Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 2

New book out now! How to Understand Your Relationships

Our latest book with Alex Iantaffi is out now, with Jessica Kingsley Publishers. How to Understand Your Relationships is the last in our How to Understand Your… trilogy, taking the same format as How to Understand Your Gender and How to Understand Your Sexuality, again with fabulous illustrations by Jules Scheele, and this time with a wonderful foreword by Sophia Graham.

Like the other books in the series, this one unpacks dominant cultural ways of understanding relationships, and how those impact us, as well as the messages about relationships and ways of relating we learn growing up. It goes on to help readers locate their own ways of relating, exploring conscious, consensual relationship practices, and the kinds of support systems people might build around their relationships. Throughout the book, we also try to hold the non-binary bothness that relationships hold for pain and pleasure, trauma and healing, restriction and freedom.

Vitally, How to Understand Your Relationships is about all kinds of relationships. While it will hopefully be helpful for those focused on partnerships – of the monogamous or non-monogamous variety – it is equally applicable to friendships, family relationships and parenting, work relationships, and relationships with other humans, non-human beings, and beyond.

You can order the book via the publishers here, and it will soon also be available as an audio book. Watch this space for a video with Alex, discussing the book and what it means to us.

You might also like to check out Alex’s other book, Trans and Disabled, which also just came out, and which includes a chapter we wrote on plurality.

The post New book out now! How to Understand Your Relationships appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The Best of The Trauma Super Conference

The Best of the Trauma Super Conference

In advance of our new book, How to Understand Your Relationships (last book in our How to Understand Your… series), Alex Iantaffi and I are made up that our interview about trauma patterns in relationships with Jaï Bristow is being included in the best of the Trauma Super Conference.

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In our conversation, we cover:

Why traumatic dynamics arise in relationships,The role of both cultural trauma and developmental trauma in our relational patterns and dynamics,How our responses to traumatic/traumatising relationships can risk furthering the problem and how we might respond differently,How important it is to broaden out our understanding of relationships, to consider traumatic dynamics that show up in all kinds of relationships, not just intimate partnerships, andHow plural understandings of selves, and somatic approaches, can be helpful in addressing traumatic/traumatising relationships.

 

The conference airs on July 8th to 14th. You can sign up for the conference from today, using this link.

The book will be out in late January 2025!

Meanwhile, this zine introduces some of these ideas around relationship struggles.

The post The Best of The Trauma Super Conference appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Traumatic/traumatising relationships for the Trauma Super Conference

In advance of our new book, How to Understand Your Relationships (last book in our How to Understand Your… series), Alex Iantaffi and I recently spoke about trauma patterns in relationships with Jaï Bristow for the Trauma Super Conference.

In our conversation, we cover:

Why traumatic dynamics arise in relationships,The role of both cultural trauma and developmental trauma in our relational patterns and dynamics,How our responses to traumatic/traumatising relationships can risk furthering the problem and how we might respond differently,How important it is to broaden out our understanding of relationships, to consider traumatic dynamics that show up in all kinds of relationships, not just intimate partnerships, andHow plural understandings of selves, and somatic approaches, can be helpful in addressing traumatic/traumatising relationships.

 

The conference airs on January 29th to February 4th, and our conversation goes out on day 4 as part of the Relational Trauma day. You can sign up for the conference from today, using this link.

Or wait for the book which should be out later this year.

Meanwhile, here’s a zine which introduces some of these ideas around relationship struggles.

The post Traumatic/traumatising relationships for the Trauma Super Conference appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

New zine for the end of the year: Triangles (and Circles) of Selves

This post describes the thinking and feeling behind our new zine Triangles (and Circles) of Selves.

It takes the form of an interview between the self who created it – Fox – and another self – James. If you haven’t read one of our plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out our other Plural Selves zines, and our free books about Plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here interesting.

Location: Fox’s favourite cafe.

Food: Poached eggs, avo, halloumi brunch, with black americano

TLDR: Fox has made a new zine about plurality and they’re very excited about it. You can find it here.

 

James: It has been a while since we’ve done one of these.

Fox: Like a year and a half. You interviewed me about the Welcome Monster Feelings zine I made back in Spring 2022.

James: So I did. Readers could be forgiven for thinking that our plural experience has lessened since then, given how most of our blog posts have been written from a collective ‘I’, rather than as dialogues between us.

Fox: Not at all. If anything, our plurality has become even more vivid, and more of a central part of our everyday life, work, and relating. But we’ve been working deeply with our two most traumatised selves – Robin and Morgan – in the kinds of ways we wrote about back in 2020 and 2021. It felt too vulnerable to share from – or about – them very openly while we were doing that work.

James: An important aspect of ‘no part gets left behind’: ensuring that everyone feels comfortable with the level of sharing. But you did manage the Plural Selves 2 zine this time last year, and now this new zine: Triangles (and Circles) of Selves.

Fox: I did! It feels helpful to us to track our own plural experience through these zines: from 2017 to 2022 to now. And it shows how we’re all always a work in progress: all of us. Hopefully it’s also useful to share with others what we’re learning about plurality, which might be helpful to them as well: whether they have a vividly plural experience like us, or just as sense of containing different parts or subpersonalities that they want to explore more, and everything in between.

James: I want to ask you more about all of that. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Fox: That can happen with me!

James: Very true *smiles* So help me out here with a bit of a plan before we begin.

Fox: Okay.

James: I want to ask you about the zine: why you wrote it and what it means to you. Then I want to ask you about your creative process because I know you love that.

Fox: It makes me feel like a proper creative type!

James: Which you are. Plus I’m intrigued about the directions our creativity is going in with you. And finally I want to touch on the picture we’ve used to illustrate this blog post: your latest image of our plural system.

Fox: Yes!

James: Alright then.

Fox: Let’s do this!

 

The Triangles (and circles) of selves zine

James: So tell us about your new zine, Fox. What motivated you to write this? And how does it differ from our previous plural selves zines?

Fox: Okay. So the Plural Selves 2 zine, which we wrote this time last year, was a very visual comic-type zine about the kinds of selves we’ve found in our system, and how people might explore whether they have similar kinds of selves themselves. But since then, we’ve come across a number of plural ideas which have helped us to understand ourselves – how we were formed and the roles we play – even better. 

James: It’s not a completely different set of ideas to Plural Selves 2 then?

Fox: Not at all. But it has this idea of a core triangle of selves at the heart of it, which a lot of people have found helpful when we shared it with them.

James: That’s why you wrote this zine really, because so many people in our lives kept asking if there was anywhere they could point people to, to explain these ideas.

Fox: Right, and there is this book Being and Becoming, by Franklyn Sills, which is where we found out some of these ideas. But that’s quite a dense book aimed at therapists, and it also doesn’t cover all of the different ideas I wanted to explore.

James: Basically you noticed that these kinds of triangles kept showing up in many of the different things we were reading: from literature on developmental trauma, to writing about relationships, to Buddhist teachings, to recovery community resources, to autism articles, to books about the politics of trauma and traumatising cultures.

Fox: Yes, so I wanted to make a zine to show how all these triangles map onto each other, at all levels of experience from existential, through sociocultural, relational, and internal bodyminds.

Image Description: A series of concentric circles, the outer circle labelled ‘existential/spiritual’, the next one in ‘sociocultural’, the next one in ‘relational’, and the inner circle ‘internal’

James: This is the post-humanist kind of model you were playing with in your Queering Creative Health zine: the idea that we’re always inevitably embodied, entangled with other beings, and embedded in the wider world. So we need to understand everything about ourselves at all those levels of experience.

Fox: And we’re existential: because we’re beings who know they exist – and have to figure out how to be given that – or something!

James: Something like that. You explain it all very well in this zine.

Fox: Thank-you.

James: So you’re saying you were motivated to put something out there explaining all these triangles and how they map onto each other, because others were finding it helpful when we shared about it.

Fox: Exactly. That’s why this zine is really a long essay with pictures. Or a lot of little essays. Not a comic like most of my zines are.

James: We’ll get to that shift in a moment. Could you just explain the main idea of the triangle model simply, so people get a sense of it.

