evokes the desire to engage in romantically intimate behaviors such as courtship, emotional bonding, intimate companionship, romantic relationships, and marriage.

Romantic Curiosity: the experience of a desire to understand the romantic capacities, qualities, interests, and history of an individual, whether directly or indirectly.

Romantic Availability: The capacity of an individual to romantically connect with another. The ability of two or more people to share a satisfying romantic connection.

Romantic Unavailability: A pattern of difficulty practicing vulnerability, establishing commitment, and connecting on a deeper, more intimate level in a romantic context. This could also be an inability to do those things or an aversion to them. A person who is polysaturated may be emotionally available as a friend but not as a romantic partner, for example.

Sexual Attraction: the personal experience that evokes the desire to engage in sexually intimate behaviors. A desire to experience others erotically and to pleasure or be pleasured by them in sexually intimate ways. Sexual arousal might increase with the intensity of the attraction.

Sexual Curiosity: the experience of a desire to understand the sexual capacities, interests, and history of an individual, whether directly or indirectly.

Sexual Availability: The capacity of an individual to connect sexually with others. This is determined by many factors, such as their interest in sex or a given individual, their energy levels, and commitments (both sexual and nonsexual). When people are “fuck-zoned,” they are talking about a relationship having its potential for sexual availability as the priority or one of the highest priorities.

Sexual Unavailability: The circumstances that create difficulty or prevent sexuality from being possible, attractive, pleasurable, or healthy in a dynamic. If you have not received consent, or consent has been rescinded, someone should be treated as sexually unavailable unless consent is willingly and enthusiastically offered. Sexual unavailability can be tied to emotions, commitments, beliefs/values/ideology, social consequences, health, or numerous other reasons. When people refer to being friend-zoned, they are talking about the determination of sexual unavailability as the general rule of a given dynamic. For yours and others’ well-being, it is generally safer not to sexually engage with those who are conflicted about their sexual availability.

Sexual Awareness: Personal sexual experience. This includes personal understandings of our own erotic energies. Our sexual self-awareness includes an understanding of our pleasure and preferences, attractions and aversions, and as a result, our boundaries, as well as which agreements we need for healthy experiences. Sexual awareness and emotional intelligence inform our capacity to communicate our sexual awareness to others.

Theory of Love: Referencing any number of theories that help us understand how we engage with love in our relationships. Attachment theory and the Triangular Theory of Love are two such examples. Languages can create cultural experiences of love and intimacy as well, i.e., Greek describes love with multiple words: Storge, Agape, Eros, Pragma, Philia, Ludus, Philautia.

NRE: New Relationship Energy describes the emotional experience of the neurochemical cocktail we associate with feelings of passion and falling in love.

Agape: Greek. Originally, agape referred to familial or spousal affection without a romantic or sexual connotation. Christianity uses it to refer to God’s perfect love. A love that will be given whether or not it is returned. A love that is not egoic in its locus. Buddhism might use this term to describe foundational loving kindness for all beings. If one were to look at all of reality as divine, as pantheistic monism might suggest, then agape would be the love of reality itself (from reality and towards reality), and acting on it would be in turn a meditation on our oneness. This love does not require familiarity.

Eros: Greek. Sexual, erotic, and/or passionate love. In contrast to Agape’s paradoxical selflessness and oneness, eros is primarily egoic in its locus and is focused on attachment to the potential for pleasure and excitement to be found in sexual/romantic/erotic attractions.

Philia: Greek. Brotherly love. The love one might feel for friends and family. The profound sense of goodwill one has towards those they care for. The focus is not the pleasure to be extracted but the goodwill to be shared.

Pragma: Greek. Love with an emphasis on the characteristics of companionship, commitment, and endurance. A love with shared hopes, values, and goals.

Storge: Greek. The love of family. As with parent to child or between siblings. Carries the qualities of caretaking, selflessness, provision, and protection. Sacrifice and acceptance. The love that provides a “safe haven.” Dependent on familiarity.

Ludus: Greek. Playful love. Associated with feelings of levity and excitement. Liable to dissipate in the face of difficulty or complication. Can persist with intentional cultivation by both parties.

Philautia: Greek. Self-love. Greeks deemed this a prerequisite for coherently loving others. The healthy, necessary experience of love of one’s self that makes it possible to give and receive love from other people without self-deception or hypocrisy. [The self-worth, confidence, and self-esteem that are necessary for self-actualization and the cognitive empathy to understand boundaries and agreements as positives. The integrity to facilitate honest interactions with the self so as not to feel entitled to manipulating others with deceptions we ourselves would not appreciate. A sense of one’s purpose, a personal capacity for fulfillment and meaning. Self-compassion. Allows for solitude to be positive and therefore time apart and space to be positive as well. The capacity to cultivate the accountability, safety, resilience, healing, and growth that allow us to contribute positively in community without the need to oppress, abuse, or dominate others to have our needs met. The self-trust that affords the ability to trust others.]

Terms Describing Sexual & Romantic Norms within Social Constructs:

Allonormativity: The presumption of individuals, communities, and the collective that all human beings are sexual.

Amatonormativity: The presumption of individuals, communities, and the collective that all human beings seek romantic connection/partnership.

Heteronormativity: The presumption of individuals, communities, and the collective that everyone is straight, in a straight relationship, or wants to be straight. [The rejection of gay marriage by straight people]

Cishet-amatonormativity: The presumption that cisgendered, heterosexual, amatonormative, allosexuality is the moral, correct, and most desirable way of being. It is effectively a sex and gender umbrella from which the conservative and traditional social scripts are derived. It represses authentic experiences, moralizes sexuality, and oppresses those who deviate from what are projected to be the human biological imperatives of sex and gender. [In queer communities, we can see the effects when relationships among queer people are held to normative standards. Monosexual individuals might experience anxiety, frustration, and invalidation on account of a partner’s capacity to find multiple genders attractive.]

Relationship Escalator: Defined by Amy Gahran as the collection of expected behaviors and choices that must be followed in order for a relationship to be seen as legitimate. [These expectations change and shift as norms do. What is acceptable in one community may be forbidden in another.]

Terms Describing Sexual and Romantic Orientations and Experiences:

Allosexual: desiring to have sex with other people.

Alloromantic: desiring romantic connections with other people.

Asexual: no sexual attraction or sexual desire for other people. They may experience romantic interest and desire. Or sexual desire without attraction or sexual attraction without desire. They may experience other forms of attraction.

Androgyny: the quality or state of being neither specifically feminine nor masculine: the combination of feminine and masculine characteristics: the quality or state of being androgynous.

Bisexual: describes an experience of being sexually attracted to both people of the same gender and people from other genders.

Ceterosexual: describes a person whose gender is nonbinary and who is sexually attracted to nonbinary people. Some ceterosexual people describe themselves as “diamoric.”

Ceteroromantic: also sometimes referred to as skolioromantic, is a romantic orientation where a person is romantically attracted to non-binary genders.

Greysexual: also referred to as “grey-asexual,” this refers to a person who feels sexual attraction very infrequently.

Gray-romantic: individuals who do not often experience romantic attraction.

Heterosexual: Within the concept of the gender binary, experiences attraction to individuals of the opposite sex. This term, originated in the 1800s, as a description of someone who had an obsession with the opposite sex to the degree that it was almost a form of deviance. It was coined by Hungarian Journalist Károly Mária Kertbeny in 1869. People historically were not considered straight or gay; rather, they mostly engaged in acceptable or unacceptable sexual behaviors. Sexologists at the end of the 1800s started using the term. In 1923, it was defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex.” By 1934, the definition shifted and encompassed “normal“ non-queer sexuality. The term “heterosexuality” did not become mainstream until the 1960s. The term straight itself seemingly arises out of queer culture, as a reference to “being on the straight and narrow” after ceasing queer behavior.

Homosexual: Experiences attraction to individuals of the same sex. This term originated in the 1800s as a description of someone who had a preference for sexual encounters with individuals of the same sex. It too has a loaded history but is generally avoided now, as it is associated with being “clinical, distancing, and archaic.” It may also not accurately represent the orientation of the individuals described. It may have originated in Germany in 1868 or with Hungarian Journalist Károly Mária Kertbeny in 1869.

Aromantic: no romantic attraction or romantic desire for other people. They may experience sexual interest and desire. Or romantic desires without romantic attraction or romantic attraction without romantic desires. They may experience other forms of attraction.

Cupioromantic: A person who desires a romantic relationship but does not feel romantic attraction.

Cupiosexual: A person who desires a sexual relationship but does not feel sexual attraction.

Demisexual: feeling sexual attraction only after an emotional bond. They may experience romantic interest and desire but lack sexual interest absent bonding.

Demiromantic: feeling romantic attraction only after an emotional bond. They may experience sexual interest and desire but lack romantic interest absent bonding.

Lithrosexual: Experiences sexual attraction but does not desire those feelings to be reciprocated or pursued. May still experience romantic attraction.

Lithromantic: Experiences romantic attraction but does not desire those feelings to be reciprocated or pursued. May still experience sexual attraction.

Pansexual/Omnisexual: sexually attracted to many or all genders. May not experience romantic attraction.

Panromantic: romantically attracted to many or all genders. May not experience sexual attraction.

Questioning: describes a person who is unsure about or exploring their sexuality and/or gender.

Gynosexual/Gynesexual: sexually attracted to femininity. 

Gynoromantic/gyneromantic: romantically attracted to femininity. Some describe themselves as “sapphic.”

Gynephilia: romantic and/or sexual attraction to femininity. Also sometimes used by TERF and TERF-adjacent people to describe being attracted only to people with a vulva.

Androsexual: sexually attracted to masculinity.

Androromantic: romantically attracted to masculinity. Some describe themselves as “achillean.”

Androphilia: romantic and/or sexual attraction to masculinity. 

Monosexual: attracted to one gender. I use this to refer to people who prefer sexually exclusive relationships. In the 19th century, it also referred to someone who masturbates. Coined by Hungarian Journalist Károly Mária Kertbeny

Polyamorous: having or having the capacity for multiple sexual and/or romantic relationships concurrently.

