Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 10

All about amatonormativity: the privileging of romantic love

Thanks so much to BBC Bitesize for interviewing me for this article on the pressure of finding The One. It’s something I’ve spoken and written about a bunch, of course – including this recent podcast with Justin on Love in the Time of Covid-19. But this interview helped me to learn about the concept of amatonormativity as a new way of framining it. You can read the BBC Bitesize piece here, and my full interview below.

What is amatonormativity?

Amatonormativity is a long word which philosopher Elizabeth Brake came up with. It means that, in our culture, it’s seen as normal for people to want romantic love, and to prioritise that kind of love over other kinds. Other kinds of love include things like the love we have in friendships, family relationships, work and play relationships, and relationships with ourselves and with companion animals, our communities, the world around us, and our spiritual beliefs.  ‘Amato’ means romantic love and ‘normativity’ means what’s seen as culturally normal.

Amatonormativity is linked to several other kinds of ‘normativity’: heteronormativity (where it’s seen as normal to want relationships with someone of the ‘opposite gender’), cisnormativity (where it’s seen as normal to be one of only two genders – male and female – and to stay in that gender all your life),  mononormativity (where it’s seen as normal to only love one person and to want a monogamous relationship with them), and sexual normativity (where it’s seen as normal to want to have sex, generally only with the person you’re in a romantic relationship with).

To make it simpler we could say that the overall ‘norm’ is to be in one gender yourself, to fall in love with someone of the ‘opposite’ gender (perhaps after dating a bit), and to form a monogamous relationship with them where you have sex and get more and more committed over time (the relationship escalator): getting married, having a family, and trying to stay together for life.

What are the different ways it affects everyone in society?

Amatonormativity affects everyone: the people who don’t fit into it and the people who do. 

The people who don’t fit into amatonormativity include people who are single or solo, people who are aromantic so don’t experience romantic love, people who prioritise other kinds of relationships in their lives, and people who prioritise many relationships rather than just one – like polyamorous people and relationship anarchists. Other people who don’t fit into amatonormativity are people from cultures where marriage and other committed relationships aren’t based on romantic love, which is actually people in many cultures around the world.

Some people don’t fit amatonormativity because they’ve realised it doesn’t work for them. It’s hard for them because the world around them assumes they will want romantic love and may discriminate against them or make them feel weird or isolated for being ‘different’. 

The people who do fit amatonormativity often have a hard time too. Because there’s so much cultural pressure – and pressure from friends and family and peers – to want romantic love and to focus on it obsessively, people often miss out on other great things in life like friendships and projects and community.

Also the huge pressure on a romantic partner to be ‘everything’ to you and ‘complete’ you and be your soul mate who meets all your needs means that most romantic love relationships often don’t work out long term. It’s just too much pressure to be someone’s best friend, and their lover, and the person they live with and have kids with, and their cheerleader, and the person who looks after them when they’re sick or struggling.

People can end up staying in really unhappy relationships because they’re scared to be alone in an amatonormative world, and they can end up breaking up with one person after another and getting really hurt by that because they’re so busy searching for someone perfect.

Is there anyone it particularly affects? 

Amatonormativity particularly affects those of us who are trying to do relationships differently because we’ve realised some of the problems with basing relationships on romantic love. While we might try to prioritise the other relationships in our lives, we may still find that our friends prioritise their romantic relationships and drift off as soon as they have a partner, or spend more time on dating than on friendships. Or they might find it weird to talk with us about how we might make commitments in our friendships.

Amatonormativity also affects people with trauma in their backgrounds – which is many of us. Romantic love can be quite risky when we have childhood trauma because it’s very easy to jump into relationships quickly and to try to get the kind of love there which we were missing – or lost – as a kid. Again that’s a lot of pressure to put on one relationship, and we can often end up getting hurt because painful patterns come up in intense romantic relationships and we can become very dependent on them.

Some neurodiverse people can struggle with amatonormativity because romantic love type relationships don’t give us the space we might need, enough solo time, or can just be too intense for us.

Finally, some people would say that amatonormativity – with its focus on one romantic relationship – isn’t so good for disabled people, or people with physical and mental health conditions, or even for parents, where being an isolated unit of just two people can be a lot of pressure. Perhaps community-based models and extended family structures where there are networks of people looking out for each other can work better when we need care and support.

Focusing on young people specifically, what expectations does it set and how might it harm them? 

For young people amatonormativity can mean that a lot of your focus goes on love relationships, particularly for girls who are still taught in stories and movies and magazines that love is their big adventure in life. When that message is all around you it can seem to make sense to spend a lot of your time longing for love, talking about the people you fancy, dating or hooking up. That can feel like the most fun and pleasurable thing in life. But what would it be like if we lived in a world where mates were seen as just as important as dates, where we were taught how to enjoy our relationship with ourselves rather than being so hard on ourselves all the time, or where we were expected to get just as excited about the things we’re passionate about as we do about the people we’re into?

If you’re a young person who doesn’t fit into amatonormativity there can be so much pressure to do so. You can end up being bullied for being weird and different if you don’t talk about who you fancy or get off with people, and you can end up feeling like an outsider or like there’s something wrong with you if romantic love isn’t something you’re interested in, or if it doesn’t seem to happen for you.

That’s why the idea of amatonormativity is really helpful. It reminds us that prioritising romantic love isn’t really the normal, natural, right thing to do. It’s just one thing we can do, and it might not even be a very good idea for all the reasons we’ve talked about.

Online communities can be a lot of help for finding other people who do things differently, and it can be good to see a counsellor if anyone is giving you a hard time. Website like BishUK and Scarleteen both have great advice for young people about relationship diversity.

Do you think there are structural things that favour couples, or privileges that come with being in a romantic relationship/marriage that are related to amatonormativity? 

One of the reasons it’s so hard to be outside amatonormativity, or to resist it if it doesn’t work for us, is because the whole of society is set up like it’s the One True Way to be. People who get married are given lots of legal and financial and health support that people who are in other kinds of relationships don’t get. It’s often much easier to get a house together if you are a romantic couple than if you’re in another kind of relationship with one or more other people. People who have kids together are often not recognised as valid parents unless they’re romantic partners.

Outside of these practical problems, cultural messages are So Strong that we should want romantic love and settle down with a romantic partner. It’s literally the ‘happy ever after’ of most fairy tales, movies, and novels. It’s also the focus of loads of magazines, soap operas, and reality TV shows like Love Island or Love is Blind. This means most people just accept amatonormativity and everyone from our mates to our families are probably assuming we’ll want romantic love and are pressuring us to date, especially around events like proms and weddings, or at times like Valentine’s Day and holiday seasons.

‘Couple privilege’ is a phrase for the many ways in which it’s easier to be in our society as a couple than it is as somebody single or in another kind of relationship. Couples never have to explain why they want to be together or stay together, whereas people who are single are always asked to explain themselves, as are people who leave romantic relationships, or who decide to prioritise other kinds of relationships.

Do you think society is changing in terms of amatonormativity?