Fox: Okay right. The idea is that – for all kinds of reasons existential, sociocultural, relational, and internal – people tend to create a singular self, who they present to the world, who is trying to perform everything they’ve learnt to think of as ‘good’. But doing this means pushing down into the shadow or unconsciousness, two selves who are seen as ‘bad’ in different ways: A needy/vulnerable self who is constantly yearning for love and connection, and a rejecting/rejected self who holds all our ‘bad’ experiences and sees the ‘bad’ in others.

Image description: A triangle. The top corner labelled ‘central/performing self’, the bottom left ‘needy/vulnerable self’ and the bottom right ‘rejecting/rejected self’

James: And where do the circles come in?

Fox: *laughs* you know where they come in! It’s you: You and Ara.

James: For our readers!

Fox: Okay. So our sense is that we needed two other selves, in order to bring those unconscious selves out of the shadow, and to free them to enable them to be what they’re capable of. We see the two other selves as the top and bottom halves of a circle which can go around the triangle, containing it.

James: And how would you describe these two halves?

Image description: A triangle within a circle. The top corner of the triangle labelled ‘open self’, the bottom left ‘sensitive self’ and the bottom right ‘clear self’. The top half of the circle labelled ‘witnessing self’ and the bottom half ‘holding self’

Fox: The top half is a kind of witnessing self. She can hold the others in a big enough space for them to bring themselves in fully, and she can see them with a loving gaze.

James: And that vital bottom half? What’s that like?

Fox: Oh I don’t know. Nothing very important really.

James: Behave!

Fox: Okay, the bottom half – who we might or might not call James – is like a grounding self, who can hold everyone steady. He can do the everyday life stuff while the top half of the circle is helping everyone to feel their old pains, and free themselves of their old patterns.

James: He sounds great.

Fox: Doesn’t he though?! Obviously the genders of these selves will be different for different people. But in us the witness is a she and the grounding is a he.

James: Right. And the zine explores a whole bunch of different ways in which we might understand the triangles, and the circles.

Fox: Yep. This zine is really focused on the ideas, while our other plural zines were a lot about the practices we use to get to know, and love, all our selves.

I guess we had struggled sometimes with all the different models of how people work and relate. You know like the trauma 4Fs, and the shame compass, inner child understandings, attachment theory, and all of that. I saw the triangle as a kind of constant through all those ideas. Maybe, like us, people might find it a useful touchstone to draw on all of those understandings – and others – instead of getting freaked out about which one is the ‘right’ one or something.

James: I see. It’s a way of weaving together all these understandings, so they stop competing with each other and start working together. Any of them can then be a helpful way into this overall understanding of how people work.

Fox: Exactly.

 

Unique or Universal?

James: That brings us to something I know you’ve struggled with. Is this a universal theory that applies to everyone?

Fox: Ugh, it’s such a paradoxy question. Like absolutely not, because nothing good ever came from imposing universal theories of how people work on everyone. And, at the same time, kinda yes, maybe, because there are some similar patterns that seem to show up in all these different understandings of how people work – from micro to macro – and across very different philosophies, faiths, and spiritualities.

James: It’s something we think about a lot isn’t it? What’s unique and what’s universal?

Fox: Right. It goes back to the levels model really. If we think about our experience of plurality: that idea of creating a ‘good’ self and disowning the ‘bad’. Some of that – we reckon – is an existential thing that many – if not all – humans do in order to deal with things like the fact they are going to die, and the way that the world around them tells them how they should be. But some of how it works for us is due to our cultural context: growing up, and living now, in a white imperialist country which bases pretty much everything – laws, education, healthcare, media, etc. – on this rigid set of ideas about what it is to be a ‘normal’ ‘successful’ individual self.

James: Right, so some of how we experience ourselves could be really different from how people experience themselves in other cultural contexts: Less individualistic cultures, for example, or cultures which readily accept that a number of selves, souls, or spirits, can share a body/mind.

Fox: Exactly. And then, going down another level, some of how we experience ourselves is due to the specifics of the way we were treated growing up in this culture. Like the kinds of developmental trauma we experienced, or what it was like to be a being who didn’t fit neatly into many categories.

James: Like?

Fox: Boy/girl, gay/straight, working/middle class background, northern/southern, and – related to our undiagnosed autism – abled/disabled, stupid/smart… So many really.

James: Mm. 

Fox: So some of our experience will likely only resonate with others who grew up in a similar time and place, or those with similar kinds of developmental trauma and/or neurodivergence, or those who have similar experiences of being between or beyond binaries, or of challenging normative classification models in some way.

James: And that relates to the inner level.

Fox: Exactly, some aspects of our plural experience are probably completely unique to us: to the ways in which our particular bodymind has been shaped – and continues to be shaped – by all these things.

James: So what does that mean for how we present these ideas?

Fox: I guess I always want to ensure that we present them in an invitational way. I think it is helpful to present our particular experience of plurality, because it does seem to resonate with a lot of people we speak with, and because it brings to life how people might do this kind of plural work themselves. So much writing on plurality doesn’t really ‘walk the walk’ in that way. You can be left, after reading it, wondering: yeah but how does it actually feel to be plural? How do you actually relate with each other? How could I explore my own plurality if it’s all unfamiliar to me?

James: Those are the kinds of questions we’re trying to help people with, by showing them how we work, and telling them about what’s worked for us.

Fox: Right but invitational. Starting with that sense – always – that some of this may be helpful to everyone, some to people only of a similar cultural context, some to people only of a similar relationship background, some – perhaps – only to other autistic, plural systems, who carry the same kinds of developmental trauma that we do.

James: And some is just our own unique team MJ way of experiencing stuff.

Fox: Our own particular weirdness.

James: Exactly.

Fox: I guess I hope that even that could be helpful. Like it could give people permission that of course it will all work in particular weird and wonderful ways for them too, and that is something to be celebrated, not resisted. That’s part of the problem, isn’t it? The idea we should all conform to some universal, or cultural, or community, ideal of ‘normal’.

James: Right. And one gift of plurality is that you know that – even internally – you can’t possibly conform, because you are however-many-number of different selves, or parts, who see the world in radically different, often contradictory, ways.

Fox: Exactly.

 

Incorrigibly Plural

James: Okay, so nearly done with the zine. Just tell me something about how it relates to our book project.

Fox: Right, so we hope to write a book, over the next year or more, called Incorrigibly Plural. In a way the zine was my first attempt to write the core of that book: The set of ideas that we’ll be playing with there.

James: How will the book differ?

Fox: Well, I hope – if you all feel up to it – that you’ll each write from yourselves, about what it’s like to be each of those selves: the needy/vulnerable self, the witnessing self, and all that.

James: So there’ll be all of our voices in there, maybe some dialogue between us all too.

Fox: Right. Telling the story of how we’ve done this: each self’s journey, and how we relate together.

James: Anything else?

Fox: Well the book will also be more practical than the zine, including a lot of the creative, therapeutic, spiritual, relational, and somatic practices that we’ve found helpful for doing this kind of selves work. And pointing people at other people’s work as well.

James: And I guess we’ll cover this universal/unique issue in more depth.

Fox: Absolutely. One thing I want to do is to emphasise this sense that both complementary-ness and contradictory-ness are helpful: That we can hold sameness and difference. So, like, we – our plural selves – have a lot of similarities in our values, passions, that kind of thing. But, like you said, we’re also very different. One thing we’re learning together is how to be alongside each other in that difference instead of in opposition. 

James: Nicely put. What do you mean?

Fox: Well like, we could see it as a problem, when we contradict each other. Like pulling in opposite directions, someone’s always going to lose out. Or we could see it as a gift of plurality, that we can always see every situation from at least five different perspectives. That enables us to get a way fuller picture of everything that’s going on. And then we go through a process of deciding how to engage with whatever-it-is which brings all of us along with us. That feels amazing, when we can do that. And it maybe helps us learn something about how people, or groups, could manage to be alongside each other in their sameness and difference too.

James: So being with where we complement each other and where we contradict each other.

Fox: You’re looking very dapper today James, but I don’t completely agree with your choice of socks.

James: I see what you did there. Personally I think these socks are an excellent choice. Very cosy for a Winter day.

Fox: Not colourful enough.

James: Sadly a problem with so much of our wardrobe when you are the only self in our system who likes bright colours.

