Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 5

Beyond Boxes

I was recently interviewed for Jaia Bristow‘s excellent new podcast series, Beyond Boxes. We talked all about going beyond binaries of gender and sexuality, about plurality, intersectionality, inbetweeness, the pros and cons of labels, the harm binaries can cause for everyone, whether you fit the binary or not, how to be a supportive ally to the trans community and much more.

You can listen to the podcast here, or check out the video version below.

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Relationship Super Conference talk

I recently did an interview for The Relationship Super Conference, which is running from October 4th to October 10th. It looks set to be an amazing event covering a huge diversity of relationship-related topics, and including talks by some of the people I regularly mention here: Alex Iantaffi, Sophia Graham, and Justin Hancock, as well as Ruby B. Johnson, Kevin Patterson, and Liz Powell who I met at the Poly Dallas conference back in 2018.

In my interview I spoke about how we need to understand relationships – and relationship struggles – through the lens of cultural and developmental trauma. I covered relationship diversity, and why this model is more helpful than binaries when it comes to relationships. I spoke about why I think we need to focus more on how we relate, than who we relate with or what relationship style we subscribe to. I also explored how our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world are interconnected.

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Bisexuality and biphobia

Earlier this year, Carla Merino from El Pais interviewed me about bisexuality and biphobia. You can read the article here. Below is the full interview in honour of Celebrate Bisexuality Day. For more on all of this check out my book with Jules Scheele: Sexuality: A Graphic Guide.

How much does social acceptance or rejection define our sexual identity and orientation? It’s curious to see that Generation Z is the one with most LGBTQIA+ members, and, going back, there’s less and less in each generation. What’s the correlation between the two factors? 

Social acceptance has a big impact on how open people feel able to be about their sexual attractions and how free they feel to act upon them. It’s likely that shifting proportions of LGBTQIA+ people across the generations reflects how socially acceptable diverse sexualities and genders are in wider culture, as well as how possible it has been to act upon them without stigma, discrimination, or restriction. Another factor is how important it has been seen over the years to identify your sexuality and gender.

It’s also important to remember that the proportion of people who identify with a particular sexuality is the tip of the iceberg. For example, with bisexuality, far more people will have sexual experiences with more than one gender than identify as bisexual, and even more will experience attraction to more than one gender which they don’t act upon.

Are sexual orientation and identity biological or a social construct?  

Both! Our sexuality is biopsychosocial, which means that – like most aspects of human experience – it comes down to a mixture of the social context we grow up in, the experiences that we have through our lives, and the ways in which our body and brain function. All of these things interact with each other in complex ways that we could never really tease apart. For example, the ways in which our body and brain function impact how we’re treated by others in our particular culture, and also the wider culture shapes the experiences that we’re able to have, which – in turn – shapes our bodies and brains.

You might think about the ways in which certain body shapes and sizes, and mental abilities, are deemed ‘sexually attractive’ in our culture, leading those who have them to have radically different experiences of sex and relationships. Or you might think about the ways in which culture enables and restricts certain forms of sexual expression, meaning that we’re more or less likely to have access to those experiences, which will impact how our bodies and brains will respond to those possibilities (e.g. with pleasure, joy, fear, shame, etc.).

What impact does fear of child sexuality have on how we develop our sexual identity and preference? 

Fear of childhood sexuality has a massive impact at the moment. Few children receive anything like a good education around sex and relationships because there is so much anxiety about talking with kids about sex. Tragically this actually results in more young people have abusive, unwanted, and risky sexual experiences, not less, because they are so ill-equipped to talk about sex or to navigate sex consensually. Certainly most sex education and advice assumes that people will be heterosexual, or only includes LGB sexualities very briefly. This restricts how able young people are to explore the full range of possible sexual and asexual identites and experiences.

It is often said that everyone is bisexual or that no one is, which are biphobic expressions. Why does society have trouble accepting bisexuality specifically. Could it be a human need to categorize everything in extremes? (black and white/ good and bad)

This is an idea that my co-author Alex Iantaffi and I explore at length in our book Life Isn’t Binary. It certainly seems that humans – particularly in western cultures – are drawn to these kinds of binary polarisations when, of course, so much about human life is diverse rather than binary. It wouldn’t make sense to divide people into short and tall – clearly height is a spectrum. A similar thing could be said about various mental capacities, we can’t divide people into a binary of unintilligent or intelligent, rather we can locate people in different places on a number of spectrums of various abilities (mathematical, linguistic, spatial, etc.). So why, when it comes to sexuality and gender, do we assume a binary?

You’re right that, many times over the years, people have tried to argue that either nobody is ‘really’ bisexual, or that everybody is bisexual. Both of those extremes risk erasing actual bisexual experience, as well as limiting human sexuality to one dimension (the gender of the people we’re attracted to), when really there is a lot more to it than that.

It is often said that putting labels on ourselves or others can be damaging, but by not calling something by a name, you can deny its existence. Do we really need labels to identify ourselves and what we’re attracted to? Why?  

This is another non-binary! There are many arguments for and against people labelling their sexuality. I find it more helpful to ask what labels open up, and close down, for people, assuming that they probably do both. For people whose sexual attractions – or absence of attractions – are marginalised, labels can be important in claiming their experience, communicating it to others, and finding supportive community within a world that harms them. At the same time, labels can come with a set of expectations which can be limiting and rigid, and it can be difficult to let go of labels – and all that they bring – if things change for you.

Culturally we’re in a place where the only accepted way to fight for equal human rights is generally on the basis of identity labels. It’s very hard to fight for the rights of a group to be treated in just ways unless that group identifies under a label and can prove, through research, the negative impact that marginalisation has upon them. This has been a key tension in discussions of the labels around attraction to multiple genders. Some argue for the dropping of labels entirely, or embracing multiple labels like pansexual, queer, omnisexual, plurisexual, and so on. However, most governments and organisations only recognise the ‘B’ for bisexual, so there are strategic reasons for people to use that term, even when it may not feel the best fit for them.

At least in the United States, bisexuals comprise more than half the LGBTQIA+ collective, but that’s not what it looks like. It seems that they’re actually a minority. Why could that be?   

There’s a long history of bisexual people being treated with suspicion in the wider LGB movement and community. This dates back to the fact that ‘gay rights’ were often fought for on the basis of the idea that sexuality was binary (straight or gay) and that gay people were a minority group who were marginalised and oppressed within that binary. Anybody whose sexuality didn’t fit that binary model were seen as ‘muddying the water’ and potentially jeopardising the fight for gay rights. 