I hope so. In 2012 my book Rewriting the Rules came out, which suggested that we could question the love rules that prioritise romantic love over other kinds of love. Eight years on we now have a word for this: amatonormativity, and people are having these kinds of conversations more widely. There are also more and more words and communities for people who want to do things differently like solo poly people, self-partnered people, relationship anarchists, aromantic people, etc. Popular TV shows like Modern Love have started to portray lots of different kinds of love rather than just romantic love.

However, at the same time, the mainstream media seems increasingly obsessed with people at a young age finding The One and getting married to them. Look at all the massively popular reality TV shows where winning is based on falling in love and making that commitment.

It’s a bit like what’s happening with sex and gender. At the same time that we have asexual communities questioning why there is so much pressure to be sexual, we also have more and more cultural obsession with having ‘great sex’ and ‘experts’ insisting that it’s vital to have sex. At the same time that we have non-binary people questioning why people are divided into men and women, there’s also a lot of cultural pressure to be a manly man and or a girly girl and ‘experts’ insisting that gender is binary.

What can we do to be less amatonormative or how do we get rid of amatonormativity?

It is So Hard to step outside of culture so go gently with yourself. If you see the problems with amatonormativity then it’s a great idea to be part of communities of other people who feel similarly in order to get support. Finding online and offline communities of other people who want to do relationships the way you do is a great plan. You might also read some of the books and zines out there which question amatonormativity and offer alternatives. I hope my book Rewriting the Rules is a pretty good place to start, and me and Justin Hancock (from Bish UK) have a podcast where we talk about these things A Lot.

For me one of the answers to how to do things differently has been to slow down all relationships. These days I tell everyone that I want to be friends first. In fact I aim to have a friendship for at least a year before I consider adding anything to it (whether that is sex or romantic love or working together or living together). New Relationship Energy or ‘falling in love’ is a major feature of amatonormativity and I think it’s a great idea to slow that right down, because it generally isn’t a great basis to build a whole relationship on.

Do you also happen to know if any cultures across the world are not amatonormative?

Actually all cultures around the world do love differently. More cultures are some form of non-monogamous than are monogamous, and many cultures base marriage or committed relationships on some kind of family and/or financial arrangement, or on choosing a good fit, rather than on romantic love (although that can develop over time in such relationships). If we don’t want to impose one view on the rest of the world – as we have in the past – we need to get on board with relationship diversity.

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

Plural tag: This post was primarily written by Fox.

The post All about amatonormativity: the privileging of romantic love appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

New joint podcasts: Covid-19, trauma, and non-binary thinking

Over the last few weeks I did two joint podcasts with co-creators who’ve also been putting out content on coping with the pandemic and lockdown situation.

First up, Nina Burrowes – from The Consent Collective – and I spoke about how survivors of trauma are experiencing living through this and what we can do if we’re experiencing trauma responses at this time.

[image error]

Listen here. Check out their other Together Apart content here.

Then Alex Iantaffi – from Gender Stories – and I spoke about how the ideas we wrote about in Life Isn’t Binary might be helpful at this time, particularly in relation to thinking, feeling, and relating in non-binary ways.

[image error]

Listen here. Check out their episode on gender and Covid-19 here.

I’m also still podcasting every week with Justin of course. Check out our Patreon for recent episodes with everything you need to know about various forms of solo sex/sensuality, and us getting existential with our watch-a-long of Groundhog Day. On our regular feed you can find us talking about Love in the time of Covid-19 and coping with the stress of it.

The post New joint podcasts: Covid-19, trauma, and non-binary thinking appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Slow Relating

There is so much to do, there is so little time, we must go slowly – Taoist saying

Note: this post was written before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, which obviously has further implications for slowing down. You can read more of my thoughts on that here . Hopefully this post will be helpful for those who’re being forced to slow down their relationships at the moment too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is slow relating?

Ara: *smiles*

Tony: What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does slow relating work?

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

Ara: And why d’you think that is?

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

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

Tony: Well I definitely need slowness in complex conversations.

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

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

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

Tony: What are our examples of slow relating?

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

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

Tony: And a great podcast was born! 

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

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

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

Tony: Pray for us Saint George, yes please!

The risks of fastlove

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony: It’s not what I expected.

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

…

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

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

Slow relating and trauma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ara: What is it like Tony?

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

Ara: Good description.

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

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

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

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

Slow relating and access intimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slow relating and kindness

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

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

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

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

Tony: When might it be particularly important to slow down

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

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

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

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

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

Balancing slower and faster desires in relationships

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

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

Ara: I’ll take that compliment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Googles*

Oh looks like someone already thought of that .

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

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

The Slow Love Manifesto



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

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

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

The post Slow Relating appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

New interview about feminist comics

I find it strange and amusing that since I stopped being an academic last summer I may well have been involved in more papers in academic journals than I was before I left. The first of these has just come out. It’s an interview that Róisín Ryan-Flood did with me for a special issue of the journal Feminist Encounters about Feminist Comics in an International Frame. Hopefully it’s a pretty accessible interview about creating feminist comics. It’s also a useful reminder to me, during this time of external and internal trauma and transformation, of what’s important to me and what I can be capable of.

I think you’ll understand why I didn’t want to say no to this opportunity. Not only is this a whole issue devoted to feminist comics, but also it takes an international perspective including comics from artist and writers in various countries across South and East Asia, Africa, Europe, and South and Central America. This introduction by editors Sally Munt and Rose Richards gives an overview of what’s included in the open access special issue and why feminist comics are important.

In my interview, Róisín asks me about how I got into creating comics and why they’re a good medium, particularly for getting across ideas about gender and sexuality. We talk about the importance of working across different mediums and genres in order to be accessible to diverse audiences. I explore why gender and sexuality have been such important themes in my work, what the main ideas are in these areas that I want to convey to readers, and why. We also get into the trans moral panic and recent gender ‘debates’ and why I think it’s vital to engage with the process of these more than the content. I got to chat about why I enjoy collaborative work so much, and why I think intersectional and non-binary thought are important in relation to gender, sexuality, and beyond.

The next article which I didn’t want say no to is a piece called ‘Plural Selves, Queer, and Comics’ coming out in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. It explores mental health and queerness in comics, particularly in relation to my comics and zines about plural selves. It develops some of the themes I explored in my talk at the Graphic Medicine conference last year. I’ll link to that here as soon as it comes out.

Read my interview in Feminist Encounters here.Read a summary of my talk on queer, mad comics here.My experience and thoughts about queer comics are here.My first plural comic is here.

The post New interview about feminist comics appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

How to start writing

The awesome folks at JKP just interviewed me about my thoughts on getting started with writing, which was a great chance for me to share some recent ideas I’ve been having about how the best writing often comes from a radical acceptance of not writing.

If you’re trans and/or non-binary and do fancy writing something, Sabah Choudrey, Yvy DeLuca, Juno Roche will be on the judging panel for their upcoming JKP writing prize, with proceeds going to Gendered Intelligence. You can read my interview here on the JKP website along with awesome interviews with Sabah, Yvy, and Juno on the same topic. Mine is also here…

How do you overcome writer’s block?