Fox: Sadly, sadly. I’m still campaigning for more orange.

James: You want to do the same thing with ideas in the book right? Complementary and contradictory.

Fox: Yes, thank-you. The zine could give the impression that all these ideas – all these triangles – just complement each other perfectly. But there are also contradictions between them. I want to get those across in the book. Like, again, it’s not a problem that there are very different stories we could tell about the way our plurality manifests. If we can hold multiple truths as valid then we can learn from the dialogue between them, instead of getting stuck trying to find the one right, true answer.

James: How’re you planning to do that?

Fox: I think we’ll present the zine ideas in the book, and then give – like – twenty different stories through our experience, from different perspectives. To show how it can be helpful both to find those common threads – like the multiple triangles that map onto each other – and to voice all the contradictory stories and hold all of them as valid and valuable also.

James: I like it.

Fox: Thank-you.

 

The creative self?

James: Okay moving on from the zine and the book, I can’t help noticing that you seem to be leading on all of our creativity these days.

Fox: It does seem like that doesn’t it?

James: What d’you make of that?

Fox: Good question. I guess I need to start with a bit about who I am.

James: Please.

Fox: Our sense is that, when we stopped trying to present a singular ‘good’ individual self to the world, that made space for me to come forward more in our system. I feel like the self we were – or maybe could have been – without trauma: just open to experience, curious, present to whatever is happening.

James: Mmhm.

Fox: At first we mistook that for me being some kind of ‘child’ self, because I have childlike qualities. So I kind of took the lead on drawing pictures, like in the monster feelings zine. I still feel very committed to the idea of presenting ideas in formats other than words – and explaining things simply, and visually. But more and more I seem to have been the one of us who gets excited about all kinds of creativity. This year I wrote that Queer Creative Health zine that we were commissioned to produce. Then I was the one who wrote this plural selves zine, even though it is much more writing than my previous zines. And just recently I wrote a purely written chapter, for Alex’s new anthology: Trans and Disabled.

James: Which also explores some of the ideas we’ve been discussing here.

Fox: Out next year!

James: I guess writing used to be the job of our central/performing self, back when we thought we were a singular self.

Fox: Right, and there were risks with that. Like it might come from a singular voice and perspective, when now we know the value of drawing on all of our voices and perspectives. Also the central/performing self is very invested in demonstrating they are ‘good’. There’s a risk that writing from that place could come across as too self-deprecating, or too defensive, or as having something to prove. All of that gets in the way of that invitational way of writing that feels so important to us now.

James: A style where people really feel permission to read it if it resonates, and not if it doesn’t. And where they can feel able to take what works for them and leave the rest – as Alex says – no implicit pressure from us for them to agree with us.

Fox: Right. And that’s all the more important now we recognise that everyone reading our work will also be as multiplicitous and contradictory as we are. Different people may relate to our work, or not, but also different parts of the same person, or selves in the same system. In the book I want us to directly speak to different selves – or parts – in the reader, as well as speaking from different selves in us.

James: Nice.

Fox: Thank-you.

James: You’re welcome.

Fox: *Grin* What was the question again?

James: Um, oh yes, so you were saying that we used to write from the central/performing self. What happened next?

Fox: After our plurality became more vivid, I gradually took over the picture-based kind of stuff, and we did a bunch of those blog posts as dialogue that are now in our plurality free books. But when we had to do serious writing, you mostly took that on: as our everyday life kind of self.

James: Mm.

Fox: How was that for you?

James: It was okay. I liked that I was writing informed by all of your experiences. It felt like a way of honouring what you were all doing. And you know I have a sense of myself as in service to the rest of you. So it kind of fit with that.

Fox: I sense a but coming!

James: Heh. Yes, I guess it didn’t feel like my forte. I think I enjoy being of service in other ways more. I enjoy doing the practical life things so the rest of you can get on with your spiritual, therapeutic, and creative work, and with connecting with other people. And I enjoy looking after you in that grounding way when one of you is struggling, and gentling you up in the evenings, hearing about your days.

Fox: You’re excellent at all of that James.

James: *smiles* Writing felt like… I could do it, but it wouldn’t be as heartfelt as if any of the rest of you were doing it. I’m not so big on feelings.

Fox: Except feeling for all of us.

James: I am big on those feelings.

Fox: Morgan tried doing some of our writing too. It probably means the most to her because she is the one who is so committed to truth-telling: the one whose voice has been so silenced through our lives. But she’s also the one who holds the inner criticism so it can be so painful for her. It’s hard for her to not keep questioning whether it’s good enough, or to struggle with the contradictions, or with being invitational rather than imposing.

James: You and I are more relaxed about such things.

Fox: We just sit down in a cafe and write about all the weird stuff that we think about all the time!

James: Exactly.

Fox: Sometimes we have the image of me with a clipboard. Like I’m running around everyone else watching what they’re doing, jotting down what they’re saying, and then I can write a report on it all.

James: Which is kind of what you did with the monster feelings zine. Most of them were not your feelings.

Fox: Except for the fizzy creative feelings!

James: Except those. You listened to Robin and Morgan describe their feelings and then turned them into pictures. It was a lovely process.

Fox: And now I’m expanding that, to write for others based on all of the things I’ve jotted down on my clipboard.

James: So do you think you’ll be the key author of our plural book?

Fox: I’m not sure. Ara wrote for the first time the other day – just her – and it was beautiful. Like she can write from that place of seeing us all, and everybody else, with that loving gaze. And. of course, in the book I’m hoping that everyone will tell their own stories, and write in dialogue together too.

James: Watch this space then?

Fox: Exactly.

 

The Picture

James: Which brings us to the last thing I wanted to ask you about. This picture you drew of us all yesterday.

Fox: Yes! I loved drawing that!

Image Description: A comic-style drawing of five people under a movie-style title ‘Incorrigible Plural’, with character names: Morgan, James, Ara, Fox, Robin written above it. The people are clustered together in a group and include an angry looking girl, a man with glasses, a kind looking woman, a person with Fox-style ears and tail, and a somewhat anxious looking boy

James: Tell me what it means to you.

Fox: Well I’ve drawn a few comics and cartoons of us in the past – or we have – but I guess I took it on after a while as the main drawing self.

James: Right. We even wrote a whole paper about comics and plural selves before that didn’t we?

Fox: Oh yes we did! Anyway, we hadn’t drawn ourselves for a year. And there have been a few important changes in our system since then.

James: Tell us about that.

Fox: Well a huge one is we’re now five instead of seven.

James: What happened there?!

Fox: Heh you know.

James: For our readers.

Fox: Well, as we focused on Robin and Morgan’s journeys we had the sense of the self we called Max gradually emptying out. We could still talk to her but it was like she was up in the hills somewhere most of the time. She always seemed very relaxed and okay with it. Like she was the previous central/performing self who just didn’t have to be anymore, and that was a huge relief. We also felt the self we called Jonathan around less and less, only really coming forward to do the cooking, and even then he didn’t really like it if we asked him how he was doing or anything.

James: Mm.

Fox: It struck us that perhaps Max was an aspect of Morgan and Jonathan an aspect of Robin. Like trauma had split Morgan into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ halves (Max, and the one we used to call Beastie), and Robin into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ halves (Jonathan, and the one we used to call Tony). It felt like the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in both of them were coming back together. Like we could feel how Morgan encompassed the kinds of energies we used to associate with Max and Beastie, and Robin those we associated with Jonathan and Tony. It took a while, and it was sometimes confusing – and sad – to lose those selves who we loved so much. I guess that’s one of those contradictions, James. It’s true to say that we lost nothing, because we still feel them in Morgan and Robin. And it’s also true to say we have lost them, and that we feel the grief and sadness of that loss, alongside a relief that the five-system feels more balanced and ‘right’ than seven ever did.

James: At one point years ago we thought we might be nine. There was a similar relief when we realised it was seven, not nine.

Fox: Mm, which does not necessarily mean five-forever. We always want to be open to different selves emerging or merging. We still sometimes have a sense of these wispy fragments of Robin and Morgan’s shadow selves: like the worst possible versions of them floating around a bit untethered. And we feel it is vital to welcome them wholeheartedly every time we feel their presence, even though they’re very into trying to scare us with just how monstrous and unacceptable they are. 