Many theorists and scientists now recognise that human sexuality is actually diverse and fluid across many dimensions, and that the proportion of people attracted to the same gender or more than one gender is probably at least equal to the number of people who are attracted to the ‘opposite’ gender only. However it is taking a long time for this way of seeing things to find its way into mainstream culture and governmental policies.

Have the different definitions of bisexuality through history influenced biphobia and formed misconceptions on what bisexuality is?  

Yes certainly they have. The most widely accepted definition of bisexuality within the bi+ community today is ‘attraction to more than one gender’, with some also using ‘attraction regardless of gender’. However, early definitions of bisexuality mixed gender and sexuality and saw bisexual people as people who had more than one gender. Later definitions assumed that bisexual people were attracted exactly equally to men and women. We see the legacy of these kinds of definitions in the assumptions that bisexual people will also be androgynous, and in the equation of bisexual with attraction to only two genders. As The Bisexual Index points out, if people are concerned about the ‘bi’ in bisexual meaning ‘two’, they can understand it as ‘attraction to both people of the same gender as themselves, and to people of different genders to themselves’.

It’s not common to hear about bisexual characters on the history of LGBTQIA+ rights although they’re there. Why are they not that visible?  

This is particularly striking when you think that one of the most famous sexologists of all time (Alfred Kinsey) and the woman who co-ordinated the first Pride march in 1970 (Brenda Howard) were both bi! However people who identified as bi or had attractions to more than one gender are often erased from LGBTQIA+ history. I suspect this is for the same reason that I mentioned above: that a lot of gay rights has been fought for on the basis of a straight (majority) / gay (minority) binary, and the existence and prevalence of bisexuality seems like a threat to this.

What is the reason that bisexual women are the ones to experience the most sexual violence? 

Bi women seem to experience higher levels of both sexual and relationship abuse than straight or lesbian women. One reason for this is the stereotype of bi women as hypersexual and sexually available, which means they experience higher levels of sexual harassment of all kinds. Another reason is that so many people find the idea of bisexuality threatening, and sexual violence can be used as a way of policing and punishing that. In relationships, the stereotype of bi people as promiscuous, suspicious, and lying means that bi people are often wrongly assumed to be more likely to leave – or cheat on – a partner. This can lead to biphobia in relationships where bi people are encouraged to hide their sexuality, and may be treated in controlling – even violent – ways by partners who are insecure about their bi-ness.

How do we work towards ending biphobia? 

I’d like to see far better awareness and education in wider culture, and for young people, about the diversity of sexuality, moving away from binary models which see it as being all about the gender of the people we’re attracted to. In my book Sexuality: A Graphic Guide I draw together lots of theories and research which suggests that there are many dimensions to sexuality, including the amount of sexual attraction that we experience, the kinds of erotic desires we have, the other features of a person that we find attractive beyond gender, and much more. We need to get to a point where we see all forms of erotic experience as equally legitimate and beautiful, so long as they are acted upon consensually.

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Free book 3: Consent

I’ve recently added a new page to my website for free books. These are collections of blog posts and other things I’ve written over the years on specific topics. I figured that a lot of readers would prefer everything collected together in one place rather than having to go searching through old blog posts and articles elsewhere online.

Free Books

The first three free books I’ve created are largely based on the writing I did last year as I navigated learning about trauma (personally, and in general), and considering how my relationship with my (plural) self, and other people, might work (consensually) under this new understanding – all during a global pandemic! So there are now three free books on these topics of trauma, plurality, and consent.

In future I hope to add free books of my best writing on gender, sexuality, love, and mental health, along with one about writing itself.

I thought I’d announce each free book over the coming weeks for people who follow my blog or twitter but don’t regularly check out the website.

Consent

The third free book is all about consent. It starts with my consent checklist zine and then goes on to all the recent writing I’ve done, particularly focused on sexual consent and social scripts, how we can make all our relationships more consensual, the importance of boundaries, the impact of gaslighting on consent, and applying consent ideas to various contexts.

We hope you enjoy this first free book. More about the other ones to come…

ConsentDownload

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Free book 2: Trauma

I’ve recently added a new page to my website for free books. These are collections of blog posts and other things I’ve written over the years on specific topics. I figured that a lot of readers would prefer everything collected together in one place rather than having to go searching through old blog posts and articles elsewhere online.

Free Books

The first three free books I’ve created are largely based on the writing I did last year as I navigated learning about trauma (personally, and in general), and considering how my relationship with my (plural) self, and other people, might work (consensually) under this new understanding – all during a global pandemic! So there are now three free books on these topics of trauma, plurality, and consent.

In future I hope to add free books of my best writing on gender, sexuality, love, and mental health, along with one about writing itself.

I thought I’d announce each free book over the coming weeks for people who follow my blog or twitter but don’t regularly check out the website.

Trauma

The second free book is all about trauma. What do I mean by that? As I say at the start of the book:

In this collection the focus is on trauma as the impact of what happened to you. As Steve Haines points out in his great little overview Trauma is Really Strange, bodily trauma responses such as mobilising into fight or flight, or going immobile or dissociating, are the same whether we’re talking about developmental trauma from the past, a recent traumatic event, or the cumulative impact of stress.

When we consider what causes us to be traumatised, I like this definition used by Bonnie Badenoch in her book The Heart of Trauma:

‘Any experience of fear and/or pain that does not have the support it needs to be digested and integrated into the flow of our brains’

This helpfully highlights the point which many trauma experts agree on that there are two elements to traumatising circumstances:

A key event, or accumulation of events, which is frightening, shameful or otherwise painful to us (whether or not it would be to other people in similar circumstances, it’s about the meaning for us)Not receiving the support we need in order to process the event or events (which usually means having somebody to hold us and hear us in our distress, reflecting it back to us in ways that reassure us that it is understandable and help us to tolerate it)

The book considers personal forms of trauma as well as cultural forms, and the interconnection between the two.

We hope you enjoy this first free book. More about the other ones to come…

TraumaDownload

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Madzines 2: Self Care zines

Recently I had a long written dialogue with my friend and colleague Helen Spandler about the ways in which zines, comics, and graphic books can be helpful ways of communicating about mental health. This is happening as I continue working on my next Icon graphic guide which focuses on mental health (and hopefully another zine along the way also).

You can read the second part of our conversation at the MadZines project website here. We focus on radical self-care zines and how they relate to MadZines.

HS: Our project is about zines that ‘craft contention about mental health knowledge and practice’. That could mean all kinds of things, but it’s essentially about challenging what is commonly understood about madness or distress, including from the so-called psy professionals (psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, etc).  I know your background is in psychology. There’s been a lot of ‘critical psychology’ these past few decades and we’ve seen quite a bit of change. Given all this, how far do you feel challenging these ideas and practices is still important?

