A World in Us
Page 23
Without all that pain there would be no blonde and brown locks of hair nestled in that little wooden box that you keep in your bedside drawer.
Pain signals new life and new understanding. The more you embrace pain, the less you will suffer.
20
The Marie Claire Article
Even if you couldn’t “keep it in the bedroom,” as your mother said, you didn’t have to advertise it in a national magazine. But I’m glad you did, despite everything that followed. Because if there’s one thing that’s true about the word family in any culture, it’s that calling someone “family” denotes a level of importance and commitment to the relationship you have with them. And that article helped you find out what family meant to you.
Family can mean blood ties. Or adoption. Or marriage. Or friends. But all of these links can be severed through estrangement, abandonment, emancipation or divorce. You of all people know that no one is obliged to keep the family they are born with or acquire by proxy, nor should they, if this family consists of influences that are more destructive than they are joyful.
Sometimes polyamorous people use another name: “intentional” family. Your first family was not the one you were born to, as you were adopted. But now you’ve found that your true family is the one you made and continue to make on a daily basis.
Your family is a group of people whom you trust and whose support you use to empower yourself to grow in this world.
You have relatives, of course, but they are not who you consider your family.
You’ll come to realise that your children learn best by example. That your inconsistency in keeping in touch with your relatives will rub off on them. You will teach them that it is OK to have less contact with family members where the relationships are destructive.
The relationships that are destructive for you are those where there is no honest communication. They are those that contain judgement, denial, and bonds of duty and obligation over love and respect for each other. Those with people who vilify you for your choices and your life, or who try to create the illusion of superiority with classist, sexist behaviour. And this means that many of your relatives are not part of your life. And you’re grateful for this.
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
~ Richard Bach
Nowadays you cannot talk to the majority of your relatives about things that mark your life. They think the most transformative experiences of your life are the most shameful, and that your honesty is vulgar. Polyamory, you’ll be surprised to know, is just one of those experiences (oh yes, there’s much more in your future than you know about).
Luckily you’ve learned that if you can depend on your relatives to judge, condemn and lie — if you cannot communicate with, accept and trust them — then you are not obliged to accord them that all-important status of family.
P.S. You’ll also be happy to know that you’ve had a lot of articles published in famous magazines.
Your family is a group of people whom you trust and whose support you use to empower yourself to grow in this world. Your relatives are not necessarily those people.
21
A Long-Distance Relationship
Ha, ha, ha. Look at you, all screwed up in restraints of your own making. But my humour disguises something else: anger.
Even now, I’m angry at you. And do you know why? Because I’m sitting here in the future, and there’s nothing I can do about your situation. When were you going to wake up and stop suppressing your feelings? (There, that feels better.)
See, what I did there was to let it out. I still struggle to let it out compassionately — especially where you are concerned — but I think this is the hardest lesson. I still feel frustration and anger on a daily basis. It happens a lot when you have two toddlers! I am learning compassion with them; ironically, I rarely treat them as harshly as I treat myself. And that’s how I learn. Nowadays when I look at my own actions, I imagine they might be my child’s actions and try to help, rather than condemn, myself.
Anger always stems from powerlessness. But whether or not you can do anything to change the situation, you can always change the way you express it and your experience of it. Never by suppressing the anger, though. The anger masks everything else until you let it out somehow. Anger, especially suppressed anger, will put you in survival mode, flooding your body with adrenaline. It shuts off all but the most necessary parts of yourself, sending logic and reason flying. This is why anger has a bad name…but I don’t agree with its reputation.
You can’t selectively numb your anger, any more than you can turn off all lights in a room, and still expect to see the light.
~ Shannon L. Alder
You see, you cannot suppress just one single emotion; it doesn’t work that way. Cut one off, and you cut them all off. Emotions are signals. Our bodily reactions to them are what help us survive.
Your anger masked fear, which needed to be addressed. By suppressing your anger in an attempt to be “wise,” you were being just the opposite. Fortunately for you, anger comes out in mysterious ways. You can’t keep a lid on it forever. You’ll get angry about an eggplant in a few chapters’ time — screamingly, illogically angry. I know, it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? It was. If only you’d let it out sooner.
Acknowledge your anger. Be conscious that you are angry. And find a way to let your anger out without insulting. The more constructively you learn to deal with it, the less power it will hold over you in the future.
22
In Retrospect
Here’s something you already know about right and wrong. Normally they’re just two polar positions. Sometimes you can just let them be that. But when you get in a fight, when something big is at stake — like your relationships with Morten and Gilles — you’ll be fighting, and it will feel like a fight for survival.
It’s times like these when the reptilian mind takes over. You become highly concerned with your opinions being perceived as “right” and attacking others who undermine this in any way they can.
