Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 8

Bi visibility: how to be a good friend

A couple of bits from me for bi awareness week.

First I’ll be on this panel tonight talking about bi visibility and mental health. ELOP LGBT centre are organising this, who offer great support to LGBT folks in North and East London.

Second, thanks to Paisley Gilmour for including me in her great piece for Cosmo on ‘how straight people can be better to their bisexual friends‘. You can read the full interview I did with Paisley below…

How does coming out as bi, or being bi, affect friendships with cishet people?

Obviously it depends a lot on the cishet people concerned, but in a situation where most of your friends are cishet identified it can be hard indeed to be the one person who is bi, pan, or queer identified. It is often the case that people are ‘recloseted’ by their friends even after coming out to them as bi. If they’re not actively in a queer romantic/sexual relationship they’re assumed to be ‘really’ straight.

This relates to the common popular stereotypes of bi/pan sexuality being ‘just a phase’, ‘not real’, etc. And that relates to the cultural assumption that sexuality is binary: you’re either straight or you’re gay. Interestingly this is also very patriarchal: bi women tend to be assumed to be ‘really’ straight, and bi man as ‘really’ gay, as if everyone would default to being with a man given the chance! It also links to slut-shaming for women, as bi women are often assumed to be promiscuous.

It is stressful indeed to have to come out repeatedly to friends, to have to keep reminding them of your bi-ness, and to have it continually erased in this way. This might take the form, for example, of them assuming you are cishet even after being told otherwise, or of only expressing interest and enthusiasm about your dates who are the ‘opposite gender’.

This is all really important because we know that bi erasure, biphobia, and lack of support, takes a toll on bi people’s mental health, which tends to be worse than that of either straight or gay people. Also the rates of abusive relationships are higher for bi people because some partners will use their bi-ness against them, or act in controlling ways because they are threatened by it in a world which equates being bi with being untrustworthy betrayers.

Why are friendships so important for bi folks?

Given cultural biphobia and bi erasure, people may well have problems in their families and/or workplaces when they come out as bi. They may even not be able to be out in those contexts. This can be particularly the case where bi-ness intersects with other aspects of oppression. For example, it may feel unsafe for a bi person to come out to biphobic/homophobic parents, particularly if that might risk them losing their home, their community, and/or a carer if they are also disabled. Black women who are already highly sexualised in the workplace may fear the extra harassment they would receive if they were out there as bi.

For these reasons friendships can be vital. They should be one place where your bi-ness can be seen and mirrored by your close people, and a place where you can feel supported and like people are there for you. It can therefore be particularly painful if the people you have chosen to be close to – rather than being forced to be close to by birth or career – are unsupportive, ignorant, attacking, or bi-erasing.

Why can navigating friendships with cishet people as a bisexual/queer person be so hard?

It’s worth thinking a bit about what may be behind some cishet people struggling with bi/pan/queer friends.

First of all, remember that the majority of people experience some attraction to the ‘opposite gender’. According to a recent YouGov survey, the majority of young people are something other than ‘exclusively heterosexual’.

So it is probably the case that the person coming out as bi or queer in an otherwise cishet group prompts some degree of envy or discomfort in at least some of the others in the group. Some may be consciously hiding queerness from their friends, others may feel edgy or uncomfortable because it prompts them to question themselves in ways they haven’t done before. They may not want to look at what it brings up for them.

Some cishet friends – responding to stereotypes of bi-ness and promiscuity – will assume that somebody being bi means they will be attracted to them. There is often discomfort and distancing in friendships where there is the possibility of sexual attraction, compared to those where there is not, which is a real shame. And obviously being bi does not mean being attracted to everyone any more than being straight means being attracted to everyone of the ‘opposite gender’.

Finally, bi folks often find themselves questioning other norms around sex, gender and relationships, and more. This is partly because questioning one set of norms often leads to further questioning, and partly because of overlaps between bi community and trans, kink, polyamorous, and other communities. Again, friends may feel a sense of envy seeing these things opened up in a way that doesn’t feel possible for them. It may feel threatening to them, or it may create distance in a friendship where people are now on quite different life trajectories (e.g. towards marriage and nuclear family vs. towards an extended polycule of queers).

Bi, pan and queer folks can end up more educated around social justice issues more widely, due to common conversations in their communities, and this can also cause rifts with friends who are less keen to know about social injustice or examine their privileges.

How can we know when to educate, when to shrug off their comments, and even when to end a friendship?

Perhaps this is a broader question to ask of all the relationships in our lives, in an ongoing way. One of the problems with normative models of friendships – and partner and family relationships – is that there isn’t often a sense that consent should be at the heart of it. In fact there’s often quite a strong sense of duty and obligation: that you should be in this relationship because you were in the past, and that it should remain the same over time.

Consent means checking in, in an ongoing way, about whether a relationship is nourishing everybody in it, and – if not – what it would take to be more nourishing, whether the relationship container may need to change, or even whether people might need to go their separate ways.

A definition of consent would be that everyone involved feels free-enough and safe-enough to express themselves, their feelings, their needs, and their boundaries, knowing that these will be respected.

In the case of coming out as bi – as with any new thing – it’s fine for friends to need a little adjustment time. But if you are still not feeling free-enough and safe-enough to express your bi-ness, and confident of having it respected, after a while, then there is an issue!

It also should not be on any marginalised person to educate those around them. It’s okay to provide a couple of links of good information and expect people to educate themselves a bit. Again those who refuse to do this are giving you some important information right there!

Of course it can be really hard to have conversations about this with your friends if there is a genuine fear that you may lose them. I would suggest slowly, when it feels okay to do so, asking friends one-to-one if they’d be up for a conversation about what the friendship needs to do in order to be free enough and safe enough for both of you to bring yourselves fully. If people aren’t up for that, or if those conversations go badly, then focusing time and energy on cultivating friendships where you feel more seen and secure, is a good idea. It’s fine for this process to take a while though, and to get some therapeutic support if you find that kind of communication and boundary-setting hard, as many of us do.

Are friendships with other queer people easier? Should we be gravitating towards them?

One tough thing for bi people – certainly in the past – has been the fact that many have had these experiences with straight friends and have then turned to the gay community for friendship and support. Sadly many lesbians and gay men have struggled just as much – if not more so – with bi folks as cishet people have. This is called double discrimination and can be really devestating for people who then feel they don’t belong anywhere.

The same kinds of issue around recloseting, casual biphobia, mental health struggles, and relationship abuse, have played out for bi people in gay communities as much as they have in straight ones. Still many older bi folks in relationships with gay or lesbian identified people do not feel able to be out as bi.

There’s a history in gay communities of bi people being seen as ‘muddying the water’ in the campaign for gay rights, or of having privileges that lesbian and gay people don’t have, or of being untrustworthy and likely to return to the straight community at some stage.

For these reasons, bi communities have been extremely important to many bi people, and it can still be great to tap into bi-specific events and spaces on or off-line. Check out Bi Pride, The Bisexual Index, Bi Community News, Bis of colour, BiCon, Biscuit, and more in the UK.

However, in younger gay and queer communities there is often far more openness to bi and pan folks than there has been in the past, so it may well be that – if you are younger – the turn towards queer community is a much more positive one, and that you will find many other people there who identify in similar ways to you.

It’s certainly very helpful indeed to have friendships with people who mirror your sexuality back to you accurately, who celebrate all your relationships, and who offer you support. However, it’s worth being aware that no community is perfect, and most have some implicit norms about how people are expected to be and behave.

You are ‘bi/pan/queer enough’ whether or not you fit the ways of being bi, pan or queer that you see around you in your community. You may well find it’s useful to join some groups – or find some friends – specific to your intersections, if you don’t feel well reflected in the wider bi/pan/queer community. For example there are great QTIPOC groups, events, and helplines in many places.

The points made earlier about consensual relating are important for everyone to take seriously, and not something you can just assume to be the case in communities where people seem to be more like you. It can be the case that people surprise you, and those who are most supportive and celebratory are not always those in your specific community. For example, people who have experienced other forms of difference and oppression in their lives can sometimes be great friends or allies, and those committed to consensual relating without sharing an identity with you, can be a better bet than those who are more similar, but are not aware around consent.

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Leaving academia

To complete my surprise trilogy of academic publications in the year after leaving academia, my interview about leaving academia with Daniel Cardoso is now available online here.

You can read about the other two articles from this year – on feminism and comics, and on queerness/plurality and comics – here and here.

This interview is published in the journal Sexualities. It is an important journal for me, which I still read, and which published two of my papers on non-monogamies here and here.

Here I reflect on a few of the themes that we cover in the interview.

Leaving academia

In the interview, Daniel and I start by discussing what academia is: what does it mean to be an academic, an intellectual, a scholar, and which – if any – of those things am I now? We also question the inside/outside binary, exploring whether perhaps I was always leaving academia, and/or whether I have really now left.

We touch on this post that I wrote last year about failure. People are encouraged to tell narratives about success and/or failure in academia, and also in life more widely. These don’t tend to capture the complexity of our actual situations, or the multiple stories we could tell through the same experience.

Selfhood

There’s quite a bit in the article about selves and selfhood. Building on that theme of telling stories, we reflect on how academia – and wider culture – encourage us to tell singular narratives of ourselves. For example, these may be stories of how we always knew who we wanted to be when we grew up and how our whole life was a process of moving towards that goal, getting closer and closer.

I’ve been questioning this idea in two main ways ever since I wrote Rewriting the Rules. One way is to see ourselves as the unfolding process, not as some end point we are at right now, or aiming towards: the journey rather than the destination. This idea of constant becoming is a lot more fluid and flexible for the unexpected things life throws at you (a pandemic for example!), allowing you to shift and change course more easily.

The other way of questioning the idea of a singular person getting ever closer to being a ‘successful self’ – or failing in that goal – is to see ourselves as plural rather than singular. Daniel and I reflect about which sides of a person may feel welcome, or at home, in academic institutions, and which may not. For example, we consider whether it is possible to be vulnerable within academia, or to bring more child-like and playful parts of ourselves out there. We explore intellectual/rational and emotional/embodied forms of knowledge, and how the former are privileged over the latter in academia, making parts of ourselves who struggle with that feel less welcome. We also talk about the emphasis on ‘doing’ and having over parts ‘being’ and reflecting parts.

Finally, in relation to selfhood, we chat about what aspects of identity or experience are welcomed in academic institutions, and how that has changed over the years. Can everybody in an academic setting be equally open about their gender, sexuality, disability, caring commitments, or class background, for example? Does everybody see themselves well represented in the professors, the curriculum, and the research?

Systemic change

Finally, Daniel and I speak about the problems with current academic – and wider neoliberal capitalist – systems, and how these might change. We touch on the need to decolonise curricula and expertise which are founded on certain kinds of white, western knowledge and practice.

We consider how self-care, slowness, and mindfulness, are not possible as an add-on to the existing pressures of ‘productive life’, but only with systems and structures which genuinely support and enable collective care.

We explore how injustices are replicated in the forms of labour and expertise and that are, and are not, valued, and in terms of grading, funding, and publication.

We look at how academic processes – like forms of assessment and publication review – benefit those with certain early trainings and life experiences over others.

Conclusions

This was a vulnerable publication to put out there (when are they not?!) I wanted to do justice to the huge benefits that my time in academia afforded me – and the privileges which enabled me to be there in the first place – as well as speaking openly about the harms of bullying cultures in some institutions, of continued sexual harrassment and gendered injustice, of the current climate of academic transphobia, and of toxic non-consensual academic culture more broadly.

I wanted to ensure that I spoke of the help and support I’ve received from so many valued colleagues and friends of the years, as well as the systems and structures that can make being collegiate, cooperative, and compassionate very difficult.

I wanted to say how passionate I am about academic ideas – so much so that I left academic partly in order to have more time to read about them and get them out to wider audiences – but how I also value other forms of knowledge and learning, and felt there was not enough space in academia for that.

I hope that I managed to capture that paradox and complexity in the interview.

If you don’t have access to academic papers and would like to read the full interview, feel free to drop me a line.

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Self-Care update

My zine Hell Yeah Self-Care has led to two exciting developments recently that I want to update you on.

[image error]Self-care box

First, the lovely people at Lagusta’s Luscious – a chocolate shop in the Hudson Valley of NY – have added the zine to their self-care box. If you order the box you get a hard copy of the zine along with fifteen pieces of their amazing chocolate, and a handmade candle in a ceremic cup. Some of the proceeds each time go to Trans Queer Pueblo, an organisation who support LGBT+ migrants of color. So do feel free to order the box here for anybody in your life who you think might appreciate it during these tough times.

[image error]Hell Yeah Self Care!

Second, you can now pre-order the workbook by the same title – Hell Yeah Self-Care – which my co-author, Alex Iantaffi, and I have written, to receive your copy in the new year.

Here’s the link to the Amazon, and Foyles pages for ordering the book. But please do order it from your local independent queer or feminist bookstore if you have one. In the UK we love Gay’s the Word and Pages in London, Category Is in Glasgow, and The Feminist Bookshop in Brighton. In the US Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis is a good friend to me and Alex.

The book Hell Yeah Self-Care develops the ideas and practices in the zine into a whole workbook full of activities, drawing on the content of some of my other zines, and also much of Alex’s work on somatic, trauma-informed, and systemic/relational self-care.

In some ways ‘self-care’ isn’t the best title for the book – or the zine – as what we’re talking about is really ‘collective care’ where we cultivate systems and structures of support and mutual aid. The book covers how we can develop our support systems, co-create consensual cultures and relationships, and do the inner work needed to care for ourselves, others, and the wider world.

The post Self-Care update appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Sapiosexuality

I was recently interviewed about sapiosexuality for a Cosmo article on the topic. You can read that article here, and my full interview below.

What is sapiosexuality?

Sapiosexual means being erotically, romantically or otherwise attracted to – or aroused by – intelligence.

Like all sexual identity terms – and pretty much everything else really – it’s useful to ask what the concept of sapiosexuality opens up and what it closes down, assuming that it probably does both.

The more binary questions which often get asked about sapiosexuality, such as whether it is ‘real’ or not, whether it is good or bad, or whether it is down to ‘nature or nurture’ are less helpful. They also echo some of the problematic debates which often happen around sexuality more broadly.

What does sapiosexuality open up?

Along with other relatively recent sexuality and relationship community terms like demisexual, aromantic, pansexual, skoliosexual, biromantic, heteroflexible, fluid, autosexual, etc., the idea of sapiosexuality is most useful in the way it alerts us to the huge cultural misunderstandings we’ve been labouring under about how sexuality works.

For the last century or so it has commonly been assumed in the west that people are a certain sexuality, that that sexuality is based entirely on the gender they are attracted to, that it is binary (gay or straight, with straight being seen as more ‘normal’ or ‘natural’), and that they were ‘born that way’ and it must remain the same throughout their lives.

Academic thought and scientific research findings now challenge all of these assumptions. Sari Van Anders brings the most recent research together in her Sexual Configurations Theory. This points out, among other things, that:

People’s attractions and desires can vary between who they are attracted to erotically and who they are attracted to emotionally or romantically.Desires can also vary between what they like solo, and what they like with other people. Gender-of-attraction is one dimension of sexuality, which can be more or less relevant for different people, but even that is multifaceted. For example, does being attracted to masculinity mean that you fancy ‘male bodies’, people who identify as men, and/or stereotypically masculine features on a person of any gender?There are many other dimensions of sexuality including how much attraction/desire you experience, what other features of people – like intelligence, appearance, personality – you find attractive, what kinds of roles or power dynamics you enjoy in sex/relationships, what kind of sensations give you pleasure, and much more. All of these things have been found to be fluid, or changeable over time, and for some people they change more than others.

Our previous cultural understanding of sexuality has limited people massively.

It has meant that those who experience high or low attraction or desire have feared there is something wrong with them or tried to conform to the norm with painful results. It has meant that many gay people have remained closeted and bi people felt pressured to ‘pick a side’. It has meant that, as people’s sexualities have changed over time, they’ve felt forced to deny that that is happening and to remain in relationships, identities, and communities that no longer work for them. It has meant that people have assumed that they must get their emotional and sexual needs met by the same person, and struggled when – as Esther Perel puts it – they’ve realised that it’s difficult – if not impossible – to get warmth and heat in the same relationship.

So sapiosexuality helpfully opens up the idea that there may be more to sexuality than the gender we’re attracted to, and that other features of a person may be as – if not more – important than gender.