M-JB: Oh, I think it’s still very important. The people I mostly speak to are therapists and readers of my work, most of whom have never come across these more critical ideas. I think the standard perspectives you get around mental health – if you take a counselling course or if you pick up a self-help book – are still very basic. That’s partly why I’m so passionate about getting these more critical and social justice ideas – about mental health and other topics – out there in accessible ways like comics, zines, self-help books, and podcasts.

HS: Are there particular issues/experiences around mental health that you think need to be challenged or contested right now?

M-JB: I think the mainstream understanding of mental health is still very binary: you’re either someone with mental illness, which means that it’s not your fault, but you need expert help in order to get ‘better’. Or you’re not someone with mental illness, which means that your struggles are your own fault and you need to pull your socks up – do mindfulness, have better stress management, that kind of thing. I’m very keen to challenge that binary in my work. Read more…

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MadZines 1: Crafting contention

Recently I had a long written dialogue with my friend and colleague Helen Spandler about the ways in which zines, comics, and graphic books can be helpful ways of communicating about mental health. This is happening as I get cracking on writing my next Icon graphic guide which focuses on mental health (and hopefully another zine along the way also).

You can read the first part of our conversation at the Graphic Medicine website here. We focus on how the comic graphics in zines can ‘craft contention’ about mental health: opening up different possibilities to mainstream ways of understanding mental health.

HS: Can you remember how you went about making your first zine?

MJB:  I can. It was back in 2014 or so. I was part of a network, which you’re also engaged with, of Buddhists and mindfulness practitioners who are critical of the ways in which mainstream mindfulness is often co-opted by capitalist systems and doesn’t engage with the social aspects of mental health. I wanted to explore what a more ‘social mindfulness’ might look like. 

I wrote a zine by that name in which I worked through how we might understand suffering as operating on multiple levels of experience (cultural, systemic, relational, and internal). So when we are ‘mindful’ it might involve being aware of those other ways in which suffering is exacerbated, as well as just that sense of how we exacerbate it with our own internal thought processes. The second half of the zine is open, like a workbook, encouraging people to incorporate this into their meditation – or other – practices, and make their own notes about how it works for them.

Since then my zines have become more integrated – words and pictures. This one was a bit more like a series of short blog posts, plus comic illustrations to go with each one. I hadn’t got creative with the format at that point. I was still making that move from more conventional forms of writing to zineing.

HS: Oh yes, I remember you talking about that zine at a social mindfulness event. I loved the way it illustrated the two-way dynamic between our internal and external worlds. Rather than just seeing ourselves as either internalising social norms or externalising our feelings, it’s like understanding that whilst we may be implicated in our own suffering, it’s usually through no fault of our own. These ideas can be hard to get our heads around, so it’s helpful to have a zine which distils this into something useful and meaningful to people’s everyday lives. I think the diagram really helped with that. It’s hard to show complex dynamics through text. Read more…

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Free book 1: Plurality

I’ve recently added a new page to my website for free books. These are collections of blog posts and other things I’ve written over the years on specific topics. I figured that a lot of readers would prefer everything collected together in one place rather than having to go searching through old blog posts and articles elsewhere online.

Free Books

The first three free books I’ve created are largely based on the writing I did last year as I navigated learning about trauma (personally, and in general), and considering how my relationship with my (plural) self, and other people, might work (consensually) under this new understanding – all during a global pandemic! So there are now three free books on these topics of trauma, plurality, and consent.

In future I hope to add free books of my best writing on gender, sexuality, love, and mental health, along with one about writing itself.

I thought I’d announce each free book over the coming weeks for people who follow my blog or twitter but don’t regularly check out the website.

Plurality

The first free book is all about plurality. This is the idea that we can usefully conceptualise ourselves as systems made up of interrelated parts, rather than as a singular whole ‘individual’.

The book is mostly made up of written conversations between my own parts about the concept of plurality, and how it relates to trauma, mental health, mindfulness, attachment, and more. Hopefully, along with my zine about plurality, this would be a useful introduction to people who want to engage with these ideas, or who are wondering about how to explore their own plurality. I – or rather we – are currently working on a follow-up zine about plurality as a way towards self (selves) love. Plurality and systems will also be major themes in the next graphic guide on mental health.

We hope you enjoy this first free book. More about the other ones to come…

PluralityDownload

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Letting go of gender reveal parties

I was recently interviewed for Vogue about whether gender reveal parties are something we might leave behind in 2020. You can read the excellent piece they wrote here, and my full interview below…

Gender reveal parties have been called problematic because they’ve started wildfires, but why are they problematic when it comes to how we think about gender

Wildfires aside, the main problem is that gender reveal parties reinforce several ideas about gender which are pretty bad for kids, and for society in general. Three main ones are: 

That gender is the most important thing we can know about a person, That we can know what gender somebody is going to be by knowing what their genitals are like, and That gender is binary (they’re either a boy or they’re a girl).

These ideas are bad for all kids.

These ideas bad for any kids who don’t end up conforming to sex and gender norms, like intersex, trans, and non-binary kids, because they mean that those kids will have a far greater battle to be recognised in their sex/genders than they would have done if we didn’t make such a big thing of sex/gender at the start of their life.

These ideas are also bad for all kids because they set them up to believe that the division between girls and boys, women and men, is a really important one, and that they need to conform to rigid ideas of what it means to be a girly girl or a ‘big brave boy’, a feminine woman or a masculine man.

They take place before the child is born, so do they actually affect the child?  

We know that from birth onwards, and perhaps even before birth, the gender attitudes of the people around a child have a huge impact on the kid. The famous ‘Baby X’ studies found that adults who were given the same baby to look after behaved very differently towards them depending on whether they were dressed in pink or blue. Babies dressed in pink were treated more gently, given dolls to play with, and assumed to be ‘upset’ if they cried. Babies dressed in blue were treated more roughly, given trucks, and assumed to be ‘angry’ if they cried.

Scientists like Cordelia Fine and Sari Van Anders have found that such different treatment has a big impact on our physiology, including the ways our brains wire up, and our levels of circulating hormones. We’re literally shaping kids’ bodies and brains when we treat them differently according to their gender. 

The BBC documentary No More Boys and Girls showed that, by primary school, kids raised like this all believed that boys were better than girls and that girls should aspire to be ‘pretty’ rather than having career goals. Boys found it difficult to ask for support when they were struggling, and couldn’t come up for words for emotions other than anger. We can see the toll that all of this takes in later life when we consider gender pay inequalities, toxic low self esteem and body dissatisfaction in women, and the high rates of suicide and aggression in men, for example. 