You’re saying, “But being right has nothing to do with survival!”
It does. In fact, the mind equates “being right” with surviving. As it develops patterns that promote our survival, the mind deems these patterns to be “right,” and more often than not, it becomes blind to the distinction. Being right — so you think — is the way to survive (even when it is not). Your judgement becomes clouded, your logic fuzzy.
Mind structures are the subject of psychologist Dr. Ron Smothermon’s 1980 book Winning through Enlightenment. That’s the book you and Gilles read cover to cover when first opening up your relationship. Turns out you didn’t absorb even the message set out in the beginning of the book:
“Being right represents successful survival ploys of the past. When they do not work, what we see is a desperate effort to use them anyway because they are so strongly associated with what worked in the past. Sometimes, people will die [or kill] in order to be right.”
Don’t worry, you don’t kill Elena — and obviously, she doesn’t kill you. You both live quite happily, out of contact now, though not too far from each other, in Sweden. (Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you?)
In a situation where two people are each, like you and Elena were, trying to disprove the other’s point of view, no one wins. Trying to convince someone else about the “rightness” of your position only means trying to create a situation where you are perceived as superior and the other person as inferior. You both did it — but you are not responsible for her choices, only your own.
So if you find yourself in either position, remember what your mind is trying to do…and walk away. It’s (mostly) not worth it.
Trying to convince someone else of the “rightness” of your position only means trying to create a situation where you are perceived as superior and the other person as inferior. You’re bigger than that.
23
Sharing with My Sisterwife
Here is one of your greatest lessons from this relationship: there was a wound that prevented you from living happily a lot of the time. The wound is about criticism: back then, you saw it everywhere. Said, unsaid, in a glance, in a comparison. That sensitivity made you very difficult to live with. If you’d been in a relationship with someone like Lydia, someone who trod around you because she lived with the same insecurities, the wound wouldn’t have been exposed — and you wouldn’t have been able to heal it. But it never occurred to Elena to tread carefully.
You heard criticism everywhere, even in constructive feedback. You felt belittled and incompetent. You heard judgement in compliments — because if one aspect of your appearance, home or personality was lauded, the others must have been lacking. And when you felt attacked, you barked hard, and bit even harder. But this is not a defect in your character. This is a result of having been judged and constantly criticized by a narcissistic mother.
You’d left your mother behind long before, and there was little chance of her coming back into your life if you could help it. And that meant you never dealt with any of your childhood crap (and back then, you’d never heard of maternal narcissism).
So here was a woman with dark hair and flashing eyes, just like your mother. A singer, like your mother. A woman who suffered from depression, like your mother. A woman with very decided, black-and-white opinions, like your mother. A woman who could dazzle, like your mother. A woman who was often convinced she was right. Like your mother.
She wasn’t your mother…but the likeness was too much to bear. After all the resentment, anger and envy, it was too much for you. It’s unsurprising that you and Elena liked drinking together. After all, that had been your way out once before, hadn’t it?
Elena was suffering, too. And sometimes that suffering meant that all of you suffered with her. That was your choice, you know, even if it seems impossible to imagine. But none of you suffered in quite the same way.
Sometimes I believe that Elena was specifically designed to conjure up all your childhood wounds. Sometimes I believe that you designed her and brought her into your life. She was the real gift in your relationship. Because until she came along, you hadn’t dealt with any of the stuff that was holding you back.
Just imagine if your mother had come back to live with you, like Elena did. You’d have been forced to grow and become an adult. Elena, just by virtue of who she was, gave you that opportunity. Never forget that.
Often, the worse the experience, the more you need its lessons. When you realise this, you will finally welcome those bad experiences into your life when they happen.
24
And Then There Was Thrusting
Ta-da! Here we are at jealousy. You knew it would raise its ugly head, right? Well, it turns out that it’s not so ugly.
Here’s a recap from earlier: In any relationship, jealousy means that the mind has decided you need the other person for your own survival, because you think you will be incomplete without them. Jealousy is one of those reactions that belies your insecurity (oh yes).
There’s a theory that makes a lot of sense to you nowadays, especially given your background. Original insecurity is rooted in childhood. It manifests itself during the time you grow and separate from your mother (who was once a part of you). The mind perceives this experience as a loss of the self and creates insecurity as a means of survival. After all, if your mother were to disappear before you were able to take care of yourself, it might mean death. But this pattern, established in our formative years, no longer serves us as adults. Losing someone no longer means death. Rationally, we know this. And yet in relationship after relationship, we reinforce it. (Some idiots like John Lennon even sing about it. Yes, at thirty-nine you call John Lennon an idiot. You’ve even done it on Facebook.)