What does sapiosexuality close down?

Sapiosexuality has rightly been criticised by people in the LGBTQ+ community, as have some of the other recent sexual and relationship categories which have emerged.

Lack of oppression

One reason for these criticisms is that being LGBT or Q carries with it the huge weight of a history of cultural oppression. This includes many – in their lifetimes – having been criminalised, pathologised, or subject to violent physical or emotional attack because of their sexuality.

It is still unlikely, if you are an LGBTQ person, that you will not have been discriminated for your sexuality/gender, and you will certainly have lived through media debates about your existence, as well as lack of positive media representation of people like you. You will know that around the world there are still many countries where you could be at risk of imprisonment or the death penalty. 

None of these things are true for being sapiosexual, unless the way your sapiosexuality works is that you are attracted to intelligence regardless of the gender of a person. If that is the case you may well be subject to the kind of erasure, stigma, and double discrimination (from both straight and gay communities) experienced by many bisexual and pansexual people, which is the reason their rates of mental health problems are even greater than those of lesbian and gay people.

Thinking critically about ‘attractiveness’

However, another criticism of sapiosexuality is that most people who claim this label are not saying they are attracted to intelligence regardless of gender. For example there are men who say they are sapiosexual, but coincidentally all of the people whose intelligence they are attracted to seem to be young women who conform to cultural ideals of attractiveness. In such cases it seems disingenuous to claim a ‘minority’ label (sapiosexual) when really the key feature of your sexuality is still that you are heterosexual, indeed heteronormative.

Another major issue with sapiosexuality is the focus on intelligence. We need to ask some important questions about what we mean by intelligence here:  what kinds of intelligence are valued in our culture, and how that maps onto our attractions if we say we are sapiosexual.

A useful analogy here is to physical appearance. People often say – on dating apps and the like – that they are attracted to a certain physical appearance (e.g. youthful, pale, slim, toned, non-disabled, smooth-skinned). Far from coincidentally this is the appearance that wider culture and mainstream media deem to be attractive, which it is shot through with racist, ageist, ableist, and fatphobic assumptions about what is and is not attractive. 

Intelligence normativity

In a similar way, the kind of intelligence deemed attractive by sapiosexual people may well be what we have been taught by our particular culture to regard as smart (e.g. rational, sharp, quick, intellectual – based on knowledge of western science and philosophy).

It is worth thinking critically about who deems this to be ‘intelligent’, who is excluded from being seen as attractive by such assumptions, and what other forms of intelligence we may be missing with such a narrow definition.

For example, the concept of neurodiversity helps us to see that there are a vast range of cognitive capacities, and that all of us will be stronger on some than others, as well as quicker or slower in different areas.

Concepts of emotional and relational intelligence help us to broaden out what’s regarded as valuable intelligence to have.

Also diverse cultures value diverse forms of knowledge and wisdom, such as spiritual, embodied, ecological, and social forms.

To get more political, it is certainly worth questioning just how intelligent forms of intelligence are which are valued in the countries which have the highest rates of social injustice, have lost most people to the global pandemic, and are most culpable in the global climate crisis.

Conclusions

A more complex understanding of how sexuality operates – like that offered by Sari Van Anders – alerts us to the fact that sexuality is biopsychosocial. It can, and does, change over time. It is certainly influenced by what our culture values, what media and communities we engage with, and whether we relate to all of that critically or not.

It is worth thinking carefully about how our attractions and desires develop, how we articulate them to others, and which ones we want to act upon – and in what ways. We need to embrace the diversity of human sexuality – rather than trying to constrain it to certain normative assumptions – and we need to put consent and ethics at the heart of how we engage with our sexuality and that of others.

The post Sapiosexuality appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Plurality and trauma – 2 – practices

In this post my two most studious parts – James and Beastie – return to revisit the question of plurality and what we have learnt about it since they last got together on the topic. Particularly they discuss our learnings from Janina Fisher’s excellent book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. You can read their earlier Plural FAQ post, and the Plural Zine that preceded it for more background on the topic, or just start here.

It turns out these two have a lot to say so we’ve divided the post into two: The first post dealt with understanding plurality from this trauma-informed perspective. This second post deals with working with plurality in practice. A further post to follow covers how these ideas and practices link to mindfulness.

James: Are you back with me Beastie?

Beastie: Yep, time to continue our conversation. One of the delights of plurality is that different parts have different ideas about the best ways to spend our time, so it’s been a couple of days since you and I had a chance to sit down to this.

James: Fox is off in the hills or dreaming up drawings, Max is still deep in her trauma healing, Tony needed to go swimming with friends apparently.

Beastie: And Ara seems to think that sitting still is just as valuable as all the studying and writing that you and I want to do.

James: I know right? It’s an interesting co-parenting arrangement that she and I have.

Beastie: I’m struck that teasing is probably our main inner love language. I really hope that translates in our written conversations! 

James: Me too. I’m honestly not sure it would be possible to love all of you more than I do. Teasing Tony about his ego, or Ara about her openness to woo, definitely comes from a place of deep love and respect. Like what would we do without one part who actually thinks we’re awesome most of the time, or one who is open to life’s mysteries which keep hitting us over the head?

Beastie: You get to be all mushy in this post old man, don’t worry, it’s coming.

James: Alright then Beasie, heh maybe we’ll get to see the softer side of you too.

Beastie: We’ll see about that. Anyway, to recap on the last post. In that one we explained this understanding of people as being divided into parts: each of which represents one of the survival strategies of fight, fawn, flight, freeze, and attach. Child and adolescent parts of us remain stuck in those patterns – and in the times in the past when they developed, so when we are retraumatised, or triggered, they feel like it’s all still going on.

The trick is to recognise – when we’re triggered or reactive – that it is not the whole of us who is struggling, but just a part. Then we can cultivate ‘dual awareness’ where a part who is not struggling can help the part who is. In this post we’re going to dig deeper into how we actually do that.

James: Alright, let’s do this.

No part gets left behind

Beastie: I loved this phrase in the book: no part gets left behind. It reminded me of the TV show Sense8 which was a hard plural relate for us when we watched it.

James: A cluster of people who can experience the same things and occupy the same body, who all bring different skills and struggles to the team. Dunno what was familiar about that to you Beastie.

[image error]

Beastie: Gosh it’s good though. A crime it got cancelled. Oof now I’m super tempted to do an aside about which of us is closest to which character…

James: I’ll take tough Wolfgang with a hint of good-guy Will.

Beastie: Tony is obviously Lito *eye roll*.

James: Jonathan’s Capheus. Aw, I love Capheus.

Beastie: I think Fox would be closest to Kala; Max to Riley.

James: Making you Sun, of course. And leaving Ara as Nomi. I’m so intrigued whether plural experience was a part of the Wachowski’s inspiration for this show. 

Beastie: Fascinating that the cluster connect through various erotic, romantic, and close friendship bonds too, no?

James: Indeed. But we got sidetracked. Our point here was that Sense8 has that same ethos of ‘no part gets left behind’. A few times they are faced with a challenge where it makes sense to leave somebody in danger, and they insist on bringing everyone along, even when that puts the cluster at greater risk.

Beastie: And by the end it is clear the same applies to the ‘sidekicks’ as well. Everybody is equally valued, equally important.

James: I guess this is another place where we were already on it with Janina’s perspective. Ever since realising that we were seven we’ve had that sense that it’s vital to bring everyone forward equally; to regard everyone as having just as much to offer.

Beastie: Whether they have been foregrounded or backgrounded through our life, whether they are grown-up or childlike, strong or gentle.

James: Janina describes a couple of challenges in this process with clients. First they have to recognise that they have vulnerable child parts, then that they have challenging adolescent parts, who often come in to block the process in some way.

Beastie: Right. With the vulnerable children the challenge is to recognise that we really have parts to us who are that vulnerable and fragile, but they tend to be very easy to love once we’ve found them. Teenage parts are often more challenging because they can seem harsh, critical, angry, even highly destructive. This maps onto what we’ve written about elsewhere about how important it is to own the parts of us who have been victims/survivors, and the parts of us who are capable of oppressive or abusive behaviour: if we are to engage helpfully in social justice, that is.

James: The trick with the more challenging parts is to assume that they are being sensible – given the life that they’ve had – and that they are probably trying to protect the whole, or the vulnerable ones, even though it may seem like the opposite. Ring any bells Beastie?

Beastie: Yeah, teen me seemed to think the way to protect us was to scream hateful abuse at us constantly. I’m not proud.

James: But it makes sense in a life where we had to learn very complex contradictory rules about how to be in order not to be attacked or abandoned by the people around us. To have a loud inner critic to keep ‘reminding’ us of the rules was essential to survival, if not particularly pleasant.

Beastie: That’s an understatement. So Janina describes many times working with a client to take care of their frightened child parts, and then suddenly an angry, sabotaging, sceptical or destructive part pops up. The thing you can do then is to shift the work to that part, treating it just as respectfully.

James: And she suggests shifting the tone too. Child parts need a really gentle, soothing tone, and simple language. Sometimes they even communicate non-verbally. Teen parts need straightforward language. Janina suggests asking clients how they would communicate with an actual troubled teen, and going with that.

Beastie: Vulnerable child parts often want reassuring that they are safe and loved, whereas tough teen parts want to know they are respected and honoured – like war veterans – for how they helped us to survive. All parts need to be spoken with truthfully too.

James: You and Max wrote last time about how things shifted dramatically for us when we befriended you Beastie. That was a turning point, when we quit fighting you and finally embraced you.

Beastie: And we’ve kept that as our rule now. Whatever part turns up, or whatever aspect of a part, however resistant or scary, we welcome them home.

James: Janina says that when we can welcome home the hurt, lost, and lonely parts, self hatred and disconnection can transform into self-compassion.

Beastie: Again deep resonance for us. The idea of loving ourselves was entirely impossible to us as a single individual. Loving our parts from the perspective of other parts is easy.

James: The metaphor of home is helpful here too. Janina notices that child parts often feel stuck in dangerous home places of the past. She helps adult clients to literally show those parts the safer homes they inhabit now, to bring them home there.

Beastie: We do some of that. Finding a safe-enough physical home space has certainly been important to us. But we also imagine a fantasy home that we live in as separate selves. That can be a safe place to go to when things get hard, a good location for internal conversations, and a space to play in our imagination. The child parts find it soothing to imagine where each of us is in that space at the end of the day, or when they are struggling. Janina says that ‘imagined experiences of safe attachment can generate the same feelings and sensations and evoke the same attunement bliss’ as actual experiences.

Holding and hearing

James: Okay we should say more about Janina’s practice. We’ve explained that trauma responses can be understood as merging or blending with traumatised younger parts, but how do we cultivate the ‘dual awareness’ or ‘parallel process’ required to un-merge? 

Beastie: Janina describes how to do this in the therapy room: the therapist guides the client to always use the language of ‘a part of me feels…’ rather than ‘I feel…’, and then to engage in internal conversation with that part. If they start to merge, she gets the client to ask the traumatised part if they would mind sitting back a little. She explains that parts usually feel safer and more relaxed when that happens. It makes them feel unsafe to be that merged, and it is a relief to unmerge.

James: That makes sense. So the alternative to merging or blending is dual awareness. As we said last time, Janina refers to this as the ‘getting on with normal life’ part taking care of the traumatised part. In our case it is whichever part – often a parental part – who feels in the ‘C’ place: able to access compassion, clarity, calm, etc. That part looks after whichever part is in the ‘F’ place…

Beastie: …freaking out or trying to figure everything out, with the five F survival strategies.

James: Mm. And the mantra here is ‘hold and hear’. A part who is struggling needs to know that they are held safe enough, and that the other part is hearing them well. It can take a while to locate which part is struggling, to separate from them enough that they feel held, and to find the way that they like to be heard. But with practice we get used to the process of finding what works each time.

Beastie: Right, it’s like being up for being flexible and shifting the container to find out what’s needed each time. Who needs to be held and heard? Who do they need it from? What does holding and hearing look like this time? And there can often be a real sense of clicking – and nervous system relaxing – when we get there.

James: I’m also struck that this process relates to what we’re aiming for in our outer relationships now too Beastie. That move from fear/shame trauma responses to a combination of protection and connection.

Beastie: Right, the holding provides that sense of being protected enough and safe enough to come forward. The hearing is the connection piece, feeling really heard and understood.

The befriending questions

James: One piece of solid gold this book has given us are the befriending questions. That’s a set of simple questions to ask the part who is struggling.

Beastie: Every time I think it’s not going to work – that it can’t apply in this case. And pretty much every time it’s been an incredibly helpful process. There are other practices that Janina suggests too, like showing the child selves that they are safe now, or working with them to figure out which aspects of everyday life they want to engage with and which they don’t. But these befriending questions would be the central practice: the questions to ask in order to hear a part once you have got them sitting with you.

James: Here are the questions. You identify a part that is in some kind of distress. Then you ask them:

‘What are you worried about if you…?’ (e.g. say ‘no’, read that message, see those people)When they reply, ask them, ‘what are you worried about if [repeat exact description they gave] really does come true?’When they reply, ask them, ‘if those worries that [repeat exact description they gave] really do happen, what are you worried will happen next?’ Keep repeating this question until the core fear is reached, often a fear of annihilation of self, or abandonment by others. Acknowledge that fear by mirroring it back to them, then ask them ‘What do you need from me right here, right now, to not be so afraid of…?’ You’re looking for a small enough, sufficiently concrete thing that can definitely be met by you.

Beastie: Wanna role play it with me old man?

James: Oh go on then, am I talking to old struggling Beastie?

Beastie: Yep and she’s a hot mess. Somebody just assumed we’d do something for them that we really don’t want to do. She wants to tell them where to go.

James: Okay Beastie. I feel your rage and it’s welcome indeed. But are you up for exploring this a bit with me first before we do anything.

Beastie: Did you see what they did? Those fuckers. I’ve got to show them how non-consensual that is.

James: I’m so up for a conversation about what we might communicate with them in a bit, but you know when these strong responses come up it’s often a good opportunity to understand each other better. I really want to understand what’s going on for you here.

Beastie: Alright, I guess.

James: Thank-you. I promise we’re going to take this seriously.

Beastie: Okay. Ask your damn questions.

James: What are you worried about if we don’t tell them where to go immediately?

Beastie: We’ll wind up doing this thing they’re asking for, allowing them to treat us this way.

James: And if we wind up doing it: allowing them to treat us that way? What are you worried will happen if we do that?

Beastie: They’ll keep doing it more and more. 

James: And if they keep doing it more and more? What are you worried will happen next?

Beastie: I hate it.

James: What do you hate?

Beastie: It’s this image of us, with like these knives getting in, like they’re intruding on us, and there’s nothing we can do.

James: I can see it Beastie, that image. Can you put a word to it?

Beastie: Invasion, annihilation, it’s like there’ll be nothing left of us.

James: That’s spot on. You described it well. That fear we have of people treating us that way and us just being annihilated by it. Can you tell me what you need from me right here, right now, to not be so afraid of this happening?

Beastie: I get what you’re saying about not responding right away, while this is so live. But could you help me write some bullet points of what I want to convey about how we need to be treated? Then we can agree to return to those in a few days and turn that into an email if it still feels right.

James: You need to know that the rest of us are going to listen to you, to take this seriously, to make sure we’re clear that we can’t offer what they demanded from us.

Beastie: Oo now you’re going off script.

James: Phew that got pretty real actually.

Beastie: You doing okay old man?

James: Are you?

Beastie: Yeah. Maybe a little pause before we continue. Thanks for being up for that.

James: You’re very welcome.

Emotional attunement 

Beastie: Ah that’s better. What’re we on? Attunement. Great, now for the bit where you get mushy.

James: Hmph.

Beastie: So these next bits relate to what we’ve been learning about shame and trauma more widely. This sense that the aim is ‘emotional regulation’, ‘expanding the window of tolerance’, and ‘earned secure attachment’. 

What you’re trying to do is to learn how to regulate emotions that come up rather than being flooded by them, so that you can tolerate them more easily over time. That involves meeting yourself like a parent should meet a child with a tough feeling. We wrote about this particularly in the post about Pat de Young’s book on shame. She said that chronic shame was caused by not having our emotions regulated as kids, and that we could learn to do it now. That would lead us towards that ‘earned secure attachment’. 