Polyromantic: romantically attracted to many genders, but not necessarily sexually attracted to them.

Polysexual: attracted to many genders. I also use this to refer to people who prefer sexually non-exclusive dynamics.

Relationship Anarchy: An approach to relationships that attempts to dismantle the relationship hierarchy of cishet-amatonormativity. It is aimed at giving individuals the freedom to love who they wish, in ways that suit them. [Can be attractive to individuals who love freedom as well as individuals who resist accountability.]

Hierarchy: a structure, system, or organization in which people or groups are ranked or ordered according to status or authority. [Not inherently problematic, unless we impose hierarchy in oppressive and abusive ways.]

Relationship Hierarchy: an organization of relationships as ranked by their importance, status, or authority within a structure, system, or organization. (ie family ties are more important than friendship) (ie My partner can dictate certain elements of my life) [Not inherently problematic, unless we impose hierarchy in oppressive and abusive ways.]

Non-Hierarchical Relationships: an organization of relationships such that they have no ranking or no fixed rankings. [Frequently this refers to a rejection of social pressures to rank relationships in specific ways. (ie a romantic partner is not more important than a friend) Since humans are naturally biased, “non-hierarchical relationships” have a tendency to expose us to our values and weaknesses. (ie I say that the length of a relationship does not matter, but I’ve noticed NRE causes me to be more spontaneous with the focus of that experience and less responsible about standing commitments)]

Terms that Describe Sex:

Sex: refers to the designations of reproductive counterparts in species that reproduce via meiosis. Sex determines which kind of gametes a creature contributes to reproduction should it be fertile, as well as which changes occur at maturation when a creature reaches sexual maturity. There are many ways to designate sex. In humans, female corresponds to an XX chromosome pairing with males having XY pairings. This is not ubiquitous in nature.

AFAB: assigned female at birth; refers to a person who is biologically female. Describing someone as biologically female is different from describing someone as biologically a woman.

AMAB: assigned male at birth; refers to a person who is biologically male. Describing someone as biologically male is different from describing someone as biologically a man.

SAAB: a designation assigned at birth based on visible genitals; can be male (AMAB), female (AFAB), or intersex. SAAB is preferred over the term “biological sex” when the latter is used harmfully towards transgender people.

Intersex: is a general term used for a variety of situations in which a person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't fit the boxes of “female” or “male.” Sometimes doctors do surgeries on intersex babies and children to make their bodies fit binary ideas of “male” or “female.”

Terms that Describe Gender:

Gender: A construct that provides social scripts for interaction with other members of society, typically associated with social and cultural interpretations of the roles of femininity and masculinity as expressed in or imposed on the participants. Gendered roles in society change from culture to culture and vary in their levels of equity and acceptance. While gender can provide a sense of security about who one is, it can also create distress about who one cannot or must not be, as well as create artificial conflicts when hierarchy is imposed or bigotry internalized.

Agender: describes a person who does not identify with any gender.

Bigender: describes a person who identifies as two or more genders.

Cisgender: describes a person whose gender is the same as their SAAB.

Nonbinary: describes a person who identifies with experiences of gender beyond the gender binary.

Gender Binary: The presumption that gender is not a construct but a biological fact, with only two genders which must be determined by sex.

Gender Expression: how other people interpret a person’s gender based on physical appearance, mannerisms, etc..

Gender Identity: how a person interprets their own gender based on their emotions, personal experiences, etc..

Genderfluid: a gender identity that is fluid between/among more than one gender.

Genderqueer: a gender identity that lies outside of male or female, sometimes without more definition.

Transgender: describes a person who identifies with an experience of gender that is different from their SAAB. It is an umbrella term that people may or may not identify with. Nonbinary people, trans men, trans women, two-spirit people, and other experiences may identify as transgender or trans.

Transsexual: describes a person who transitions sexually from their SAAB. Has some loaded and potentially negative connotations dating back to the 1920s when it was associated with mental illness.

Ally: a person who actively works to end intolerance, educate others, and support social equity for a marginalized group.

I hope this list serves you well. I may post another version of this on my site directly. I plan to follow this up with a list of terms related perhaps to polyamory and kink as well as various worksheets to help people navigate their experiences.

We Are Not The Same.

But we are.

Each of us has similarities and differences to the people we engage with.

Duh.

And we want to have the right kinds of similarities and the right kinds of differences.

Duh again.

But how did you figure out what the *right* similarities and differences were?

I want you to think about what importance you place on your similarities and differences when selecting anyone for anything.

Any relationship you can think of.

If you’re adept at selection, it’s not just about similarities and differences. It’s about the functionality of those similarities and differences.

Each observable thing in the universe has traits. And those traits are somewhat dependent on an observer’s capacity to engage with them or not.

Is this trait positive, neutral, negative? Is it supplementary, complementary? Compatible, incompatible? Collaborative, competitive?

When you think about two people and someone says, “opposites attract” what is actually in opposition? We are not magnets. Is one strategic while the other shoots from the hip? Is one aggressive while the other is passive? Is one honest and the other a liar?

These things aren’t really absolutes. In different contexts and environments, someone’s extreme is some society’s norm. Maybe there’s no word for a thing that you do in your language, and five to describe it in another one. There may be a feeling you have that does not translate.

So let’s give it context:

If someone is talkative, they may do well with someone else who likes to listen. Different.

But they also may get bored if they feel that person seems to have nothing to say, and find themself in search of a repeated meeting of the minds. Same.

Which is better?

If someone is goal oriented, they may need someone around who challenges them and keeps them sharp. Same, competitive. But they may do just as well if not better with someone who is extremely supportive of their goals, but doesn’t directly participate in their projects. Different, supplementary + compatible. Maybe they need an assistant or mentor whose direct engagement adds dynamism to the process that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Same, complementary + collaborative. Even still they may find that they truly need people who are disinterested in what they do. From this they draw fresh perspectives and get time away from their consuming interests. They have someone who makes them excited to step away and find balance. Different, complementary. The answer to which is better is found in the fulfillment of the engaged individuals and the consequences of the connection.

Sometimes we have negative compatibility. Like people who enable our self-destructive tendencies. If someone has an addictive personality and a drug dealer bestie, there might be consequences. If someone has low emotional intelligence but finds people who compensate for the damage they do with their lack of self awareness, when those people aren’t around to clean up for them, there will probably be consequences. In these ways, people are dissimilar, yet they function in ways that supplement or complement some aspect of the other’s existence. Negative compatibilities are some of the ways we get stuck in phases where we ought to be growing. How we lose our potential for actualization to entitlements. Entitlements breed ingratitude. Anger, resentment, disappointments. When we look back, and we have had time to heal, our gratitude is typically focused on the fact that it’s over, and the fact that we learned our lesson. Well, hopefully.

Sometimes we have negative similarities. We butt heads because we’re both aggressive. We let things fester because we are both passive. Frequently, we’re naturally repelled by these people until we mature. Some of us have to revisit this space when we see our flaws in our children. We don’t have as big of a problem with seeing negative similarities if we make peace with our own flaws. When we take the time to grow, we trust others to grow. If we don’t grow, we might feel punished when we see others succeeding, especially via means we see or have seen ourselves being punished for. We might fear that they’ll have to learn the same lessons we did, or feel vindicated when they do. We might suffer when we see them thriving via means that others have used to wound us, and that we have promised we would never embody. Judging and rejecting a part of ourselves because we project the pain that we suffered onto others that might witness us engaged in these behaviors or thought patterns. Or we shame ourselves for the pain we did and do cause in these ways. And we justify not forgiving them by not forgiving ourselves either. Or with hypocrisy.

On the other hand, when we witness negative differences, the ones that we don’t like, and that don’t help us, I’ve found one of the deepest signs of maturity is a capacity to extend ourselves compassionately for the possibility of another person’s growth. Not because we’re anyone’s savior and we’re attached to the idea of fixing or saving someone. But because within ourselves we have found the freedom to act against our own individual interest because it is possible for fulfillment to come in service of the collective. Sure, there are some of us who feel we genuinely want to be good people and end up hurting ourselves and others in the pursuit of nobility and martyrdom. But truly finding the capacity for care, altruism, and love primarily because you want to take that kind of action is beautiful. And doing it because you want those values to be expressed as its own reward, rather than for a reward, is to reflect the capacity to transcend mere survival. To thrive and to be a thing of awe that defies the expectations of those whose focus is self-centered because that’s the truth of the phase that they are in.

And only through accepting each other as we are and embracing each other’s truth can we embrace our own. It takes trusting your own truth to be able to trust another’s, and to truly be touched by it. And even as stark a contrast as altruistic hope and faithless desolation are, sometimes, those opposites are exactly what the other needs.

From some perspectives, our differences aren’t nearly as numerous as our similarities. And for some, certain differences or similarities are all that matter. But realistically, similarities and differences are so relative that they don’t matter nearly as much as the fulfillment an experience brings. And again, core to that is gratitude.

You must be able to trust your own perceptions, awareness, and intuition to be able to operate in this world confidently. Even if you are wrong. Because you also have to trust and develop your ability to learn and grow in relationship to your mistakes. You must be able to learn that what is a mistake in one context may not be a mistake in another. And what works perfectly in one aspect of life may not have a useful place in another, except perhaps to teach you about the errors of your choice of application.

There's an experience of process and an experience of outcome. What matters is that you can find people to engage with where you have a positive experience of process and a positive experience of outcome. In some cases, regardless of the realities of processes and outcomes.

We are not the same. But we are.

We just have to figure out how and when that matters.

This one I would like to dedicate to Mikey and Nella. Nella because she asks wonderful questions and in doing so, demonstrates a genuine desire to love others in a profound way that gives me hope. Mikey, because in some ways he is competence incarnate, and one of my oldest friends. And if it were not for him, there are certain things I would never bother to express, or really honor the value of.

Like Action Like Thought

Another blog about trust. Eyy.