My perspective on this has shifted radically in recent years. I’m a strong believer now that one of the most vital things we can do in life is to learn to treat ourselves (and others of course) with consent. This means shifting the old patterns that so many of us have or pushing through or forcing ourselves to do things when we’re not in self-consent.

My approach to this is similar to sex. We simply cannot have consensual sex if we don’t absolutely know that it’s okay not to have sex now, or indeed ever. We can’t do consensual writing if we don’t absolutely know that it’s okay not to write now, or indeed ever. The sex that we may have if we create these utterly consensual conditions will be far better than any we would’ve had the old way, and it may well look very different indeed to what we expected it would look like when we were trying to do a certain thing because that’s what we thought we should do. The same is true for writing.

So now when I have space in which I could write, I begin by tuning into whether I want to write. I invite myself into that creative period rather than trying to force it. And, if I can, I try to give myself a range of options as to what I might do, and go with what feels live, rather than pushing into a particular project. Again this is a good analogy with sex: having a range of options rather than a default script. A good practice with creativity is inviting it, making a start on something, and giving it a certain amount of time. If it’s not flowing and you don’t feel present and engaged after 45 minutes, for example, then stop and rest or do something else. Invite yourself again the next day, and do the same again. That way you never give yourself the negative reinforcement of continuing to write till it becomes a really unpleasant and punishing experience.

All of this is particularly important for marginalised people – who are particularly likely to have trauma histories. Writing is an area where we can easily re-traumatise ourselves, feeling the common fear/shame response whereby we don’t think we’re okay unless we’re writing, but also feel terrified of writing badly. Working with the inner critic is a particularly important task for writers, as is finding – if we can – the younger, freer parts of ourselves who are more able to be creatively playful without self-judgement. There’s plenty more on my website about working with these different ‘plural’ sides of yourself.

Could you describe your own writing process? What motivates you?

Personally I often find that taking a walk and letting my thoughts drift to various projects helps me get fired up about one, so that’s a good thing to do prior to a creative period. Journaling about what I’d like to write about – rather than actually trying to write it – can be another good practice for firing me up. It seems to me though that projects have their time. Often when I’ve allowed myself not to go there when I’m not feeling it, when I finally do so I realise that things have clicked into place in the meantime in helpful ways. 

I try to have a few projects floating around at any one time, which is easy for me because there are so many things that I want to create. I have the option at the moment, for example, to focus on blog posts applying my ideas about relationships with ourselves and others to the current Covid-19 situation. I have the option of podcasting with my co-creator Justin, or working on my next book with my co-author Alex (and I highly recommend creating with others as a way of getting around blocks and inner criticism).

I have an ongoing erotic fic project I can go to. And I have some comic based zines I’d like to write. I try to feel into what is most live and fires me up, or let myself rest and be gentle if none of them do, because we are all adapting to a massive global trauma at the moment and we’re going to need plenty of rest. I generally find that once something does take hold of me, it becomes the thing I want to do with my time and blocks are less of a problem.

I’d recommend writing also with your editor turned off, ideally free yourself to know that it’s for your eyes only and you need never publish it. Just enjoy the process of writing it and remember that you can return to the question of whether/how to edit it and publish it later, if you want to. Much of my best writing – I think – comes from a place of vulnerability, and I could never allow that if I was thinking about putting it out there while I was writing it. I guess what motivates me to write is going deep into my inner experience, applying the things I’ve learnt there, and then turning what I learn from that process into something which might be useful and engaging for others. That can take the form of non-fiction, fiction, writing, or comics.

What books have inspired you or helped you through a difficult time in your life?

My top one would be When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron, which has got me through so many difficult times I can’t even. It’s a Buddhist mindfulness book about how we can relate to our struggles and difficult feelings.

Then, writing wise, I love anything by Natalie Goldberg, who writes beautifully and radically about how to write.

In relation to trans, Juno Roche’s books have had a big impact on me, and I also love their approach to writing. Juno has opened up both my way of being trans, and my way of writing, as they’ve shown me how valid it is to write about our personal journeys as well as how it’s fine to write bits on your phone in daily life rather than always having this sacred, protected, writing time.

What kinds of experiences would you love to read about in the submissions?

Oo good question, I mean the kinds of writing I personally love most would be erotic fic, ghost stories, graphic memoir, and writing which says something about relationships and how people tick, so those genres are always going to appeal to me.

But in terms of experiences I’d love to read writing – like that of Travis Alabanza, Juno Roche, Juliet Jacques and CN Lester – which troubles conventional trans narratives and gives a sense of the diversity of ways of being trans as well as the complexity of trans experience beyond the kind of tragic or sensationalist stories we see in the media. If people tune into their experience and write from that place then I’m pretty sure that’s what we’ll get.

What makes a story come alive for you?

Um, a spooky thing or a sex scene, maybe a spooky sex scene?! No, really for me I think it’s about being pulled into a person’s experience – whether that’s the author of a memoir piece or a character in a fictional story. I need to care about them and what happens to them. The books I tend to put down are the ones where I don’t find anyone I’m rooting for and want to know more about. Even in my non-fic writing I’m increasingly trying to include myself, or – in my graphic guides with Jules Scheele – characters we might care about who are exploring the topic and have adventures along the way  (actually my next graphic guide with Jules does also have spooky sex scenes in it now that I think of it).

Could you share any words of advice for writers at the start of their writing journey?

Yes, I’d say go where it is live and juicy and vulnerable-as-hell and write from there. My experience is that writing from that place really speaks to others, and that’s far more important than how good your vocabulary or grammar or any of that stuff is. All of that can be fixed up after.

Also remember that it’s absolutely okay to not write. The best writing comes from a radical acceptance of not writing.

Here are a few previous posts from me about writing. More to come no doubt…

On writing from vulnerability.

All about writing.

Writing about writing.

The post How to start writing appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Trauma and cPTSD 101

In recent blog posts and podcasts I have been increasingly weaving a trauma-informed perspective into my writing. This post gives an overview of trauma and how it works – drawing largely from Pete Walker’s work on cPTSD. Content Note: Brief mentions of self-harm, suicidal thoughts, bullying, war, and sexual violence, but not details.

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

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

Why is this useful to me?

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

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

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

[image error]

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

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

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

What is cPTSD?

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

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

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

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

Emotional flashbacksBeing highly critical of ourselves and/or othersToxic shameAbandoning ourselvesAnxiety and/or struggles around social situations or relationshipsLoneliness and/or feeling abandonedDissociation (feeling checked out and/or distracting yourself/numbing with food, drink, worrying, working, social media, TV, etc.)Feeling bad about ourselves from low self-esteem to self-loathingBig mood changes and struggles with feelingsDifficulties with relationships Being easily triggered into the 4Fs

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

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

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

Emotional flashbacks

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

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

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

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

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

The 4 Fs

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

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

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

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

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

Repeating patterns

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

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

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

Why do something about it?