James: Kids who aren’t emotionally regulated like that are likely to form insecure attachments with caregivers – and later others – in various ways. Kids who are emotionally regulated by their caregivers can form more secure attachments. They know that they have a safe place to return to from their explorations where they will be emotionally regulated (rather than being punished or ignored, or evoking stress in their caregiver, for example). 

This ‘earned secure attachment’ idea suggests that we can learn to do this emotional regulation for ourselves if we haven’t had it as kids. Back to the neuroscience , we are retraining our brain and our nervous system by holding and hearing those trauma responses or overwhelming emotional states.

Beastie: Which we can do because of neuroplasticity. Follow a different neural path enough times when these things happen and we’ll eventually respond to potentially triggering situations with curiosity and containment rather than overwhelm, melt down, shut down, or fragmenting.

James: So I notice you’ve called this section ‘emotional attunement’ rather than ‘emotional regulation’ Beastie, why is that?

Beastie: Still trying to avoid the mushy part James? Okay I’ll bite, it’s because of neoliberal capitalism.

James: Of course it is.

Beastie: Think about the language ‘emotional regulation’. I don’t like it. It suggests that emotions are a problem, something to be regulated – presumably by rationality – rather than being immensely valuable. There’s a disturbingly patriarchal and colonialist legacy right there. We’re watching the documentary The Century of The Self at the moment. It demonstrates the roots of the consumer capitalist model – which is responsible for climate crisis, the rich/poor divide, exploitation and dehumanisation, huge mental and physical health problems…

James: ..the eroding of real democracy, everything bad basically. 

Beastie: It’s rooted in psychoanalytic thinking, particularly the ideas of Anna Freud that people need to learn how to regulate their unconscious forces by bringing in the rational ego. Anna and co encouraged people to do this in order to conform to normality (which at the time meant a whole bunch of misogynist, homophobic, racist ways of being). And many of the people who drew on her ideas back then believed that they – as the elite – should control the irrational unconscious forces of the masses, making them into docile consumers who would cause no trouble and keep the economy going.

James: And we’re living through the terrifying end result of this approach to humanity. I can see why you’re not keen on ‘regulation’ Beastie.

Beastie: It also doesn’t accurately capture what these authors are actually describing James. I think ‘emotional attunement’ is a much better word for it.

James: Agreed. When we are holding and hearing one of us who is struggling, we’re not trying to regulate them into shutting up. In fact, trying to do that was the problem. When we used to try to repress these parts – and their feelings – that damaged us, leaving us disconnected from ourselves and from others. 

Beastie: Or the parts and their feelings just got louder and louder because they were being ignored, or ended out reacting when in such states. Not helpful either

James: So the aim of attunement is that we stay with that part, demonstrating to them how much we welcome them, how we are able to hold them, and how we are interested and committed to hearing them.

Beastie: And when we find that click moment, where they feel truly held and heard, that is emotional attunement…

James: Okay now I’ll get mushy about it. So the books we’ve been reading describe emotional attunement as like the feeling a parent gets with a child. It’s that state that a parent and child go into when the parent has figured out exactly what that child needs and has provided it.

Beastie: ‘Are you crying because you’re tired? Because you need changing? Oh no you’re hungry, here’s your bottle…’

James: And then both parent and child go into that blissful state. That’s emotional attunement.

Beastie: We had another smug moment realising we’d already got to this with each other before reading Janina’s book.

James: But that’s been the part of plurality that we’ve perhaps found most difficult – embarrassing even – to convey to others.

Beastie: Indeed. We’ve gone from not even being able to conceptualise what loving ourself could be like, to experiencing moments of deep emotional attunement with ourself, which feel precisely like that feeling of parent/child bliss, falling in love, or the afterglow of sex.

James: Indeed they sometimes actually are those things, if they’re between parts which feel a parent/child bond, a romantic bond, and/or an erotic connection.

Beastie: Tell us about your feels old man!

James: Okay well this week I had the parent/child version with Fox. They’d dragged us up to one of their favourite outside spaces and taken a bunch of pictures of flowers and animals, and we were walking home all sun-soaked and tired, and they were chatting away to me, and… honestly Beastie when it’s like that I just find it hard to believe that somebody looking at us would not see a tall man walking hand in hand with a little kid. It feels so vividly like two different people. And I looked down at them with such love and fondness, and such wonder you know? That this delightful part of us exists and wants to be with me. Is that mushy enough for you?

Beastie: You did good *grin* So I guess we’d already found our way to attunement moments with each other in various different ways. We can also get there by joking together…

James: The teasing. It’s like we’re getting to know each other better and better so those jokes come from that place of deep understanding of each of our foibles.

Beastie: Like knowing it’ll embarrass you to be so open about your feelings, for example.

James: Like that, yes.

Beastie: And we can reach a similar sense of attunement in romantic or erotic moments, whether in fantasy or reality, or the in-between.

James: The other day I pulled you up to dance with me after we finished writing.

Beastie: To Stevie Wonder no less, very smooth.

James: I love that it’s me you come to to have these conversations Beastie.

Beastie: And I love that our inner prof respects me and my ideas so much, it’s a good counterbalance to all the patriarchal bullshit we’ve had to endure.

James: I do respect you Beastie: deep respect for your ideas and how they develop our thinking.

Beastie: Okay, okay enough. So I guess we’re saying that any kind of emotional attunement you can get between parts is awesome. And specifically – drawing on Janina’s work – it’s good to aim for that when a part is struggling, in other words when any tough emotion, thought, or sensation comes up.

James: Which is a great way of flipping that experience, so that each time it happens it’s an opportunity to find attunement, and to keep moving towards that part with curiosity until we’ve found it. That’s a radical shift from any tough experience feeling like it’s a bad sign, or something we should avoid.

Earned secure attachment and inner parents

Beastie: A little more on earned secure attachment and inner parents?

James: This perhaps relates more to Pete Walker’s work on cPTSD , although Pat De Young writes about earned secure attachment too. One of the bits of Pete’s book which really stuck with us was the idea of ‘reparenting yourself and reparenting by committee.’

Beastie: That’s what we’ve been aiming at since reading his book. How to provide yourself with care and protection, and to cultivate multiple relationships where you receive that kind of care and protection too.

James: Reparenting by committee means that you don’t put that on one person – as we can so easily do in codependent-type relationships – but rather you develop your support system of people who you turn to for care and protection, as well as offering that too.

Beastie: Hold your horses James, we’ll get to plurality and external relationships in a sec.

James: Okay, okay. So the sense we have is that a key aim here is to cultivate an ‘earned secure attachment’. This would mean that we were less flooded by tough emotions and trauma responses because we would trust our own capacity to attune to ourselves, and to care-for and protect ourselves, when those things came up. Practising emotional attunement with all parts of us, in all situations, is the way of moving towards that earned secure attachment.

Beastie: And inner parent parts are pivotal in that – we think. There isn’t much about that in Janina’s book – it’s more a sense that the ‘getting on with normal life’ adult part is the inner parent. But Sarah Peynton, Pete Walker, and others have more of a sense of cultivating specific inner nurturers, protectors, or wise witnessing parts, however they describe them.

James: And I guess that’s what we have done with me and Ara.

Beastie: It almost felt like building you out of patchwork. Mm, like we said in our previous conversation James, an act of excavation and creation simultaneously: finding what was always already there, and deliberately shaping you both and bringing you forward. You feel like a combination of memories of attuned moments we had with actual family members, teachers, companion animals, etc., as well as our relationships with a few great therapists, supervisors, and mentors along the way, and a lot of examples in fiction that we draw on.

James: My starting point being queer James Bond , although now our littlest one is addicted to hospital dramas I’m becoming more of a combination of Richard Webber from Grey’s Anatomy and Daniel Charles from Chicago Med.

Beastie: Fox is bizarrely obsessed with Dr. Charles right now. 

James: Our first experience of Ara was one of emotional attunement huh? Jonathan felt that sense of being cradled, after we started our process towards gender surgery.

Beastie: Now we have that cradling feeling more and more. I guess the point here that all people have these potentials in themselves, even if woven together from the merest scraps of memories and fictional examples. And we can all work on developing and strengthening parental parts, or whatever we want to call them. Perhaps caring and protective parts is less loaded.

James: I can’t even with the shift we’ve experienced in this. A few months back we rarely felt me or Ara around much, whereas now we can have whole days where one of us is to the fore in our everyday life, and/or much of our time is spent in dialogue between one of the two of us and other parts.

Outer relationships: Delegating our parts to others

Beastie: I think this gets us to the final issue that we want to touch upon, although I expect it’s one we’ll return to in more depth in future. One reason why we didn’t have much access to you and Ara in the past is because we didn’t understand how we needed to cultivate parental parts for ourselves.

James: Right, so one thing we did was to look for other people – mainly partners – to be that for us. And another thing we did was to offer us – me and/or Ara – to other people, rather than learning how to be that for ourselves.

Beastie: I guess this is the piece we’re least proud of. It seems so obvious now that we’ve done all this reading. But we’ve hurt others and ourselves a lot by trying to be that kind of parent for them, and by trying to find that kind of parent in them. What does Janina have to say about this?

James: She cites Judith Herman who said that trauma leaves us with desperation for an omnipotent rescuer. She also points out that therapists have often done damage in the past by assuming that their role is to become that attachment figure for a client, and to work with the relationship in that way. She sees the therapeutic role instead as facilitating the client to find the capacity in themselves to parent their traumatised inner child and teen parts. She writes a good bit about how to explain this to clients, and to side step attempts by them – and temptations in yourself – to take on that role.

Beastie: This has been so helpful in understanding how we want our relationships of all kinds to be. When we feel drawn by somebody else into that kind of role, perhaps through them pedestalling us or assuming that we can parent them, we now feel highly uncomfortable. We try to discuss openly where our boundaries are, and how we might facilitate them finding that capacity in themselves, if indeed we have that to offer in that relationship. We can also notice when one of us has fallen into projecting this kind of thing onto somebody else.

James: That one of us often being Tony.

Beastie: Now we realise that he’s our ‘attach’ part, yep.

James: There’s something so important about empowerment and disempowerment here. To take on a parental role for another person’s child parts is inherently disempowering, however great it might feel for all concerned. It so easily leads to dynamics where the child parts become dependent on that person to feel safe, or where that person simply can’t sustain that level of ‘parenting’ and the child parts become retraumatised. Instead we need to trust others to find their own inner parents, whichever way works for them. That’s far more empowering for them, and less risky for everyone involved.

Beastie: Writing like Janina’s, and hopefully ours, might help people to find something of a route-map for this, but nobody should ever be offering to do it for another person, or telling them how to do it. Everyone has to find their own path, ideally well-supported with others who understand this work and are doing it alongside them, and/or facilitating them in it.

James: I’m struck that the internal process Janina describes requires de-blending, or un-meshing from our parts, and how that relates to doing the same in relationships with others. It doesn’t help anybody to become blended or enmeshed, as we do when we unconsciously enter stuck parent-child dynamics in relationships. Remaining separate and mutual is the thing.

Beastie: Back to being both protected and connected.

James: Okay another 5000 words for part 2 of our epic blog post Beastie. Time for another break before we come back, write a summary, and put it out there.

Beastie: Plan.

Plural superpowers

James: So we’d like to end by suggesting that plurality is a superpower.

Beastie: I mean we would say that wouldn’t we? But I think Janina agrees. First she points out that fragmenting or compartmentalisation is only ‘pathological’ when it is unconscious. It is a natural response to trauma. It enables us to survive. And when we make conscious use of it, it can make us incredibly strong.

James: For a start, cultivating dual awareness means that we’re far less likely to get reactive and hurt others and ourselves out of that reactivity. But beyond that, when we’re conscious of all our parts, and able to bring them forward or allow them to retreat, we can find the ‘right part for the job’: the part with mastery in that area. Like the times we’ve found Tony for public speaking, or Ara for facilitating a workshop, or you for holding our boundaries Beastie. The feeling is extraordinary when one of us is in their element, and it connects way better with others too.

Beastie: I think there’s way more to discover here. Like the kind of art that might emerge from playful Fox rather than productive Max, or what it will be like to bring Jonathan’s capacity for emotional empathy to relationships when he’s not so overwhelmed.

James: Heh right now it’s more like the bit in the superhero movie where the hero realises they have powers but has no idea how to use them.

Beastie: Spidey crashing into buildings and getting goo everywhere.

James: We’re so using that superhero theme for our next graphic guide on mental health Beastie.

Beastie: I can’t wait. Let’s end with a list of the key practices here.

James: Great writing with you Beastiegirl.

Beastie: Right back atcha.

Repeat the following (repetition is soothing and required for neuroplastic shift) 



Recognise all feelings and triggered reactions as sensible communications from a part (e.g. expressing worries, attempting to find solutions, up/down regulating emotions)Elicit a felt sense of that part and respond curiously from differentiated adult partEmphasise the togetherness of adult and child: holding and hearingEncourage reciprocal communication, attending to how each part feels and respondsUse the four befriending questionsAnything that doesn’t work is an opportunity to learn and develop trust (e.g. if a part backs away let them know you understand why)Maximise moments of attunement, stay embodiedAll parts are equally valuable so bring them forward equally – no part gets left behindCheck in with everybody regularly to let them know that they are held in mind and get curious how they’re doingCultivate compassion for all parts and communication and trust within each dyad

Check out the first blog post in this series to find out more about the theory around plurality and trauma.

Patreon link: If you liked this, please feel free to support my Patreon.

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

The post Plurality and trauma – 2 – practices appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Plurality and trauma – 1 – theory

In this post my two most studious parts – James and Beastie – return to revisit the question of plurality and what we have learnt about it since they last got together on the topic. Particularly they discuss our learnings from Janina Fisher’s excellent book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. You can read their earlier Plural FAQ post, and the Plural Zine that preceded it for more background on the topic, or just start here.

It turns out these two have a lot to say so we’ve divided the post into two: The first post deals with understanding plurality from this trauma-informed perspective. The second post deals with working with plurality and trauma in practice. A further post to follow covers how these ideas and practices link to mindfulness.

Beastie: Ready to shoot the breeze with me again James?

James: Always Beastie.

Beastie: I’m glad we finally got around to this post.

James: Worth waiting for this moment I think. Janina’s book filled in so many of the missing pieces for us. 

Beastie: And affirmed much of where we’d already got to ourselves, drawing together our learning on trauma with our experience of plurality. I felt quite smug reading parts of the book. Like ‘we got there all by ourselves, nice going.’

James: Should we explain what we’re intending to do in this blog post?

Beastie: Right, well we considered doing another book review post like we did on the books by Pete Walker, Pat de Young, and to some extent David Treleaven. But that would’ve been a lot because we basically highlighted something on every page of Janina’s book. Also we’re more interested in digging into some of the key ideas and practices, and how we’ve been applying them, rather than just summarising it.

James: Yep. We’d certainly recommend the entire book to anybody who this blog post resonates with. 

I’d also like to start with my usual point that this stuff is relevant to everybody, no matter how extreme or mild their experience of trauma, or how muted or vivid their experience of plurality. We all get reactive and experience overwhelming feelings at times. And it’s valuable for everybody to locate that reactivity and emotion in parts of themselves rather than in the whole of themselves, in order to work through it rather than becoming stuck in it .

Beastie: I mean who isn’t traumatised during a pandemic? And who doesn’t disown parts of themselves growing up under the shaming self-policing system of neoliberal capitalism. Am I right?

James: As you are about so many things Beastiegirl.

Beastie: I sense you’re a bit looser than last time we had one of these conversations old man. This is going to be fun.

Plurality and trauma: An Overview

James: So we were excited about this book because Janina brings together somatic work around the neurobiology of trauma together with a multiconsciousness model of how people work. These are the two areas we’ve been bringing together in our work of late, although we also like to mix it up with Buddhist and social justice / intersectional feminist understandings. 

Specifically Janina weaves together Sensorimotor Psychotherapy with Internal Family Systems Theory , but she also draws more broadly on the literatures on trauma, attachment, mindfulness, and plurality.

Beastie: Right. So what that looks like in practice is that she assumes that all distressing thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations are communications from traumatised parts of us, who are still stuck in the past when the traumatic things happened to them. What needs to happen is for all parts to be befriended, heard, held, and brought into the present, where they can finally feel safe enough.

James: What we were smug about is that Janina suggests that our parts often map onto those trauma survival strategies of fight, flight, freeze, etc. The way these have become encoded over time as learned patterns of behaviour.