It all starts with the idea that the gender of a kid is the most important thing about them.

Why do you believe that gender reveal parties no longer have a place in 2020? Did they ever have a place?

 
I don’t believe they ever had a place. Looking back in time, and around the world today, we find that this idea that people can be divided into two ‘opposite’ genders is actually a pretty new, western thing. Many places and times have celebrated gender diversity as something sacred, have had more than two gender categories, and have regarded gender as only one feature of a person among many, not something to determine their whole lifecourses.

Another reason to leave gender reveal parties in 2020 is the increasing awareness, in our culture, of intersex, trans and non-binary people. Between one and two percent of babies are born with some variation of sex characteristics. In the past, such babies often received surgical interventions to make their genitals conform to norms of what we think male or female genitals should look like. Such surgeries can be risky, can deaden sexual sensation in later life, and can lead to later struggles if the decision is made in a different direction from the way that person ends up experiencing their gender. The need to ‘reveal’ the gender of a baby is part of a cultural pressure which makes parents more likely to believe that they should ask for such surgical interventions, rather than waiting until the child themselves is able to make that choice consensually – unless there’s actually a good medical reason for surgery.

Also, now that we know that over a third of adults experience their gender as to some extent the other gender, neither gender, or both gender, and that many people identify as trans and non-binary, we should be wary of anything that puts people in a box regarding gender that it’s hard to move out of later. 

What would a better approach be?

Some parents are now raising all kids gender-free until they’re old enough to make a decision about what gender they experience themselves as being – if any. Even if we don’t go that far, we can clue ourselves up about the strong impact of rigid gender stereotypes on all kids, and work to challenge these in our own childrearing. 

For example, on the No More Boys and Girls documentary they tried providing all kids with gender diverse toys and clothes and allowing them to make their own choices, they deliberately exposed kids to people who worked in non-stereotypical occupations like a male ballet dancer and a female mechanic, and they did activities that showed the kids how equal boys and girls were on physical strength and all kinds of activities at that age. 

It’s important that schools and families move in this direction, towards raising human beings who have all the choices available to them, rather than restricting their future possibilities, and later mental health, with rigid gender stereotypes.

Trans author and educator S. Bear Bergman also suggests that, while things remain so tough for gender diverse people, we could consider having gender reveal parties for people when they come out as trans or non-binary. What might it be like – for everyone – if we saw gender creativity as something to celebrate, rather than something to commiserate? What if we regarded trans, intersex, and non-binary people as a gift – as artist Travis Alabanza puts it – who have something vital to teach everybody about the beautiful, unique, complexity of all of our genders.

Find out more

There’s more on these topics in my books Gender: A Graphic Guide, How to Understand Your Gender, and Life Isn’t Binary. There’s also a free zine for exploring gender here.

If you enjoyed this, please consider supporting my Patreon here.

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Attachment, emotion and plural parts work

In this follow up to my recent attachment theory piece, two of my containing parts discuss how we can embrace all of the attachment styles within us – and the emotions that they hold – and bring them into our relationships with others.

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 post about plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here useful.

James: Hey again Ara.

Ara: Hey James. So good to talk with you again so soon.

James: I thought about writing this as a regular post, but I realised I could really do with somebody to bounce off: to ask me questions to help me clarify my thoughts.

Ara: I’d love to do that. I’m aware that in our last post together you asked me a lot of questions. It feels good to balance that dynamic by doing it the other way around.

James: Mm like you are more of the expert around feelings and embodiment, but perhaps I have the expertise on this more intellectual piece: weaving the various theories together.

Ara: I like that.

James: I also feel like I need you as a kind of anchor. I feel so excited about the puzzle pieces that seem to be slotting together here. I want to zoom off in a hundred different directions at once.

Ara: How can I help to ground you?

James: Remind me to breathe, to slow down, I don’t have to do it all at once. You could ask me questions to lead me through one step at a time. Are you up for that?

Ara: Absolutely. Want to breathe before we start?

James: Sure *laughs* *breathes*

Overview

Ara: Okay. Can you start by giving us an overview of the terrain you want to cover in this piece? If the terms we use here are unfamiliar to people, we’ll define them in the next section.

James: Absolutely. It’s something I’ve been building to ever since I did that Bowlby Centre event last month which I wrote up here, about attachment theory . My sense is that perhaps everyone contains all of the different attachment styles – or at least the capacity for them – within themselves. Rather than aiming at some kind of static secure attachment, perhaps there’s more value in getting to know all our different attachment potentials very well. Maybe that even is the way that we get to that ‘earned secure attachment’.

Ara: A kind of paradox? We’ve tried to get to ‘secure attachment’ by getting away from ‘insecure’ attachment styles, but perhaps the way to get there is through them, not away from them?

James: Precisely. And there’s this sense that it also maps onto emotions and the ‘window of tolerance’. The only way to expand the window of tolerance and get to a place where you can be with all emotional states is through experiencing (tough) emotions, not by trying to avoid them or get away from them.

Ara: So that’s attachment and emotion, what about plural parts work?

James: We’ve reached these conclusions by getting to know all of the parts of us deeply. I’m suggesting that we can do this work by befriending the three parts of us who map on to the three ‘insecure’ attachment styles, and the emotions that they hold. That’s the way to both earned secure attachment and an expanded window of tolerance.

Ara: Wonderful. So you can explain to us how we now understand our parts having operated together in the ‘old’ system, that we had our whole life. And you can describe how we’re working with them now to reconfigure the system towards more secure attachments in our inner and outer relationships, and towards an expanded window of tolerance. How am I doing?

James: This is really helpful, thankyou Ara. 

Ara: Another breath before we continue?

James: Mm. *breathes*

The faux window of tolerance, faux secure attachment, and faux parts

Ara: So one thing that we read which helped you click together on all of this was the concept of the faux window of tolerance in Kathy L. Kain and Stephen J. Terrell’s book ‘Nurturing Resilience’. Do you want to explain that, and how it relates to attachment?

James: That’s a great place to start, yes. So Kathy and Stephen explain that many, if not most, people develop a ‘faux window of tolerance’ when they’re growing up, in order to handle intense emotions. The window of tolerance is Daniel Siegal ’s term for the space in which we can be present to – and regulate – our emotions, rather than being overwhelmed by them. 

Growing up if our caregivers and others can meet us in various emotional states and help us to know that they are okay, understandable, and manageable, then we will develop that window of tolerance. We’ll learn in those early relationships that those feelings are okay, and we’ll learn from experience with others what we can do to soothe ourselves when feelings are really intense. We’ll end up with a nice wide space in which we can welcome a variety of different feelings at different intensities.