James: No part gets left behind.

Fox: Exactly, and it is so important to us to recognise that – just like everyone – we contain the capacity to be harmful, to do the worst things that humans are capable of. The path towards causing less harm comes from accepting that with great honesty, not by denying it and shoving those little ghosts and demons back under the rug.

James: Well put. More of that in the book I suspect.

Fox: Oh definitely.

James: So you were saying. One big shift in our system was to being five instead of seven, because we recognised Robin and Morgan as incorporating the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ boy and girl, respectively.

Fox: Mmhm. The other big shift is even more recent. Ara came in way more fully.

James: She did!

Fox: We weren’t expecting it. She’s been available all the time since summer 2020. Like if any of us wanted to be with her we could, any time. But we visualised her as sitting in a field somewhere that we could go and visit, or on the stoop of our imaginary house. She wasn’t quite one of us, in the way the rest of us were. I guess we thought it’d always be that way, given that she’s the witnessing self. Maybe she needed all that solitude and space in order to be able to hold us when we went to her.

James: But she started to be more present, on long walks particularly.

Fox: She walks. A. Lot. More. Slowly. Than. The. Rest. Of. Us.

James: *Chuckles*

Fox: Then she had a session with our therapist, talking as herself: as Ara. And after that it was like she was embodied fully. One of us. Hopefully she’ll share all of that more in the book, but for us it was like we could engage with her way more readily in our everyday life, and she was having a lot more of her own experiences.

James: And I could let go of some of the holding and hearing that I’d been doing. She took it over.

Fox: You’re, like, a gentleman of leisure now right? I do the creativity, Ara does the holding…

James: There’s still plenty to do. And also, someone has to hold you and Ara when it’s been a lot.

Fox: You’re doing brilliantly. You know that right?

James: I do okay. You know me, just steady steady, step by step through the day; through the life.

Fox: Brilliantly.

James: So this picture.

Fox: *Grin* So I guess we’d never really known what Ara looked like before. I’d drawn her in a certain way, but it was kind of a mash up of people we’d felt compassion from in the past, rather than a real sense of what she feels like – the way I draw the rest of us. When I did the latest picture she came out looking like she feels. She’s a bit more like I used to draw Max, with the short white hair, but her face conveys the feeling that I used to convey in the more mash-up pictures of Ara.

James: She also has a nice cosy looking coat on.

Fox: That just felt right somehow.

James: So why this picture this way?

Fox: Well people might have noticed that it’s a riff on the poster from the 1980s movie ‘The Breakfast Club’. We were out walking the other day – fast not slow because it was me walking and listening to our tunes – and ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ came on, which is the song from that movie. And suddenly I thought we mapped onto the characters in that film, now that we are five.

James: One of our favourite games: who would each of us be from this movie, or that TV show, or that book?

Fox: It is one of the most fun plural games.

Image description: The same picture from before next to the movie poster of The Breakfast Club, which depicts five people in a similar cluster who represent stereotypes of US high-school kids: A recluse, a rebel, a jock, a beauty and a brain (according the the movie description)

James: So what appealed about ‘The Breakfast Club’, exactly?

Fox: Well it wasn’t precisely the characters. I mean a little bit in the way there’s a character who is a sad, angry girl – the way Morgan can be – and there’s a character who is a scared boy – the way we can experience Robin. But the other characters, not so much.

James: So you don’t think you bear any resemblance to a princess then…?

Fox: Hey! I mean I guess I am here being treated by you to brunch and an extra hot chocolate. But other than that not at all. I mean (1) I’m not gendered, and (2) I wear orange, not pink. At least when I’m allowed to…

James: Alright, alright. So what was it that amused you about us being the characters from ‘The Breakfast Club’?

Fox: Well the set up is that they are five school students who are all shut in detention together, and they are completely different: ‘A brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel and a recluse’. And by the end of the movie they’ve learnt how to get along.

James: Spoiler alert.

Fox: Dude it came out in 1984. It’s an iconic John Hughes movie. Anyone who is going to watch it has already watched it.

James: Heh you’re feisty today.

Fox: Know your place serving man.

James: *laughs* very well prince/ss? Your honour? Majesterial majestical monarch.

Fox: *laughs*

James: Anyway, you’re saying you like the idea of us as five very different selves locked in together, learning about each other: what we have in common, and how to relate across our differences.

Fox: Exactly. You could say that’s the situation of our lives – born into this bodymind together. Or you could say it’s what happened from 2020 onwards. Like, literally, locked in, the five of us together.

James: ‘They only met once, but it changed their lives forever.’

Fox: Like ‘The Breakfast Club’ if they all decided to move in together after the movie.

James: Personally I like that I occupy the position of the ‘rebel’ in our version of the poster. Looking pretty hunky and moody there too.

Fox: I wouldn’t make too much of it, Ara is in the position of the ‘jock’ which is hardly her is it?

James: Way to burst my bubble: the brooding hero, James.

Fox: Maybe in a parallel universe.

James: I’ll take it. Anything else to say?

Fox: I don’t think so. Just that the title of the picture –  ‘Incorrigibly Plural’ – is the title we’re playing with for the book. And we’ll be writing more about that in a chapter we’re writing for a new anthology on neuroqueer: what it means to embrace being incorrigibly plural.

James: Perhaps we’ll share some of that here when that chapter comes out.

Fox: Plan. Thanks for this James.

James: Right back at you littlest.

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Healing toxic relationships summit

In advance of our new book, How to Understand Your Relationships (last book in our How to Understand Your… series), Alex Iantaffi and I recently spoke with Jaï Bristow for the upcoming summit on Healing Toxic Relationships.

In our conversation, we cover:

Why toxic dynamics arise in relationships,The role of cultural trauma and developmental trauma in our relational patterns and dynamics,How our responses to toxic relationships can risk furthering the problem and how we might respond differently,How important it is to broaden out our understanding of relationships, to consider toxic dynamics that show up in all kinds of relationships, not just intimate partnerships, andHow we might know when it is a good idea to remain in a relationship, when it’s not, and what the spectrum of options may be in relation to this.

 

The conference airs on November 6th – 12th and our interview goes out on Day 1. You can sign up for the conference from today, using this link.

Or wait for the book which should be out next year.

The post Healing toxic relationships summit appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Healing Toxic Relationships Summit

In advance of our new book, How to Understand Your Relationships (last book in our How to Understand Your… series), Alex Iantaffi and I recently spoke with Jaï Bristow for the upcoming summit on Healing Toxic Relationships.

In our conversation, we cover:

Why toxic dynamics arise in relationships,The role of cultural trauma and developmental trauma in our relational patterns and dynamics,How our responses to toxic relationships can risk furthering the problem and how we might respond differently,How important it is to broaden out our understanding of relationships, to consider toxic dynamics that show up in all kinds of relationships, not just intimate partnerships, andHow we might know when it is a good idea to remain in a relationship, when it’s not, and what the spectrum of options may be in relation to this.

 

The conference airs on November 6th – 12th and our interview goes out on Day 1. You can sign up for the conference from today, using this link.

Or wait for the book which should be out next year.

 

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Queer Storytelling

Hi all, I’m just back from my writing retreat with Alex Iantaffi where we finished the first draft of our new book – How to Understand Your Relationships! This completes our How to Understand Your… trilogy. Hopefully we’ll edit the book over the next few months and it’ll be out at some point next year. Watch this space for details. We’re already mulling possible next projects. Queer spiritulity and queer creativity are major themes we’re hoping to explore further together…

While I was away, I was included in an interview about the Out on the Page and Audible Pride List of Queer Storytelling. I was one of the nominators for this amazing list of queer stories and storytellers. It’s a brilliant resource if you’re looking to expand your queer reading.

Attitude magazine interviewed me, along with Shivani Dave and Juliet Jacques about our own relationships to queer storytelling. This was particularly exciting, for me. All my published books to date have been non-fiction, but I do attempt to tell queer stories through these books, particularly the graphic guides. Also I’m increasingly creating more fictional and comic/zine stories alongside that work, and exploring queer creativity specifically. It’s affirming to be thought of as a queer storyteller.