Beastie: Regular readers will know that we already got there a couple of months back: Mapping me, Jonathan, Max, and Fox onto the four Fs.

James: But Janina throws a further F into the mix, which isn’t an F at all: Attach.

Beastie: And that finally helped us to make sense of our wild card, Tony. Tony is totally the 5th F.

James: He also had a different idea about what that 5th F might stand for in his case, which I won’t repeat here because it’d only encourage him.

Beastie: Well I guess that is one way of attaching to people.

James: We’ll get more into the Fs in a moment. Anything else we need to say up front about this way of understanding – and working with – ourselves?

Beastie: A key sense is that what people tend to do when traumatised parts show up is either to disown them – which is probably what they did in order to survive growing up – or to completely identify with them: feeling like the flood of emotions are theirs and worrying that they’re broken because of how overwhelming that feels. The alternative to this is to cultivate a dual awareness so that you can hold and hear the traumatised part, but not become them.

James: Right. We’ll say a lot more about how that works in the second half of this post.

Beastie: As a therapist Janina is mostly describing how she works with clients in this way, but here we’ll emphasise how we’ve used this approach ourselves. There’s important stuff in the book about how the therapist’s task is to help the client to develop the parts of themselves who can meet and hold their traumatised parts, not to do it for them. That’s very much how we’ve experienced our own therapist.

James: Yeah she was stoked when our most compassionate self – Ara – showed up in therapy, clearly well capable of holding the rest of us through the tough feelings. At that point our therapist spoke of stepping back and her trust in our own capacity to do this work.

Beastie: It helps to keep seeing her for now though. The way she talks us through these practices teaches us how to do it for ourselves in a space that feels very held and safe, particularly when going to the really hard, vulnerable places.

James: I’d certainly recommend that people access a trauma-informed therapist with a non-pathologising affirmative understanding of plurality to facilitate this kind of work. We’ve had plenty of past experience of therapy as both therapist and client, but we still really needed that kind of guidance and holding through this process.

Beastie: Just make sure the therapist is all about empowering you to find this wisdom and capacity in you, rather than being invested in doing it for you. We’ll come back to that in the second post.

James: Mm. Janina suggests that a lot of therapy in the past hasn’t worked for clients – and might even have damaged them – because it has assumed them to be singular rather than plural, and because it has focused on replaying past traumatic memories, rather than helping traumatised parts to find safety in the present.

Beastie: Right, if you assume you’re working with a singular self who has all these overwhelming feelings and experiences, even to the point of self-destruction, then you’ll easily reinforce the belief that they are ‘crazy, damaged or inadequate’ because of their bewildering reactions and contradictions. 

It can be incredibly reassuring for a client – or for anyone – to learn that those feelings, experiences and behaviours only reside in a part of them, and that that part can be heard and brought into a much safer relationship to the rest of the self. Also it helps hugely to learn that we all have parts who are strong survivors and who can function well. That’s a much more empowering message.

James: In that way this book is more optimistic than the book on shame that we reviewed, which suggested that those with chronic shame would never fully recover.

Beastie: We’re still sceptical of linear recovery narratives, but we like the sense here that people may be fragmented, but that doesn’t mean that we’re forever broken. Fragmenting, compartmentalision, or dissociative splitting, was actually a normal and smart strategy which enabled us to survive the past rather than remaining trapped in trauma. And it can give us superpower in the present if we can master how to bring each part forward when needed.

James: Comparing this to other books we’ve read, we also prefer some of the message here to Pete Walker’s .

Beastie: Yeah Pete is very down on the inner critic, he’s all about fighting and dismissing the critical voices. Janina rightly points out that angry critical parts are trying to protect us and it;s just as vital to listen to and befriend them as any other part, even if they seem to be destructive or blocking progress.

James: I can see why you might prefer that message Beastie.

Beastie: Reformed inner critics can be the best allies in our experience.

James: Some of them turn out to be pretty keen bloggers too.

Beastie: D’you know what makes me angry James?

James: Um, you’re our fight part. Do you want me to give you the full list? 

Beastie: Hilarious. What angers me is that when we first learnt about plurality, and about trauma, as a trainee psychologist, both were dismissed and ridiculed. I remember us learning that ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’ was made up, just some attention-grabbing behaviour whipped up between crazy patients and their gullible therapists. And I remember hearing all the backlash against the idea that developmental trauma was very common. Again a sense that most people were probably making it up, or making too much of it.

James: I share your anger Beastie: these understandings that are so helpful to us now – and potentially to so many people – have a legacy of gaslighting around them, by wider culture and by the so-called experts. There’s denial that these things are real, or that they really happened. There’s a good deal of the blaming of survivors in order to defend perpetrators and the systems that allowed damage to happen. And there’s a sense that people should be easily able to ‘fix’ their struggles, rather than recognising the huge challenges of living with a traumatised nervous system.

Beastie: Again we’d emphasise that both trauma and plurality are on a spectrum. But the things that have happened to us definitely ‘count’ as trauma, and our plurality is certainly a genuine embodied experience which takes us in the direction of healing. We could have been saved a lot of pain on this journey if people hadn’t attempted to minimise and question these experiences. We wasted far too much time and energy wondering whether what happened to us was ‘bad enough’ and whether our plurality was ‘real’. That kind of internalised gaslighting just kept fetching us back in shame and retraumatising memories.

James: So I guess we’d want to convey to the reader that whatever happened to them, and however they experience themselves, is legit. And whatever they can do to embrace it, assume that it is sensible , and befriend themselves around it , is for the good. 

Beastie: Okay enough preamble. Let’s dig into some of the specifics of this way of understanding – and working with – plurality.

Plurality and the 5Fs

James: So a big ‘aha’ moment for us reading this book, as we’ve said, was realising that our parts mapped onto the major trauma survival strategies: flight, freeze , fight, fawn , and – the new one on us – attach.

Beastie: We have heard another idea that the fifth F is ‘fragment’, but our sense is that fragmenting or splitting is what happened to separate us into these parts in the first place. And it doesn’t seem to map onto a separate part of us in the way the other Fs (and A) do. 

James: We can still ‘fragment’ when something really overwhelming hits. But that, for us, is a sense of being scattered: unable to find each other and to look after each other through whatever is happening.

Beastie: That’s the sense of being abandoned internally rather than accompanied that Max and I wrote about.

James: Another piece that Janina wrote about, which helped us to make sense of our internal system, was the idea of different survival strategies as located at different ages. So she says that attach and freeze are very early infant strategies. The infant is so helpless that they trust and reach out to caregivers even if they aren’t always met or emotionally regulated by those caregivers: that’s attach. The kinds of startle responses and frightened disappearing that we associate with Fox’s freeze response are also very young.

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Beastie: We always thought of Fox as a very young part of us, but it’s new to locate Tony as an infant. He always had such strong adolescent energy that we didn’t see that. But it makes a lot of sense as he’s driven by a yearning for intimacy, and he’s also… how shall I put this?

James: Very full of himself.

Beastie: Right, and narcissism is associated with infancy too: you really believe that you are the centre of the universe at that age. Don’t get me wrong, it’s hella useful to have a part of us who actually thinks he’s pretty awesome, given how many parts are convinced that they’re terrible.

James: But recognising that Tony is driven by yearning for intimacy, and can be overly sure of himself, has helped us to understand him better and to help him think about how he can channel those energies in ways that are safe-enough for the rest of us.

Beastie: We generally let him take our public-facing roles, which means him taking credit for all kinds of work that isn’t really his. We help him to understand that there are many ways of getting intimacy needs met to temper his hot love and fastlove tendencies. Given his narcissism, we put him in charge of our ‘look’.

James: Which is why we dress like a teenaged boy.

Beastie: Don’t worry prof, some day we’ll indulge your fetish for elbow patches and tweed.

James: Ahem. Going back to Tony, when his energy gets too hyper…

Beastie: We make him do the vacuuming. It is very helpful to have one hyper inner boy…

James: And another who wants to please us all by making us delicious meals.

Beastie: This has been a real theme since our last post James: finding the everyday tasks that each of us excel at and enjoy, so that we all get some time ‘fronting’ each day.

James: And the tasks that work well for each dyad, so that we nurture each relationship too.

Beastie: Like reading and blogging together in our case. 

There’s definitely that sense in this book too that it’s important to keep checking in on all parts and giving them space. Janina suggests making sure that you ask inner children how they’re doing regularly, buying them soft toys, whatever it takes to let them know that they are held safe and heard.

James: The other aspect of locating our parts in the five Fs that we found useful is that it helps us to know which part a difficult feeling is coming from. Because we have one part who tends to feel all the feelings for everybody – out in the world and in here – we have often assumed that it is him who is feeling every tough feeling that we experience. But now we can remember that Fox’s fear and Tony’s yearning often lie underneath Jonathan’s struggles.

Beastie: Janina also points out that fight and flight are generally more teen parts, because those strategies develop in adolescence. That certainly makes sense of how we experience me and Max, and the period of our life that we associate with Max coming forward and me being cast out – because it wasn’t safe to be angry.

James: So now we can trace tough feelings back through you all. Recognising that the noise of fight or flight is often a response to the frantic hypervigilance of fawn, and that that may be triggered by those younger freeze or attach parts feeling frightened or desperately yearning for closeness.

5 parts, 7 parts, or more?

Beastie: So that’s five parts James, but what about you and Ara? You don’t get a mention here. And what about people who don’t experience their parts as five Fs?

James: So Janina refers to parts beyond the five Fs in several places. There can be further traumatised parts whose job it is to block progress, for example, or who carry the urge to self destruct or to give up. She also refers to a ‘getting on with normal life’ part who is the adult who can be brought into communication with all these parts. We’ll come back to them shortly.

Beastie: For us the way it works is that there’s a vivid experience of the five of us, and the two of you – James and Ara – who feel like parental parts. We used to think of it as two kids (Fox and Jonathan), three teens (me, Max, and Tony), and two ‘grownups’ (you and Ara). I guess Tony has shifted down to a kid, but the rest of that feels pretty accurate.

James: Mm but we did cling rather tightly to the idea of being seven for a while in ways that weren’t helpful. It meant that we didn’t want to engage with any experience or feeling that couldn’t clearly be located in one of the seven of us.

Beastie: The way we’ve loosened that is to recognise that each of us can manifest in multiple ways. Like sometimes we can be the aspects of us that we are now: like an adult aspect of each of us. But sometimes we can still feel the child aspect of each of us: who they were when things were hard. And sometimes we can feel a kind of pure form of each of our energies: like when I really connect with my rage.

James: We could say that each of us has an everyday aspect, a stuck/traumatised child aspect, perhaps also a shadow aspect and a sacred aspect: representing our worst and best potentials.

Beastie: So we might be seven, or twenty eight, depending on how you look at it.

James: For us it works best to mostly function as seven, but to be up for welcoming and listening to each of our aspects when they’re around.

Beastie: It all reminds us that it’s wise not to hold too tightly to any one model. Like the sense of us as the five Fs is very helpful, but it can equally be helpful to see us as more like the emotions in Inside Out (anger, fear, sadness, joy, shame, with peacefulness and powerfulness as the parents), or more like the five Buddha families when Ara’s getting our spiritual on.

James: We’re mostly hopeless geeks so we can spend a lot of time going down those rabbit-holes until we’re reminded that we’re meant to be following the feelings rather than spending all our time intellectualising.

Beastie: I don’t mind enabling your geeky habits every now and then prof.

Dual awareness rather than merging

James: Thank you. So another pivotal idea in Janina’s book is that when people feel swept into the trauma vortex they are merging, or blending, with their traumatised parts.

Beastie: This has helped us so much. Even though we understand ourselves as plural, when triggered we often experienced ourselves as purely whichever part was activated. 

James: Most people do. You are just enraged, or terrified, or swamped with shame. It feels like the only possible reaction to what has happened. It feels like all that you are, and even all that you will ever be. And you are desperate to react out of that place: to lash out, to do something, or to disappear, for example.

Beastie: So what Janina is suggesting is that we cultivate the capacity to detach at such moments. Detaching is also helpful at the less intense moments when there are just flickers of such feelings rather than full on trauma responses. She calls this cultivating ‘dual awareness’ or ‘parallel processing’. 

James: It’s a lot like the mindfulness idea that we can have an observing mind who is not caught up in the emotions, thoughts, or sensations. We’ve always struggled with actually doing that, but the plural piece made it all fall into place. If we see everything as messages from traumatised parts, we can absolutely experience ourselves as one part – who is calm and clear – holding another part – who is caught up or activated.

Beastie: Janina suggests that the ‘getting on with normal life’ part learns to hold the traumatised child parts. We do it a bit differently to that, as we’ll explain in a moment.

James: But this way of seeing things – that people have a tendency to merge or blend with their traumatised parts – is extremely useful in making sense of our hugely confusing experience of feeling simultaneously like a competent adult and a fragile child.

Beastie: I know right? In the midst of our post-traumatic stress time it could be extremely disorienting that we’d manage to go and facilitate a training for fifty people, and later that same day we’d meltdown over not having a safe-enough TV show to watch that evening. It was absolutely terrifying that sometime it might flip and a traumatised child part might show up when we were doing something ‘grownup’. A few times we had to get ourselves home fast when that happened.

James: Janina also explains imposter syndrome helpfully in this way. Our five F parts can feel so intense that we can come to mistrust the ‘reality’ of more bland ‘getting on with life’ parts: like they are the ones who must be unreal or fake, because we know that really we are this impossibly fragile person who can hardly function day-to-day.

Beastie: Mm, so when people accept their plurality they don’t have to get caught up worrying about which parts are real or fake. What a relief.

James: Janina says she likes the language of ‘parts’ because it’s what people already use in everyday language. It’s commonplace to say ‘a part of me feels… ‘ And putting it like that helps to create that distance – that dual awareness. ‘A part of me is scared to go out, and I can listen to his fears without imagining that he is all of me.’ Rather than ‘I feel a rush of terror, it must mean that I’m incapable of anything, and when I do seem capable that’s all a facade.’

The neurobiology of parts

Beastie: Let’s not get too much into the neurobiology of trauma here because you have already done a whole post about that, but we can understand all of this on that level: having parts associated with the 5 Fs, and dual awareness.

James: We can. And in fact that helps us to understand just how different each of us feels on an embodied level. We have wondered at that, as have those who we’ve been brave enough to allow to meet separately in person. We really do feel like different beings: bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker, tighter or looser: like our whole body seems to alter as we shift between parts.

Beastie: We always knew we were a shapeshifter! But that makes sense if we consider the way the nervous system is so different in those different trauma responses right? When we locate our parts in those responses then it makes complete sense that we’d experience our embodiment in very different ways.

James: Right, and the idea of dual awareness also makes sense on a neurobiological level. We are able to locate part of us – in Janina’s way of seeing things, the ‘getting on with normal life’ part – in the ‘rational’ brain, and whichever other part we’re dealing with in the ‘emotional brain’.

Beastie: I would still like us to read more about the neuroscience aspect of this, because some authors like Janina and Pat de Young talk about the left (rational) brain and the right (emotional) brain, while others like David Treleaven talk about the prefrontal cortex (rational) and the more mammalian/reptilian parts (emotional). And even then the rational/emotional binary is an oversimplified shorthand for more nuanced distinctions. But whatever the science, it fits our lived experience. 

James: It does seem that attuning to traumatic emotional survival responses, and connecting them up to more analytic, task-oriented, modes is a key part of trauma recovery. And it is helpful that this whole way of seeing things lends legitimacy to experiences of plurality.

Beastie: Not that something should need a biological basis in order to be treated as legit of course James, I’m sure you’d never suggest that.

James: Fair criticism Beastie, of course it is all always biopsychosocial . I like when Janina says:

‘I can sense my medial prefrontal cortex is curious about the negative mood state connected to the right subcortical area of the brain’ doesn’t evoke the same emotional connection or self compassion as ‘I can sense in myself some curiosity about the depressed part’s sadness.’

Beastie: All of us – including you and me – could be seen as simply a shorthand for these physiological states, but that shorthand is extremely helpful when it comes to bringing compassion and understanding to what’s happening.

James: My physiological state is up for hanging out with your physiological state any time Beastie.