Today I want to dedicate my writing to Komal. I love you dearly friend. And when people learn to witness you correctly, we will all be better for it. This is also dedicated to Mikey. For you, there’s a part two.

-

Humans typically have much more in common than not in many ways. In healthy humans we have similar needs for staying alive. We typically have the same circuitry to allow emotional experience. We all must find our way in this world. As far as we know all of us live on the planet or in nearby space stations.

It’s a simple mistake.

We meet someone volunteering at the free farm stand and we assume that because we love giving back to our community, so do they. They must have a similar desire to engage generously with their time. And as we chat we discover that they love the same artists as we do, we start associating them with having a similar emotional or political sensibility. How can you love Serj Tankian and not care about his politics? But as we meet them for lunch one day and see how disgusted they are by the unhoused man on the corner… we notice something feels a little off. We go back to the farmstand and they’re not there. After a few questions we find out their presence had been court mandated. And it was “better than picking up someone else’s trash on the freeway.”

People frequently mistake “like action” with “like thought.”

And I find it feels like it’s not discussed enough, if ever, in the circles I move in. I find for many people, it is preferable to take like actions while never discussing their real opinions and perspectives in their personal and communal relationships. The unspoken rule seems to be “what should be done is what is socially agreed upon and what is suspected not to be agreed upon ought to be consciously or unconsciously avoided.” 

On the other hand it is incredibly common to watch conflict arise when opinions and perspectives are understood to be similar, but different courses of action are found preferable. As if the rejection of one’s actions are tantamount to a rejection of the individual. Of their reason or rightness or righteousness.

Even amongst intellectuals, there is safety in group think.

And what is not openly justified with a rational explanation, but intuition, whether a positive hunch or distrust, can be treated as foolish and chaotic. Even if if the hunch is a prediction based on evidence:

In 1994 Joycelyn Elders, surgeon general, was stripped of her position, disgraced and pilloried about her personal opinions on health and wellness, because she had outspoken, progressive(at the time) beliefs that were too radical. How dare she suggest masturbation was natural and might be a part of sex education, believing that it could lead to less teen pregnancy, economic empowerment for women, and slow the spread of STDs? Americans were not ready for that level of sex positivity. And we still suffer today because of it. As recently as 2020 I have watched a number of a confidant’s friendships end over their caution about the covid vaccine, even though the person in question was neither against vaccines nor ignoring covid regulations. Their faith in their fellow Americans was shaken by the zealous scientism of people hoping that their trust in modern technology would bring them back to a pre-covid world. And when it didn’t, blaming “those people” who “just couldn’t listen to reason” and “do what they were told” was treated as the problem. Acting as if the issue wasn’t much more complex and the reality was that vaccine or not, unless people were of the same mind, and willing to work together, zero covid wasn’t going to happen anyway. But even as partisan rhetoric, and conspiracy abounded in the US, communally the population of New Zealand in 2020 actually managed to be covid free for a time, while Americans were dying in droves and calling the disease a hoax. What happened in New Zealand was a reflection of what humanity is capable of when like action and like thought combine. Unity instead of division.

And even then, it’s still more complex.

Sometimes, when someone does what we do, it can be irritating. Especially when we assume that they’re not thinking for themselves or that they're trying to profit from our hard work. Perhaps it comes from hypocrisy or self hatred, which is a topic for another day. But when we assume imitation is because they like, admire, or agree with us, imitation becomes the highest form of flattery.

Imitation is primal. It’s how babies learn. And cooperation is cohesion. To be like, creates kinship. Kinship creates legacy, for better or for worse.

Similarly, when someone doesn’t do what we do… When they refuse our guidance or reject our ways, it can feel like an attack on our reasoning, identity, or even our validity. We can over identify with our actions and thoughts, surely. But we can also become dependent on agreement, requiring acceptance or validation, lest we face distress. But when we are secure in ourselves, the differences can be something to marvel at and in many cases benefit from.

Our relationship to these presumptions is that they shortcut needing to vet every individual directly. But this leads to its own problems. We don't just confuse like action for like thought. We mistake community with agreement.

I said earlier that a seemingly unspoken rule of social harmony is, “What should be done is what is socially agreed upon and what is suspected not to be agreed upon ought to be consciously or unconsciously avoided.”

And I have a theory as to why this happens.

Many of us have an unconscious competence in the space of submission and agreeability. Whether it came from an authoritarian guardian or the institutions to which we are beholden and subject, it can easily be internalized that hiding or ignoring differences potentially benefits the common good. If we don’t need to know each other’s politics to get our shelter built, it doesn’t really make sense to give ourselves reasons to distrust each other or to not cooperate. If we all love the same person, it does not make sense to focus on our differences and ruin the experience of togetherness on their birthday. It’s imprudent to talk about religion and politics not because people don’t want to know what others believe or care about their truths… but because when the conversation begins, questions of one’s identity are involved. The authorities to which they may submit their thinking to are called into question, and it is possible that even a casual interaction will end with an inadvertent, or intentional attack on the identity of a person. Sure people are people, and not their religion or political party(over-identify as they may) but the state of online discourse and news media couldn’t be what they are if it couldn’t FEEL that way. 

If a christian living in Ohio can feel persecuted because christianity is outlawed in foreign countries, an inability to sympathize or empathize can derail an otherwise productive interaction. Sure, a christian may be of a protected class, where you are, from your perspective. But that’s not their perspective, no matter how out of touch it is with your own perception of reality. Beneath their existential dread is the same humanity any person concerned for themselves and people like them is likely to express. Rejecting that they are persecuted because others who they identify with have been persecuted, is your choice. But if you make that the crux of your argument, you’re engaged in whataboutism. Regardless of your feelings about christianity, if you replace that identity in with some other demographic, it becomes pretty clear. People who identify with a demographic can feel that the capacity to deny the reality of their potential persecution somewhere in the world is indicative of a lack of concern with their safety and wellbeing. Replace christians with lgbtq, ukranians, jews, palestinians, uighurs, armenians, trans people.

The lines we draw about who deserves empathy create tribal lines of us and them, which derail our capacity for unity. There is one human race. (Even if there wasn’t, our mistreatment of life reflects poorly on our capacity to wield power, and illuminates our own potential for callous and abusive behavior. It does not reflect the potential or quality of the exploited beings.)  This practice of submitting to our tribes decrease of which people and things are deserving of platforms and aid is an example of the divisive nature of our shortcutting and submissiveness and agreeability. Activists, changemakers, and revolutionaries must answer to higher or deeper authorities than group think.

These positive and negative attributes that we give people based on our understandings of self and our like actions affect us at every level. I’m sure sociology has a sophisticated term for the positive prejudice of assuming likeness.

Love Fantasy

Forgive me. This one is MUCH longer than usual. The last post I wrote was dedicated to Sydney. I like this practice. This one is dedicated to Nella, because without her I probably wouldn’t have felt so compelled to finish and publish. I’d also like to thank Tiffany and Farnaz, for listening to the first few drafts of this.

I’d like to introduce you to a concept I call the "Love Fantasy."

What is a love fantasy?

A love fantasy is an experience of love that we would enjoy but that is not happening in this current moment. Anything that is not present to the senses lives in our imagination. What is imagined is a fantasy. What is remembered is a fantasy. This is because it is an abstraction of the phenomenon as it occurred into human perception, which is then experienced as a recollection. Even discussing our interpretations of the present moment lives as an abstraction of that moment into speech.

According to our most modern understandings, time itself, and therefore the "present moment," are illusions.

Even as we comment on them, they are already slipping away or exist not as realities but predictions that may or may not come to fruition, no matter how seemingly inevitable.

We can only truly hold space for what is happening and what can happen when we detach from needing external realities to fit our personal perceptions. We can only get to know someone when we don’t project onto them. We can only discover how much healing and care someone is capable of bringing when we are not ruled by the fear of the pain our vulnerability might lead to.

And this openness is one of the greatest gifts we can give to others: true intimacy. To let them discover the beauty of honest connection with us. Of knowing us. But in other ways as well. To hear them not just as we experience them but as they would like to be experienced or need to be experienced. To hear not simply, “I want you to do what I want” when a lover makes a request of us, but to recognize that "you’re the person I want to share this with" is a message they may be failing to properly convey.

"I feel safe to share this part of me with you."

"I revel in our connection."

Sometimes they simply do not have the language, but the meaning could come alive in the actions they communicate to you with, when you learn the language they are speaking.

In mature relationships, it is not simply about getting what one wants but finding successful ways of communicating the beauty of what happens inside of ourselves when we witness the other.

Lovers hopefully create space for each other’s love fantasies to become rich lived experiences and a cultivation of mutual joy. Ideally, some might even have the ability to mutually create love fantasies together that blossom because of the connection they have with each other. Manifesting love fantasies that exist BECAUSE they choose to show up together, not just for the other.

How compatible our personal fantasies are with the reality of the other is important.

It determines the level of intention that must go into actualizing a fantasy. Whether that’s a massage after dinner while watching a film, time in the garden where one tends to flowers as the other paints, or an illicit, all-night, poolside lovemaking session staring at moonlight breaking on the surface of the water in Mykonos. The abilities and limitations of each individual and the environment determine what can and does happen when attempts to make the fantasies realities occur. Do I have working hands and a movie to watch after dinner? Do we have a garden to engage our hobbies in and the materials and time to do this together? Can I plot the course of the moon such that on vacation in Greece there is a sneaky spot to have sex while the moon is correctly positioned over water during the night?

—

"If they wanted to, they would."

I love this saying–... because it’s hilariously reductive. When you want to, do you? Do you wear your heart on your sleeve, or do you hide it in a box? Have you been conditioned to take appropriate actions at appropriate times? And what’s appropriate when you’re not sure what the rules are?

As an adult, the most mature answer is probably "discuss our boundaries and establish some agreements, making sure we have space to adapt as life changes." But based on the grievances of so many, this isn’t the case for them.

Not when it matters.

And certainly not frequently enough to make this a waste of time to write.