Jealousy challenges you, because jealousy is a symptom of an underlying issue of your own insecurity and fear. Sometimes that’s a valid signal: Is your relationship in danger of breaking up? Then your jealousy is shouting at you to “wake the fuck up” and work on it.
But here was Morten kissing a woman you knew he had no interest in pursuing a relationship with. It was like the lightest experiment you possibly could have imagined….
So your relationship was fine. What did you feel? Jealous. Well, surprise, surprise, it meant you had deeper-rooted self-esteem issues. How much happier you were once you started working on it! Jealousy is far from being a demon. It’s an opportunity. Throw your arms open wide and say to jealousy, “Come on in old friend, I’m so glad you’re here! What is it you want me to work on?”
But in many cases, people run away from it.
Doing that is like saying, “Yes, my insecurity is a great thing. I like to feed it, and I have no intention of solving it. In fact, I prefer to criticise and oppress others to try to make it flourish better.”
We live in a fool’s paradise that lauds emotional intelligence yet has no structure to develop it. Our emotions make us feel uncomfortable, so we build controls to avoid facing them. We crown our maturity by learning how to drive, learning how to have sex and learning how to drink. And then we repress the very tools our minds provide that would help us actually become adults.
I’m not saying you’ve become an adult now, though (that would be lying). But you’re rarely jealous anymore. And that’s awesome. Even more awesome is that when you are jealous, you’re kind of happy about it. It means there’s some more emotional growth around the corner.
Jealousy is a great opportunity to dig deeper. Sure, your relationship might be in trouble, but it’s more likely that you have your own demons of insecurity to battle. In both cases, it’s a necessary emotion. Turn away from it at your peril.
25
The Eggplant Incident
So the worm turned at last. You finally expressed how you felt…and got sent off to therapy in the process. This lesson isn’t about eggplants (you used to call them aubergines, but then the second edition of The Husband Swap got published in America!). This lesson is about the validity of emotion. You felt belittled and pointless. I want you to remember precisely how that felt.
You’re going to name your daughter Freya. She’s the Norse goddess associated with love and sexuality — yes, polyamory even influenced the naming of your children! Your daughter will teach you many lessons, including the importance of not undermining her confidence by belittling the experience she has of life. Sometimes her tantrums seem vastly out of proportion to the event that sparked them — how hysterical she got when her little brother swallowed sausage skin, for example. But you see, she was afraid he would die. In her small world, this was a catastrophe. You’ve realised, thanks to her, that people act and feel according to their perception. And that you cannot diminish their experience even if your own is not the same.
An eggplant isn’t the end of the world. But for you, it sparked a whole cavalcade of emotions about the end of your marriage. It was the end of your world. Now, perhaps, your rage seems more understandable.
Just remember this: your emotions are valid. No question about it. But you have a choice as to what to do about them. You can learn how to express them constructively — like how to let them out without smashing eggs. But it’s a process, a lifetime of learning…which I hope I am teaching our children. Their lives will be so much more rewarding if they can communicate, if they can recognise why they are feeling what they are feeling. To give them voice is part of your life’s work.
Once you publish your book, you will feel so much better. Your voice will be heard. It’s why you believe that everyone has a right to
express whatever it is they feel.
I just hope you remember that in future when your children start blogging about what their parents put them through.
Everyone has a right to tell their story, express their emotions and have their voice heard without being belittled for it. These rights are universal.
26
Fight Club
Here’s something that is curiously buried in your book. You encouraged Gilles to get back with Elena — not just once, but several times. Why, despite the fights and what you felt was the dysfunction in their relationship, did you persist?
Motivations are rarely single-stranded. When you spoke to Gilles’s best friend, you tried to explain.
“You don’t see what’s happening. Gilles is changing. I don’t know him anymore, but he’s growing. And I think he needed that. I didn’t do it for him.”
“But will you stay together?” his friend asked.
“I don’t know. I love him. But I want what’s best for him. Maybe it’s best for me too.”
It was, of course, true that it was best for Gilles to stay with Elena…but your approach also reflected the attitude of a mother, not a lover: you sacrificed your own relationship with Gilles for what you thought was his greater good. Fortunately, of course, you had Morten, and your relationship with him was healthier than the one you had with Gilles. You’re no saint, but you did what you thought was best for you both. But even back then you wondered if you had deeper, hidden motives: Why the hell are we doing what we’re doing? Why do we do what we do?
Human nature is a funny beast. Even after years of studying it, it still continues to surprise you. One of the most surprising things is how vile we can be…and also how amazing. Why have you struggled for so long to understand your motivations? Is it not enough to live from day to day clothed, fed and comfortable? Apparently not — although some people say you think too much!