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

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

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

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

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

What to do?

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

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

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

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

Safety

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

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

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

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

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

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

Educating ourselves

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

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

Grieving and feeling the feels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relating with others

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

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

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

Coping with flashbacks

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

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

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

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

Trauma denial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

cPTSD superpowers

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Trauma and cPTSD 101 appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Taking ourselves seriously

Another plural blog post written a short while before Covid-19 hit, but relevant more than ever now. This time my serious selves, Max and Jonathan, talk about why it’s important to take ourselves seriously and assume we’re being sensible. Check out this zine and this blog post if you want to know more about plural selves. Hopefully the content of the conversation is interesting regardless.

Max: You and me this time then kid.

Jonathan: How does it feel Max?

Max: Vulnerable as fuck. I’m managing it by reminding myself we don’t have to publish this. But it also feels important. I guess it’s what I’m struggling with at the moment, and it feels like something that you have a handle on. It’s a chance for me to come to you for support which is a different dynamic for us. Also it works on a meta level. Writing about taking ourselves seriously is a way of taking ourselves seriously.

What does taking ourselves seriously mean?

Jonathan: Should I start with what we mean by that: taking ourselves seriously?

Max: Go ahead. It seems like your phrase.

Jonathan: I notice that it feels easier to start with what it isn’t, maybe because it’s so discouraged in our culture so we’re more familiar with not taking ourselves seriously. But I’d rather come up with a positive definition of what it is.

I’m thinking first of bell hooks’s definition of love in All About Love. It’s about valuing ourselves and others equally: knowing that we’re no more important than anybody else, but no less important either. That’s maybe a bit abstract. On an everyday level it’s about tuning into ourselves, feeling our feelings, welcoming them, listening to them. 

That’s when the idea of taking ourselves seriously comes to me the most: when we’re having a difficult feeling that doesn’t immediately make sense. What we need to do when that happens is to assume that it does make sense, that it is sensible, that we are sensible. That’s true even – perhaps especially – when we don’t understand what’s going on. That’s perhaps the hardest – and most important – time to take ourselves seriously.

Max: Can you give some examples: of taking ourselves seriously and assuming it’s sensible?

I suppose what we’ve been trying to do lately. It’s taking ourselves seriously to put The Work before the work. We make sure we start each day by tuning into where we’re at, and giving some time journaling about whatever is on our mind. If there’s anything big we try to give that some time and care before going on to anything else. Or we note it to come back to as soon as we can if that isn’t possible.

Assuming it’s sensible is when we’ve tuned into feelings that keep coming up, like fearful feelings around certain kinds of exchanges with other people. In the past we would’ve got annoyed with those seemingly inexplicable feelings and berated ourselves for having them. Or we would’ve rushed to act on them immediately. Instead we now try to keep noticing them, and noting down the kinds of experiences that trigger them. Gradually – over time – we understand them better and become more able to talk openly about what’s going on for us, and ask for what we need from the people concerned.

Another example would be noticing we’re blocked around doing a certain task or piece of writing. In the past we would’ve tried to push on and do it, or come up with a quick explanation for what was going on: usually one that involved being hard on ourselves. If we assume it’s sensible we can keep being curious about why we might not be going there at the moment, without letting it overwhelm everything, or giving up on it entirely. Often, over time, we realise several reasons why this block might be there. We learn a lot from the process of sitting with it, and often – once we’ve learnt all we needed to – it comes easily and goes better than it would’ve done if we’d tried to push through.

Max: *exhales*

Jonathan: That’s challenging for you huh Max-y? You’ve always been the part of us that does: that figures things out and gets on with it. 

Max: Yup. I hate not understanding things, and I hate not being able to get on with what I think I should be doing. It’s so hard for me to take myself seriously in the way you’re describing.

Jonathan: Why do you find it so hard do you think?

Why it’s hard to take ourselves seriously

Max: So many reasons. First, it runs counter to the way I’ve always done things: pushing through; getting on with things; avoiding, repressing or battling any difficult feelings that stand in our way. Taking ourselves seriously involves changing the habit of a lifetime: a habit that I developed because it was the only way to survive. So it’s a lot to give up on. More than that, it’s incredibly hard to acknowledge that that habit actually did us – and others – damage. There’s a hell of a lot of grief to feel if I acknowledge that there’s this other way of being which is better for everyone. 

Second, it’s a leap of faith into massive uncertainty because I’m not sure what this other life – the taking ourselves seriously life – even looks like.

Third, the world is on fire right now. There’s a massive sense of urgency to be part of doing something about it. Turning inwards and taking ourselves seriously and learning what that looks like feels like a huge privilege: a luxury that we can’t afford, that simply isn’t okay.

Jonathan: We can take those one at a time. They’re all big ones. And ones a lot of people struggle with I think. Does that feel okay for you?

Max: I’d really like to hear your thoughts baby boy. I’m definitely struggling with this.

Jonathan: I’d like to help. And it’s also okay to struggle with it Max. That in itself is something to take seriously, not to try to push through.

Max: Go slow . It’s all anyone seems to be telling me at the moment. But the world is on fire.

But the world is on fire

Jonathan: It is. And I think that’s all the more reason to take yourself seriously. There are many reasons for that. First, we need to feel the feelings about everything being so hard. That’s why people are developing grief circles to feel the impact of climate crisis, support groups for survivors following #metoo, transformative justice processes to find ways to hear each other’s experiences when relations break down. Our wider culture is terrible at this stuff: the systems within it retain the status quo, treat people non-consensually, and harm the most marginalised. So we have to find ways of doing it differently: of taking ourselves, and others, and our feelings seriously.

Max: And if we don’t feel the feelings?

Jonathan: We break down, or burn out, or close off. Shutting off our feelings is no way to handle it. You know that Max-y.

Max: The alternative seems to be to feel SO fragile though: a fragility that makes it hard to do anything. I’ve never felt this level of fragility before. It’s so scary.

Jonathan: I think learning what that fragility feels like is part of the process. For a start it is a sane reaction to an insane world. Anyone who feels safe and secure right now maybe has a bit of a problem! Fragility connects us with what’s really going on, and with what everyone is feeling: whether they’re allowing it or whether they’re covering it over and pretending it’s all okay. It means we can have a lot more empathy and compassion for others, and see any defensive reactions they have for what they are, rather than getting pulled into escalating those dynamics with them.

Also when we can tune into our fragility we can make way better choices about what we have capacity for and what we don’t. When we have the ability to discern in that way, we can know when we’re up for moving out of our comfort zone into our stretch zone – giving a little more of ourselves – and when we need to go back into the comfort zone to recover for a while. We can notice if we’ve tipped into overwhelm – beyond the stretch zone – and pull back and recover. Tuning into ourselves in this way we’re far less likely to overstretch or burn out. We can also maybe increase the capacity of the comfort zone and stretch zone over time – because we’re not overstretching. Then more things might be possible within those zones.

Max: I would love a bigger comfort and stretch zone. They feel pretty tiny right now.