Beyond that, social media and pop culture tend to err on the side of avoiding vulnerability and "simping." But if you take the risk, vulnerability shows you what this person does when you give them an opportunity for intimacy. If you have the maturity to move as gradually as allows you confidence in your assessments, even if it doesn’t work out, you have so much more capacity for clarity.

And speaking of clarity:

It seems to be part of the current zeitgeist, but we’re starting to recognize and discuss how people often don’t mean the same thing when they use the word “love.”

Some people are saying, "I would do anything for you," and of course, they mean "within reason." Others are literally expressing that they might commit murder or plead guilty to protect you if you were the one to do it. They would literally do anything for you, regardless of the ethics. Perhaps misguided sometimes, but powerful in its own way. Some mean that they will do whatever they believe is right for you. Some of them mean that they couldn’t imagine what is right for you is not right for them. Perhaps codependently. Perhaps because they have faith that the only way to love you is to absolutely accept you as you are, even if that means letting you go.

Forget not meaning the same thing for a moment and consider: Some may not even really understand what they’re saying when they suggest that they love someone.

Do they love how that person makes them feel?

Do they find some heretofore unfelt peace that they did not know they could feel before they met the focus of their affections?

Or maybe it’s excitement and passion they haven’t felt in years or have never felt before?

Perhaps it’s something that can’t even be articulated.

Maybe for  now obvious reasons, I like to suggest that before people run around looking for others to fulfill our need and desire for love, it’s important to be open to realizing we don’t and maybe cannot know everything we need to know about love. And maybe that infinite potential for discovery of ourselves, our lovers, and our relationships as they grow and change is beautiful. That maybe this problem of not having or getting what we want is not a punishment for some failing… but an invitation to a new kind of greatness only courageously loving ourselves and others can bring.

I’m blessed to be at a point in my life where more often than not, I do not feel bereft of love or connection. I’m at a point where I truly know I have beautiful love in my life, for myself and from others, even if on rare occasions I do not feel it. When I have found myself feeling disconnected from that, I ask myself questions. I want to offer them to you if there’s even a remote chance that you experience deeper or more fulfilling love for even just their consideration:

What am I actually looking for, and can I confidently articulate it for another or recognize it in them? Do my actions contribute to preserving the relationships my needs are met in, or are my habits and actions self-destructive?

Am I looking to give love, or am I looking to receive love? Am I comfortable with the realities that come with actually getting what I think I want?

Do I know how to experience love in solitude or with distance? Am I at risk of acting/operating from a place of desperation?

Do I know what I want for myself (is it even a question of love)? Will I take steps to experience it, or am I resigned to helplessness?

Considering the love landscape of my life, am I ok with my realities and my limitations?

Do I trust and understand how my partner (if I have one) perceives themselves through these same questions?

Of course, one doesn’t need to have answers to any of those questions.

Life doesn’t force us to be considerate of ourselves or others. And some people will be rewarded or punished for that on communal or cosmic levels, and we have to be ok with that for them, or torment ourselves over the concept of fairness–... which is a topic for another time…

But what are we committing to, or asking others to commit to, if we don’t have the capacity to communicate clearly with the people we are intimate with, whether it’s physically, emotionally, or spiritually? Whether this is a friend, lover, or relative? Trying to get a father to be the dad one needed and not simply the provider they were obligated to be(some failing this as well) has led to many broken hearts.

It’s helpful to stop and evaluate the relationships we have and the way we are going about making sure that we are capable of experiencing mutual fulfillment, that we are engaging with affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and compassion. Do we understand our own internal experiences? Do we have unresolved trauma? Do we have mental or emotional conditions that cause us not to act in our own best interest? Are we reaping the fruits of spiritual or therapeutic practices and unsure how to embrace that change? Are we trying to protect our inner peace from others or to force them to have that experience? Are we willing to wait for the ones who share our values, or are we engaging in snobbery because we’re “better” than those people?

I know I ask a lot of questions. And I’m not sorry about it. The deep motivation of my inner child is curiosity. I refuse to disconnect from that, and it serves me well. I do it for every child whose parents, school, or community is in the process of dissuading them from cultivating it. We don’t have an obligation to “know” who we are. In many ways, we can’t. But it’s a beautiful gift to discover who we might be. And if you take time to sit with your own questions, you’ll probably live a life full of serendipitous discoveries. So if you’re out of practice, I offer you mine.

Some of mine are clearly not for you, but for some of them, I can’t help but believe life put me through something just so you might have the chance to see it or share it with the person who needs it.

So, quite unapologetically, here are still more questions.

This next set of questions helps me personally when I am trying to figure out if I’m loving "unconditionally," by which I mean I feel entitled to figure out what a loving action honestly looks like from my perspective, but I’m not unduly attached to the outcome. I am entitled to my actions, but not their fruits. I remind myself of this whenever I slip into being tempted to allow myself attachment to outcomes that might rob me of joy or peace if things don’t go how I’d hope:

Am I looking to give love, or to receive it?

Am I looking to give AS they wish to receive? Do I expect gratitude and why? Were their wishes/preferences/needs considered?

Am I looking to receive their truth? Is their truth capable of being received as a kind of gift (from them or life), or do I expect/demand deceptions that fulfill my desires/needs without respect to their own other’s truths or reality?

This is about to get a little woo... but bear with me.

Some of us think our love language is words of affirmation, but actually, it’s quality time with conversation. In a relationship fraught with struggles, we sometimes discover that honest communication becomes difficult... And then even the idea of trying to communicate becomes exhausting.

Communicating costs energy. Deception costs even more. And maintaining deceptions creates perpetual stress. It activates the sympathetic nervous system and causes us to produce more cortisol. We do not owe anyone communication, truthful or deceptive. We really don’t owe anyone anything. Not truly. But if we want to have healthful experiences of ourselves and others, we must choose truthfulness. People naturally do what makes sense to them, and lying and deception are what make sense when it’s believed the value of the lie is worth the cost and the risk. When we delude ourselves and buy into falsities, we don’t just erode our integrity, but our quality of life. And to make it less taxing, we likely subconsciously prime ourselves to create and maintain connections that contribute to making that easier.

The reason this is going to sound a little woo is that I don’t have irrefutable evidence for it. It’s intuitive. But in the way that I realized that if I want to be an honest person, I have to make sure I don’t deceive myself… I noticed that if I am honest with life, life is honest with me. When I tell myself that I want to be joyful, I become aware of the things in my life that don’t bring me joy... And then I have to take responsibility for dealing with them. And so when we are in relationships where we feel like we can’t tell the truth or are being deceived, not addressing it directly is corrosive to the foundation if that foundation has anything to do with trust.

If you have ever witnessed or been party to a codependent relationship, with a parent perhaps, you likely understand. Walking on eggshells can be exhausting because of how much extra processing one has to do. This can become incredibly toxic to our nervous system and bleed into other areas of life. The erosion of boundaries in one place can cause us subconsciously to prime ourselves to accept it in other places... or even to build elements of our existence around maintaining the connection at unreasonable costs... becoming what they want and need from you, to survive. We may, on a conscious level, not realize we’re doing this because fear is fear. And fear originated to keep living beings alive. It is primal and base. But it is necessary and beautiful. When shameful behavior could lead to exile, which could be a death sentence, it was of deathly importance to know the rules and be accepted. Now we might focus on acceptance at all costs as if our life depends on it, even when it most certainly doesn’t. This is the experience of having unconditional relationships with conditional love (where love might be care or provision). An example would be a thought like, “she’s always going to be my mother, so she has to be part of my life whether or not it’s healthy for either of us.”

But

Consider that love is unconditional.

That all “relationship” in and of itself is conditional. Even being strangers is a conditional relationship. Consider that if love could exist unconditionally for any one thing in your heart, then in order for that to be true, all things must be loved unconditionally.

If this isn’t immediately clear, or even something you can accept, that’s ok. It’s a thing that some people seem to have been born knowing, some believe after a visit to a shaman, and honestly– some find on drugs, which are sometimes bad, m’kay? Some find it between the sheets or in the eyes of a child. Some find it meditating or in a therapist’s chair.

And some never find it. And that’s ok. 

But it follows a logic that requires opting into certain beliefs about the nature of reality, namely those that support that all things are unified as part of a greater thing. As all-encompassing as you can fathom. And once you get there, you likely recognize, sometimes immediately, sometimes not... that if they are, all your hatred is on some level a form of self-rejection.

And this is why discernment is key:

Recognizing that sometimes love is closeness and intimacy... and sometimes love is space for the other to grow, make their own mistakes, and learn their own lessons...

Recognizing that sometimes love is even making peace with the need for violence. Embracing, appreciating, and honoring every single thing that dies so that you can persist. That suffered at your hands so that you could learn. And trying to do better on behalf of the sacrifices they may not have willingly made. To respect what you take by being generous to everything else. And perhaps in this way life has woven into us a need for humility and grace.

I know this started with the concept of the "love fantasy,"

But the gift I hope you’ve walked away with is a fuller connection to your capacity for love as a reality.

If this helped you at all, I’d be honored if you shared it. And if you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them. I hope the questions offered find you as a timeless gift. They have sweetened, deepened, and healed the love in my life, and I hope they will forever do that for you.

Beyond Objectification: Exploring the Complexity of Sex and Humanity

I met a circus performer who wanted to create a piece about what it is to be sexualized and it reminded me of something I wrote a couple years ago. I told myself I would go back to it, and never did. So, firstly I’d like to thank Sydney, because without her, you likely might not be seeing this:

I wanted to write about sexual objectification, but I feel like I can’t really do that without talking about what sex is.

What is sex? 

“Sex is where babies come from.” 

Birds do it, bees do it,

then the bees help the plants do it. 

Sex is the genesis of complex life. It turns a uterus into the portal through which new consciousness arises. It allows two cells, under the correct circumstances and consequence cascade, to become many millions of cells, unified into a series of singular experiences. 