The ‘getting on with normal life’ part 

Beastie: Heh what’s next? Oh yes, Janina’s idea of the ‘getting on with normal life’ part was a challenge for us, because we really don’t have a sense of such a part any more: a ‘Meg-John Barker’ who is separate from the rest of us. Our sense is that the part that ‘got on with normal life’ for most of our adulthood was Max, who is totally identified with flight. She’s the workaholic, overachiever who has been sent to the hammock while the rest of us figure out how to relate more kindly and consensually to our work!

James: Yes quite the challenge to read that we need a ‘getting on with normal life’ part, when we were so proud of ourselves for getting rid of any sense of having a leader, and working as a collective.

Beastie: I am also extreme side-eye to the word ‘normal’ in there.

James: Yes, and that would be one of our few criticisms of the book right? The lack of critical engagement with this concept of ‘normal life’ which people should be aspiring too, which looks suspiciously like that of the good neoliberal capitalist citizen.

Beastie: Going after a nice normal romantic partnership, a nine-to-five job, and all the goals that make a good successful singular self.

James: I don’t think that is quite what Janina is saying to be fair. The valid – and vital – point is that everybody, even the most traumatised people, have access to a part that can sometimes function in everyday life. Or at least that they could imagine what that might be like. And that is hugely helpful to access when you’re feeling utterly overwhelmed by trauma.

Beastie: Absolutely, no question. But I would like to challenge the sense that the best thing for that part to pursue is ‘normality’ in a world where ‘normality’ is leading us over the edge of a cliff. I would also challenge the sense that the ideal outcome is to appear in the world as a singular ‘getting on with normal life’ part, albeit one who is holding their much-loved inner children close and safe inside, having rescued them from their traumatised pasts.

The Fs and the Cs

James: I think that your comment right there demonstrates exactly what we’re about to say next. All of our ‘traumatised’ parts also hold potentials that are extremely helpful to us. It serves us better to regard each of the seven of us as holding both useful capacities, and particular struggles, rather than the ‘getting on with normal life’ part – whoever that may be – holding all the good stuff, and the other parts just holding trauma. The rage that you have brought to a couple of places in this conversation – and which you bring to our life more broadly – is immensely helpful in enabling us to see clearly when situations are not okay, and in setting boundaries and challenging harmful messages.

Beastie: Thanks, I try to bring the thunder in useful ways.

James: You do Beastie. It is very much appreciated. Again to be fair I don’t think that Janina is suggesting that there is no value in the traumatised parts. There’s a definite sense in there that once the traumatised parts have been befriended and brought home, we can draw on their energies in helpful ways: like encouraging confident parts to give the presentations, and the gentle parts to care for plants and animals. There’s a sense that the ‘getting on with normal life’ part might bring those parts forward for experiences they enjoy and excel at, and encourage them to stay away somewhere safe for things they find scary and triggering.

Beastie: But Janina does suggest that it is only the ‘getting on with normal life’ part who can access all of the ‘C’s.

James: Yes, this book is all about F words and C words, I am so very glad that Tony isn’t part of this conversation.

Beastie: Quite. The Cs are things like curiosity, creativity, compassion, confidence, connection, courage, clarity, commitment, calm. Janina locates those in the ‘rational’ brain of the ‘getting on with normal life’ part, but we have a different experience right?

James: Right. You made a table of it.

Beastie: Here…

PartF foibleC capacityFoxFreezeCuriosity/creativityTonyFasten (attach)Confidence/connectionJonathanFawn (submit)CompassionMaxFlightCourageBeastieFightClarityJamesFogCommitmentAraFadeCalm

James: Oh I like that you found a more decent F for Tony.

Beastie: The main point is that we experience each of those Cs as being a capacity that one of us has more than the others. There’s a sense of each of us having a place where we get stuck, and a capacity which is our most helpful potential.

James: I like that you’ve found Fs for me and Ara. Even the parent parts have places they can get stuck.

Beastie: In our experience Ara’s main difficulty has been actually being available. She’s been the most elusive, hence ‘fade’. And you’ve struggled at those times when you haven’t been able to access your rational competence because a situation is beyond your comprehension or capacity.

James: Which feels like getting lost in the fog. Nicely put.

Beastie: So my alternative to Janina’s ‘getting on with normal life’ part vs. traumatised parts model would be to suggest that all parts have patterns they get stuck in (Fs), and potentials (Cs). Dual awareness, for us, involves finding a part – any part – who is in their C place, and bringing them in to listen to – and hold – the part who is their F place. Often it helps to go to a parental part as you are more consistently in your Cs, but it’s also helpful to mix it up so that all parts can experience their potentials when they have them.

James: It’s good Beastie. And I think there’s also a further layer where the Fs can have a cascade effect: one of us stuck in F can mean others go into their Fs too. But similarly, the more some of us access our Cs the more others can as well.

Beastie: Right. I’m just getting this. Like if Fox is frightened and we don’t notice, or try to ignore the flicker of fear, we often end up with Jonathan going into his hypervigilent fawn mode and trying to figure it all out, and me or Max getting caught up in noisy busy, shameful, or angry, thoughts about whatever-it-is. The whole system goes back to it’s old trauma mode, and it can feel harder to access you and Ara as you go into Fog and Fade.

James: But as we find our way through this trauma time, and Max relaxes, you feel clearer, we notice that suddenly Tony’s confidence is back, Fox’s creativity returns.

Beastie: Right now Fox is planning to write a whole plural graphic memoir so I’m guessing that’s a good sign.

James: I don’t want to say that Janina is definitely wrong about a ‘getting on with normal life’ part. It may well work for other people, and it may even be a better model for us someday. Certainly we find that remembering that we are capable of daily tasks – by moving into them for a while – can be a relief when the trauma is up but not overpowering. However I personally like the idea that each part of us can do that. And I like the empowering and equalising sense that we each have capacities as well as foibles.

Beastie: I thought ‘foible’ was a bit more friendly than ‘flaw’ or ‘fault’.

James: Definitely.

Check out the second blog post in this series to find out more about how you can work with plurality in this way in practice.

Patreon link: If you liked this, please feel free to support my Patreon.

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

The post Plurality and trauma – 1 – theory appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Accompanying vs. abandoning ourselves

During these last months of addressing my stuck patterns and trauma responses, one piece that’s become increasingly important has been the idea of accompanying rather than abandoning ourselves. 

To discuss this one I brought together two sides of myself who used to wish to abandon – or even eradicate – each other, but who now form a pivotal friendship in my plural system: Max and Beastie. Check out this zine and this blog post if you want to know more about plural selves. Hopefully the content of the conversation is interesting regardless.

Beastie: You and me this time bestie, have we done this before?

Max: I don’t think so. Definitely makes sense to be the two of us given our background huh?

Beastie: It does. I guess the time that you befriended me was the first time that we determined to accompany a part of ourselves that we had previously tried to abandon. It’s formed something of a blueprint for subsequent times. And it helps us have faith that it’s always worth doing.

Max: I still remember it vividly. Around six months before I befriended you was the last time that I tried to eradicate you entirely. That was something I’d been trying to do our whole life: to get rid of the harsh critical voice that was always so loud in my mind. Something tough happened and you were saying such cruel things. I dragged you into the woods determined to be rid of you once and for all. I shouted at you out loud. It was the first time we’d ever talked. I would never talk aloud to myself normally, back then. But I screamed at you to be gone, and you just screamed back even louder.

Beastie: I gave as good as I got. This is a key point though isn’t it. You can’t eradicate parts of yourself, no matter how much you might want to. You might as well learn to accompany them, because abandoning them hurts you, and in the end it’s never going to work. You’d have loved to have abandoned me in those woods for good, but I followed you home.

Max: We listened to this song: Fighting with Myself , coming back out of the woods. At least it gave us a smile.

Beastie: Six months later, you decided to interview me, in your journal.

Max: You were pretty mean to me then too. But we got more curious. We started to journal with you more often, from all the different sides of us.

Beastie: And weirdly it was you and I who ended up forming one of the closest bonds.

Max: I’m so grateful for that. I’d read all those books about how, when embraced, the inner critic could become a fierce ally. But I was skeptical.

Beastie: You so often are.

Max: Yeah, yeah. They were right though. I consider you my best friend now, no question.

Beastie: And I you Max. You are the side of us who has been to the fore our whole life: battling hard to survive and feeling so alone in it. I’m so glad to be able to accompany you now, along with the rest of our motley crew.

Max: And I need a good friend, finally confronting the impact of all those times.

Beastie: Shall we start? 

Max: Let’s.

What does it mean to accompany yourself rather than abandoning yourself?

Max: Okay so the idea of accompanying yourself means that you commit to staying present with yourself through every mental or physical state that you might be in: every situation you encounter, every feeling you experience, every side of yourself that shows up, no matter what.

It’s a radical alternative to what most people usually do. Abandoning is a good word for that because it captures how we tend to reject the suffering part of us when we are hurting, and even kick them while they’re down. For example when we feel a physical or emotional pain we might try to ignore it or push through it, and even become angry and frustrated with ourselves about it.

Beastie:  This relates to what Ara and I recently discussed, about the gap. In practice our commitment to accompaniment rather than abandonment looks like returning to the gap each time a challenging situation, feeling, or thought comes up. Instead of going to the next item on our to-do list, scrolling through social media, or pressing ‘next episode’ on Netflix, we sit for a few minutes to check whether there’s anything there. If there is, we sit with that, or journal about it, or talk it through, before we go on to the next thing.

Why is this so necessary?

Max: Do you want to start on this one?

Beastie: Sure. I think a big part of what we’re doing when we accompany ourselves is to meet ourselves in a regulating rather than dysregulating way. Given the way our culture is around feelings, very few people have learnt to regulate their emotions, particularly when very strong emotions arise. Mostly we try to repress feelings by zoning out or distracting ourselves with busy-ness. Or we react out of feelings in ways that are dysregulating for ourselves, and often for others too.

Max: Mmhm. Staying busy – or flight – has definitely been my go-to up until now. It’s been such a challenge for me these last months to continually drop that abandonment strategy and commit to staying present with myself and with whatever I was trying to distract from.

Beastie: We all have our go-to ways of avoiding experience Max. Mine – fight – has always been to get very noisy mentally about all the things we’re doing wrong, or lately more what other people are doing wrong. Either way it’s another way of not really being here now: getting caught up in critical and judgemental thoughts.

Max: From what we now know about trauma and shame , both result in people who very easily become dysregulated and reactive. Committing to accompany yourself increases your capacity for regulating yourself, through whatever life brings.

Beastie: I’ve also heard it described as increasing the ‘window of tolerance’ between zoning out and becoming activated. When we have a narrow window of tolerance, many experiences tend to result in us shutting down or distracting ourselves, or becoming overwhelmed by big feelings. Accompanying ourselves can expand that window to get gradually wider over time. More experiences become possible to tolerate without disappearing or disintegrating – two ways of abandoning ourselves. Pema Chödrön talks of the same thing as ‘refraining’ rather than repressing or reacting. 

Max: Refraining sounds like not really doing anything, but what we are doing when we refrain is to accompany ourselves.

Micro and macro accompaniment/abandonment

Beastie: It’s useful to think about how we abandon ourselves on every level – micro to macro – and how we might accompany ourselves at every level too.

Max: Right. So micro level might be a fleeting moment, and macro level our most challenging situations. 

Beastie: What are your macro abandonings Max-y?

Max: Oof you know very well what they are. I often abandon myself when I feel I might be getting sick: finding ways to blame myself for it, and worrying about cancelling things, instead of stopping and looking after myself. Hurting others and getting hurt by others are also big ones for me. When I realise I’ve hurt someone I can feel I don’t deserve to accompany myself, so I abandon myself into shame and self-blame and trying desperately to make it better. When others have hurt me I often go to shame too, assuming it must somehow be my fault, or getting lost in trying desperately to make sense of what happened.

Beastie: I’m hoping to write more about shame given that seems like one of the very hardest experiences to accompany ourselves through. Also I like the idea of a reformed inner critic becoming an expert on shame.

Max: Well you’re already helping me out with it, but it remains a tough one indeed for us.

Beastie: As with so many things it can be great to work your way up from the micro to the macro level. In working on the micro moments when we tend to abandon ourselves we can practice moving from abandoning into accompanying in those situations. Hopefully eventually it will be our go-to even in our more challenging situations.

Max: Practising regulation, or expanding the window of tolerance.

Beastie: Exactly. In the conversation James and Jonathan had about trauma they described how we’re picking up on little micro moments where we might’ve abandoned ourselves in the past, and deliberately accompanying ourselves instead.

Max: Oh yes, like if we stub our toe, or drop something, or cut our finger. In the past we might’ve thought ‘I’m so stupid’ and sped up to get on with whatever we were doing. Now we take such moments as an opportunity for accompaniment. We try to slow down rather than speeding up, to respond with kindness rather than harshness, and maybe even to make quite a ritual of looking after ourselves for at least as long as we need. We do a similar thing if we wake in the night from a bad dream.

Noticing abandonment

Beastie: That takes us nicely into how we even notice when we abandon ourselves. I guess many people abandon themselves a lot of the time without even realising they’re doing it, or naming it as such. We certainly did.

Max: Or rather I did, when I felt like it was just me rather than this plural system of seven. I would never have named overworking as abandonment. I wouldn’t have noticed that I was trying to crack on with something even when my body or feelings really needed my attention.

Beastie: Speeding up is a useful thing to notice. That’s often a sign of abandonment. Recently we were on a walk and got lost taking a path that petered out. In the past we would have sped up under those circumstances: trying to find a route from there to where we wanted to be, even if it meant going over barbed wire fences or through marshes, or something that got us even more lost.

Max: What a metaphor! The last time that happened, we deliberately slowed down and remembered that habit, and then went back the way we came.

Beastie: What other things are a sign that we’re abandoning ourselves, or at risk of it?

Max: I would say noise is a big one: When our thoughts get noisy planning things, or worrying about whether we’ve done something wrong or might do, or judging other people.

Beastie: You, Jonathan, and me that is: flight, fawn, and fight. We can all get noisy.

Max: We often think of it as being stuck back in this huge chalkboard room trying to predict, control, and figure out everything. It’s noisy as hell in there.

Beastie: So then the freeze strategy of zoning out is another sign of abandoning, as is remaining busy. We might notice that we’ve been scrolling on our phone for ages, or moving quickly from one task to the next.

Max: Right. So speeding up, thoughts getting noisy, or feeling numb and disconnected from our feelings: Those are all signs that we’re abandoning ourselves, at the micro level.

Beastie: And at the macro level it’s much more of a plunge into extremely tough feelings: abject shame, or terror that others will invade us, or that we will disintegrate. That’s the emotional flashback. 

Max: It’s the worst. At those times the sense is that we deserve to be abandoned or punished, not to be accompanied or looked after.

Beastie: It’s certainly easier to notice at that level. Not so easy to accompany ourselves when it happens though.

Plurality and accompaniment/abandonment

Max: I think plurality has been a vital part of our way into accompaniment rather than abandonment. When I felt like I was a single person I just couldn’t feel kindly enough towards myself to do this. I didn’t value myself enough to feel I was worthy of accompanying rather than abandoning. And I guess I saw my value in what I did, rather than who I was, so I always tried to push through and do more.

Beastie: Hence all the speed and the noise.

Max: You were a big part of that noise if you remember, monster.

Beastie: If you hadn’t kept shutting me out… that’s all I’m saying.

Max: I really doubt that is all you’re saying.

Beastie: When a person has been cast out and alone for so many years they may have a tendency to verbosity.

Max: *chuckles*

Beastie: But yes, experiencing ourselves as more than one person has helped hugely in accompanying ourselves. For people who don’t have a vivid sense of themselves as plural, it may well still be helpful to cultivate a kind witnessing voice who can remind them when they are in danger of abandoning themselves, and accompany them through tough experiences present, or past (like when they go back over memories).

Max: Right. It doesn’t have to feel like a separate person, it can just be you talking as if you were supporting a friend in the same situation. The more you practice it the more familiar it can become.

Beastie: Because we have seven selves to draw upon we tend to locate ourselves in a conversation between whoever is struggling most, and whoever has most capacity to support them in that moment. Quite often we find it helpful to default to our parental parts supporting. That’s James and Ara who are generally good at being kind, protective, holding, and calm. But it’s nice to mix it up so we all get to see that we’re capable of accompanying, and practise doing it.