Ara: So that’s how it relates to secure attachment? The window of tolerance is developed within secure relationships?

James: Right, a secure attachment refers to that kind of nurturing relationship where we have a ‘secure base’ or ‘safe haven’ to return to when emotions are unfamiliar or overwhelming. As a child, if we learn that we can return there and be met, understood, soothed, have our needs met, then we’ll be more and more able to extend out from that base to explore our world with openness, curiosity, and creativity. We‘ll have more of a sense that we can tolerate any tough experiences and regulate our own experiences, as well as a strong sense of trust in that base that we can return to if it gets too hard. 

Later in life that would translate into building strong, secure relationships with other people in our lives – friends, partners, mentors, communities, etc. – so that we still have a place to return where people can help us coregulate around the tough feelings, where we can express our needs and have them met, etc.

Ara: So what’s the ‘faux window of tolerance’.

James: Most of us carry some degree of developmental trauma: a sense of key relationships not being very secure and of not all emotions – or all intensities of emotion – being tolerated and regulated by those around us. Kathy and Stephen suggest that what therapists call ‘defences’ are what we develop in order to have a ‘faux window of tolerance’: the impression that we are tolerating our emotional states, but really we’re defending against them.

Ara: That resonated for us.

James: So much. This last year or two we’ve often wondered how we’ve done so seemingly okay in life despite clearly carrying so much developmental trauma, such that we’ve been plunged into intense trauma periods and overwhelming emotion several times over the years. The idea of a ‘faux window of tolerance’ makes so much sense. It might have looked like we were handling difficult experiences and the emotions they brought up pretty well, but really it was more that we were adept at various defences, or survival strategies, to avoid or sidestep them.

Ara: I think that fits well with what we discussed last time about emotions James. The sense that we thought we were pretty good at ‘staying with feelings’ but have lately realised that there were several vital emotions that we were barely feeling at all.

James: Exactly. So what we were generally doing was repressing feelings, or reacting out of survival strategies in ways which made the difficult experience and/or feelings go away. Part of why the last year or two have been so intense is that we’ve finally been feeling many of the feelings – and the experiences they resulted from – which we hadn’t allowed ourselves to feel along the way.

Ara: And you think it may be useful to conceptualise this as a ‘faux secure attachment’ as well as a ‘faux window of tolerance’?

James: I do. We – and I suspect many, many people – were able to do a pretty good impression of functioning in the world, and relating with ourselves and others, for much of the time because we’d developed pretty remarkable defences and survival strategies. However, the ‘faux-ness’ became apparent any time something retraumatising happened – beyond the capacity of the defences and survival strategies to cope with – which put us into periods of intense PTSD where the feelings were terrifying and overwhelming and we couldn’t function. 

The ‘faux-ness’ was also revealed in most of our close relationships because eventually it became apparent that we – and the other person – weren’t really securely attached – in ourselves or with each other – and the relationship ended. Maybe they became more insecure and needy over time and we had to get away, or vice versa. Often it was revealed how much we’d been shaping ourselves to fit that person, and how much we’d lost ourselves in the process, and we finally began to struggle with that.

Ara: I notice that I feel some resistance to the word ‘faux’ here.

James: Me too. It does feel rather harsh and judgemental, and there’s also a sense in it of having been a ‘false self’ covering up a ‘real self’ which is something that I would question.

Ara: Being seven selves all of whom are a work in progress definitely raises questions around any sense of a real ‘authentic’ self!

James: It does indeed.

Faux selves?

Ara: Do you want to say how all this relates to plurality?

James: Well, if we were to use those terms, we would say that we developed a ‘faux part’ – Max – who was to the fore for most of our life. She was the one who formed that ‘faux window of tolerance’ and who formed those ‘faux secure attachments’. She would likely have looked pretty happy and successful from the outside, except for the few times – when traumatic things happened and/or relationships ended – when it became very hard for her to maintain that facade.

Ara: We find it so interesting that we chose the name ‘Max’ for her, given that it sounds a lot like ‘mask’, which is kind of what she was.

James: And her survival strategies were to dissociate a lot, not that she realised that at the time. Throwing herself into work, and into helping others, both enabled her to keep our own intense feelings, and traumatised parts, very disowned and buried. Busy-ness and distraction was her main ‘faux window of tolerance’. Focusing on becoming something for others – rather than bringing herself openly and vulnerably to relationships – was her main ‘faux secure attachment’.

Ara: And this is why we don’t love ‘faux’ for her, although it is accurate in a way, because these survivor parts – in all of us – are something we should be deeply grateful for, and celebrate, not dismiss as ‘false’ or flawed.

James: Agreed. We simply wouldn’t be here now were it not for Max. She protected the other parts of us through some truly horrific early – and later – experiences. And she kept searching for answers to all of the tough stuff that we encountered with our mental health, and in our relationships, and that she saw others around us struggling with too. Ironically if she hadn’t had the survival strategies of workaholism, and trying to help others, we would not now have this huge foundation of knowledge and writing to build upon. 

Ara: We can feel deep gratitude to Max, and huge grief for what she had to go through. One image of her is of the ‘parentified child’: an inner child or teenager who has to act like an inner parent in order to survive and look after the other parts of the inner system who are even more vulnerable. It’s rather like the way a big sibling might have to look after the other kids in a family where parents are struggling, or unable to handle tough experiences and emotions.

James: How it feels at the moment is that we have finally freed Max of that burden and she is off walking in the hills alone somewhere.

Ara: Mm I always think of her when I read the Mary Oliver poem, The Journey. By finding/developing our own inner parents – you and me James – and by working with our three traumatised child parts directly, we have liberated Max.

James: Which brings us on to those parts and how they function in terms of attachment.

Insecurely attached parts under the faux secure attachment

Ara: Go for it James.

James: Right, so this is the idea that all of us have all of the attachment styles present within us. Parts work gives us a nice easy way of working with this. Our experience is that we literally have members of our plural system who map on to each of the forms of insecure attachment.

Ara: I sense a table coming on!

James: How did you guess?

Part ( 4F ) Attachment style Main (disowned) emotion Transactional analysis position Defence against feeling those emotionsTony (fasten / attach)Anxious – preoccupiedYearning / needinessI’m not okay, you’re okayVeneer of confidence, eroticising things, deflecting with humourMorgan aka Beastie (fight)Dismissive – avoidantAnger / rageI’m okay, you’re not okayInner critic – internalising others’ criticisms of usJonathan (fawn / freeze)Fearful – avoidantTerror / shameI’m not okay, you’re not okayPeople pleasing hypervigilance – pretending to be fine and keeping others happyMax (flight)Faux secure covering over the othersTrapped fearI’m pretending that I’m okay and you’re okayBusy-ness, distraction, projecting our insecure parts onto others and helping them

Ara: A lot to unpack there James. How about getting a drink before we start?