You can read the interview with me, Shiv and Juliet here, and read my answers in full below.

 

How has the writing process aided you in your gender journey?

In so many ways. I’ve been fortunate to be paid to write about gender for a general audience. Writing Gender: A Graphic Guide with Jules Scheele enabled me to learn all about gender, weaving together history, psychology, sociology, biology, cultural theory and more to come to my best attempt at making sense of how it all works. Writing How To Understand Your Gender with Alex Iantaffi helped me to reflect – again – on my own gender and to write the book I wish I’d had as a young person.

Nowadays I write fiction to further explore the multiple gendered parts of myself and to bring them into better communication with each other, as well as journaling in dialogue between them – both for myself and on my blog.

Who would you say is the most influential gender-diverse writer in history? 

I’m going to say all the gender diverse writers who never got to write and who we’ve therefore never had the chance to read. Thanks to the rigid white Western binary model of gender, and the way it’s been enforced around the world, so many voices have been silenced. Even now – as writers like Travis Alabanza and Juliet Jacques have pointed out – we only hear particular narratives of gender diversity: those that fit the dominant culture’s narrow sense of allowable transness. This severely closes down the options of how we can understand, experience and express our gender diversity and creativity.

I would point people towards Kit Heyam’s wonderful history book Before We Were Trans which tells the stories of gender diverse people across time and place, including those who have been silenced or written out of history in various ways.

Who are the most influential gender-diverse characters? 

Anna Madrigal from Tales of the City was the first gender diverse character I remember reading as a late teenager. Armisted Maupin’s books had a huge impact on me way before I realised my own transness, and on so many other people I know.

The depiction of a wise, kind, older trans woman was radical for the time when – as the Disclosure documentary shows – gender diverse people were generally depicted as objects of ridicule, dangerous perpetrators, or disposable victims, if they were depicted at all. Maupin’s later books – and the TV shows based on them – include many other great depictions of various forms of gender diversity. 

What text exploring gender-diversity is most important to you?

I picked Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater for the Pride list because it depicts a plural experience of gender diversity – someone who has several different selves, or spirits, of different genders – as well as exploring how gender and spirituality can be interwoven. This was huge for me as there are so few books that depict plurality as part of life – outside of mental health memoirs. 

I also picked Becky Chambers because she writes so affirmatively about many types of gender, sexual, and relationship diversity, and about relating kindly across difference. Her most recent series has a non-binary lead character without that being a big deal or central to the plot.

What are some of the most common obstacles faced by gender-diverse writers and how do we change them?

Juliet Jacques, Travis Alabanza, Juno Roche, Shon Faye, CN Lester and others have written eloquently about the ways in which only certain stories of gender diversity are welcomed, such as stories that centre our transness (and often white middle class transness), that focus on medical transition, that draw on the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative, and that present us as poster children for trans by being normative in every other way.

They have also highlighted the fraught cultural moment that we are writing into – where we are still often assumed to be deluded and/or dangerous – and how incredibly hard it is to write honestly about the complexities of gender, and about our experience, when we know how people are likely to misrepresent us and attack us.

We need everyone’s support to shift the current toxic culture around gender diversity so that it becomes safer to tell diverse stories of gender, and so that people can find the stories they need to help them on their own journeys.

How can the literary community better support gender-diverse writers?

I was very struck by an answer Juno Roche gave at a book launch event where they were talking with H Howitt. A cis person asked Juno how they could best write trans characters. I think we were all expecting Juno to say something like ‘don’t’ or ‘educate yourself and talk to lots of trans people’, but what they actually said was along the lines of ‘find the trans person in you and speak from them’. 

Personally I love this challenging of the trans/cis binary. I think the most helpful thing that people in wider communities – including the literary community – can do is to undertake deep reflective work around their own gender diversity, their own gender transitions, and the ways the rigid gender binary has hurt them. Then it won’t just be trans people who have to write about this stuff, and we can work for change in the gender system – and other intersecting systems of oppression – in solidarity.

What is the best way to respond to the rise of book banning in schools and libraries?

I couldn’t say that I know the best way to respond. I guess I would say it’s important to do our best to make sure that there are as many places as possible – on and offline – where people, including young people, can access stories and supportive resources around gender diversity. It’s also great to encourage young people to create their own stories and resources in ways that are safe enough in the current climate.

What books from Audible and Out on the Page’s collaboration have you read and added to your reading lists?

There were so many books on the list I haven’t read! I suppose I’d want to reassure people that that’s ok. We can so easily get the sense that we should have read all the things, or even that we’re not queer enough unless we have an encyclopaedic knowledge of queer literature. I believe it is fine to focus on the stories and voices that speak to you, even returning to them time and again as trusted friends, rather than forcing yourself to read everything. 

We also need to challenge any sense that certain kinds of writing are superior or inferior. It’s so fine to be into genre fiction or comic books, for example, and some of the best queer writing I’ve read is in online fanfic communities. 

When we expand our understanding of queer to include being neuroqueer we have to acknowledge that people take in information and stories in very different ways, which is part of why having books available in audio format, as well as diverse kinds of fiction, non-fiction, graphic books and poetry, on a list like this is so important.

That said, hopefully a list like this can give you a flavour of the kinds of amazing books that are out there, and why people love them so much, so you might flick through some of them and pursue them if they grab you. 

Personally it was lovely to see how many other people chose my old favourites like Alison Bechdel (who Shivani Dave and others mentioned), Jeanette Winterson, Alice Walker, and Mary Oliver, and to get some pointers on other authors I might like to read. Particularly I came away wanting to read some of James Baldwin’s fiction (having only read essays by him). Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward really appeals because it uses multiple genres in one book. I definitely want to read Here Again Now by Okechukwu Nzelu, which several people nominated. Two of the books that Juliet Jacques recommended grabbed me in her descriptions: Lote by Shola von Reinhold and Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt which plays with haunted houses and explores cultural transphobia. As a comic fan I also fancy The Pride Omnibus by Joe Glass which Alex Bertie says is like the Avengers but queer.

Why are campaigns such as this important to you and the rest of the LGBTQ community?

For me what stood out was the way it celebrated diverse writing forms, genres, authors, and stories, from around the world and across time. For me there’s far more to queer storytelling than representing LGBTQ people, it’s about representing diversity within queerness and raising more marginalised voices. It’s also about telling stories that challenge normative narratives of what it is to be a person, to love, or to have a successful life, for example. Hopefully the list will inspire others to read these books and to explore their own creativity in different ways as well.

What is your advice to an aspiring writer who is gender-diverse?

When I was asked about this by JKP I said: 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.

We have to learn to create in the ways that feel nourishing for us, not the ways we feel we should do it, or the ways the world expects us to do it. Finding what that is for us is hugely important. As gender diverse people we’re already treated non-consensually enough. It’s vital that we treat ourselves consensually when it comes to our creativity, and what we put out there and when. It’s fine to create just for ourselves, or to share only with trusted others. It’s absolutely okay to not write at all. The best writing comes from a radical acceptance of not writing.

My nominations

Becky Chambers – A Psalm for the Wild Built

Becky Chambers is my favourite novelist. Her sci-fi books are filled with tender characters doing their best to relate across difference. A Psalm for the Wild Built is the first in her Monk and Robot series, which features a non-binary lead character as well as imagining beautifully queer, sustainable forms of loving, living, and community building. Becky’s stories are just the kind of gentle, warm, hopeful read so many of us need right now.

Travis Alabanza – None of the Above

None of the Above is a beautiful, profound, and heart-breaking memoir by Travis Alabanza in which they time travel back through their life via various comments people have made which stayed with them. The book raises vital questions about why it is the non-binary person – rather than the white western capitalist gender binary system – who is called upon to explain themselves. I love Travis’s embracing of paradox, complexity and liminality, as well as how they question all of the binaries imposed on us in order to determine who is valued and who is not.

Akwaeke Emezi – Freshwater

Freshwater is non-binary novelist Akwaeke Emezi’s semi-autobiographical book about a girl growing up containing ogbanje (Igbo spirits). It’s a stunning book, and a wonderful literary depiction of multiplicity, which meant a lot to me as someone who experiences themselves as plural. I love the way that Akwaeke questions the spirit/body binary as well as the gender binary through their writing, and how they write across multiple genres rather than restricting themselves to one.