Max: The book we’re reading at the moment by Janina Fisher suggests that what it does – neurobiologically – is to connect up the more rational and emotional parts of the brain . It feels like – even when our nervous system is jangled – we can access a self that’s apart from that who can talk the jangled part of us into a more soothed state again.

Beastie: These seven parts of us may just be a really strong metaphor overlaid on that kind of embodied response. But it’s a metaphor that works well for us.

Max: My bestie the metaphor! It does feel like leaning back into a kind supportive friend who will talk you through it for as long as it takes.

Beastie: I’ve got you Max.

Max: I feel it.

Working with internal and external situations this way

Beastie: So something we’ve hit on recently is that it’s possible to work with both internal and external situations in this way: shifting from abandoning to accompanying.

Max: I guess we’ve already given a few examples of how the internal situations work. Let’s just pick a couple more though, to bring it to life. So last night Jonathan was at risk of abandoning himself: giving himself a hard time for having tough feelings, worrying he was bringing us all down.

Beastie: Something we can all do at times.

Max: What accompanying looked like then was that James encouraged Jonathan to sit down with him. He reminded him of everything we’re dealing with at the moment and how intense it is, how these feelings make sense. Then he encouraged Jonathan to recall what we’re trying to do now. Jonathan remembered how his difficult feelings were actually an opportunity to practise regulating: potentially expanding the window of tolerance. Finally James encouraged him to do one of his top soothing activities.

Beastie: Imagining a house we all live in and where each of us is in the house at that particular moment.

Max: Other times we do the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 grounding technique. Both those seem to calm our nervous system well.

Beastie: What’s another recent example?

Max: This morning I got into a loop of whether we’re getting anywhere. It had been ages since we’d written anything. I was worrying whether creativity would ever come back; whether we’d ever work on bigger projects again. I wondered whether we’re really doing anything here or whether we’re just telling a cute story of progress around what is actually us spinning in a wheel like a hamster.

Beastie: Helpful. 

Max: I know, I know. Anyway how I went from abandoning to accompanying was I journaled with Ara : as a dialogue like this. Again that involved her helping me to remember why we’re doing this, why it is so tough, and what potential there is for helping others going through similar things having gone through it ourselves.

Beastie: But we have also used the accompany-not-abandon idea well when working with external situations, right?

Max: Yes. It reminds me of that thing Adrienne Maree Brown said that really sticks with us. How if you see something out in the world that you find yourself judging, find it in yourself and work with it there first, before you engage with it out there in the world.

Beastie: One recent example is that we were angry – okay I was angry – at somebody’s people-pleasing behaviour. By trying to be really even-handed and look after everybody they were actually in danger of hurting us. It made me think of that idea that’s circulating a lot at the moment about how being neutral or passive in a situation is to collaborate with what’s going on.

Max: You got beautifully firey and self-righteous as you do Beastie.

Beastie: I may have done a bit. And then I remembered. We have a people pleaser within us. Suddenly I was nearly in tears. To think about treating our Jonathan the way I was treating this person in my mind. Because we know Johnathan intimately we know precisely the terror of conflict he feels which leads to him desperately trying to please everyone, and the horrendous things he’s been through which explain where that comes from.

Max: We had a similar experience around somebody who overstretched themselves and didn’t have any energy left for us. I had a flicker of judgement around that, and then remembered that it’s exactly what I used to do all the time: so busy that I had no time to nurture important relationships including my relationship with myself. I could really connect with the pain that caused me, and those around me. Like I could connect with both sides of that situation now that we’ve experienced both.

Beastie: There’s a deep point here about the connection between separating self from other and separating self from self. When we judge people out there in the world we separate ourselves from them – us and them thinking – and it also leads to a kind of internal severing of ourselves from the part of us which is capable of doing the exact same thing. I realised profoundly how hating or trying to destroy something out there has the knock on impact of separating us from the part of ourselves who has that capacity. Often that part becomes distant internally after we do that.

Max: So accompanying every part of ourselves, and helping them to be really honest with themselves about their potentials and their impact, is a way of getting to the point where we could accompany anybody else in the world too.

Beastie: Yes. I see it as a potential plural superpower. Like if we can really accompany all of the sides of ourselves then we’d be able to see those aspects manifesting in others, and be with them in a regulating way too. I guess it’s what Pat DeYoung describes doing in therapy with her clients: because she can be with all of her own shame without disintegrating, she can be with all their parts’ shame too.

Max: If we could accompany every part of ourselves, even when we’re manifesting our worst capacities, then there’d be nothing we were projecting onto others. There’d be nothing to leak out – or lash out – because we’re not okay with it and trying to keep it down.

Beastie: Yeah but we’re not quite there yet!

Max: I wish. It’s like what Pema says though, about how the most difficult people in life should be our most valued teachers. They show us the bits we’re still abandoning in other people, because we haven’t managed to accompany it in ourselves yet.

Beastie: You spot it, you got it!

What does this mean for our relationships with others?

Max: So here’s a burning question I have for you Beastie. If we recognise that we have the capacity for everything in ourselves, and that the task is to learn how to accompany all of it…

Beastie: Yes?

Max: Doesn’t that mean that we end up allowing others’ abusive behaviour? Or never acting for social justice because we know that we have it in us to be the oppressor ourselves?

Beastie: Oh that’s a good one.

Max: I know you like the complex questions.

Beastie: My answer would be not at all. In fact it is quite the opposite: seeing this stuff in ourselves – and learning to accompany it – is in service of preventing abuse and acting against oppression. 

First when we accompany rather than abandoning ourselves through everything we are less likely to act in abusive, oppressive, and harmful ways. Seeing those capacities in ourselves, and knowing the parts of us who are capable of that kind of harm intimately, means that we are less likely to unconsciously act out of it. We’re able to be more intentional and less reactive. 

Secondly, knowing those capacities in ourselves intimately makes it way easier to see when others are acting from those places. When other people behave in reactive ways we can often feel very confused and gaslit. That’s true whether it is a ‘fight’ person claiming they’re not trying to control us, or a ‘flight’ person saying they can be here for us when clearly they can’t, or a ‘fawn’ person telling us what they think we want to hear but we can sense the inauthenticity. When we’re super familiar with those parts of ourselves, we more easily see it in others and can have both clarity and grief about what they are doing, and the impact that has on other people, and on themselves.

Max: So we’re less likely to be drawn into damaging dynamics with them.

Beastie: Right, we can more clearly see what we’re dealing with because we know that potential in ourselves. Pema would say that the aim is to prevent others from hurting you or anyone else. And when we can see what they’re doing that clearly – and with that much compassion – we’re more able to find the wisest strategy for preventing harm. No strategy is off limits.

Max: What about wider systemic and structural oppression, rather than interpersonal harm?

Beastie: I feel like again if we can address these things in our inner systems then we’re more likely to see, and to be able to address them, in outer systems. Obviously that requires collective rather than just individual work, but the individual work helps us to be able to join that struggle. We tend to collapse or close down in the areas where we abandon ourselves. We are more able to engage in the areas where we accompany ourselves. 

So we need to move towards the places where we tend to shut down and become a bystander, or act out and become a perpetrator. Like Laverne Cox said: 

‘Each and every one of us has the capacity to be an oppressor. I want to encourage each and every one of us to interrogate how we might be an oppressor and how we might be able to become liberators for ourselves and for each other.’

In some ways knowing that all these capacities are in here – in us – is a relief. There’s no more need for defenses or for pretending that they’re not. The outcome of such inner work could be to expand our capacity to value everyone, not matter what. That is desperately needed in a world where some people – some lives – are valued so much more highly than others.

Max: You take this very seriously don’t you?

Beastie: I contain our capacity to do the most damage, potentially. I’ve turned it in towards us our whole life, rather than out towards others, but I do hold rage, I hold fight instincts, I am capable of harm. I have harmed us after all. If accompanying myself means having more of a handle on that capacity, and potentially helping others who have the same capacity not to act out of it, I’m very much down with that. 

How to shift from abandonment to accompaniment

Max: Right, so let’s summarise, how can people do this work of shifting from abandoning themselves to accompanying themselves?

Beastie: Enough questions for me. Your turn bestie.

Max: But I thought I was meant to be swinging in a hammock somewhere trying to get over my flight tendency to do all of the work all of the time.

Beastie: You are, but this time you managed to wait until you really felt like having this conversation so I’m letting you have a pass. If I feel you starting to push it I’ll send you right back to the hammock, don’t worry.

Max: *grin* Okay well first I’m reminded of your excellent post about the master’s tools and mental health . 

Beastie: Why thankyou.

Max: You said that whatever we do, we can’t get out of our stuck patterns and harmful habits the same way we got into them. 

Beastie: How do you see that linking to abandonment and accompaniment? 

Max: Well first we could see abandonment as the thing that was done to us in the first place: we were taught – by those around us and wider culture – that parts of us were unacceptable, and that is why we split them off and abandoned them. Me and Tony covered that in the plural selves zine .

Beastie: You’ve both come a long way since then.

Max: I know right? So yes one way to remind ourselves to accompany rather than abandoning ourselves is to remember that abandoning any part of ourselves – or any experience – repeats the same kind of violence that was done to us in the first place , which may well have already have been repeated through our lives enough. Those of us who have been emotionally abandoned in various ways seem tragically more prone to abandoning ourselves, and to developing relationships where that same kind of abandonment occurs.

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Beastie: Nice! And once we’re committed to accompanying not abandoning?

Max: Well these are the practices that we’ve been trying, plus some links to where we’ve explained them in more detail:

Practise noticing the particular signs that suggest you are abandoning yourself – these may be different for different people – and name that that is what’s happening. This is something like Babette Rothschild’s mindful gauges .Commit to bringing yourself to the gap each time this happens. This could be anything from three deep breaths to show yourself that you noticed the abandonment and that you are committed to coming back to accompaniment, up to a long sit where you stay with the experience until you feel really present to yourself again. If you can’t do this on the spot when abandonment happens, promise yourself to do it as soon as you do have the capacity to do so: top priority.Journal or talk aloud between the part who is feeling abandoned or is tempted to abandon themselves, and a kind supportive voice who can accompany them through whatever they’re going through.Also notice where you are feeling like abandoning another person, or a way of behaving, out there in the world (e.g. by judging, criticising, or withdrawing) and use that as an opportunity to connect with the part of you who is capable of the same thing, through sitting with their feelings, journaling, or similar. Personify aspects of yourself that you find hard to accompany and communicate with them that way.Develop rituals for regretting moments of abandonment and re-committing to accompaniment.



What about the places where you can’t do it yet?

Beastie: So obviously this is a work in progress for everyone.

Max: Yeah we’ve reflected on being in process with this a couple of times lately. I like this idea from Pema. She says that if walking barefoot over the world hurts your bare feet you could try to cover the world with leather, or you could make yourself a pair of leather shoes. 

Learning to accompany ourselves feels like making that pair of shoes. It means that we are able to go towards more and more places because we know that we can accompany ourselves there. There’s no risk of abandonment, or of destruction by others, because we know that we have our own care and protection to bring to the situation. Also we can clearly see what others are up to and where they are coming from, rather than getting drawn into damaging dynamics with them, or taking on anything of theirs that they try to project onto us. 

There’s a sense that even death might not be so scary if we have learnt to accompany ourselves anywhere. We’ve thought recently that a lot of our fear of death is actually fear of abandonment because it brings up everything that we still haven’t come to terms with about ourselves. If we imagine that we had come to terms with all those things then death itself doesn’t feel so scary.

Beastie: But we’re not quite there yet with death.

Max: Heh no, although I can now get the flicker of feelings what that might be like. Still these days I can be tempted to abandon myself when I feel in pain or like I’m getting sick, so I probably have a way to go with death.

Beastie: What we’re learning is that there’ll always be places that we can’t yet go to, without abandoning ourselves. It’s about going the next step, not all of the way, and learning to be okay with the fact that we’re there in some situations and not in others. It’s not all or nothing. 

Pema has another metaphor about meeting our edges. Like a bunch of people are climbing a mountain and each will reach that place where they can’t go any further at a different point.

Max: The place where they can no longer manage to go on accompanying themselves. As someone with a big fear of heights I like that analogy.

Beastie: The thing is not to feel terrible for meeting our edge. We can get to know those edges really well, and eventually find the way to accompany ourselves across them.

Max: We actually have a kind of mental list of the situations where we can do accompaniment already, and the situations that are edges for us, that we keep gently moving towards. Checking in on those situations is helpful for recognising that what is an edge this week can become a place we’re able to accompany ourselves across next week.

Beastie: Or month, or year, for those of us who are not massive overachievers Max-y.

Max: Alright, alright. But we will have this whole thing sewn up by the end of this year right Beastie?

Beastie: Whatever you need to tell yourself love.

Accompanying yourself when you abandon yourself

Max: So what do we do when we find a situation where we still abandon ourselves?

Beastie: Well recently I realised that there’s a paradox here.

Max: I know you love a juicy paradox.

Beastie: Do you need to go back in the hammock? I think you’re getting tired.

Max: Meanie.

Beastie: What I realised – as you well know – is that one of the times we most often abandoned ourselves was when we abandoned ourselves.

Max: Totally. 

Beastie: So one we get a lot is first thing in the morning. We often find the noisy thoughts kick in before we’re fully awake, and we lie there and let them churn for a while before we realise that’s what we’re doing. 

Max: And what was happening was that we were then getting frustrated with ourselves for abandoning ourselves, and therefore abandoning ourselves more.

Beastie: Now we try to just notice that it has happened and get curious as to what it might be like to accompany ourselves around having just abandoned ourselves. In that case it looks like bringing kindness in around those thoughts as soon as we do notice them, and using them a bit like a dream: as something to get curious about but not take too seriously. We might use the content of the noisy thoughts as a jumping off point for journaling, or try to access the underlying feeling and sit with that, for example.

Max: I definitely felt the shift when we moved to accompanying around abandoning. The noisy thoughts didn’t go away, but we didn’t have that extra layer of suffering that we had when we struggled against them and abandoned ourselves around them.

Beastie: There’s probably a lot of those paradoxes right? How to love yourself when you’re not loving yourself, how to befriend yourself when you’re being unfriendly towards yourself…

Max: We’re not going to run short of blog posts any time soon are we?

Beastie: You have a problem and the hammock is right there.

Max: Moving on, another situation we’ve come up against is when one of those big flashback moments hit and we just can’t accompany ourselves through it. We feel like we’re disintegrating. We’re totally abandoned.

Beastie: Right and what we now try to do is to return to basic self-care, setting up the conditions under which the capacity to accompany ourselves is most likely to come back.

Max: In practice what that looks like is allowing ourselves to finish whatever we were doing – because in abandonment we often just can’t allow ourselves to pause or stop. Then we get ourselves set up in our chair with our journal, perhaps a hot water bottle and a hot chocolate.

Beastie: The July hot water bottle is a real thing around here.

Max: And so far we’ve found that we can find our way back to each other at that point. The abandonment is usually only for the twenty or thirty minutes that it takes us to get there.

Beastie: That’s pretty impressive given how it used to often last for days or longer. Although of course it’ll also be fine to find ourselves in longer periods of abandonment when really hard stuff hits. The process is to commit to finding our way back to accompaniment, however long it takes.

Max: Is there anything else?

Beastie: It’s probably a whole further blog post, but I’m struck by how accompanying ourselves looks something like treating ourselves the way people are encouraged to treat romantic partners. Think about the marriage vows: ‘I take thee to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.’ What does it mean to make such a commitment to ourselves? To have and hold ourselves no matter what? That’s real accompanying. Maybe people need to commit that to themselves first and foremost in order to be in good relation with others? 

Max: It connects with what we often talk about on the podcast, about the importance of self-love . I’m also reminded of that bit from the TV show Normal People where Connell protects his love Marianne.

Beastie: He says:

Look at me a second… No-one is ever going to hurt you like that again. Everything’s going to be alright, trust me. Because I love you. And I’m not going to let anything like that happen to you again.

Max: When we heard that we imagined you saying that to me, rather than hearing it from an external person.

Beastie: There may have been one or two tears shed at that moment.

Max: *smiles*

Beastie: I think I’m going to leave the last word to Pema:

The practice is compassionate inquiry into our moods, our emotions, our thoughts. We are encouraged to be curious about the neurosis that’s bound to kick in when our coping mechanisms start falling apart. This is how we get to the place where we stop believing in our personal myths, the place where we are not always divided against ourselves, always resisting our own energy. This is how we learn to abide…in groundlessness.