James: Hot chocolate?

Ara: You read my mind.

James: I was going to say that’s not so hard when it’s the same mind, but given how poorly parts of us knew each other in the past perhaps I can’t say that.

Ara: We’re getting to know each other better and better now thankfully. Also I feel like we both do and don’t share the same bodymind, given how differently each of us think, feel, and inhabit our body, but perhaps that’s one for another blog post!

…

James: Okay then. So to explain the table. We’ve introduced these four ‘traumatised parts’ before in various places, although our understanding of them – and how they fit together – has definitely clarified over the past year. Mapping onto attachment theory we’d now say that Tony was our anxious-preoccupied part: needy, clingy and desperate for connection. Morgan – who we used to call Beastie – is dismissive avoidant: struggling to trust others and pushing them away. And Jonathan is fearful avoidant: terrified of that other people will hurt or shame him.

Ara: And the ‘okay’ bit of the table?

James: Transactional analysis is another therapeutic approach which seems to map fairly well onto attachment theory. The anxious-preoccupied part – Tony – believes that other people are okay, but he’s not, so he craves others’ love, approval, and attention, and he fears their disapproval, dismissal, and disgust. The dismissive avoidant part believes that she is okay but other people are not, so she tends to blame others and push them away. And the fearful avoidant part believes that he isn’t okay and neither are other people, hence Jonathan’s fear/shame trauma response: other people are dangerous and he is wrong and unacceptable.

Ara: But most of our life these three parts have been disowned?

James: Precisely, which does not mean they haven’t had an impact. Now we understand it that Max was constantly responding to others’ demands inside and out. On the inside she was constantly getting, often rather desperate, messages from Tony, Morgan and Jonathan, about what they needed. She tried her best to balance and meet those needs. On the outside she was very tuned into what other people wanted of her and tried to balance and meet those demands. No wonder she’s off in the hills these days taking a well-earned break!

Ara: So dismantling Max’s defences and setting her free, as we did last year, left us with a much clearer sense of the other three traumatised parts. They have been gradually revealing themselves more and more as they’ve come to trust us. They’re gradually feeling more securely attached to us, and to other people, and they’re gradually sensing that their feelings have a more expanded window of tolerance to be held in.

James: Nicely put. What just clicked with me this morning is that not only did Max have her set of defences – or survival strategies – that covered over the others, but each of the ‘insecure’ parts also have a set of defences that we need to get underneath in order for them to show themselves fully and to feel all their feelings.

Ara: This is so exciting, and it makes so much sense. Do you want to take me through it?

James: Please. The thing that struck me was about Tony initially. He didn’t seem to make sense. On the one hand we experience him as this cocky, hot, humorous part of us: very extrovert and craving connection with others. On the other hand we know that he holds the Deep Yearning of the Soul () . When he does feel his feelings they are often feelings of unquenchable thirst, desperate need, and longing. So how can this seemingly confident part also be the part who feels that he isn’t okay and will be abandoned by others?

But with this sense of defences it all makes sense. If Tony is driven by not wanting to feel the traumatic level of neediness and loneliness that he holds then it makes all kinds of sense that he would fling himself into connections by coming over as charming, sexy, funny and so on.

Ara: Mm yes. As he and I recently discussed, tragically that often fetches him up with just the kind of rejection and loss of belonging that he deeply fears. But it does make all kinds of sense as a defence, just like Max dissociating from recognising just how trapped she’s been in work and relationships. What about Morgan?

James: Again initially confusing. The part of us who holds anger, even hatred, towards others has manifested our whole life as the inner critic, turning that anger and hatred inwards. But if you look at it from the defence perspective that, like Tony, Morgan was disowned all our life, then it makes sense.

Ara: So growing up we learnt that we must never be needy and desperate as Tony can be, or rageful and resentful at others, as Morgan can be. So both of them defended by becoming the opposite – when they were allowed out at all. 

James: Tony faked confidence and made light of his pain, Morgan turned anger in against us rather than ever allowing herself to feel it towards others.

Ara: And our chalkboard boy Jonathan did something similar.

James: I think so. Deep down he holds that incredibly vulnerable fear and shame, and it wasn’t acceptable to admit to those things. So he became the people pleaser who pretended to be fine – in order to keep others happy – and who hypervigilantly figured out what others wanted from him and tried to give it to them.

Ara: Expanding out from our particular experience, do you think there’s something for other people in all this?

James: I suspect so. It probably manifests very differently for different people, but it would be worth everyone exploring what their ‘faux secure’ part looks like, and whether they also have all three ‘insecure’ parts in them somewhere. How do those three influence the whole system? How do they impact how they relate with other people? How repressed or available are they?  What are their defensive behaviours and what are those covering up?

Ara: You’ve done a great job at overviewing the theory, and how it applies to us, here James. I’m wondering if we might dig into practice a little more now?

James: I’d love to. What did you have in mind?

Ara: I’d like to reflect more on how we’re working with this internally and externally. How are we building that ‘earned secure attachment’ with each of the ‘insecure’ parts, and how are we bringing awareness of the three different ‘insecure’ styles into our current relationships? 

We’ve had this radical sense lately that strong relationships are not ones in which we’re just securely attached, but rather the ones in which we can honestly and kindly recognise all the different attachments in play.

James: Yes! 

Ara: A little stretch first?

James: Also yes.

…

Working with insecure parts internally

Ara: We covered some of this territory in our last post James, about how we’re working to help each part to expand their window of tolerance and feel their feelings safely enough, which is also how we’re building our earned secure attachment with each of them.

James: You’re doing the big space ‘drop the storyline and feel the feeling’ work with them, and I’m trying to hold them close, love them and hear them when they’re struggling. We’re also checking in with the ‘insecure three’ at least twice a day to see where they’re at with everything. Because they’re so used to hiding themselves and their feeling, it’s important to keep encouraging them to deliberately tune in and share where they’re at.

Ara: So what else do we need to say here?

James: I guess the new piece is recognising those defences that each of those three holds. Perhaps it feels obvious to go to Tony when we feel yearning, Morgan when we feel anger, and Jonathan when we feel fear, to help them really feel it and be held and heard in it. But there’s now this extra piece of recognising that we need to go to them at least as much if Tony is pinning that yearning onto somebody else or falling into over-excited connection or fantasy, if Morgan is going into inner critic anger-inward type noise, or if Jonathan is chalkboarding .

