Polysecure
Page 9
In addition to the ways that capitalism can influence who and how we love, in couples therapy I regularly witness how patriarchal values and gender discourses eclipse intimate connection and attachment. Developing healthy relational attachment requires feelings of safety and security. While significant achievements have been made for women over the past several decades, many women still experience sexism, objectification, invisibility, exclusion or even servitude within their most intimate relationships. My generation was taught that girls can do anything that boys can do, but most of my peers still feel the need to have to shave, pluck, color, tint, laser, push up or add extensions to parts of their bodies just to achieve baseline attractiveness and feel good enough to walk out the door every day.
For many women, feminism has added more criteria to what it means to be a woman. In commenting on how increased racial and ethnic diversity in Hollywood has had a positive change on body image, the comedian Tina Fey credits women like Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé for revising the definition of American beauty. Being skinny is no longer the only ideal, but having a larger butt and thighs is now also considered desirable. These changes have definitely added more nuance to our beauty standards and represent positive developments, particularly for racialized women, larger-bodied women, trans women and disabled women who have typically been found wanting or lesser-than in comparison to the narrow beauty norms of privileged thin, cisgender, able-bodied white women. However, Tina Fey points out, these changes did not necessarily emancipate all women to embrace their body as it is, but rather,
… added to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have: Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama and doll tits.36
In addition to inflated beauty standards, women are now also expected to be career-driven, achievement-orientated, financially independent, and a competent badass in the boardroom, bedroom, kitchen and nursery.
On the flip side, the plights of men are often dismissed and unseen, since men are regarded as the ones wielding all the privilege and power. But what happens when the same societal structures that grant men superiority also deny them the full range of human emotions and threaten their status as men if they experience even the slightest form of sensitivity, vulnerability or indication of their needs for love, emotional safety and tenderness (basically, if men admit to having any attachment needs at all)? What happens when men are paralyzed by shame and made to feel unworthy of love and partnership unless they meet certain masculine expectations around financial or professional success? And what happens to a person’s ability to feel safe and connected when they are transgender or do not fit in the gender binary at all? Many of the personal problems and relationship struggles that we face are actually societal issues impairing our ability to bond, connect and love in secure ways.
Global or Collective Level
The earth is alive. It is where we come from, it is what nourishes life and it is where we will return to. If we are going to talk about attachment relationships it would be remiss not to mention our original mother: Mother Earth. For many of us, our relationship to the environment is dissociative and overly abstracted. Even though the earth is the very ground upon which we move, we still see it as separate, unaffected and removed from our daily existence. Growing up in New York City, it was frequently modeled to me that the ground was not a place to revere or enjoy. This was mostly because actual areas of earth and grass in the city were few and far between. What I saw instead was that the earth was something to pour concrete over, to drive over, to blast through, to take for granted or the place to literally throw your trash. The earth was more of a means to an end, a resource to take from instead of a living entity to be in relationship with. I think it’s safe to say that in the US, many people have a dismissive attachment to the earth. They downplay its importance, cutting off any potential experience of wisdom or intimacy that could be gained through connection with the natural world.
On a daily basis, people are immediately confronted with the sudden and overwhelming realities of our planet through fires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, tsunamis, volcanoes and pandemics. Needless to say, it can be traumatizing to lose loved ones, homes, and entire communities in natural disasters. Access to post-disaster aid and support can also be further traumatizing when poverty, racism or public policy further influence who, how and when people are helped. In a 2019 TED Talk, How Climate Change Affects Your Mental Health, Britt Wray articulates the ways in which natural disasters can lead to increased PTSD and suicide in survivors. She addresses how our changing environment threatens our social, mental, relational and spiritual health, and how some psychologists are treating “pre-traumatic stress” in regard to climate change.37 Zhiwa Woodbury explains that humans are being confronted with a new type of trauma that has never been confronted before—one that is ongoing and continuous without immediate solutions, and which calls into question our shared identity as humans. In an article titled “Climate Trauma: Towards a New Taxonomy of Traumatology,” he writes:
Climate Trauma is an ever-present existential threat with a bevy of constant cognitive reminders—melting ice caps; eroding shorelines; waves of homeless refugees; the ravaging storms, floods, and fires broadcast into our homes 24/7; and the constant roll-call of disappearing species, vanishing rain forests, and dying coral reefs. There are certain things in life that we cannot “unsee,” and Climate Trauma indelibly stamps our consciousness in that way, fundamentally altering the way we see the world and our place in it.38
Not everyone is currently or directly in harm’s way of natural disasters, but many of us still experience climate trauma or a preoccupied attachment to the earth by living in daily anxiety about the state of our water, air pollution, the state of forests, the loss of biodiversity and the extinction of animal species, just to name a few. For one of my clients, the bulk of our therapy has revolved around her environmental anxiety and its impact on every area of her life. When she wakes up every day, she looks through her window to what she sees as a world in peril. She is personally pained by the manifold ways that humans are mistreating the planet. Even though she has everything she needs on a physical level, she often tells me that “If the environment isn’t OK, then I’m just not OK.” She feels intensely unsafe and unstable living in a world where a natural disaster could occur at any time, and where the future sustainability of human life seems so precarious. This particular client illuminated for me how the current state of the earth has changed the way in which some people orient to their personal future and even their individual sense of purpose. Where for many it appears to be a given truth that we are working towards a better future for the next generations, infusing our individual life with a larger sense of meaning, for this client the future was no longer something secure that she could hang her sense of meaning and fulfillment on.