Jonathan: I think they remain smaller if we try to push or force them to expand, and get bigger if we take it gently and slowly and invite that expansion.

Max: So you’re saying taking ourselves seriously actually makes us better for others and the wider world?

Jonathan: I think so. Practically, it helps us to see what kinds of relationships and support help us to be more open and available, and to pursue those and be boundaried around ones that don’t. It helps us tune into what kinds of work feel most skillful and fulfilling to us, and therefore best for us to offer to others. It also helps us to navigate difficult things that come up more carefully and skillfully.

Max: That feels like another paradox to me. Taking myself seriously feels like the last thing I want to do when I fuck up. I want to give of myself to the person or situation concerned until I’ve atoned sufficiently.

Jonathan: But does that help them? Or anybody else?

Max: Not really. I guess it denies me the opportunity to see what I’ve done clearly and take appropriate responsibility. Collapsing into shame is just as bad as defending myself by insisting I’m blameless. Either way I don’t really see the other person and the impact on them, because I’m all caught up in myself. And I also neglect to take account of all the other stuff going on : the dynamics playing out between us, the wider systems operating through us, that kind of thing, which is always a big part of the picture. Also that overwhelming sense of shame makes me want to give up on everything: so I’m less available to other people, less likely to do anything of benefit to the wider world.

Jonathan: It’s hard to see all that. You’re doing really well.

Max: It feels hard.

Jonathan: Maybe breathe a bit Max.

Max: Okay. I’m breathing. Can you tell me about that Adrienne Maree Brown piece Jonathan. I know that struck you when we listened to her being interviewed .

Taking ourselves seriously and fighting injustice

Jonathan: She said that every time she finds herself getting angry about an injustice out there in the world, she begins by turning inwards and reflecting on how it operates within – and through – herself. She doesn’t engage outwards until she’s done that inner work.

Max: Wow.

Jonathan: I guess I see all the people we’re most inspired by saying something along those lines. Laverne Cox talks of having to face our inner oppressor rather than trying to fight oppression ‘out there’ as if it’s not also ‘in here’. When we reflect on Audre Lorde’s idea of self-care as a political act we see that self-care enables us to be honest and kind around the parts of ourselves who are survivors and the parts of ourselves who are perpetrators. 

Audre Lorde also said ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. If we don’t take ourselves seriously then we can easily find ourselves using the tools of oppression to fight oppression: like shaming people, trying to ‘save’ people because it makes us look good, rushing into situations we don’t understand rather than slowing down and listening to the people directly impacted, or seeing ourselves as somehow superior.

Max: I get that. I think that’s a big part of what we’re trying to do this year – or however many years it takes. I know, I know, it might be much longer. If we keep relating to ourselves, to other people, and to our work, in the ways we’ve learnt in this non-consensual, unjust culture we’ll inevitably keep perpetuating that culture.

Jonathan: And we’re not going to decolonise our mind, cultivate entirely consensual practices, escape the binaries, and dismantle our inner capitalism overnight Max-y. We can’t step outside of culture. This stuff is deeply entrenched in all of us. And the very attempt at total transformation of self into something ‘better’ is, in itself, a colonialist and capitalist way of treating a person. 

Max: So what can we do?

Jonathan: Keep taking ourselves seriously in this process, remember why we’re doing it, cultivate systems and structures of support around it, share what we’re learning through it with anyone who finds it helpful, acknowledge when we make mistakes and address them, and uplift the other people who we’re learning from as much as possible. 

Max: Sounds like a pretty clear routemap.

Jonathan: Not easy though. I liked what we heard Pema Chödrön say about compassion recently, on one of her audios. She said that there’s a type of compassion which is about being kind towards ourselves and receiving support from others. There’s a type of compassion which is about being alongside others as equals: providing mutual support and learning from each other. And there’s a type of compassion which is about offering kindness to others who are struggling more than we are at the moment. It’s not about one of those being better than the others. We all need all of them. The wisdom is in knowing which we need – or have available – when.

Max: At the moment we’re needing more of the first type than ever. Perhaps because we’ve given ourselves so little of that before. But most days we do also do the other two types. Talking with friends and co-creating with Justin or Alex feels like the second one. And when we can create a safe-enough container we do still offer compassion outwards: like in sessions with mentees, or giving a talk or training, or meeting explicitly to support a friend. Even at the moment we still have that capacity at times.

Jonathan: Do you want to return to those other reasons that you find it so hard to take yourself seriously? We’ve done ‘the world is on fire’, but what about it being a leap into uncertainty? Or it changing the habit of a lifetime?

Changing the (non-consensual) habit of a lifetime

Max: Well I guess I’m on board with the need to change the habit of a lifetime. It relates to consent doesn’t it? The habit of a lifetime was treating myself non-consensually: overriding myself because I thought I needed to do that in order to be loved, or approved of, or validated that I was okay. The more I do that, the more I’m practising non-consent as a way of being.

Jonathan: Right. I think a huge part of this is that in taking ourselves seriously we’re giving ourselves a big message – every day – that we are okay. Not because somebody else says we are, or because we’re doing helpful things, or because we can point to any evidence of being a ‘successful self’. When we take ourselves seriously we can be sure we’re relating to others – and doing our work – from that knowledge of our okayness. So we’re less likely to override our own self-consent, or the consent of others, in our attempts to get validation.

Max: Oh this stuff is humbling as fuck isn’t it?

Jonathan: It’s what you said about why it’s hard Max-y. For everyone. Because it involves seeing all the hurt we’ve caused to ourselves – and others – through that old habit.

Max: It kind of reminds me of a common trans experience. For a lot of trans people when we finally acknowledge our transness and contemplate coming out, or transitioning, in whatever ways feel right for us…

Jonathan: Yes?

Max: We hit up against this huge grief. Because we recognise that we could’ve done it a long time ago. We could’ve had this whole life feeling way more congruent and comfortable in our gender. For some people that grief is too much to bear. They don’t do anything about it because doing so would involve having to feel all that grief.

Jonathan: Mmhm.

Max: That’s how I feel sometimes about changing my ways of working, or relating to others, or relating to myself. Like if I really allow it fully then I have to acknowledge the pain I’ve caused myself and others doing it this other way all this time. I can see why people remain in hiding, in normativity of various kinds, not confronting this stuff. I can see that it is a huge ask when we invite people in our lives to do this work in order to be safe-enough for us.

Jonathan: Another reason why this is so important I guess. It means we’re more connected with everyone else who is confronting this stuff and finding it incredibly – even impossibly – hard. It also means that we’re less likely to use shaming tactics against people who aren’t confronting their stuff, because we’re aware of how hard it is, and how being shamed around it makes it even more hard to do.

Max: I hope I can remember that.

Jonathan: I think it’s a big part of the work we do Max. Trying to find non-shaming ways to explain injustice, non-consent and their impact to people – whether that’s at the micro level of interpersonal relationships or the macro level of what’s going on in the world – helping people see how we’re all implicated in it and suffering from it. And being part of the wider movement to work together to address it: across our differences and our shared experiences.