Ara: Those experiences often feel more dissociated – now that we understand what that means. It often doesn’t feel so apparent that there is a feeling present. There may not be clarity around which part of us is doing their thing, or what has triggered them. There’s just a general sense of unease, confusion, or of being a bit scattered or vague.

James: That’s right. I think we got it first with Jonathan because we clearly identified him with hypervigilance and chalkboarding. Last year whenever we found our brain going over and over things in that familiar way, I would go to Jonathan and encourage him to go closer to the ‘traumado’ of fear/shame feelings instead of desperately trying to solve impossible equations. It had to be very slow and gradual, but eventually we could sit together in the eye of the storm and let it swirl around us, finding a way to settle him there instead of trying to figure everything out which usually made it worse and worse.

Ara: And lately we’ve taken any – even fleeting – ‘noisy’ anger in/out thoughts as an opportunity to go to Morgan and encourage her to sit with her feelings of anger. Tony can be very dissociated, but again we’ve been noticing the kind of thing that’s likely to make him feel rejected or lonely when it happens, and encouraging him to drop down into the yearning feeling, with one of us holding him through it.

James: From a trauma-informed perspective it has to be gradual doesn’t it? Feeling the feelings in the times when it feels possible to do so, gradually expanding the window of tolerance so more and more of it is possible to feel. Slowly these parts can drop the defences more and more, creating a ‘secure base’ of more gentle time with us every day to return to. And very gradually they can share those feelings with trusted others too.

Ara: More on that in a moment. Anything else to say on the inner work?

James: One thing is how each part’s go-to fantasies helped us to understand their resistance, as well as the feelings they covered up. There’s a lot more to write about how we us our erotic imagination for such exploration. We sketched out some of it in this zine with Justin. 

Lately we noticed that Jonathan, Tony, and Morgan kept going towards a fantasy where they were welcomed into a home with me. But the way that fantasy played out was very different for each of them. With Jonathan it was about being in a terrifying situation, rescued by me, and taken somewhere safe where he had a lot of time to recover before having to do anything else. With Tony it was about coming to live with me but being convinced that he would mess up and be sent away. He kept acting out until he could admit those feelings and believe my reassurance. With Morgan she came to me very reluctantly. She kept wanting to fight me and walk away, struggling to trust me to really be up for being with her rage.

Ara: So fascinating how those fantasies – and many of the dreams we’ve had too – echo the processes we’re going through in our outer life. Anything else?

James: I guess that the process feels reciprocal. The more the ‘insecure’ parts learn to trust us, the more of the previously disowned ‘unacceptable’ feelings they can bring. And the more they bring those feelings, the more trust is built. Welcoming them in those feelings seems to help all of them to become more real, more fully fleshed out. That is partly why Morgan wanted a ‘real name’ rather than being called ‘Beastie’ which felt like a caricature. 

But on the way towards that more ‘secure’ attachment with us they often balk at it. They try to resist those feelings, like they can’t really believe it’s really okay to say that they hate somebody – or us (Morgan), or to beg not to be left (Tony).

Ara: Mm which is perhaps why they have to practise in fantasy before they’re able to do that in reality. We’ve described it as encouraging them to bring the whole palette of feelings, not just the not palatable elements of themselves.

James: We like a bit of word play don’t we? 

We also find it useful to notice which old experiences keep returning to our mind, and which current ones. With old experiences we can ask where each part of us is at with those. Often it seems that one of them needs to return to that memory and to complete it somehow – by really feeling it, or by saying how they wish they’d been able to respond, for example, if they’d been more available back then. You and I can hold and hear them through that process, instead of our old pattern of despairing that we kept churning round and round old memories. 

With current experiences it’s similarly important for all of them – or the one who is particularly struggling – to be heard and heeded. For example recently we deeply listened to Morgan’s angry response to how someone treated us and found a response that sat well with her. After that she felt a lot more welcome and ‘at home’ in us.

Ara: It’s not about directly reacting to any ‘insecure’ impulse they might have, as Max might once have done. Rather it’s about engaging in conversation, taking them very seriously, and thinking together how we might respond – giving ourselves a lot of time around it.

James: Right, so instead of Tony leaping into a connection with someone the minute he feels drawn to them, we can notice that feeling and consider how we might move cautiously towards that connection, or whether it’s really speaking to a general desire for more contact, or to be looked after internally. Instead of Morgan deciding never to engage with somebody again we can investigate what she’s responding to negatively in them, and what might be a safe-enough, boundaried way of relating with that person, given what they bring up in her.

Ara: I’m thinking that all these ways of being with them are about demonstrating how loved and respected they are.

James: Which is very easy to do. It’s when parts or feelings are hidden that they feel murky or threatening or hard to love. Brought to the surface and into the light they become far easier to love and understand.

Ara: Which brings us onto the final part because I suspect the same is true in relationships with others. When parts of us – and their feelings – are hidden and murky, others may well respond to us with aversion, or by trying to grasp onto the more appealing defensive versions of us. When it’s all available – and clear – to ourselves and others, we stand a better chance of having mutually nourishing, open, relationships.

James: Right. But so hard for the parts of us who have survived for years by employing those defences to believe that.

Bringing all our parts into relationships

Ara: So let’s explore this. How is it useful to bring the ‘insecure’ parts into relationship with others? I can imagine people thinking that doesn’t make much sense. Surely the last thing we want to do is to relate with others in an insecure way?

James: Mm well part of it is that Pete Walker bit we find so useful: reparenting ourselves and reparenting by committee. We can’t do all this work alone because humans are relational, interconnected and interdependent. There’s only so far we can get as an individual (albeit an individual who is also seven people!)

Ara: There’s only so far our inner relationships can take us.

James: Right. I’m thinking that therapy is like an in-between between the inner work and the work of relating to the people in our life. We can gradually bring our ‘insecure’ parts into the therapeutic relationship in order to notice how they relate with another person, and to experience a different response to the damaging ones they’ve received in the past.

Ara: It often feels like that doesn’t it? That me, you or Fox is taking Morgan, Jonathan or Tony to therapy to give them an hour of practicing doing this with another person.

James: Right, they practise with us at home, and with our therapist in that room. Doing similar things. Like the therapist will point out their defences and encourage them to drop into their body, communicate how they’re feeling, etc. They can practise revealing the things that they assume other people will reject in them – because that’s what’s happened in the past – and experience somebody just being okay with them.

Ara: Maybe a couple of examples?