The Places That Scare You, chapter 19.

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

Plural tag: This post was by Beastie and Max.

The post Accompanying vs. abandoning ourselves appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Trans and sex

I recently took part in an Instagram Q&A for Sh! women’s sex store all about trans and sex. I thought I’d share my responses here. You can watch the live stream here.

You have written three books relating to non-binary and trans issues – Gender: A Graphic Guide, Life Isn’t Binary and How to Understand Your Gender. Could you give us an idea on how you got into writing about sex, relationships and gender?

Sex, relationships and gender have always felt important to me personally and politically. I grew up really buying the cultural norm that a romantic relationship was where I would find love, happiness, and belonging, and the related ideas that – as a woman – that would be with a man, and would involve having only certain kinds of sex.

Over the course of my life I’ve come to see all these interrelated cultural norms as damaging for those who are excluded from them, and also for those who are included in them. 

The norm the romantic love is all important keeps many people in damaging relationships, makes others feel like a failure for not managing such relationships, and takes our attention from other forms of love that it is vital to cultivate (self-love, friendship love, solidarity with our fellow humans, and love of the planet, to name a few). 

The norm that we should have particularly forms of (hetero) sex in our relationships exclude most people including ace people, LGBT+ people, kinky people, and non-monogamous people. It often leads to people severing their sexual desires and fantasies from the sex they have with other people. And it means that people feel a failure when they can’t sustain erotic attraction through a long-term relationship – even though this is extremely common.

When it comes to gender, the man/woman binary hurts all of those whose experiences don’t completely fit the binary, over a third of people according to one study. Also, the cultural ideals of masculinity and femininity – and their mutual attraction – are bad for most men and women too. For example, norms of men being providers, not seeking help, and not showing emotions relate to men’s mental health problems, as do norms of women prioritising other people, and focusing on appearance and desirability.

What does it mean for a person to be trans?

Being trans means that you no longer experience yourself as the gender that people assumed you were when you were born: when the doctor said ‘it’s a boy/girl’, for example. Anybody who has such an experience is ‘trans enough’!

Being trans doesn’t have to be associated with going through particular ‘transitions’ like changing name and pronouns, having surgical interventions, or taking hormones. However, many trans people do find some or all of those things to be affirming of their gender and/or alleviating of ‘dysphoria’, or painful feelings about their body/identity. It’s important to remember though, that many cis people go through transitions with names, hormones, surgeries, etc. over their lifetimes too.

How about gender nonconforming, genderqueer, and non-binary people?

Mostly these words are used pretty interchangeably for all folks whose experience falls outside of the current cultural gender binary, in other words anybody who doesn’t experience themselves as male or female. 

It’s important to remember, however, that many cultures around the world don’t have binary models of gender, and that the binary model of ‘two opposite genders’ is pretty new in western cultures also. In places and times where there have been diverse gender options, or where gender hasn’t been such an important category of human experience, very different possibilities have been available.

How do people realise they’re trans, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, or non-binary?

Experiences vary. Many people have a sense of their assumed gender not fitting from a very young age, but for others it’s a deepening understanding over time, or even quite a sudden realisation in later life. As well as not being binary, gender is fluid: which means that most peoples’ experiences and expressions of gender change over time. Think about how you might express your gender as a kid, teen, adult, and older person, and how others might respond to you, for example.

For many people, having some kind of cultural language and media representation is vital in recognising their transness, as the recent documentary Disclosure highlighted. The increasing visibility of non-binary people has helped many people to recognise that spaces between or beyond man and woman are a better fit for them. 

Generally people’s mental health improves a lot if they are able to find a gender expression and identity which feels congruent to them, especially if that is mirrored and supported by those around them.

If I want to know someone’s gender identity, but I don’t want to be offensive. Is there a polite way to ask?

The important question is really why you want to know. If it’s just your curiosity then best not to ask! If there’s some reason why it is definitely relevant then it’s worth asking yourself whether you ask this of all people, or just this person. Remember that you can’t tell by looking at somebody what gender they identify with or what pronouns they use.

It’s great practise if everyone can start giving their pronouns when they introduce themselves, or on email signatures etc. This makes it easier for all of us to do that. Saying ‘I’m Nancy and I use she/her pronouns, how would you like me to refer to you?’ is a good opener with anybody where you might need to refer to them beyond a short encounter.

Someone I’m talking to just misgendered another person while referring to them. How do I correct them, and how should they respond?

Best practise here is to be matter of fact and kind.  We all mess up on this occasionally. ‘Oh actually Ki uses they pronouns,’ would be a great way to put it, and then a response like, ‘I’m sorry, so Ki was telling me that they have a great recipe for brownies…’ Just apologise and move on.

Many people experience shame and fear about ‘getting it wrong’ in areas of oppression they aren’t personally familiar with. If that’s the case for you then I’d suggest putting some time into this area. Engaging with media and social media by trans people can help the terminology to come more naturally, as well as helping you get a sense of key issues, and the diversity of trans experience.

Sitting kindly with your uncomfortable feelings rather than avoiding them or reacting defensively is a great approach. Practise using unfamiliar pronouns, for example by talking aloud about people who use them, or using gender neutral pronouns to refer to animals. Check out trans organisations like Trans Media Watch, All About Trans, or Gendered Intelligence to find out what kinds of support you might usefully give in this area.

Why does society give people who don’t follow gender norms such a hard time?

There are probably many reasons for this, but one of the big ones – in my view – is that people know, deep down, the injustice and violence which flow from a structurally transphobic and patriarchal society. Facing up to that truth – and all the damage that has been done – is so painful that it is easy for many to engage in a form of cultural gaslighting in this area. This involves minimisation, denial, victim blame, and defensiveness. 

In the area of gender, we see this in the ways in which the behaviours of women survivors of sexual assault and harrassment are scrutinised, as if somehow they might be responsible for what happened to them. Also the impact of such experiences on them is downplayed, while the impact of being named as a perpetrator is seen as potentially ‘ruining someone’s life/career’. We also see this cultural gaslighting in the way trans people are represented as perpetrators of violence when they are actually way overrepresented as victims of violence (particularly trans women of colour).

In this time of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and the trans moral panic it’s vital to draw the links between these movements, for example, how the criminal justice system is violent towards survivors, trans people, and black people. It’s important to engage in collective struggle, and to reveal the cultural gaslighting which follows whenever we draw attention to structural oppression of any kinds.

Do you have any advice for communication around sex with a trans partner?

Yes! The advice for good sex with a trans partner is actually identical to the advice for good sex with anybody. The problem here is that most sex advice is so poor that it suggests things that only work well for a very narrow group of cisgender people who have certain kinds of bodies and enjoy very specific kinds of sex.

As Justin Hancock and I say in our book and podcast, good sex involves assuming nothing about the person – and body – in front of us. We need to be present to that particular person and body, learning what they need in order to be comfortable and consenting, what lights them up, what kind of touch they do and don’t enjoy, what kinds of experiences they do and don’t want during sex, what these experiences mean to them.

In a way sex with a trans person – like sex with a disabled person – could be seen as an opportunity to get way better at sex with all people, because we should never assume how somebody’s genitals work – for example – or that their body will be comfortable in a certain position, or enjoy certain kinds of stimulation. All sex should be an ongoing conversation between people – verbally and/or non-verbally.

In addition to our work, Juno Roche’s book Queer Sex is great on highlighting the diversity of forms of sex trans people – just like cis people – can have (and not have).

How can sex educators be more inclusive with their language with regards to trans people?

Again making no assumptions and talking about what’s relevant. It’s generally good practice to avoid making sweeping statements about ‘women’ and ‘men’ anyway. If you’re advising people on how to engage with parts of the body then talking about ‘people with penises’ or ‘people with vulvas’, for example, is better language than gendering those bodies. 

However, I would go a stage further to question whether much of the advice about how to stimulate penises or vulvas is that helpful. It centres the genitals in ways that don’t work for many people (whose main eroticism is located in other parts of their minds and brains, and/or who aren’t into genital stimulation); it suggests an anatomical binary rather than the spectrum that there actually is around genital structures; and it suggests that similar things work for all penises, or all vulvas, when actually there’s massive diversity in how people with these anatomies like to be touched.

How does taking hormones affect sexuality?

There definitely can be impacts, but ‘biopsychosocial’ is a useful word here. It’s hard, for example, to determine how much of an increase in sex drive after taking testosterone is due to the direct impact of the hormone, or expectations about what that impact will be, or feeling liberated to finally be on a transmasculine journey, or feeling more comfortable in your body, or being read more accurately in the wider world and not experiencing so much everyday misgendering.

Many people take hormones – or have experiences that alter their hormones – at some point in their lives, including adolescence, birth control, menopause, HRT, some cancer treatments, engaging in some sports, etc. As sexuality – like gender – is fluid – some people experience big shifts in their sex drive, the kinds of people they find attractive, or their desires and fantasies. Others experience few changes. And all of that is okay.

With the government proposing even harsher, transphobic policies around bathrooms etc. and the coverage that JK Rowling’s transphobic comments are receiving in the media, how can we best support the trans community right now? 

I’ve been writing about the current trans moral panic since 2017 and it truly has been horrendous for trans people. It is infuriating and exhausting to get to a point, now, where it seems that the whole consultation – and the frenzy it whipped up – was pointless, because the GRA will not be changed, and in fact other trans rights may also be rolled back.

JK Rowling’s comments hit some of the most vulnerable members of our community with the highest levels of mental health struggles – young people. It is particularly painful given how many young trans and queer people grew up seeing some kind of mirror of their experiences in the Harry Potter books and films: the idea of those who are different being special rather than unacceptable, and the strong stance in the series that those who are ‘half-blood’ should not be discriminated against, speaking to the experience of those who have moved away from cultural ideals of purity – like conforming to a fixed gender binary.

What people can do is to keep putting pressure on the government directly, and their MP, to follow the recommendations of the GRA consultation, and to stand against any rolling back of trans rights. They can also put pressure on the British media which has an appalling track record of demonising trans people. They can understand that trans people are being used as a handy scapegoat to take attention away from governmental mishandling of the C-19 pandemic, and to create divisions within feminism, LGBT+ movements, and the left, which take us away from the kind of collective solidarity which is so needed around interlocking axes of structural oppression.

Could you recommend some good resources for trans people, or people thinking about their gender identity?

Yes! For young people we have Gendered Intelligence and Mermaids

Hopefully my book with Alex Iantaffi How To Understand Your Gender is a good starter for anybody and everybody. And Gender: A Graphic Guide is a comic book introduction to how gender works.

There are so many amazing trans authors in the UK currently writing on these issues. Some I particularly love right now include:

Amrou Al-KadhiBen VincentCN LesterEris YoungJuliet JacquesJuno RocheKuchengaRuth PearceSabah ChoudreyTravis AlabanzaYvy deLuca

The post Trans and sex appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Holding multiple possible stories through our experience

Back in the early days of 2020 I met up with a friend for coffee to talk about whether I might support him in some writing projects he was considering. As always these days I suggested consent as a starting point for thinking about writing. Did he really know that it was okay not to write? Could he allow that all other activities are also equally valid – whether or not they feel as productive, have such an obvious output, or follow the cultural script for what makes an individual successful?

Over the course of the conversation it emerged that he was going through a vital personal process at the moment. A fellow Buddhist and therapist, he described how he was spending much of his non-working time engaged in spiritual practices. Frequently what was coming up in these was excruciatingly painful, and deeply challenging, but he was being helped through by his teacher who reminded him that this is exactly the process described by most Buddhist – and other contemplative – practitioners as the path to awakening. By the end of our conversation he had decided that this process was what he wanted to focus on for the foreseeable future, rather than any writing project.

I walked away from this meeting in a bit of a daze. The process he had described was something very similar to what I was going through, myself, in the early days of what I have mostly been describing here as dealing with post-traumatic stress. We were both experiencing overwhelming emotions, intrusive troubling memories, and confrontation with the aspects of ourselves we most struggle with. I walked home feeling much lighter than I’d felt during my journey out to the cafe. This heavy trauma story I’d been telling could be reframed as something very different: a sacred process, the path of a spiritual warrior.

Holding multiple stories

Following that time I’ve sunk far deeper into my process, as regular readers will be aware because I’ve been documenting – here – what I’ve been learning along the way. Throughout this time I’ve found it useful to hold both those potential stories about what I’m going through: trauma and spiritual awakening. This is reflected in my reading, my practices, and my writing. 

Nearly every day I read – or listen to – some Buddhist teachings (usually my main go-to, Pema Chödrön), and some trauma literature (the kinds of books and videos that I’ve been summarising here). I’ve also been weaving together practices that I’ve learnt from Buddhism with ones from the trauma literature, for example bringing bodily/environmental grounding into my sitting practice, using brief meditation as a form of consent check-in, and working with a Buddhist trauma-informed therapist. I hope that my writing reflects this synthesis. While writing about trauma I’ve endeavoured to hold onto the sense that there is a spectrum of traumatic experience, that we’re all impacted by historical and intergenerational trauma, and that the ideas about how to navigate triggering and reactivity are valuable for all of us.

It occurred to me that there are actually four different stories which I’m telling myself about my current experience:

Shame story: The story from within my trauma is a shame-saturated one where I am a bad person who harms people with their habits. I need to retreat substantially from the world in order to address these habits and make myself safer for others in close relationships and in my work, if that’s even possible. This is the story I tell myself, each time trauma feelings hit, which any amount of intellectual knowing-otherwise struggles to shift.Trauma story: The trauma-informed story is that I’m a person who has gone through several periods of trauma in their life: for a year or two each decade following school bullying and family struggles in my teens; rejection by my university friends in my twenties; and workplace bullying, public shaming, and sexual assault in my thirties. I’m now understanding this as post-traumatic stress, and its roots in intergenerational and developmental trauma, and applying a trauma-informed perspective to this process in my forties, instead of withdrawing from the world and looking to a partner relationship to rescue me as I did those previous times. Hopefully this will mean that I heal or recover to some extent, or at least that the fifties version of me who goes through this again will be better resourced when they do so.Human story: The human story is that this is just what people go through. I’m neither especially bent or broken (as the shame and trauma stories might suggest), nor am I going through something particularly special or meaningful. I’m neither wholly the small fragile person I feel like when I’m in trauma, or the big strong person I feel like when I allow that I’m brave to be doing this work and to be sharing it this way. What I’m going through could be framed as the kind of existential crisis which most of us hit at some point when we’re forced to evaluate how we’ve been operating in the world. It’s the stuff of so much of the fiction I’m reading and watching because it’s so common. This story humbles me and connects me with others. How different am I really to the stereotypical ‘mid-life crisis’ guy who makes sudden life-changes and is completely thrown when everything crashes down around him? Perhaps I can find compassion, rather than criticism, for all of us caught up in these moments.Sacred story: The sacred story frames what I’m going through as a spiritual emergency. I feel like the caterpillar who went into the chrysalis, became goo, and is slowly emerging, impossibly fragile, with damp wings which need to dry in the sun before they’re able to fly. There is no going back, and what emerges is radically different from what was there before. During the toughest times I thought of what I was going through as ‘goo-life’: everything fallen apart, everything being reconfigured at every level of my life from my neural pathways to my place in the world. On the other side of this I will be more awake to myself, to others, and to the world. I’ll be committed to a spiritual path as the main purpose and practice of my life. I’ll have far more to share with others, and I’ll be able to do so in more grounded, compassionate and containing ways. I’ll be able to welcome my death when it comes because I’ll finally know that I can accompany myself through anything.

Setting down these stories was reassuring because, in some ways, it doesn’t matter which one I tell. The answer is the same. Whether I’m a harmful person, a traumatised person, a messy regular human being, and/or a spiritual warrior, I need to retreat sufficiently to give myself enough space, I need to build enough support around me to hold me through this, I need to learn enough self-compassion to be able to take a clear, honest look at my habits and patterns, and I need to do the slow, steady, work of shifting those habits that can be harmful to me and/or others. 

Holding multiple stories is also helpful for reminding me not to cling too tightly to any one of them. In the break-up chapter of Rewriting the Rules I explored how this sense of multiple stories can prevent us from falling into the polarised stories of good and bad, right and wrong, which so often circulate within us – and in the wider world – following a relationship ending. 