Max: For one of our inner children you seem to have some damn big words and concepts at your disposal Jonathan.

Jonathan: I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot. And inner children can grow and develop once you’re more in touch with them it seems. Our understanding is that you – Max – were the part of ourselves we developed in order to survive the tough stuff of our childhood: when it wasn’t safe to feel or express our feelings, and when we were being bullied and taught we were unacceptable on a daily basis. I was the little people-pleasing kid you were trying to protect by becoming what we needed to be in order to survive, to fit in, to find love.

Max: We realised recently even my name reflects that: Max = mask: The masks I wore in order to survive.

Jonathan: I guess I hope we might shift those inner dynamics now Max. Max also sounds like ‘maxed out’. Maybe the parts of us you were protecting can come forward to care for you, and you can step back a bit: to rest, to grieve, to heal. 

Max: I am not great at stepping back.

Jonathan: Believe me we know that! 

Max: Ha!

Time to take ourselves seriously

Jonathan: It takes time too Max, to enable new habits to bed in as deeply as the old ones were. It takes dropping any grip on what the future might be because how can we know? It takes making a daily practice of noticing you’ve clenched and tightened up again and gone into old habits, and gently loosening the grip, feeling into the alternatives available, doing something different each time.

Max: It’s crazy how hard that is. I sometimes literally believe that if I allow myself that then I will die. I’m convinced I have this or that illness in those moments. Like somehow I would deserve to die if I really allowed taking myself seriously: freeing myself of all these ideas I have about how I should be.

Jonathan: Our therapist said maybe it’s the death of the ego that we feel/fear at those times. Although we are going to die someday of course, and that’s another good reason to do this work. When we can turn and face the inevitability of death it becomes more possible to be open about this stuff, instead of trying to craft ourselves into someone who people will approve of, or stay busy to distract ourselves, or tell people what they want to hear. 

Max: Stephen Batchelor says to meditate on the phrase: ‘since death is certain, and the time of death is uncertain, what shall I do?’ Today apparently the answer was to have an illuminating and challenging conversation between two of our plural selves in a cafe.

Jonathan: Over hot chocolate with whipped cream and cheese toasties. Feeding the inner child Max-y?

Max: Well I do like to take him seriously.

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

Plural tag: This post was written by Jonathan and Max.

The post Taking ourselves seriously appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Rewriting the Rules on relationship book list

Thanks so much to the folks at wiki.ezvid.com for including Rewriting the Rules in their recent list of recommended books about relationships.

It’s particularly good to be included on a list with other authors who I enjoy and respect such as Esther Perel and Polly Young-Eisendrath. Esther’s work offers similar critiques to mine of the common assumption that we can get all of our needs met in one relationship: particularly the need for hot passionate love and the need for warm companionate love. Like me Polly weaves together ideas and practices from western psychotherapy and from Buddhist philosophy.

It’s also great to see the inclusion of books like mine on this list which offer alternatives to normative culturally accepted ways of doing relationships. I’m now keen to get hold of Clare Chambers‘s Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State, which looks like it reflects on some similar issues to my book, but from the perspective of what levelling out hierarchies of love might look like on a societal level than an interpersonal one.

Thanks again for including me

The master’s tools and mental health: We can’t get out of our struggles the same way we got into them

Something hit me recently: one of those things that must have been staring me in the face for so long but somehow I never saw it. And now that I have, I can’t unsee it. We can’t get out of our mental health struggles the same way we got into them. 

The research on trauma and mental health suggests that a huge part of the way we generally got into them was non-consensual treatment at the hands of other people and/or the world around us. So whatever we do to recover, heal, or otherwise address our issues, it has to be done differently: from a place of consent, care and friendliness for ourselves instead of a place of fear, shame, and harshness.

The master’s tools

Audre Lorde famously wrote that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. This means that we can’t dismantle systems and structures of oppression using the same kinds of mechanisms and tools that were used to put them there in the first place. If we try to do it that way we generally re/create corrupt systems rather than finding our way to some genuine alternative. 

We can see many mental health struggles as a set of inner systems and structures which were put in place when we were treated non-consensually during our lives, often in childhood, but also through traumatic experiences which happened later on. Most of the main therapeutic approaches agree that when we’re taught that we have to be a certain way in order to receive care and protection – or to avoid punishment or rejection – we develop survival strategies in order to cope.

Trauma and survival strategies

It’s these survival strategies – in the form of habits and patterns like addictions and compulsions, fear and anxiety, depression and distancing, anger and acting out – which we end up addressing as adults, when we realise that they’ve become a problem. They may be rooted, for example, in physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect at home, in particular traumatic events that happened to us, in the discrimination and hatred we experienced due to being part of any marginalised group, and/or in being repeatedly sent back into unsafe situations such as bullying or otherwise hostile school environments.

In our current culture few of us escape such experiences entirely. Few girls reach adulthood without experiences of sexual harassment and assualt and without learning the ways they will be denied agency and regarded as second class citizens throughout their lives. If you are part of an oppressed group you will soon come to realise how differently you are treated: how your body, labour and life are valued less. School is a pretty non-consensual situation for even those who escape the more obvious forms of trauma there, much of which is normalised. Most families pass on messages that children should override their self-consent in order to conform to normality, hide their feelings and/or meet others’ expectations. 

All of this occurs within a wider culture which rests on teaching people that they are lacking and should be different to how they are in order to ensure docile and productive citizens, and in order to sell everything from drugs to diets, fast food to fashion, soft drinks to spirituality.

Treating ourselves non-consensually in the name of recovery

The problem is that – once we become aware of our mental health struggles, our habitual patterns, or our unhelpful survival strategies – the way we go about trying to address them often mirrors the very way they were put there in the first place. We try to fix ourselves, we push ourselves too far too fast, and we force ourselves to do all the things we’ve been told will help, punishing ourselves we don’t find ourselves improving as quickly as we felt that we should.

This has been brought home to me recently in a few ways. I’ll share my own experiences here and then give a few further examples where this might apply.

Trauma work

First I’ve been struggling particularly in the last year or so with what I’ve learnt are called emotional flashbacks: quick plummets into fear and shame which result in feeling very small, fragile and incapable of anything. I realise I’ve experienced these at greater or lesser intensity throughout my life, but the literature on cPTSD has helped me put a label to them. After reading a few books on trauma I fixed onto an idea – also common to many schools of therapy – that it could be useful to use current triggering experiences to connect back to earlier memories of traumatic events, and to revisit those in some way to loosen their grip.

Being somebody whose survival strategy tends towards the overfunctioning end of the spectrum, I grasped this idea and ran with it. One day, for example, I decided to write down all the traumatic memories I could think of in order to start revisiting them as a regular practice. Needless to say the result of this was not in any way pretty. I’m learning that the only way to do this kind of work is slowly and gently. If you try to push through, or force it, you end up retraumatising yourself and doing nothing to loosen the grip of the habits you’ve developed in order to survive.