More on Queer Writing…What is Queer Writing?Queer ComicsQueer CreativityAdvice for Queer WritersFree Book On Writing

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Working with – outer and inner – relationship diversity

This week I’m heading away with my co-author, Alex Iantaffi, for a writing retreat when we hope to make a start on our new book How to Understand Your Relationships (follow-up to How to Understand Your Gender, and How to Understand Your Sexuality).

I thought it’d be a good time to share the write-up of an interview I gave earlier this year to the Association for Cognitive Analytic Therapy conference about working with outer and inner relationship diversity.

The interview was aimed at therapists, but is hopefully relevant to anyone interested in working with their own outer and inner relationships. Alex and I will be covering many of these themes in more depth in the new book.

Who are you and where are you at in your journey?

I’m a full time writer now, but my background is in academia, activism and therapy. I write therapeutically. By that I mean that I write about therapeutic topics for a general audience (to make them more accessible than they are in a lot of books aimed at therapists) and also that I focus on writing of various kinds as a therapeutic practice.

I felt some sense of dislocation being asked to talk at a therapy conference, having spent the last four years on the other side of that room – as a client. But I have a feeling that perhaps I’ve learnt more from this recent period than from the previous twenty years, especially about inner and outer relationships.

Why are we having this conversation with you?

Probably because it was Dominic Davies – of Pink Therapy – and myself who came up with the acronym GSRD (for gender, sex and relational diversity) which I consequently wrote the free BACP resource about (hopefully useful starting point for anyone who is unfamiliar with these areas).

One of the many reasons we decided on that acronym was because we wanted to highlight that relationship diversity was just as important for therapists to consider as gender and sexual diversity – and also interrelated with them.

Relationship diversity means the diverse ways in which people understand and conduct their relationships – usually focusing on romantic relationships. For example, it includes whether people are single or coupled, monogamous or non monogamous, and whether they experience romantic attraction or not, or prioritise romantic or other kinds of relationships.

What is your approach?

I was initially a fairly mainstream psychologist and my main therapeutic learning (in my psychology degree) was cognitive behavioural therapy, with a person-centred counselling counselling certificate on the side. Then I shifted academically into a more critical form of psychology informed by feminism and social constructionism – eventually into intersectional understandings.

I trained therapeutically in existential therapy, and more recently have been mainly informed by trauma and somatic approaches. These days I see my approach as plural – I try to consider everything on (at least) four different levels, and let those understandings ripple through and influence each other. These levels are: 

The existential level of addressing the challenges of being human and making meaning. The sociocultural level of living in a world of certain norms and the systems and structures that enforce these. The relational level that we are brought up in relationship in ways that impact our relationships with others and ourselves now.  The internal level that we are embodied beings who manifest all forms of bodymind diversity (sometimes called neurodiversity) based on the differences we are born with and the ones we develop due to our experiences.What are we going to cover in the rest of our conversation?

I thought we might explore:

A bit more about why we need the R in GSRDWhat relationship diversity looks likeHow it impacts mental healthWhat an affirmative approach to relationship diversity might look likeHow we might engage people in ‘how’ they relate rather than ‘what’ relationships or relationship styles they haveRelationship trauma as a form of cultural and developmental traumaWorking with our inner relationships – as a key way of addressing our outer relationshipsWhy do we need the R in GSRD?

Most therapy books and trainings tend to cover LGBT issues, or gender and sexuality (often as shorthand for LGBT – focused on how therapists can work with people with minority genders and sexualities).

We added relationships because gender, sexuality and relationships are inextricably linked. Dominant culture has a binary/hierarchical model of all three: gender wise we can either be a man or a woman, sexually we can be attracted to the opposite/same sex (making us straight or gay), and we act out that attraction in the form of a romantic and sexual relationship. The normative monogamous coupled relationship is the key place in which we’re expected to play out our gendered role and manifest our sexuality.

This can also lead us to question the idea of gender, sexual and relationship minorities – as there are actually many many people who do not entirely fit this binary/hierarchical model of gender, sexuality and relationships. This includes those who don’t take on traditional gender roles, those who don’t have kids, those who divorce, those who stop being sexual in their relationship, and those who live alone, for example. It can be more useful to talk of marginalised gender, sexualities and relationships; to consider the degree to which each person is marginalised by the gender/sex/relationship norms and ideals, and whether they embrace or resist that marginalisation. Like the term neurodivergence, we could also use GSR divergence to name those genders, sexualities and relationship forms that diverge from normativity.

We can trace the roots of current dominant culture normativities – and their impact – through gender, sex and relationships and how these intersects with race, class and disability. The focus on being normal is actually pretty recent historically and has its roots in scientific projects of categorisation in the 19th and early 20th century. 

At the same time that scientists and doctors were conducting research and writing books trying to determine which races were inferior (to justify colonisation and/or enslavement), the eugenics movement was taking hold in many countries to try to stop people deemed inferior – generally by race, class and/or disability – from reproducing. Essentialist arguments were also being made for gender differences to justify women remaining in the home and looking after and reproducing the workforce unpaid – something that capitalism relied upon. 

It was in this environment that we saw the origins of detailed classifications of sexual and gender ‘deviance’, as well as the first classifications of mental disorders of course. We can’t tease these intersecting forms of oppression apart; they’re all rooted in the scientific assumption that normal is important and that anyone deemed less normal is also less valuable, less human, and less deserving of compassion – or that they need to be fixed or cured and brought in line with normal.

The legacy of such approaches continues today and has a massive impact on where we’re at now.

How does relationship diversity impact mental health?

From a trauma informed and shame sensitive approach to mental health, we need to be mindful about the relationship styles and statuses of everyone.

Shame is all about normativities. We’re taught what it is and is not ok to be and we internalise that – from the cultural messages we receive, and from the people who were around us (growing up and in the present).

Relationships are a key area where this plays out (like gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and more) because they’re  seen as so fundamental to successful selfhood. As with gender and sexuality, this impacts everyone: those who fit normativity, those who’re marginalised, and those who are invisible

Impact on those who stay within relationship normativity (whether because it feels like a good fit or because they fear doing otherwise)

As with the pressures on straight and cisgender people around sexuality and gender there is huge pressure on people in normative relationship styles to do relationships right, and often a lot of fear and shame around getting it wrong. Given the precariousness of relationships these days – and everything that gets bound up with romantic love and sex – many people are constantly in fear and shame of becoming suddenly single, of getting caught up in secret non-monogamy, or of finding themselves in a ‘sexless’ or ‘loveless’ relationship (i.e. the ‘others’ of the ideal of coupled monogamous love). Trying to fit rigid cultural or personal rules – rather than being authentic and flexible – also takes a massive toll on mental and physical health.

Impact on those with marginalised ways of doing relationships 

As with lesbian, gay and trans people, single/solo, openly non-monogamous, and asexual/aromantic people face all kinds of subtle and overt discriminations, from constantly being expected to explain themselves, through to questions raised by social services over their capacity to parent, lack of media representation in any positive way, attempts to convert them, and lack of legal recognition of their relationships (everything being set up to favour romantic couples and nuclear families). All this takes a toll on mental health, from daily micro aggressions, to having to constantly come out and educate others – or stay closeted and hide, with the sense of precariousness this involves.

Impact on those who are invisible in their relationships

Those who are non-binary or a- in their gender or sexuality are often invisible within cultural binaries, with questions posed about whether they are even ‘real’ or exist. Think about the common assumptions that bi people are really gay or straight, non-binary people are going through a phase, or asexual people are confused and just need a good sexual partner. Invisibly marginalised people generally have worse mental health than visibly marginalised people, likely due to the struggle to find supportive community (double discrimination from both normative and visibly marginalised communities), and having to constantly justify their lived experience to self and others. We’re brought up against the fact we’re not seen as valid by others constantly. For example, you might experience this every time a form or professional asks ‘do you have a partner’ and you have to say ‘no’, rather than the honest answer of ‘yes I have three’, or ‘yes, I’m self partnered’, or ‘no but I have several people who occupy the role that partners take in partnered-people’s lives’.

What does relationship diversity look like?