Nurtured appropriately, they become many trillions of cells that will consume other life and generate new experiences that even more life may witness. And these trillions of cells with their specialized roles will form a body - a body working in unison to create an experience so complex that it is likely impossible to fully understand. And that body will reconstitute the matter of this earth into the forms and fuels that will allow an awareness to turn energies and frequencies into pleasure, pain, and concepts of beauty. These forms can turn light to art, chemicals to tastes and smells, and vibrations to heat, sound, and sensation. We may hear music, and maybe we will dance. It will turn our witnessing into fear, anger, and love. We will meet strangers one day, perhaps after thousands of days have passed, and we will decide we don’t want to face the days to come without them. Or perhaps we will be the reason that they do not see another.

Sex drives human existence. We persist because things procreate. Because they have fucked and they will continue to do so. And as time has passed, our awareness around sex has shifted. As our understanding of what it is to be human changes, so too do our attitudes towards sex.

If we believe that a god cares about marriage, we may feel extreme shame and guilt over acting on sexual desires... or even simply having them. Homosexuality occurs in nature but, because of religious law, is punishable by imprisonment or death in some places. Some might have social or political motivations for sexual activity. For one wave of feminism, promiscuity and sex positivity were a symbol of liberation and rebellion. For some, it’s an economic strategy to be selected, whether by one person or by many. Whether an unwed woman from certain societies or eras needs to make a good match or a sex worker needs clients. For some, it’s experienced as essential to bonding. For others, it’s seen as a necessary evil. Still, there are the abstinent and celibate who might find emotional desolation or spiritual connection without sex. There are nuances to the conscious and unconscious understandings of what sex is and can be, for at least as many people as there are to have them.

So where does objectification come in?

One version of objectification invokes how a person really understands anything.

Objectification used to mean concretizing the abstract. Now it also means degrading someone or something’s purpose to its utility. This is problematic in the sense that this word creates loaded language. Humans understand the world through constructs. Constructs are a form of objectification. We simplify things in order to know how to interact with them.

Human constructs are immensely complex as well as complicated. Complex in the sense that there are many interconnected parts. Complicated in the sense that how each part actually relates to the others requires not just information but intuition to grasp. The phenomena in question, the observers of it, their interpretations of it... arguments for or against its very existence and the consequences of interacting with the phenomenon all play a part. How valuable a construct is in helping us understand or engage with the actual reality we are witnessing usually determines its longevity.

(It’s one thing to recognize colors; it’s another to create art that speaks to others’ spirits like it’s your job. It’s one thing to love the art you make, and another entirely to have it critiqued by people whose opinions are respected that happen to hate your guts. It’s one thing to tell someone what a color is scientifically, it’s another to teach a course on how to use it to trick the eye into seeing wondrous things to people who did not think they could be artists.) Hopefully the metaphor is not too extended.

The reason objectification is so fraught and perilous when it comes to social interactions is that we take it for granted. Someone is paid to wait on you at the restaurant. Someone is paid to do your nails at the salon. Their worth is treated as the quality of their service, but we hopefully recognize it’s so much more. Their character, care, integrity, and patience make it so that our experiences can leave us feeling like a business is our friend, or that we are nothing but a paycheck. The objectification goes both ways… and frequently if not always, it’s harmful. No matter what, something is lost.

When we lived in tribes and villages, every human wore multiple hats. We couldn’t see someone as just a shitty plumber or a rude waitress. They hunted with someone we knew. They helped tend the children. They built a barn or made the best elk jerky. The service industry was not an industry. We as communities served each other. And as the spirit of this dies, we wound our humanity.

To objectify a person is to degrade them, from a whole human at best, and from a spiritual being whom the divine witnesses you through at worst. Even if you’re not spiritual, it still sucks.

And if you don’t have to think about it frequently, you might be the one doing it. To engage with others as though the experience doesn’t matter. To treat them as replaceable, usable. To treat them as property. To act as though they are allowed to or deserve to be used, abused, or violated. In the western world, this is most intensely done to women and people of color, and media and socialization can prime children for it to happen before they’re even grown. Objectification happens when you feel like you are excused from respecting their humanity.

When we talk about sexual objectification, we’re talking about engaging in this way to make their existence, identity, and value equal to their capacity to be consumed for sexual gratification.

We’re talking about language: “she’s for the streets” “you can’t turn a hoe into a housewife.”

 We’re talking about culture. Virginity and innocence. Statistics of sex crimes. 

We’re talking about the male gaze and the corresponding female vigilance.

It’s not enough that women are portrayed as consumable; they also have to construct their path through life in relation to how they are perceived sexually. To have a powerful sense of sexuality too early can be dangerous when young women are seen as a status symbol and predatory masculinity is celebrated. To be too attractive in the workplace can hinder your successes, and to be a mother or to have the potential can limit your opportunities.

Sexuality is a dimension of existence. Before in vitro fertilization, each individual only came into existence if sex happened. Sex is potentially beautiful. The desire someone can feel for another person is powerful. It can upend one’s entire existence. The potential for love and attraction to create literal life is magnificent. When the consequences of intimacy with another person are that bits of what make them, them, and you, you, come together to find their own potential for life and love and suffering and joy, that’s its own kind of magic. You do not know what you will get. You do not know what they will do. And until you’ve met the product of that connection, you do not know how profoundly it will affect you, if you let it.

To sexualize someone is to recognize them as a sexual being. To acknowledge sex as one of their attributes or to make them “sexy.” I apparently get sexualized frequently. I don’t always know how or why, but people frequently read my existence as sexual. It might be how I dance or my devotion to my body. It might be the freedom with which I can talk about sex. It might honestly just be my skin color. Even when I was doing youth theater (I was 18+ at the time), directors would talk to me about my sex appeal, and I would not understand what they meant or what they wanted from me on stage. For me, in the earlier parts of my life, overt sexuality was a power women had. Men were just attractive or not based on the murky preferences of the female psyche or how well they fit male power fantasies, which afforded them the confidence to approach and be approached. Black people are objectified constantly, and since rumor has it we have big dicks, it only occurred to me recently that there are a number of people who probably had that specific sexual curiosity about me based on this stereotype alone. I knew from growing up around white men that it wasn’t uncommon or even taboo for them to sexualize black women when women couldn’t hear, or even to casually joke about my body or Asian men and women’s bodies.

As a person who, for a long time, identified as demisexual, I’ve personally had an experience of discovering what it is to sexualize someone only after getting to know them. To see them as beautiful in a variety of ways that simply doesn’t include sexual attractiveness. For the things they’ve chosen. The loves they’ve cultivated. For the passions of their life that have come and gone. For their unique experience of common things. For their uncommon experiences that they don’t realize are unique. For the way that they laugh or dance. For how open their hearts are or how they guard what is vulnerable or what they love. For me to discover them as a sexual being is a celebration of all of that and more. And it is also a celebration of the body they’ve brought all of this to me with. It can genuinely become a holy experience to see someone as sexual. To be invited to intimacy with them. And to offer it back. And how congruent or disjointed that experience of their pleasure can be is also delightful. People who are dominant in one place and not the other. Playful in the bedroom but not in life. Good kissers. Bad kissers. The cautious and the confident. People who have one way of being in the bedroom and people who wear a million faces. And to recognize that the experience they can have with me is only one of the many they could have. That I can’t know the full potential of our own connection. And that I could never truly know them as anyone else, no matter how much I would love to step outside myself and meet them as someone else and explore them in different ways. Sexually or not. I will never be their sister or the mother of their child. I cannot be their grandfather or their childhood friend who has never given up on them. I can only be so many people’s friend in a truly intimate way.

And honestly for me, sexuality is only one dimension of existence. And it’s one I’m perfectly happy never to explore with someone no matter how magnificent they are. Being given sexual access is a thing to honor. Because even if the participants don’t consciously experience it this way, scientists have discovered that when a lover connects with us sexually, it tells us that things are ok. That we are accepted as we are. And if we fail to communicate in so many ways over so many topics, touch can say for us what words cannot.

Of course, that power is misused... but that’s a topic for another day.

For me, finding the nonsexual connection that says, “I unconditionally accept you, as you appear in each moment,” is the most important part of constructing any intimate relationship. It may be because I was celibate for a time and instinctively felt I must find some other way of holding the space and intimacy of sex if I wasn’t going to have romantic love as a part of my life, but still felt a deep desire to connect with others.

We frequently destroy the beauty of sexuality with objectification. In a western world where capital is king and relationships themselves can be reduced to another set of transactions, sexualization is frequently objectification. In a world spun by money, anyone who exists is likely going to be reduced to their monetary worth.

And for a woman, in a world where across the board they earn less for the same work a man does, what are we telling them about their worth?

When the only arenas where women are expected to earn more than men are fashion modeling and sex work, what are we telling women about their worth?

And when the rules of society rob a woman of her value for how sexually promiscuous she is perceived to be, while a man’s promiscuity in similar ways could be socially rewarded, what are we telling our children about equity? About what it means to respect themselves and each other? About who they are allowed to be?

And when we defend the status quo of sexual objectification, what are we telling our daughters and our sons? It’s clearly not that they are perfectly worthy of love the way that they are. And not that they all deserve to be respected equally for how they embody their truths, make their own mistakes, and grow into who it lights up their soul to be.

We are trauma bonded with society if we allow it to erode our sense of self-worth as a function of the system. If we say that it is ok for society to treat any person as an object, we teach ourselves and our children to accept this treatment if those circumstances ever come about in their lives. (This is actually a question of justice, but that’ll be for a different time).

So even with all the social complexity layered into our experiences of sexuality, we are still animals. Conditioned and instinctual.

For animals and plants out in nature, there can be clear seasonal and environmental triggers that dictate when reproduction happens. It’s an automatic process. And to be sexually successful is to be successful. 

That is what success is.

To be healthy enough to do it and to be attractive or seductive enough to mate. To have enough resources for the offspring to mature.

That’s what success is.

For some, it’s so cut and dry, sex is a death sentence. The male antechinus, some octopuses, some spiders, and many praying mantises die shortly after mating. For at least female ferrets, a lack of sex is a death sentence. For male lions, if they cannot find a pride, they live alone or die fighting to get or keep one.