James: Well like whenever Morgan allows herself to talk about what she’d really like to say to somebody who has treated us badly, our therapist clearly enjoys her energy and her capacity to see through people’s bullshit and protect us. And Tony is gradually feeling safe enough that if he shows up in therapy with the energy that he’s scared will be ‘too much’ for people, she’ll help him to stay grounded. She’ll be up for seeing the vulnerability he’s covering over, while encouraging him to go slowly instead of revealing ‘too far too fast’ as he has in the past.

Ara: And you’re thinking that this kind of therapy is a bridge to bringing those parts into more open relation with others?

James: I think that’s where discernment comes in perhaps. Who is it safe enough to openly engage with from those parts? Who might we be able to speak about these parts with, without actually bringing them out? What situations might we want to be cautious around, perhaps only bringing you or me to Ara, at least while this is all so new?

Ara: I’m thinking that maps nicely onto what Tony and I wrote about Dunbar’s number too. Discerning where a relationship is at, in our life, and what that means in terms of how open and vulnerable we’re able to be in it.

James: Heh our computer just told us it was ‘establishing secure connection’. I thought, ‘you and me both mate’!

Ara: *laughs*

James: What were we saying? Oh yeah. So we’re finding hugely useful to recognise that Morgan, Tony, and Jonathan are already engaged in all our relationships – of course. And now we continually check in where they’re at with them. There’s a sense that, instead of denying that we feel any anger, yearning, or fear towards the people in our life, perhaps it’s more useful to assume that we will feel all of those things – to some extent – in all our relationships, and to name that – to ourselves, and even with that person.

Ara: Absolutely. There’s this paradoxical sense that the more we can allow all of that, the better we’ll be able  to love that person.

James: The more we know how we hate them, fear them, and want something from them, the better the relationship will be! It is surprising indeed, but it’s true. We’ve navigated recent potentially tricky moments in relationships much better, I think, being able to name to ourselves what those attachments – or potential attachments – are with that person.

Ara: Again an example?

James: Well with one friend we noticed how Tony wanted to fling himself into closer relationship with them, while Morgan had flickers of anger that perhaps they weren’t being mindful enough of how vulnerable we are. With another we noticed Tony wishing for more time with them, and Morgan wanting to dismiss them for not making more time for us. 

Those two things happened with friends who we talk about this stuff with all the time so we could name it, and they could reciprocate naming the multiple different parts of them in play. It makes it much easier to be able to say ‘this part of me feels…’ because there’s no blame in it. Not ‘you’re treating us badly’ but ‘I notice that part of me longs for more time with you and another part of me wants to distance from you because we’re not getting it. Can we talk about how we might do time together in future so those parts can have a bit more clarity about where we’re at?’ 

Ara: Mm that’s a good example because it turned out that it wasn’t that we really wanted lots more from them, or to reject them, we just wanted to understand where they were at more clearly, and what we could expect from them.

James: Discernment is important in knowing who will be up for those kinds of conversations and who won’t. Sometimes it’s more of an implicit sense – once we’ve named it all to ourselves – that we need to pull back a bit from this person, or to have a different kind of conversation, perhaps just from one of us Ara.

Ara: Yes, in the deepest relationships we might encourage Tony, Jonathan or Morgan to have the conversation directly, in order to experience that part of us being met well. In less close ones we could report on where our parts are at. In even less close relationships – like a professional exchange – we would talk from one of us as if we were a unified ‘I’, once we’d come up with our boundary, or request, or whatever it was. It feels important to have at least some relationships where all parts of us are welcome, just as we welcome them within ourselves.

James: I think we’re nearly there with this piece Ara.

Ara: One more breath to feel whether there’s anything more to add?

James: *breathes* Okay yes I want to say that it’s important to give these processes a lot of time. That’s why slow, spacious relationships are so essential for us at the moment. Often we need time to notice that an exchange with somebody has brought some of those ‘insecure’ feelings up in us, to find the part – or multiple parts – in us who are triggered, to fully drop into what they are feeling, and then to consider together what kind of response, if any, is necessary. We tend to keep ongoing notes on our phone about each of the current situations in play, and keep returning to them over days, or even weeks, until we have a clear sense of the appropriate response.

Ara: Mm right, and not jumping too quickly to that last part is so important. As we’ve said, it might be that the feeling just needs to be held and heard inwardly, or that some kind of communication or clarification is important, or that we need the relationship to shift in some way. We often can’t tell which it is till we’ve had time to go through the whole process. And the more we do this – giving it time, and asking that other people give us time – the more those parts of us relax into the process instead of freaking out and trying to solve it immediately.

James: Criticism and conflict are a particular challenge of course. Morgan, Jonathan, and Tony would reactively go into a blame, shame, or tame response – respectively.

Ara: I like that. Blame the other, collapse in shame, or tame the situation by glossing over it or making it okay for the other person without attending to our needs. But taking time, as a team, helps us find more of an ‘I’m okay, you’re okay’ response, where we value ourselves and the others involved equally.

James: This whole thing also helps us to see much more clearly when we’re on the receiving end of other peoples’ reactivity: when they are foregrounding their equivalent of Morgan, Tony, or Jonathan – or their Max cover up. We’re not there yet of course, but there’s a strong sense of building compassion for others – even when they do react against us – because we’re so familiar with those parts of ourselves, and we know the incredibly tough feelings – and the painful experiences – that they come from. On the way to that compassion, though, we need to fully feel our attractions and aversions to those things in other people.

Ara: The sense I’m left with is that ‘earned secure attachment’ requires us to hold – and even share – all of our ‘insecure attachments’. Without that it would just be ‘faux secure attachment’ again.

James: Which meshes nicely with Bonnie Badenoch ’s ‘radical inclusivity’, Janina Fisher ’s ‘no part gets left behind’ and Richard Schwartz ’s ‘no bad parts’. The answer is never to try to eradicate any part, or the less palatable elements of any part. The answer is to welcome them all fully, reach an inner secure attachment with them, and bring them all to all of our experiences in a safe-enough, secure-enough way.

Ara: Nicely put James.

James: Thank-you. And thank-you for doing this Ara. I’ve loved it, and your reminders to pause have definitely helped me both to enjoy the process throughout, and to not stray into the unwieldy lengths of some of our blog posts.

Ara: Mm there’s definitely more to be said about applying this same approach to our relationship with work James, but not for now. Let’s keep it a succinct little piece (for us!) at under 7000 words. Time for a walk *smiles*

More on this:

For more exploration of these themes check out our recent pieces on attachment, slow relating, and big feels and the other work on trauma and plurality on this website.

Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support my free writing on Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was by James and Ara.

The post Attachment, emotion and plural parts work appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.