When I was writing the BACP resource I included a paragraph or two for each major gender, sexuality and relationship style I was aware of. In a previous book I’d only thought of monogamy and non-monogamy for ‘relationship style’, but writing this document helped me realise there are at least as many relationship styles as there are sexualities and genders. 

Like sexuality and gender it’s helpful to conceive of relationships on multiple dimensions. Some we’ve already considered are where people are at on a dimensions of: monogamy to non-monogamy, single to partnered, aromantic to highly romantic, asexual to highly sexual. We could also add dimensions  around whether people are engaging in sex and/or relationships for emotional and/or transactional reasons, and more.

Dimensions are important because none of these things are binary, for example many people occupy a position somewhere between lifelong monogamy and open non-monogamy, including monogamish relationships, affairs, dating, hook-ups, friends-with-benefits, etc.

Sexual Configurations Theory – by Sari Van Anders – is a useful theory that distinguishes between ‘erotic’ and ‘nurturing’ connections, and how these can be separate or connected, and more or less important or unimportant in people’s lives, in addition to being conducted in diverse ways with the same, or different, others.

When considering relationship style with clients we also need to be aware of the way they intersect with race, class, disability, and other intersecting axes of oppression – for instance in terms of what relationship styles are available within a particular community or culture, and how people are seen if they take up various styles. For example, Nathan Rambukkana has written about the ways in which white polyamorous people are afforded legal rights which are still denied to polygamous immigrants (polygamy actually being a majority set of relationship styles across much of the world) – with white western polyamorous people being represented as authentically choosing their lifestyle, while polygamous people are often assumed to be coerced or inferior. Forms of non-monogamy associated with people from working class backgrounds – like swinging or dogging – are also often regarded as inferior to middle class associated ones. And the ways in which disabled people navigate their sexual and intimate relationships are often denigrated – related to the view that disabled people aren’t attractive and shouldn’t be sexual.

What might an affirmative approach to relationship diversity look like?

It would recognise that different relationship styles work for different people (and at different points in their lives). 

It would treat all relationship styles as equally valid. 

It would bring these themes into the therapy room with those in normative relationships just as much as those in non-normative ones. 

As with gender and sexuality, relationship normativity can have just as detrimental an impact on people within normativity as outside of it, and they are also the least likely to have reflected on their relationships styles or to have considered other options which might be a better fit for them. So there is an argument for bringing the diverse ways of doing relationships into the room with people in normative relationships. For instance, we might ask ourselves if we would ask a polyamorous person whether they had ever considered being monogamous, might we also ask a monogamous person whether they had ever considered being polyamorous?

As with gender and sexuality, if a therapist wants to work in more relationship affirmative ways, the most vital thing is to do their own personal reflective work around their relationships. And, as with all intersecting axes of oppression, it is particularly vital that those within the norm do this work because we can be unintentionally retraumatising/oppressive when we’re in the assumed norm and haven’t examined that position and its impact on ourselves and others. 

Staying clued up about relationship diversity by reading or watching relevant material can also be useful so clients aren’t required to educate you – although, as always, it’s important to check out what a particular client’s meanings and experiences are rather than assuming.

Generally relationship diversity is taken to mean how people conduct their intimate relationships, for example whether they are monogamous or non-monogamous, but we could usefully expand the concept out to include all of the diverse ways in which people relate with themselves, with other humans, and with the non-human world. We might gently challenge the culturally dominant norms that prioritise some forms of relationships way over others (e.g. romance over friendship, exclusive over casual, with-others over with-self, with-humans over with-animals, objects, projects or passions). We could relate this to how we value some lives so much more highly than others – and the implications of this for global injustice and climate crisis.

How might we engage people in ‘how’ they relate rather than ‘what’ relationships or relationship styles they have?

Too much focus on the ‘what’ of relationships (e.g. single/partnered, monogamous/non-monogamous, romantic/friendship), can take us away from possibilities between or beyond these binaries, as well as from the more important question of ‘how’ we relate. 

There’s a free zine on my website – relationship struggles – that covers this in more depth. My sense is, that across all people of all relationship styles there is a real lack of knowledge of the ways in which people develop – and enact – relationship patterns. This means that people are often searching for the ‘right’ relationship (the one), or the ‘right’ relationship style (the poly grail) – as I did myself for many years – in order to solve the problem of painful relationships, rather than exploring what their relationship patterns are or how they might develop relationships in ways that are a better fit for them.

We’re often looking for safety, belonging and dignity from a particular relationship, or community. These come to represent – to us – things we lacked or lost previously, putting them under greater pressure and making them more precarious.

How is relationship trauma usefully seen as a form of cultural and developmental trauma?

There is significant cultural and developmental trauma around relating which plays out in relationship struggles and abusive dynamics.

We might think of cultural trauma as the normative social messages we receive about what ways of being are acceptable, good and right, and what are unacceptable, bad and wrong. Developmental trauma includes the messages we receive growing up about what aspects of ourselves are acceptable, good and right, and what are unacceptable, bad and wrong. These forms of trauma are highly interconnected, of course, as families and education systems often pass on culturally normative messages – about what emotions are acceptable to experience/express for different genders, for example, or what desires it is acceptable to feel or not feel and how it’s acceptable to act upon them – or not.

In his book, therapist Dwight Turner writes about how this operates in terms of intersecting oppressions – how we project out what we don’t want to acknowledge in ourselves onto individuals/groups and Other them (projective identification), and how we – when we are marginalised ourselves – kill parts of us in order to survive every day in normativity (internalised oppression).

In relation to relationship diversity, then, we could attend to the projections we – and others – make to those who are relationally different from ourselves. How do we/they talk about older spinsters/bachelors, for example, or the imagined relationships of young people these days, or cultural others? What aspects of our own intimate lives do we feel we have to kill off – our hide – in order to be accepted around the water cooler or at the family gathering?

To support everyone to  move towards more mutually nourishing relationships I think it’s useful to help people tune into their relationship patterns – in order that they can be more conscious of these and how they play out and gradually try to shift them (for example, we might think of patterns around fight/fawn/flight/freeze trauma responses, or blame out/blame in/avoid/withdraw shame responses).

It’s also useful to help people tune in – honestly and kindly – to the ways their bodyminds work (due to inherent neurodiversity and/or trauma and/or chosen values), and to learn what kinds of relationships – and ways of doing relationships – work for them. They could practise how to communicate this with others and focus on close relationships where there is a good fit. For example, they might consider speed of relationship development, preferences for types of social contact, boundaries around behaviours, etc. This applies regardless of type of relationship, of course, not just to conventional partnerships.

In all of this though it is vital to keep hold of the understanding of relationship diversity and the sense that all consensual relationship styles as equally valid, rather than being tempted to pathologise (e.g. thinking that people are polyamorous, aromantic, or sex workers because of their trauma, attachment style, or neurodivergence).

Why are you so keen on working with our inner relationships – as a key therapeutic process and to address our outer relationships?

One – increasingly popular – way of helping people with their trauma patterns or relationship patterns  is to work with their inner relationship diversity, exploring their plural systems, internal families, inner teams, or constellations. 

You might be familiar with Dick Schwartz’s Internal family systems model, for example, or the work of Mick Cooper and John Rowan, or Janina Fisher in relation to trauma, or Philip Bromberg in a psychoanalytic context, or Miller Mair in personal construct theory. 

This is the approach that I’ve taken to myself – or rather ourselves! – over the last decade, and particularly in grappling with the traumatic last few years – there are two free books and two free zines on the topic of plurality on our website.

When it comes to relationships we can usefully see our foregrounded – and disowned – trauma patterns or relationship survival strategies as selves or parts. For example the fight, fawn, flight and freeze ones mentioned before. It may be that we have a tendency to foreground one of those in relationships, or different ones in different kinds of relationships. We may be drawn to continually reproducing a fight/fawn, controlling/hypervigilant, or a needy/avoidant dynamic, with others – for example. Or we may find ourselves on opposite sides of familiar dynamics in different relationships

Plural work is about becoming more conscious of all parts of the self – or selves: welcoming them all in, balancing them out, and improving communication between them so we are not eclipsed by them when triggered, for example.