We may think of ourselves as more evolved. We think our behaviors are less “automatic.” But experiencing your own humanity and allowing yourself to be programmed and conditioned not to think, and not to imbue others with the fullness of their humanity at every chance you get is an argument against that. To degrade another human to protect, improve, or maintain your social status is an argument against that idea. To treat other beings as objects, outside of the context of mutually consensual play is an argument against that. I can’t think of another species on this planet that can be developmentally traumatized by seeing its own kind naked or mating because it’s been conditioned to be so unnatural that the most natural things are aberrant. We do not just pay with money, but with time and experiences. With our psyches. We make endless exchanges. We pay not to see trash. We pay to hide death. We’ve made objectification business as usual and intimacy transactional. And we pay the prices for all these purchases with the fullness of our humanity.

And if you are dissatisfied with the experience, what you’re getting probably isn’t worth the cost.

–

If this spoke to you, I’d love for you to leave a comment. If you think this would speak to someone else, share it. If this helps you say something you could not put words to, I am blessed to be of service.

–

And if you are Sydney Billings, thank you for reminding me to take the time to say all of this.

–

I wrote this for every woman I’ve ever known. For my sisters. For every daughter I haven’t had. For every woman whose hands have ever felt forced where love and sex is concerned. That sexism and objectification are the standards that they must accept. I’m sorry for all the men in your life that didn’t have the courage to stand up for you when you needed them. For the ones who simply don’t care. For the ones who believe this is the proper order of the world. The ones that the double standards are dogma for.

I am sorry for every time you have had to fear that what you are won’t matter in the face of your capacity to be objectified. For everyone who has ever been trafficked or abused. For everyone who lost their job or friends or family because of sex positivity or youthful exuberance a man would never be punished for.  I’m sorry that any of you have lived a life where the fullness of what each person is, ends up discarded for what can be used, or what is convenient. I am sorry that I can’t snap my fingers and fix the ills of society. You deserve to be seen not just as whole but divine. And I think the greatest sin I will ever commit is failing to honor that.

How Can I Trust You?

49 “She is good to people who are good. She is also good to people who aren’t good. This is true goodness. She trusts people who are trustworthy. She trusts people who aren’t trustworthy. This is true trust.”

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

How can I trust you?

Trust is a funny thing.

Trust is inextricably linked to personal truths.

Some of us don’t recognize that truths are personal. Even if we believe we know the "objective" truth with deep conviction, the reality is that this truth is a personal interpretation of a personal perspective on a concept or phenomenon.

And that perspective might change.

If you think you’re a relatively consistent person and that your views on things likely won’t change, consider this:

Have you ever met someone who used to be a devout believer but is now full of doubts? (Gnostic Theist - Pure Agnostic) Or who started as an atheist and then became a devout believer? (Gnostic Atheist - Gnostic Theist)

If we were to ask them at either point why they believe what they believe, they would have a distinctly different answer than they would have at the other point in their journey. You might even be that person if you ever believed in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

Somehow, more or different information changed their sense of what may have been an absolute truth and fundamental to their understanding of the structure of reality.

They are arguably the same person, but from moment to moment, their truth shifts.

They may not be tomorrow the person that made you that promise today. And perhaps their vow to harm you will go unfulfilled... Or the promise to help you. And you may or may not carry the effects of this broken promise with you. Whether it gave you grace or grief.

Instead of fooling myself into believing that I am not capable of anything another human is capable of, in terms of actions or belief, I made peace very early in life with the fact that I simply have not encountered the circumstances that would lead to me taking an action or adopting a belief. I discover what would make violence and dishonesty tempting. I make peace with the reality that the kind of patterns I cultivate are responsible for what I do or don’t do. I’m not a murderer or martyr today, but do I know what I would kill or die for?

When I tell myself what my convictions are, do I live into them? Appreciating the chance life has given me to honor the values I claim I wish to uphold. Or do I wither in the face of challenge, much less difficulty or inconvenience?

If I allow myself to perpetually make my choices based on convenience, who will I become when the immoral action is convenient? If I do not practice discipline, where will it come from when I need it?

If I am unwilling to answer these kinds of questions, what am I really telling myself? Is it that I don’t want or cannot handle the responsibility of self-actualization? That I don’t actually want to feel culpable, if I get caught up in the role of the abuser or oppressor? That I don’t want to take responsibility for my agency in avoiding/overcoming/accepting helplessness or victimhood? That I am somehow better than others, when I find myself in the circumstance of being the hero... not because I faced my weaknesses or ignorance, but because I am a noble soul destined for greatness?

If I reflect on who I’ve been, what does it say about who I’m taking responsibility for becoming?

So in light of that:

What does it mean to trust?

Where does my faith come from when I trust? The strength of my convictions? Hope? Fear? Whose integrity galvanizes mine? Corrodes it?

If you “trust” someone, have you considered what you’re actually saying about your relationship to them, your own perspectives, and reality?

• You might actually be expressing that you believe they are afraid of the consequences of breaking trust with you. (a punitive incentive)

• You might actually be expressing that you believe they want to honor whatever leads them to build trust with you. (an equanimous/reciprocal experience)

• You might also be actually expressing that you are fully accepting of whatever actions they take, regardless of if they are going to break trust with you, because you “trust the process.” (transcendent trust in reality itself)

People can flow through these experiences of trust and trustworthiness. Experiencing different versions in different aspects of relationships or even just different circumstances at different times of day. Are we cultivating transcendent trust, or do we stumble into it when high on divinity or drugs? Of course this is general and non-comprehensive, as anything that I write will be.

No model is ever the thing itself.

I started by asking how can I trust you? But I suppose we’ve arrived somewhere else:

How do I trust myself? Is my trust a shackle, a gift, or even divinity honored?

When I am afraid to trust, what am I really afraid of?

Love As a Fire

Loving people correctly is like tending a tiny fire in their heart. We all have these little fires to tend. However, if we tend them incorrectly, they can be smothered by too much fuel or put out by too much wind. Neglected, they can be choked by their own ashes or burn through all their fuel.

We can share our fires with others. By learning to tend our own fire, we can teach others how to tend it, too.

We can even help them with their own. For those of us who have had to restart the fire when it has been put out, we have the ability to share the methods of how we did that with those who are experiencing it for the first time. For those who have lived life primarily without this fire, even if we have as well, we can love them from the place of having that fire built. It may be tempting to put ours out to feel accepted or to dim its light to belong, but that temptation is worth resisting.

Then there are those who want to love us and tend to our fires. If someone wants to tend your fire, there is a risk that they will do it wrong. In order not to hurt their feelings, you might put in extra work to pretend that's not the case. However, each mistake is a potential teaching moment. Few people enjoy being shamed for doing something incorrectly or ineffectively, but many people love to learn to do something properly and even excel at it. Hiding the truth denies them the opportunity to grow as someone who loves you, and it denies you the opportunity to grow in the strength of vulnerability. Hiding the truth robs both parties of opportunities to witness each other's character.

Telling someone you love them in a love language they understand and accept tends the fire. Telling someone you love them in a way that truly resonates fuels that fire. Loving them through your actions, without feeling entitled to the fruits of those actions, allows love to become a prayer. Loving without entitlement to outcomes is a practice of unconditional love. If you can do this, the love you give becomes miraculous. It lives beyond transactional ways of meeting your needs through energy exchanges and exists as an expression of your own divinity. It is a sacred trust in being something and someone that life is happening for, not to. It is the capacity to take action because it feels right to you, not because you are compelling reality to produce a certain result for you.

It's not to say that any one way of loving is better than another or that one is right and the other is wrong. For those who cannot consciously feel safe with intimacy, love is anxiety-inducing and dangerous. It does not feel rewarding to share your light or your fire. And if you do not have the means to easily reignite it, or to tend to it when it is weak, or someone to turn to—people to safely and happily turn to—when you do not know what it needs, then why should you ever leave it in the care of someone who you cannot verify will care for it well? It is selfish of others to demand you do as they do when they have never experienced a similar precariousness.

To those who have lived a life where risks were worth taking because the community was full of people to tend their fire, and resources for feeding and starting it were plentiful—those who could even be a little careless with the fires of others because everyone would clearly be okay unless something catastrophic happened—how could they not be careless? Their privilege was to make mistakes repeatedly, without even having to learn from them. From their perspective, those mistakes are their birthright and not even mistakes at all, perhaps. If anyone has ever told you to “trust the process” you know that means that it’s ok to fail, and to make mistakes. To learn experientially.

When all of these different experiences meet, it is easy to reject that which is not like us due to the difficulty, discomfort, or pain proximity causes. Things that may seem like care to one could be an act of aggression or betrayal to another. Some incessantly tease out of love where others decidedly only have the ability to mock. And how we interpret or misinterpret intentions makes all the difference.

Let’s start with love as seeing the worthiness of a thing to experience beneficence, like a parent to a child. This, consciously or not, is the first love one is capable of succeeding or failing to experience personally. And whether it is experienced or not deeply affects one's capacity to develop healthy, life-affirming relationships with aspects of oneself, community, and environment. It becomes easier to see why one projects the worthiness of beneficence onto that which is like them if they have learned to believe they are worthy of love. It is also easier to see how many things can go awry when that belief in one's own foundational experience of worthiness of beneficence and grace is missing or conditional.

Reparenting Myself: Rebirth of the Blog

Several years ago I started the work of learning to reparent myself. It evolved into learning to actively love and adore myself like I was a precious baby life had gifted me. Bleh. But also, good on me. I’m dope.

You see, for a long time, I really just tolerated myself.

I wasn’t particularly mean or anything. And that seemed to be good enough. But then I would look at my life and wonder why it seemed like my enjoyment of my own existence left something to be desired. That didn’t seem to be the case for everyone, but it was a common experience. I just sought enjoyment and elevation primarily through connecting with experiences and spirituality, rather than “loving” myself. I couldn’t “love” me, yet it didn’t seem like a problem, because in the model I was given, I didn’t have to… 

or perhaps I wasn’t supposed to.