Here, for example, the trauma story can remind me to go slowly and treat myself gently given what we know about how nervous systems respond to trauma. The human story can help me to feel more connected to everyone else around me, at a time when it is easy to feel isolated and alienated – like others couldn’t possibly understand what I’m going through and like I should hide it for fear of troubling them. The sacred story can give me the courage I need to turn towards my demons instead of away from them, each time they arrive. The sacred story also helps me to weather the days spent desperately trying to welcome feelings I would so much rather avoid. Instead of a flailing mess, I can visualise myself as the warrior getting back up off the arena floor time and time again (Captain Marvel is my go-to image for this).

Even the shame story is helpful, if held lightly alongside the other potential stories. It reminds me that all of us have the capacity to hurt others with our actions, and that it is important to look at this honestly and openly, and to do something about it where we can. It also connects me with all others who are steeped in shame, perhaps those whose actions have been even more devastating in their impact than mine. If I can hold that they are redeemable – that nobody deserves to be endlessly punished and tortured for their mistakes – perhaps I can hold that for myself too.

I liked this exchange I recently read between a character and their therapist in the novel Cousins, by Salley Vickers. The character is beating themselves up for putting another character in danger with their actions. The therapist says:

You made a mistake… and the trick of life is to make the mistakes as fast as possible not try to avoid making them.

The character protests that the impact of their actions on the other person could have been really bad. The therapists replies:

It strikes me that the other person also made a mistake. You can’t nab all the mistakes for yourself.

Multiple stories, parallel tracks

As well as these being multiple stories that I can tell about my life, they also operate as different tracks which are constantly playing through my everyday experience. Different ones play louder at different times, but it is – perhaps – always possible to tune in to any of them.

I like this parallel tracks idea because it doesn’t have the ‘end point’ which might be present in the idea of a story. It’s easy to fall into the sense that the shame, trauma, human, or sacred stories have a linear narrative from beginning, to middle, to end. In the shame story I should eventually ‘become a better person’. In the trauma story I should eventually recover or heal myself. In the sacred story I will ‘awaken’ or reach some kind of enlightenment. I worry that holding out for such a ‘happily ever after’ will become another kind of grasping which will keep me struggling. I believe that the truth of human experience is much more like a spiral where we go round and round the same themes many times, perhaps reaching a slightly deeper understanding each time. 

This would certainly make sense of my decade-ly return to these particular kinds of struggles, challenging my sense that each one is a ‘failure’ because I didn’t manage to ‘sort myself out’ once and for all. 

While it is intense – and perhaps a bit self-punishing (hello, I’m MJ, have we met?!) – to imagine my fifties trauma/crisis before I’m even out of my forties one, maybe doing so is more hepful than hoping that this time I’m going to finally ‘do it’, whatever ‘it’ is.

I found it useful, in relation to these tracks, to think about the different Buddhist heaven and hell realms which I wrote about here. Pema Chödrön, suggests that these can usefully be seen as states that we move between on a daily basis, all of which are possible in any given moment.

The shame track is like the hell realm. I’m in torment, believing myself to be bad and worthy of punishment. I’m totally inward facing, I can’t see anybody else through the fog of gaslight that surrounds me, telling me that I’m terrible, will harm/lose everyone, and should just give up.The trauma track is like the animal realm. I can’t live anything like regular everyday human life. I have to be supremely careful about what I take on, what I do, what contact I engage in, because anything can quickly overwhelm me. It’s just one day at a time, slowly, slowly, doing the work I know that I need to do. It’s still very inward facing and hard to be around anyone except very safe others, or to see other people and their stuff clearly.The human track – or realm – is like the gap in the clouds. I can see clearly again for a moment and it is wonderful. My nervous system is relaxed. I can feel excited about my projects again. I’m not mired in confusion and self doubt over every decision. I can contact easily what I want and don’t want to do. I can imagine a future. I can connect with other people. Turning outwards feels good.The sacred track – or heaven realm – feels utterly open and connected with myself and to others. I can even see clearly those who have hurt me and how it comes from these same places of shame and fear that I am grappling with myself. I can grieve for how we’re all caught up in these dynamics together – and the damage they cause – at the same time as seeing the strange tragic beauty of it all. I know that the very things that divide us could be points of deep connection. Kindness for myself and others isn’t something I have to work on, it’s just the obvious response.

Again, recognising all four possible tracks, or realms, and their simultaneous availability can help us not to become too stuck in one of them. It’s easy to desperately try to escape the hell and animal realms when there: to tune out the shame and trauma tracks. It’s also easy to want to turn up the human and sacred tracks when we can hear those: to grasp hold of the human and heaven realms. 

Buddhism has this paradoxical idea that it’s important not to prefer Nirvana to Samsara. It’s not about transcending our human lives to reach some eternal enlightened state. Most of the great religious figures had a moment of choosing not to retreat into blissful solitude, but to return to the world with others, even though they knew how painful that would be and how they would be dragged back into messy human struggles, even be overwhelmed or destroyed by them.

If we can allow each of these tracks – or states – without trying to cling to them, or escape them, when they are present, perhaps we can flow through them more easily. There is as much – if not more – to be learnt from accompanying ourselves through shame and trauma as there is through our beautiful, complex everyday lives, or through our moments of transcendence.

Back to writing

Returning to the story I began this post with – about my friend who was considering writing – curiously, a number of the people I mentor with their writing have come to similar conclusions of late. They’ve begun with a parallel personal and creative process, and have eventually dropped the creative element entirely, or shifted it into something more private and unconventional, that may or may not ever see the light of day. For example many are exploring forms of doodling, collaging, crafting, zining, or small-scale playing with words and stories, rather than the more standard novels or memoirs that they began with in the hopes of getting published.

One of my own challenges – through this time – has been to let go of the sense that I should be working on some ‘big project’ – probably a book – as I’ve mainly been consistently doing for the last decade. My shame story about this sneaks back in occasionally, but what has actually felt right – during this time – has been to only write when it feels absolutely consensual, and to focus on these short (for me, if not for a blog post!) dispatches from my trauma recovery / spiritual awakening.

Another friend got in touch recently to ask how I was fairing through lockdown. She said that her romantic idea of me was that I was hunkered down working on my masterpiece. After a brief flicker of shame I laughed because I think that I very well might be.

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

Plural tag: This post was written by Ara.

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Caught in-between: The messy middle of shifting stuck patterns

Note: This post was written towards the end of May. Since then the challenges out in the world, and in my relationships with myself and others, have shifted again. But hopefully these questions of how we navigate in-between states are still relevant, even as the nature of that in-between shifts.

As lockdown eases I’ve felt a similar easing in myself. I’m not as trapped in trauma as I have been for much of the last few months. The fear/shame feelings are not such a big part of everyday life. I haven’t had a major flashback in a while [update: except for the massive one I had two days after writing this post, ah well it’s a process]. 

However there has been an edgy, uneasy feeling of late. I fear that emerging any further from my own personal lockdown will mean ‘going back’ to old patterns I really don’t want to return to. There’s a sense of not being ready, certainly, to engage in more challenging situations until these new ways of relating to myself, others, my work, the world, have had a chance to bed in a little deeper. At the same time there’s also some frustration, a pull to engage more, to be ‘through this’: to be able to work on bigger projects, to deal with urgent situations, to approach things I’ve been protecting myself from in order to address this trauma, and to get a little stronger.

It’s back to fear and shame again of course. There’s both fear that I will over-stretch, overwhelm, and override myself again, and shame that I should be able to do more, go further, reach some kind of imaginary destination point of recovery or fixed-ness.

The in-between state

I’ve found it helpful to return to a chapter in Pema Chödrön’s book The Places that Scare You about ‘the in-between state’. She speaks of a time in the warrior’s journey of addressing our stuck patterns when we’re completely fed up with our old ways of being, but still wish that outer circumstances could bring us lasting happiness.

We know that our usual habits are no match for suffering, but we still want to go to them for comfort because we can’t quite trust our new ways yet. We struggle to hang out in the gap left by dropping our old strategies, and just to be with the agitated energy of that place without trying to get ground back under our feet. It’s hard to hold the uncertainty and paradox of it all instead of going back to binaries of good/bad, right/wrong, truth/lie, etc.

Bringing these Buddhist ideas into dialogue with the trauma literature I’ve been studying, I see that most of my recent struggles have been around a draw back to those old habits of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, realising they’re just not working for me any more, but struggling to be with the edgy, agitated feelings left in their wake.

Flight and freeze

I’m tempted back to flight. At those times it doesn’t really feel okay to keep focusing on this inner work, despite everything I know about how necessary that is for me, for everyone around me, and for my outer work. I think I should be out there more, I should take on more, I should be working on a ‘big project’ again instead of these blog posts, I should get the decks cleared, I should read about something other than emotional trauma because the world is on fire.

When I try to push through with this it doesn’t work. I force myself to answer emails and I know I’m being less human and connected than I want to be in my replies. I start a blog post but it feels dead and unappealing: so different from the lively, fired up kind of writing I do when I wait till it’s really calling me. Working like this feels zombified and dehumanising to me and to others.

Flight doesn’t work for me any more. So instead I have to sit with the fear feelings that come up when I push through, and the shame feelings that come up when I’m not ‘doing’. I have to keep learning to be warm, kind and tender towards them – towards the parts of me that can’t ‘do’ like that any more, and towards the parts that struggle so much with ‘not-doing’ – instead of ignoring or overriding them.

When flight isn’t working, I’m tempted back into freeze. Instead of sitting with that appalling shame feeling I could just give up and fall into the black hole of scrolling social media or Netflix binging. But that doesn’t work anymore either. Like Pema says:

We’d give anything to have the comfort we used to get from eating a pizza or watching a video. However, even though those things can be pleasurable, we’ve seen that eating a pizza or watching a video is a feeble match for our suffering.

Pema Chödrön – The Places that Scare You

Every time I engage with any of my go-to comforting activities from that place of trying to avoid feelings or distract myself, I feel worse afterwards – and often during. The flickers of tough feelings become flames or even fires in the background in order to be noticed.

This doesn’t mean never doing any work, or anything gentle, of course. It means continuing to notice how I’m engaging in both work and gentle activities. It means returning to the gap – to sitting still – whenever I notice I’m treating myself non-consensually around work, or around the desire to distract from tough feelings. It means staying with the edgy emotions – along with everything else in that moment – until I know that I’m in a position to make a kind, consensual decision about what to do next, and returning to the gap if those emotions return, as many times as it takes.

Fawn and fight

In contact with others I notice a draw back to fawn and flight. When I don’t really feel okay about giving myself this time to focus on addressing trauma I feel like I should be engaging with others differently. I feel like I should say ‘yes’ to every request for my time and energy. I shouldn’t have boundaries around what kinds of contact feel okay – and not okay – for me if those conflict with what others want from me. I should have capacity for interactions that I still don’t feel ready for.

That old fawn pattern manifests as quickly responding to every email request with a ‘yes’, before I’ve had chance to tune into whether it’s something I want, or to get enough information. It manifests as not feeling able to honestly explain what I’m going through and the limits that might put around things I may previously have had capacity for (ironic given that it’s out here for all to read, but there it is!) It manifests as jumping back into contact with others the moment I feel I might be ready, rather than leaving it a couple more weeks to be sure.

A few weeks ago I went straight from solitude to a very busy walk where social distancing was impossible, without thinking about the impact such a sudden shift would have on my nervous system. I didn’t feel able to draw back, to find another way, or to figure out what I needed afterwards because of not wanting to be difficult or awkward for another person.

As with flight, the answer is to hang out in the gap with the feelings before responding, for as long as it takes, for as long as I don’t feel ready. If I override myself I will have a backlash of fear, especially when I’ve offered something more than I really feel able to give, or overstepped my own boundaries.

This also means staying with the shame of being where I am, with this very limited capacity, and having to let others know that: not always being the person I would like to be for them – in fact not even close. It feels hugely shameful to say that I can’t yet manage being in a busy area, or that I may have to cancel something if I’m badly triggered that day, or that I still can’t manage to be open and kind in some relationships in the ways I’d like to be.

As with the move from flight to freeze, there can be a move from fawn to fight: from what Love Uncommon calls the broken house to the fortress of solitude. When the fawn feelings are unbearable it’s tempting to go the other way: to go over difficult exchanges, or problematic emails, or tough relationships and judge the other people, even to be drawn to point out their behaviour in shaming ways.

Now that I’m outside of academic systems this comes up particularly around any engagement with people who are still embedded within them. I’m shocked by the tone of some editors and reviewers who are expecting huge amounts of free labour and still give their feedback in harshly critical ways ‘you must…’, ‘wrong’, ‘unclear’, etc. When engaging around assessing students – something I still do a little of – I’ve been in dynamics where the desire to follow academic procedures are clearly placed well above both student well-being, and my well-being.

At such times my head can get very noisy rehearsing stories about how and why others are wrong, what I should say to them, how to ‘win’. There’s fear that whatever I do or say they – and their systems – will override me anyway. There’s shame because I know my response is helping nobody and actually taking me further from the kind of connected and boundaried contact I’d really like to have with others.

If I can stay in the gap, at these moments, I can reach that place where it all dissolves and I see that their attempts to control me and shame me into behaving as they want, have made me want to control them and shame them right back. I can see the whole tragic drama and how I’ve become caught up in it. Then it can dissolve and something much more tender can emerge in its place. I’m humbled by the times I have managed to ‘drop the storyline’ I had going about such situations – as Pema puts it – and have been surprised by a very real, vulnerable, connected interaction where I’d assumed that was impossible.

Dwelling in the in-between state requires learning to contain the paradox of something’s being both right and wrong, of someone’s being strong and loving and also angry, uptight, and stingy. In that painful moment when we don’t live up to our own standards, do we condemn ourselves or truly appreciate the paradox of being human? Can we forgive ourselves and stay in touch with our good and tender heart? When someone pushes our buttons, do we set out to make the person wrong? Or do we repress our reaction with ‘I’m supposed to be loving. How could I hold this negative thought?’

Pema Chödrön – The Places that Scare You

Hanging out in the in-between

So with work/play, and with relationships with others, the answer is – still – to hang out in the gap, in the in-between, with all the agitated feelings that come with that: to welcome those feelings warmly into the big open space of the present moment, to stay with the uncertainty and paradox of it all.

Right now I’m trying to notice the desire to rush through this ‘in-between’ to get to some imagined destination where I can do all the work from that lively creative place, treat myself gently, and navigate all my relationships with others with the perfect balance of compassion and consent with them and with myself.

A big question, for me, is what it would be like to really allow myself to be where I currently am, instead of trying to get somewhere else: to let this be my life. It strikes me that a lot of my nightmares through this period have been of being trapped back in bullying schools and workplaces, and in homes with non-consensual relationship dynamics. I’ve done much in the past years to free myself from non-consensual outer systems, where others involved are not keen to shift those cultures and dynamics, but the inner system still defaults so often to non-consent. 

Allowing this to be my life – this commitment to consensual compassionate treatment of myself and others – involves freeing myself from those internalised non-consensual, controlling, systems, which is a much bigger ask, and requires a whole lot of time hanging out with these feelings, in the gap.

The major practice now – and perhaps forever – is looking out for those four Fs sneaking back in and – when they do – radically noticing the feelings, returning to the gap, refraining from any action until I can engage from a place that is consensual, compassionate, and able to hold the paradoxes. Sometimes that will be a small gap at the start of the day and then crack on. Other times I will have to return again and again to the gap as it keeps coming up. Sometimes I’ll make a choice to go into that four F response to survive the moment, because nothing else feels possible. Then at least I will commit to returning to the gap, and being with whatever feelings that brings up, as soon as it is safe enough to do so.

What I’m aspiring to with the four Fs is:

Flight: Only go to  work when I feel called to it, grounded in what I’m offering, and consensual with myself around it.

Freeze: Only go to gentle things when they really feel gentle, rather than being an attempt to avoid something else, or a form of gentleness I think I should enjoy rather than actually feeling called towards.

Fawn: Only offer things to others which feel right, rather than coming from a place of craving something from them, or shaping myself for them.

Fight: Only engage in contact/relationships where I’m being treated consensually, and endeavour to be clear with others what that involves instead of allowing non-consensual treatment. Resist being pulled into non-consensual behaviour back, recognising how hard it is to be consensual within non-consensual systems, and trying to be open to the full human being rather than this current behaviour.

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Plural tag: This post was a team effort.

The post Caught in-between: The messy middle of shifting stuck patterns appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.