It can involve gradually understanding the masking mechanisms which kept the parts of us we weren’t allowed to be hidden, loosening these, bringing split off selves home, hearing and holding the feelings they protected us from, and learning who and how they can be now that they’re home.

We may well find selves that map on to all the things we’ve disliked most in others. Certainly we’re likely to find inner oppressors and abusers, as well as survivors and victims. We can also find things that we’ve delegated to others in the past (e.g. parts of us who can be strong or vulnerable when we’ve tended to try to make others into ‘the strong one’ or ‘the vulnerable one’ in relationships).

In addition to therapy, we think it can be helpful for people to do their own work/play to get to know their selves and to communicate between them. We write a lot – and try to model – journalling between selves, talking to each other, drawing our selves, exploring them in dreams, fantasies and creative writing, and inviting them explicitly into different aspects of life (e.g. cooking, inner rituals).

Plurality is absolutely not just a queer thing – straight and cis people have just as complex self systems as queer and trans people – and often also have selves who are differently gendered and/or have different erotic and/or relational desires. However people from various queer communities – in addition to cultural or spiritual communities – may have more available understandings and practices for exploring plurality. For example, some trans and non-binary people embrace multiple gender positions, some polyamorous people seek out different relationships for different selves to be foregrounded, some kinksters explicitly play with dominant/submissive parts or engage in play in order to experience child selves, or animalistic selves.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity – Pema Chödrön

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New zine: Queer Creative Health

Announcing a new zine!

This zine was commissioned by Queer Circle to explore what queer creative health might look like, as part of their programme for developing creative health practices with queer community.

Queer people experience worse health struggles than others, and health systems are often not safe enough for queer, and other marginalised, people.

Queer people also engage with different forms of creativity, often employing creative methods to queerly create themselves and their communities, as well as exploring and communicating their experiences.

So what might queer creative health look like?

Creative health is anything that brings creativity and the arts together with health, such as art therapies, creatively expressing our health experiences, bringing music into health settings, or making health practices or understandings accessible through books or comics.

This zine explores the different meanings of queer, health, and creativity, as well as introducing a number of practices that you could try as forms of queer creative health.

The zine divides these practices into embodied, entangled, and embedded practices, to recognise that we are embodied beings (carrying all the things that have happened to us, and to previous generations), entangled beings (always in relation to other human and non-human beings and communities), and embedded beings (in the time and place we live in, and in the systems, structures and cultural norms that are present there).

The zine gives a taster of the kinds of workshops that took place at Queer Circle for anyone who couldn’t access them in person. It also explores how you might bring queer creative health practices into your own life.

Find out more:

You can download the zine here.

QueerCreativeHealthZine

You can check out the Queer Circle website, and a report of the queer creative health programme here.

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More free books – happy new year!

As well as making a few zines in 2022, I also managed to finish my project of creating free books out of my old blog posts and other pieces published in various places since I started blogging.

In 2021 I published free books on Plurality, Trauma, and Consent – the main themes which I’d been blogging about during the pandemic. The new free books go back further in time to cover the themes I’ve been writing about since I began blogging, particularly gender, sex,  relationships, and mental health.

As with my latest zine (which I made five years on from making the first Plural Selves zine) these free books mark an imporant anniversary for me. It’s a decade on from 2012: the year when I published the first edition of Rewriting the Rules (my first self-help style book) and started blogging.

It feels helpful, somehow, to bring all the material from this vital period of my life together, and – perhaps – to draw a line there, marking a turning point towards what I might create in the future. Whatever that is will be deeply shaped by this time of external and internal emergency/transformation/paradigm shift, and my learnings from that experience, and from others who are writing on such themes.

Caveat

I begin each of the new free books with a caveat that some of the earlier pieces may not represent (all of) my current thoughts and feelings on these topics. I’ve learned so much more from my own experiences, and from engaging with other people’s work, in the last ten years.

I hope – as with my older published books – that people will read these free books mindful of the time and context in which some of the content was written, and with compassion for the places where the language or ideas are limited and/or have now been replaced with something more inclusive, nuanced, or helpful.

The Books

Here’s a list of the new free books, and what you can expect to find in them:

Relationships

This book contains all my writing on love and relationships. It goes back furthest because these topics were the focus of most of my first blog posts after Rewriting the Rules was published. It also includes some of my most recent writing on slow relating and break-ups.

The book is divided into sections on love (mostly the impact of cultural love norms or amatonormativity), crushes and new relationship energy, slow relating, monogamy and non-monogamy, conflict and communication, and break-ups.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my published books Rewriting the Rules, The Secrets of Enduring Love (with Jaqui Gabb), and How To Understand Your Relationships (which Alex and I will hopefully be writing next year).

Download here.

Sex

This book contains all my writing about sex. It’s divided into sections on sex ed, sex advice, sex in relationships (particularly sexual incompatibility), sexual desires, sexual practices, and BDSM/kink (the theme of by far my most popular blog posts for some reason!)

This book, and the relationships and feelings ones, contain versions of several of my summary posts from The Meg-John & Justin podcast, (with links to where you can listen to the audio episodes) as well as posts from this website and elsewhere.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my published book with Justin, Enjoy Sex (How, When and IF You Want To) as well as to the next free book – and published books – on sexuality.

Download here.

Sexuality

This book starts with a general section which covers figuring out your sexuality, coming out, and the diversity and fluidity of sexuality. Then we have sections on heteronormativity and heterosexuality, bisexuality and pansexuality, queer issues (like nature/nurture and same-sex relationship recognition), further sexualities (like kink and sapiosexuality), and porn.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my graphic guides on Queer and Sexuality (with Jules Scheele), as well as Alex and my How to Understand Your Sexuality.

Download here.

Gender

Like sexuality, this book starts with a general section which deals with gender diversity and fluidity, my vision for gender affirmative and inclusive therapy, and the future of gender. Then we have sections on trans (including pieces on the trans moral panic, trans time and space, and trans sex) and on non-binary genders (including my post coming out as non-binary in 2015!) The book ends with a couple of older pieces about understanding masculinities and femininities.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my graphic guide to Gender (with Jules Scheele) as well as to Alex and my How to Understand Your Gender, Life Isn’t Binary, and the edited collection Non-Binary Lives.

Download here.

Mental Health

This book includes most of my writing about madness and mental health which isn’t specific to trauma (which has its own full book).

The mental health book starts with a number of general articles covering my thoughts on mental health, mostly focused on why we need to understand it at a sociocultural and sociopolitical level, as well as at the level of individual experience, and why we need to challenge mad/sane and ill/well binaries. After this, the book includes sections on mental health and relationships, self-help, mindfulness, and depression.

I also included a section on new year resolutions towards the end of this book because I’ve written so many pieces about this over the years, and because I wasn’t sure where else to put them! My critiques of new year resolutions are quite similar to my critiques of self-help and self-improvement more broadly. This book ends with a short piece on therapy, and a couple of pieces that touch on plurality and madness – another topic that has its own free books.

These books, and the next one, are hopefully good companions to Alex and my book Hell Yeah Self-Care!, my book on Mindfulness, and Jules and my forthcoming graphic guide on trauma and mental health (hopefully arriving 2024).

Download here.

Feelings

Linked to the mental health book, the free book on feelings covers emotional struggles and emotional experiences more broadly. It starts with a couple of earlier pieces about being with feelings, which eventually lead to my Staying With Feelings and Welcome Monster Feelings zines. Then there are a number of posts about happiness and why we might be suspicious of approaches that encourage us to strive for happiness.

After this there’s a section about other feelings include anger, failure, gratitude and more. Several of these posts are more personal reflections on my own experiences, as are the three ‘memorial’ posts on themes of loss and grief that follow. This book ends with another short piece about therapy, including ideas and practices from some of the main therapy approaches.

Download here.

Writing

The shortest free book is on writing – something that I plan to write plenty more about. But I was able to find 50 pages which seemed enough for a brief book (the others are mostly around 100 pages long).

This book starts with my essay about queer writing and writing queerly (for anyone, not just for queers!) and includes a few other pieces about how I write and my advice for people who want to start writing. In this book I’ve also included some material about journalling and zining, as well as a piece I wrote about purpose and integrity.

Download here.

You can find links to all of the free books here.

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