I could love others or I could love the god in them, but to love myself was to have tall poppy syndrome or something of that nature. And actually, I started to notice how accepting the love I was given was actually something I myself wasn’t really doing.

I would appreciate the sentiment, but I would often respond with self-deprecation or dismissal without realizing that it could be experienced as a rejection of the love I was offered. 

Somehow I was to love others as God loved them… 

but I understood that I was not to love myself as god loved me. I was to have my goodness validated not by my experience of it, but by what other individuals offered me when exposed to it. Yet I was also to be unconcerned with whether or not I was being perceived as good. This is all quite convoluted, but the most important take away was that I was expecting others to accept love in a way that I, in practice, did not. Fully, deeply, and without rebuttal.

Not to say that I was demanding people accept the love I offer… But I was confused, perhaps because the idea that love is what people want resonated with me.. but in practice I couldn’t understand why so many of us rejected it or engaged dysfunctionally when presented with instances of its expression.

It was sometimes strange to notice how frequently it was hard for people to accept the idea that I or anyone else loved them(perhaps without a condition that they could understand or validate). It was also interesting to note that in this semi-christian environment many of us struggled with loving ourselves simply because we existed to be unconditionally loved by the divine(without some condition of validation, except that we indeed existed in the first place). It varied from person to person, but when I noticed commonalities between the thought patterns of myself and those who seemed to reject love I was in fact, faced my own hypocrisy. How could I expect people to accept love when I didn’t?

So.. I decided I would figure it out for all our sakes.

to be continued…

The Purpose of Art is Washing the Dust of Daily Life Off of Our Souls

First things first:

Everything is love.

You are free.

-

So I’m in Europe right now. People keep asking me why I’m here and what I’m doing and the answer has become easier to give, even though it’s different every time. Frequently, I either say or am tempted to say:

*I’m doing stuff with my art collective

*I’m creating new connections for my poetry business

*I’m on a content creating adventure

*I’m hanging out with one of the loves/some of the loves of my life

All of these things are true, and based on the audience, I’ll pick one or some of them to talk about.  And based on their responses I may even go in depth.

But the reality is..

I actually don’t “know” what I’m doing

-

I don’t “know” anything.

The Truth with a capital “T” as in “the objective actual reality to which our human consciousnesses seem to agree we are subjected” is a thing that a single human likely cannot fathom. For example: Some of us think we “know” who we are or can figure out who we are. But the reality is that we can get attached to memories about the slivers of reality that we can perceive. We can trust and believe the details that we remember/misremember/intentionally distort/confabulate and further filter them through the lenses/media/contexts we have internalized that we are consciously allowed to use to analyze those “data points”

But as Diego so eloquently quoted from his professor last night-.. and I promise you I will promptly butcher (ha, misrememberings abound) 

“the truth is our least provably false theory about the information provided” 

and I had to add that even though that’s the standard of science and I’m sure many people could accept that as a definition of truth, many of us still use the much more lax “this is the most convenient theory I’ve come by, which I can accept without needing to change or challenge.”

This is not a judgment of humanity or our memories or our ways of thinking. This is an acknowledgement of that fact that human memory/conscious cognition is nothing in the face of actual reality. We are limited to what we can perceive and process and accept on a conscious level. The science is nascent but we’re working with 40 - 2000 bits per second bps on the conscious level. 2 Mbps is watching a 480p youtube video without buffering or downloading 1Gb in an hour. That could be a lot or a little or meaningless, based on your understanding of computing and your own brain. To put it in perspective though

The subconscious mind is theorized to process 200 million to 400 billion bps. 400 Gbps as the upper limit of what your brain can process is effectively the equivalent of 40 hours of 1080p video that your body receives every second.

If we put the lowest estimate of the conscious mind next to the highest estimate of the subconscious mind we would end up with our conscious experience being 0.0000000001% of our existence… further limited by the filters of our fallibility, selectiveness, and sleep. 😴

given how much we take in and how we structure reality based on the sense we can make of the stories our left brain creates/recalls… Actual reality happens to be no match for the mind either.

We will continue to believe what we are capable of believing until something unravels the foundations of the beliefs.

And the foundations of those beliefs run deep. And they were built at one of our most malleable and vulnerable points: Childhood.

Ex. Play: Peek-a-boo “Mama sometimes disappears, seemingly not forever. She is happy to see me when she returns. This can be fun.” (Object Permanence) Age 1

Ex. Change: Mother starts taking trips for work “Sometimes people disappear, and I do not know when or if they will come back. I know they still exist, but they are not here with me/for me. It hurts.” (separation anxiety) Age 4

Ex. Life events: Mother starts a new relationship with a partner in a different city “Mother loves new people and has a new family. They post happy pictures on social media together. She looks happier without me. This hurts even more.” (Abandonment Trauma) Age 7

These moments of creating understanding come to define how many of us process reality. But they don’t NEED to. 

I used a “mother” because many people have mother figures to connect to at these ages and how they come to understand that mother figure showing up can determine their ability to understand what is possible in their other relationships. The subconscious messaging around “mother” as the “most unconditionally loving figure in a human’s life, save a god” can create lasting consequences when one has a difficult/abusive/complex dynamic with their mother, who was most certainly a human, before she was made to discover the reality of her experience as a caregiver.

We can decide how we see. We don’t need specific others to validate it, because life itself is always in conversation with us. What is happening is so much greater than the limits of your memories or ideas. Perhaps we could all stand to be a little bit bigger than what we can “understand”

Perhaps we could all stand to allow everyone to be bigger.

-

What am I doing in Europe? I’m traveling light.

“Trauma Bonding” a response to My Culture My Rules

Note: This has been edited.*

I'm so fascinated by this. There's a part of me that read this and was like, "Yes!" This is how I feel it should work... 

And there's a part of me that read this and felt… wrong. 

Not because it's my responsibility to fix anyone on my journey. I'm actually pleased to let go of anyone after showing up as fully and as healthily as I know how in the moments I have with them. What hurts more is the collapse of relationships with those who try to convince me they have my back and that our connection is growth-oriented when our dynamic proves unhealthy or even toxic for me. 

Sometimes, I discover that the main driver of their attempts at growth is the rejection of their shadow. We fail to function together not because of their flaws, but because they're not making peace with the fullness of who they are and have been. They displace their responsibility for harm because they’re afraid of and rejecting the pain they have felt and caused.

They don't bring light to their shadow; they run from their insecurities in search of a "better" version of themselves. I can't love all of who they are because they don't love all of who they are. In fact, they hate some aspects of themselves. And they feel compelled to pretend to be someone or something else to be worthy in the eyes of others. So, understandably, acceptance threatens that paradigm. It seems that I'm invalidating the work they are or aren't doing because I accept all of them, with or without it.

This doesn't make them bad, although it does mean they likely aren't part of MY long-term journey. And that's a little sad. I love deeply and easily. It's not being rejected that hurts me when this happens, whether it's a friend or a lover. It's the sense that my inability to communicate has harmed the other person. But I make peace with the fact that in each moment, I can only do what I am capable of recognizing and choosing.

—

July 13, 2023 I'd also like to add:

Trauma bonding is not actually bonding over shared trauma, though interestingly enough in my experience, shared trauma has been a factor in some of these experiences in my own life. Trauma bonding is a clinical term for abusive cycles between two individuals that erode boundaries and establish dependency or codependency. These dynamics are most common in romantic relationships but can exist in friendships, familial relationships, and workplace dynamics.

Trauma bonding has seven distinct stages that involve:

• 1. Love bombing - The abusive party gives excessive praise and flattery. 

  (Are they simply nice and complimentary? Do they like you, or do they need you to like them?)

  2. Trust & dependency - The abusive party does whatever it takes to gain the trust and dependence of the abused party. 

  (Set boundaries and watch out for behavior that is too generous or intimate. Did you offer to hold space for them, or did they trauma dump on you and make it awkward to discuss boundaries around appropriate intimacy for the stage of the relationship you're in?)

  3. Criticism - The abusive party blames and criticizes the abused party to damage or destroy self-esteem, self-worth, and agency.

  (Watch out for people who can't seem to express their displeasure without placing the blame outside of themselves. They don't dislike your behavior; they think you behave improperly.)

  4. Gaslighting & manipulation - The abusive party gaslights and manipulates the abused party, making them doubt that the behavior is toxic, unhealthy, or even inappropriate. They may even try to convince them that it's not happening. 

  (Watch out for people who never seem to remember what they've done wrong, don't apologize, and can't handle discussing situations that don't paint them in a favorable light or feel compelled to deflect or shift blame onto you or someone else. Claiming that your behavior validates the abuse is incredibly toxic.)

  5. Addiction / Resignation - The abused party finds themselves attached or addicted to the highs of love bombing or resigned to the idea that the dynamic is what they deserve. It could be both.

  6. Loss of Self - The abused party forgets/loses their sense of self-worth (some incredibly vulnerable people start with low or even no self esteem) and their identity outside of the relationship. 

  (Check in with yourself: If you feel you cannot live or survive without someone as a part of your life, is it because of the good things they do and have done for you, or is it because of the promises they make and the way they talk to you outside of the harm and pain they inflict? Are you respected? Does your community approve of the way this person treats you only because they don't know what negatives of your relationship are really like?)

  7. Resignation & Submission - The abused party gives in to avoid conflict and please their abuser.

  (If you find yourself walking on eggshells around someone or lying to avoid the negative consequences of their foul moods, or if you're afraid of how they'll react to the truth or punish you,  these are red flags.)

How does a trauma bond begin?

1. Abuse - Emotional, physical, sexual, or psychological abuse occurs.

2. Manipulation/gaslighting - The abusing party convinces the abused to accept whatever happened as an act of love or convinces them that they deserved this treatment. (If there is shared trauma, here is frequently where our similarities make us vulnerable to forgiving transgressed boundaries or susceptible to the violence of the abusing party. They may be punishing the parts of the victim that remind them of themselves. This is context for the treatment, but not an excuse.)