Mindfulness

Another example is mindfulness. As regular readers will be aware, I’ve always been skeptical of the mindfulness movement from a social justice perspective, and a lot of my work involves attempting to weave Buddhist thinking and practices together with social understanding and engagement. 

However, I definitely bought the Buddhist mindfulness idea that it was generally a good idea to put time aside every day to sit, to notice your thoughts, and to keep bringing yourself back to the present. I figured that should be helpful to enable me to become more present to everyday life, to learn how not to get carried away into reactivity when hard stuff happens, and to notice forms of oppression acting through me and working to dismantle those as much as is possible.

What I actually found was that my fifteen minute meditation at the start of every day ranged from – at best – sitting with my noisy mind carrying me away for fifteen minutes and feeling a bit bad that I hadn’t come back to the present at all by the end to – at worst – taking a fifteen minute journey into precisely how bad I felt about myself.

I’m now reading an awesome book by David A. Treleavan called Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness which brings mindfulness into dialogue with trauma-informed therapy and social justice. It’s helped me to make sense of these meditation experiences. As someone with regularly recurring cPTSD symptoms, meditation like this can be counterproductive unless engaged with in a trauma-informed way. In fact many – if not most – people experience some mild to major re-traumatising when they try to just sit with themselves without having any awareness of how trauma works. In pushing myself to meditate every day like this, with the idea that it must be good for me, I think I’ve been making things worse, and certainly not better.

Staying with feelings

A final example is staying with feelings: something that I’ve always been a big advocate of, as you can tell from my zine of this name. But engaging with the work of blogger and trauma-informed counsellor Love Uncommon showed me a vital missing piece of these practices. It’s only a good idea to stay with your feelings when they are in the manageable range. When they have reached a high intensity – or tipped into reactivity – then it is far more helpful to soothe yourself until they are manageable again. As with the other points, trying to stay with feelings when they are overwhelming is often retraumatising and unhelpful, making the feelings more scary and harder to stay with, rather than less so.

A similar thing is true for conflict and staying with each other’s feelings. A lot of people have the sense that the best thing to do in conflict is to stay and hash it out. But if any of the people involved has tipped into high intensity reactivity – or a trauma response – then that is a really bad idea. Far better to take time out, self-soothe, and cool down, perhaps making a time to return to whatever the conflict was about when everyone is in a good place to do so. Staying when one or more of you is in a place of trauma is again a recipe for retraumatising yourselves, acting out your survival strategies in ways that tighten rather than loosening them, and making further painful conflict between you more, rather than less, likely over time.

Other examples

Other examples where people often take a non-self-consensual approach to addressing their mental health struggles would include forcing yourself to go to a form of therapy or support that doesn’t feel right for you, staying with a therapist who doesn’t feel good, insisting to yourself that you must ‘be better’ by a certain point, anything which rests on the idea of ‘pulling your socks up’ or ‘getting over it’, and engaging in any form of self-help which is based on the idea that you are broken and need fixing rather than that you are okay as you are and deserve support. 

I’ve also had some interesting conversations with people recently who’re moving away from abstinence and restriction approaches to addressing addiction, self-harm and self-soothing to models where you allow yourself all the things you want, but engage with them consciously and intentionally with curiosity. One person said that any habit that harms us is oppression acting through us, so we cannot and must not respond with further self-harm and oppression.

It may seem paradoxical that some people experience way more radical shifts when they move towards the latter model, but it makes sense from the perspective that progress is only possible when we stop treating ourselves in the way that put the survival strategies or unhelpful habits there in the first place.

The role of fear and shame

Another part of this clicked for me after reading Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD (yes I am becoming a trauma nerd). He puts a lot of emphasis on the fear/shame feeling combo as being the key feature of emotional flashback and also – I realise now – a low level everyday backdrop to life for most of us with these kinds of past experiences.

Related to the idea that we can’t help ourselves using the same non-consensual approaches that hurt is in the first place, is the idea that fear and shame will not get us out of fear and shame. When we’re struggling we often try this kind of approach. We feel that we are bad people for struggling in these ways so we try to shame ourselves into addressing them or sorting ourselves out. We try to frighten ourselves into action by pointing out all the terrible things that might happen if we continue to employ our survival strategies.

There’s a whole additional post to be written about how fear and shame-based strategies don’t work for changing other people’s behaviour in a world where these seem to be the go-to strategies everywhere. Justin and I recently podcasted about this in relation to the fearmongering and shaming responses we’re seeing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fear and shame tend to make people frightened and defensive, and therefore more – rather than less – likely keep right on doing the things you don’t want them to do. The same is true with ourselves when we’re struggling. Like what could be a worse strategy for trying to cure ourselves from fear and shame than giving ourselves a load of fear and shame about our fear and shame. Think about it.

So what can we do?

So what I’m saying here is that if we treat ourselves in the ways that put our survival strategies, habits, or stuck patterns there in the first place this will solidify and tighten them, rather than dissolving or loosening them. 

What is the alternative? Well it is a massive challenge within our current cultural context because it involves us treating ourselves – and each other – in the radically different ways which intersectional feminists from Audre Lorde onwards have been encouraging us to do: valuing ourselves and others equally, practicing self-care, sitting with the places in which we are oppressed and victimised and the places where we oppress or hurt others. 

Such thinkers also point out that individual and systemic shifts need to happen alongside each other, given our interdependence. It’s hard – if not impossible – for individuals to change their inner landscape if the non-consensual outer landscape remains the same, and the idea that we should be able to do so harms us more. Engaging with others to share our experiences and work collectively is vital if possible.

For me a key starting point is self-consent. I’m trying to slow down my everyday life sufficiently to notice every time I’m drawn to override my self-consent. This is proving easier to notice now that many attempts to do so result in an emotional flashback plummet into fear/shame (trauma humour). But I’m also trying to notice the micro-moments of overriding my consent, the flickers of fear/shame that come up when I do that. I try to pay attention to what happened to elicit that response, to bring self-compassion to the situation to understand why that was my response, and to consider ways in which I might engage with whatever happened differently, in ways that don’t override my self-consent.

Slowness is another key here. This just can’t be done fast. Speeding up inevitably involves pushing through and getting overwhelmed. It’s helpful to tune into when I’m stepping out of my comfort zone into my stretch zone, and ensuring that I pull back into the comfort zone before I hit overwhelm. I was having a lot of quiet nights in before they became the default.

If fear and shame are a big part of the problem, then the solution is the opposite: cultivating protection and care to counter the fear and shame. Pete Walker talks about reparenting yourself and reparenting by committee. Other authors talk about cultivating a compassionate witness within yourself or befriending yourself, often alongside receiving a safe-enough and kind-enough therapeutic relationship to model what this might be like. 

I’ll be writing more about how I’ve gone about this from a plural perspective, but basically it’s anything you can do to be kind and protective towards yourself rather than shaming or frightening yourself, and to treat yourself consensually instead of non-consensually. 

Useful questions to ask yourself are: ‘what do I usually/habitually do under these circumstances?’ and ‘what would the opposite of that look like?’ You may find that there are several different ‘opposite’ options to play with. They may also be the ‘opposite’ of the experiences that resulted in your stuck patterns or survival strategies.

At this point you can bring those other practices back in. For me it’s not about stopping addressing traumatic memories, meditating, or trying to stay with my feelings. All those practices are immensely valuable, but only if done consensually, gently, gradually, and in ways that feel good rather than bad, and stretching rather than overwhelming.

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

Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie.

The post The master’s tools and mental health: We can’t get out of our struggles the same way we got into them appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Zones of stuck patterns

I’m thinking a lot at the moment about how we can shift our stuck patterns and habits. I’m weaving together various ideas and applying them to my own life. It seems that there are some pretty universal ways of doing this work that apply to us all, but the way we do it needs to be tailored to every one of us uniquely.

The general approach to shifting stuck patterns and habits is:

Notice the patterns when they kick inGradually shift them by doing something differentMake that an everyday practice so that new habits can bed in over time

Adapting practices

I’ve written here about some of my current ways of doing this in my everyday life. While the practices offered by therapeutic approaches, Buddhist mindfulness, religious faiths and so on may be very helpful to point us in the right direction, I’ve found that any of these practices applied too rigidly or harshly doesn’t work great. 

Pema Chödrön’s comparison of training a dog is helpful here: you get a much better trained, happier, and more flexible dog if you train them with rewards which work for that particular dog (e.g. cuddles, treats, or walks) within a broader understanding of how dogs work. If you just punish the dog whenever they do something you don’t like, and try to force them to conform to what you want, they may eventually do what you want them to do but they will be unhappy and inflexible when situations change. They may potentially become so stuck they can’t do anything if your training is inconsistent as well as harsh.

When endeavouring to change our own stuck patterns, then, it’s great to adapt practices to suit us. I tried – for years – to meditate, but struggled like hell to notice my stuck patterns and bring myself to the present, which is pretty much the point of meditation. However, bringing myself back came far easier to me when I allowed every glimpse of a bird to remind me to return to the present (I live in a place with a LOT of seagulls). It came even easier when I allowed myself to visualise the part of me who had gone back into a stuck pattern, and invited other parts of myself to help that part to come out again, often by talking with him directly rather than sitting in silence.

Three zones of stuck patterns

Something that came together for me today was that we need to draw ourselves back from stuck patterns in three ways. Again this is influenced by ideas from Pema Chödrön, and also Love Uncommon’s emotion thermometer.

It’s easy to feel we’ve done ‘well’ at catching a stuck pattern if we notice the first flicker of falling back into it and manage to say ‘nope’ and bring ourselves back out again. We can feel like we’ve failed if we wake up to ourselves and realise that we’ve been back in our stuck pattern for the last hour or so without realising it. And we can feel the absolute worst when our pattern has plunged us into full-on reactivity: an intense overwhelming response where we may melt down or shut down entirely.

I experienced all three of these yesterday. 

Noticing the flicker

In the morning I was being a boss at noticing when flickers of uncomfortable feeling arose. Instead of pushing it down or acting out of it by rushing into doing something, I paused, took myself to a gentle place, and asked myself what the feeling might be about, assuming it was a perfectly sensible response to the situation. Then I gave myself time to tune into what seemed like the best thing to do next with my day, of all the options, instead of trying to force anything.

Falling into the pattern

Later in the day I felt keen to do a work task: working on the blog posts that I shared yesterday. However once I got into this I started to feel self-doubt about whether they were any good, and frustration with how long it was taking to edit them and get them up. Instead of pausing and noticing, I pushed on because I didn’t want to feel those feelings and I just wanted to get the job done. By the end of a couple of hours I felt pretty rotten and it took a while to realise what I’d done to myself, and to bring myself to a kinder place. I took myself for a walk and had an internal conversation about how it was inevitable to fall into stuck patterns sometimes Then I had some gentle time doing something enjoyable when I returned home.

Overwhelm

In the evening I tried to confront a situation I’ve been finding very difficult lately: one which triggers really old, deep pain. I forgot everything I’ve been learning about how evenings are my most fragile time, how important it is not to push on when I’ve already had one tough thing happen in a day, and how I need to go particularly slowly and carefully around the ‘big ones’. 

I got drawn into trying to come up with a solution to this big, difficult, ongoing issue, and my failure to manage to solve it plunged me into an intense flashback: a combination of panic and toxic shame where I couldn’t stop myself from continuing to try to figure out a solution. I pulled myself back by naming what was happening, doing a minute of intense exercise followed by deep exhales to try to change my bodily state, and telling myself terrible old jokes to make me laugh (the latter worked best!) Then – once I felt a bit calmer – I put myself to bed with comfort food and my favourite current TV show, and later had some more soothing self-talk about what happened.

Working in the three zones

The point here isn’t that it is ‘best’ to notice the flicker and pull yourself back at that stage. Inevitably sometimes we won’t manage to do that and will fall into old patterns (we have practised them thousands of times, remember). And sometimes we will fall all the way into reactivity or flashback. Finding our own ways of drawing ourselves back from each of these places is the key. We could see each of them as an opportunity in that way.

We could conceptualise it like this, as three zones that we can go into with stuck patterns: the flicker of feeling that we’re about to go into them.The innermost circle is our everyday zone where we’re in an okay place with occasional flickers of feeling when our stuck patterns threatening. Our task if we’ve fallen more fully into a stuck pattern is to bring ourselves back to the innermost circle. Our task if we’ve gone into overwhelm or reactivity is to bring ourselves back through regular stuck patterns to the innermost circle.

[image error]

So in each of the three zones the task is to notice what’s happened and to draw ourselves back from enacting our stuck patterns. But the way we find to do this will likely be different in each zone. 

For the flickers of feeling it may be a fairly brief pause, allowing the feeling and understanding that it’s a sensible response, and reminding ourselves of our aim to do things differently now. For stuck patterns playing out more vividly, perhaps we need a longer time out to shift out of the pattern. We could do a practice to really get in touch with the underlying feelings, and/or we could talk/journal with ourselves about what happened and why it makes sense given the stuck patterns we’ve learnt and how ingrained they are.For overwhelm/reactivity it’s generally about taking ourselves right away from the triggering situation, not trying to deal with it right now. We might try soothing ourselves and being as kind as possible, which may take some time depending on how intense the overwhelm was. Pete Walker’s list is helpful if you experience this overwhelm as an emotional flashback (big plunge into fear and shame).

Summary

Overall it’s important to:

Recognise that we will inevitably fall into all three zones at times rather than seeing one as better/worse than anotherPractise slowing down enough to notice when we’re in any of the three zonesPlay with what works for us to do something different in each of the zones – and therefore to shift out of the stuck pattern. It can be useful to inform ourselves about the literature, for example on mindfulness or handling an emotional flashback, but it’s great to find our own ways because these are more likely to work for us, and stick.

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

Plural tag: This post was written by James (with bird input from Fox).

The post Zones of stuck patterns appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.