3. Cycle begins - The abused individual hopes that the situation will get better, but instead, the abuse persists, evolves, and/or intensifies (e.g., transitioning from emotional to physical, from physical to sexual).

The real cruelty of trauma bonding is that it preys on one's capacity to hope, forgive, and care. Until one can establish self-love and boundaries that allow them to prevent or end the attachment and/or enmeshment that make these relationships hard to leave, they will remain vulnerable to these dynamics. If communities do not hold the abusive individuals accountable, the behaviors will persist. And if the original trauma bond comes from developmental relationships, the cycle may feel impossible to break because the individual doesn't know what healthy, supportive dynamics truly look like. It's important to teach ourselves and our loved ones to establish dynamics where vulnerability leads to healing and growth in intimacy, rather than abuse and harm.

If you need help or resources, call 800.799.SAFE (7233) if you believe your internet usage is being monitored; otherwise, visit thehotline.org.

Thanks for taking the time. If this taught you anything or you think it might help someone you love, please share it.

204 chronicles | or something

Above is a photo by My Culture My Rules. Check them out. You’re welcome.

Love Language

I just wrote a poetry book as a response to Gary Chapman’s “5 Love Languages” book.

From the reviews I’ve gotten, I think I did a pretty great job.

I wrote this as a sort of artist’s statement:

Love Language a poetic response to the concept of there being 5 love languages. I think there are mostly two kinds of people when it comes to this:

1. The person who hears about love languages and decides which ones they need to be loved in

2. The person who sees that people have different love languages and tries to figure out how to best love the people around them.

In truth it's really a venn diagram.

This book, however, is for a third kind of person. Someone who sees love languages as a foundation to build on or even leap from. It's for what awakens within those of us who expand our sense of self and our sense of love, as a practice. This is for the love that exists in the dance between dualistic and universalized consciousness. This is a book about what it is to experience fuller intimacy as an act of revelation and concealment as the divine dances in and out of our awareness. For those of us who recognize that witnessing divinity is to accept concealment and embrace revelation as the underlying truth of all the perceptions.

I’ll admit the language there gets flowery and waxes tantric in philosophy… but I have a more important admission to disclose:

I have never read this book.

Yeah. I know. Shocking.

But hear me out:

I believe that when Gary Chapman wrote about the concept of there being 5 love languages, it was meant to be so simple that anyone could benefit from the concept just by hearing it. Perhaps if you wanted his in depth take, you could go check out his work. But I don’t think he meant to try to profiteer from his perceptions about how we love.

I have to, because I essentially allude to his work being incomplete when it comes to capturing the essence of how we love. Maybe it’s much more in depth than I could ever expect from the way that it’s been summarized to me. Maybe it comes with a disclaimer that it’s one of many theories of how we love. Maybe it lauds itself as the be all and end all of texts on the subject of love.

Personally, I have no idea. But it feels a bit irresponsible to suggest that I want to take people deeper without knowing if the body of water to which I’m referring is a kiddie pool or an ocean.

If you’d like a preview of the work, contact me.

Awakened JP missed the mark and now we have things to discuss.

So @Alyssa_Neill made a post on Instagram about the male gaze and this was my response. The photo is a link, if you wanna read her comment!

I wrote this directly to address her caption, and have not proofread it or edited it… but it felt like something I ought to share. If you want to see the video we’re discussing here I linked it at the bottom.

1. I watched it. And personally my biggest issue was that is subversively sexist. It wasn’t about being Instagram famous, it was about stereotyping a pattern of behavior on Instagram. While the critique likely holds validity in the minds of some, it’s because they hold a similar perspective whether or not their understanding of the “symptom” actually gets to the root of the “cause”

It’s like western medicine trying to diagnose spontaneous tears and laughter as a psychotic break. Because they haven’t cultivated spaces for cultural experiences of samadhi, and they have only seen this under the influence of drugs or hysteria, it lies outside the realm of possibility that it could in fact be samadhi.

2. As a male person, reading the comments, I saw both male and female people who loved the video and it highlighted something for me:

While none of the comments I read said anything aggressively sexist(I only read a few, though) all of them are indoctrinated into thinking about the behavior of women through the phenomenon of male gaze, which is an aversive sexism. It informs policy and hurts the liberty of women to express themselves as they see fit. They think this is normal, and fail to see it as the norm they perpetuate. And this is female people as well, holding each other to different standards of behavior and beauty and policing what other women do.

3. As a NB person, this is bizarre to even think about. Plenty of men and women operate in this way mentally because of the historical paradigms of sex and sexuality in a post-agrarian society. Culturally we have tied a woman’s value to her sexuality, submissiveness, and role as mother/caretaker. Anything she does that makes her hard to control or potentially damages her ability to fulfill the prescribed roles, lowers her value to the patriarchy, which is the locus of power. As the systems of power became more complex and distributed, people’s overall power individually increased, but the gap in power between individuals and entities grew exponentially.

This is a part of queer theory, because the narratives of heteronormativity require a paradigm where males and females form a binary that creates complimentary roles... feminism liberates all people from a sort of transactional sexuality, because the male doesn’t trade being a provider for the opportunity to have a family, and a female can provide for herself if she decides to create a family on her own. This damages the narrative because it removes value from males and females who perceive themselves as lesser when a single female fulfills both roles alone in a world where the odds are stacked against her, especially when the single male parent counterpart is expected to fail or abdicate his responsibilities. Empowered women and queer people in a patriarchal society fundamentally undermine the accepted norms which removes heteronormative models, which include religious doctrines, economic models, and cultural norms from their place at the top of the hierarchy.

4. While there are many awakening people, who will likely question why this video was made or be frustrated by it being perceived as funny, the reality is that it describes a reality. In their reality, that is what people do. They laugh because to them, it holds some truth. In a heteronormative dynamic, this is the logical breakdown of that behavior, and they can agree upon it.

In another example of this, we have mainstream responses to female leadership. Culturally we still see the idea that a woman’s value is so inherently tied to her sexual contributions to society, that female CEO’s are undermined as leaders, but male CEO’s are never critiqued for being absent parents if anyone ever even bothers to asks if they even have kids.

You are right, there’s you and so many other people whose nudity is art and artful. Who want to bring sovereignty back to their experience of their own body. Who recognize themselves as beautiful, because that is what we are when we opt to see it. You’re not wrong. But it is a world we are sharing. So long as they have a heteronormative dynamic to point to as the ideal, people’s thinking will be trapped in these constructs, male and female.

Here’s the video we were reacting to, if you wanna see it.

Some Thoughts on the Art of Happiness

I was listening to the Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama a few months back and something from the book really stuck with me.

Disclaimer, I’m going to say some stuff that may sound disparaging about psychology, but like, fight me. IDK. IDC.

Psychology is a pretty nascent science, but it’s currently the best tool we have we to try to understand eons of neural development that have led to the phenomenon of human consciousness. We’ve made some massive breakthroughs, as far as we can tell. Still, we have some problems related to the fact that science really aims to study empirical evidence. Here’s the definition from the wikipedia:

Empirical evidence is the information received by means of the senses, particularly by observation and documentation of patterns and behavior through experimentation.

Psychology has a few glaring problems in light of this description, I’ll try to keep this brief:

1. A person’s subconscious processes dictate 90-99% of their behavior according to recent studies. (Fuck Your Feelings by Ryan Munsey)

2. We’re still just learning how to map AND decode connectomemes (which basically means we’re still figuring out how neurons work)((Fun fact, there’s a single neuron in your brain for Homer Simpson and Jennifer Anniston, respectively.))

3. Each human mind is a subjective experience. What they observe and interpret about their behavior will be fundamentally different than what an outsider will observe even if they agree about what happened. (Just, go have a conversation with your family about your behavior)

4. Theories of personality are unraveling in the wake of new research that calls what we know about the very nature of self into question. Sorry , you might have to buy this article for more info haha.

As it relates to trauma, in the Art of Happiness, The Dalai Lama basically explains to the psychologist interviewing him, Howard C. Cutler, that while Western Psychology makes the assumption that the source of our suffering must part of the sum total of our experiences, Buddhism asserts that our past lives are also a potential source of our suffering. My boy Tenzin(His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso for those who are worried I might be gettin fresh) breaks it down for Howie, with this analogy about a room.

“for instance, it(psychology) does not accept the idea of imprints being carried over from a past life. And at the same time there is an assumption that everything must be accounted for within this lifetime. So, when you can’t explain what is causing certain behaviors or problems, the tendency is to always attribute it to the unconscious. It’s a bit like you’ve lost something and you decide that the object is in this room. And once you have decided this, then you’ve already fixed your parameters; you’ve precluded the possibility of its being outside the room or in another room. So you keep on searching and searching, but you are not finding it, yet you continue to assume that it is still hidden somewhere in the room!”

While you may not believe in past lives and karma, the reality is that human perception and perspective is deeply limited. Playing with hypotheticals here there’s a possibility your “problem” could be triggered by something that’s part of a cognitive blindspot, like the forer effect or negativity bias. But before you get too excited about those having nothing to do with your past lives, here’s an article about mice inheriting fear from their fathers

Remember last week when I brought up reliving your traumas and your parents being your history? The fact that genetics factor into tendencies like anxiety and addiction combined with our learned cognitive biases toward lifestyle basically means that it’s not just the punchline to a bad joke.

I’m not telling you I have all the answers, but I do have my answers.

There’s hope for those of us who wish to experience happiness-… and it’s very much within reach. We didn’t choose our starting points in life. For some of us it’s been hopelessly hard. But clinging to the difficulty of the past does not make the present easier. Instead of looking into our past to try to solve mysteries to which we could never hope to find all the clues, we have access to something endlessly empowering right now.

Literally, it’s now. 😉

So I guess next week’s blog is about mindfulness.

Click here if you’d like to get a copy of the Dalai Lama’s book The Art of Happiness

(Disclaimer: I’m not saying quit your meds or stop going to therapy. This is not professional medical advice and should not be interpreted as such. )