Another client of mine always felt a strong sense that the meaning of his life had everything to do with becoming a father. Ever since he could remember he desired to be a dad, seeing parenthood as his greatest contribution to this life. When he learned more about global issues such as overpopulation and food scarcity, it seriously called into question whether having a child made sense for him anymore. His concern for the environment ignited a personal identity crisis as he contemplated who he would be and what he would do if having children no longer seemed viable or wise from an environmental perspective. His worry for the planet created a state of constant urgency in his internal nervous system and hypervigilance that disrupted his work and marriage.
With both of these clients, I found that by treating their attachment anxiety with the environment the same way I would work with relational attachment trauma, they were both able to rebuild an inner sense of safety and security. Each of th
em developed a larger felt sense of trust in the wisdom and support that the earth has to offer, while also feeling more empowered, rather than overwhelmed or complacent, about their environmental efforts.
Finally, in talking about the global level, it is also extremely important to highlight collective trauma. This is the traumatic impact that happens to societies over multiple generations when experiences including slavery, genocide, famine, war or the subjugation of women occur. The individuals who experience these events are undeniably impacted, but the effect also transcends the individual, altering the course of the world in unfathomable and incalculable ways. Thomas Hübl is the cofounder of the The Pocket Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the healing of collective trauma. He posits that we currently exist in a traumatized collective and the main symptom of being in a traumatized world is that we feel separate from each other, from the world, from spirit and from the natural world as a whole.39 These symptoms are not just present in the collective or even individual psyches, but can become evident through actual changes in our genetic expression. Unresolved trauma from previous generations can alter the expression of DNA, making subsequent generations more susceptible to certain health issues, increased anxiety, PTSD and wariness to danger. This means that certain mental health or physical symptoms that you are experiencing today at the self level may have actually been inherited from collective traumas that your ancestors went through generations ago.
Traumas arise in many forms over multiple generations and how each person and their nervous system responds to the very same incident can vary greatly in degree. Trauma and attachment wounds separate us from feeling safe and secure, and left unaddressed they can create serious impairments in our ability to connect, respond or even function. All of these levels can cause threats, ruptures and violations that activate the attachment system. This means that each level has the potential to impact how safe we feel in our bodies, with others and in the world at large. Living in regular chaos, fear or uncertainty is not conducive to secure attachment. At each separate level we can look at a potential trauma occurring at that level and see how it then permeates to all of the levels above and below. Traumas that continue to occur at the levels of culture, society and the collective cannot entirely be healed by the individual, but that does not mean that they are beyond cleansing and repair at the self and relationship levels where we do have more power to take responsibility for our own healing. As I’ve already alluded to, healing is available to all of us at these different levels too. When ruptures occur at one level, we can focus our healing on that specific level, but we must also utilize the repair and respite that the other levels have to offer us—whether through self-compassion, a warm embrace from a loved one, a home where we can relax, being acknowledged and accepted within a community, receiving legal rights or benefits that were previously denied, or a quiet walk in nature to restore our inner equilibrium.
Part Two
Now that we have become more familiar with attachment theory and trauma, we will use Part Two to become better acquainted with consensual nonmonogamy. This section will address what consensual nonmongamy is, what attachment research has to say about nonmonogamy, why understanding attachment is particularly important for people practicing nonmonogamy, and how attachment ruptures and traumas can occur at multiple levels of the nested model of attachment and trauma when a person is nonmonogamous.
CHAPTER FOUR
CONSENSUAL NONMONOGAMY
WE ARE LIVING IN A TIME OF NOTABLE CHANGE. Since change is the only constant, we could probably say that about any time in history, but over the last several decades, multiple established beliefs and deeply rooted cultural and societal practices have shifted. This includes attitudes towards race, class, gender and sexuality. While these societal revisions are far from complete and there is still much room for improvement, over the past 50 years or so marginalized groups have received more access, acknowledgment, justice and rights than previously granted in Western history. These necessary changes have come from the courageous and sustained efforts of the oppressed. Many people, known and unknown, have sacrificed their personal safety, their own freedoms and even their lives for the collective.
As lifestyles and biases previously invisible to the privileged have been exposed and deconstructed, choice has emerged. We have increased choice to pick what path in life we want to take, choice in how we identify ourselves and the choice of who and how we love. While transformations in constructs of race, class, gender and sexual orientation have thus far been in the vanguard of this societal change, monogamy has mostly stayed unchallenged as a social construct, with those who do not fit within its constraints finding themselves alienated from a profound social revolution. As Esther Perel points out,40 even the monolith of the family has evolved with the proliferation of alternatives to the nuclear family. The emergence of stepfamilies, blended families, sperm and egg donor families, single-parent families and surrogate families have expanded our acceptance of what a family can look like.
However, the romantic ideal of the monogamous couple has mostly stayed intact as the dominant model for love and relationships. Well, at least on the surface. The divorce rate in the US is at 40 to 50 percent, and an estimated 30 to 60 percent of married men and 20 to 50 percent of married women in the United States admit to cheating on their partners.41 Perel reminds us that there is plenty of evidence that the monogamous model doesn’t necessarily work, with many people endorsing a proclaimed monogamy, while actually performing clandestine nonmonogamy. And yet, despite this substantial discrepancy between people espousing monogamy and actually practicing it, its stronghold on the romantic status quo is undeniable. Couple privilege and the bias of monogamy are still omnipresent in both contemporary American culture and at the global level. It is still predominantly believed that monogamy is not only the morally superior way to practice partnership, but also the one and only way to do so. This paradigm is so well-established that straying from it often entails the risk of familial and social estrangement, as well as an assortment of legal repercussions, imprisonment or even death.
However, consensual nonmonogamy (CNM) is on the rise. Books like Sex at Dawn and The Ethical Slut remind us that even though monogamy is a relatively new concept in human history, CNM as a legitimate relationship option and an unconcealed lifestyle choice is still fairly new to our modern times. For decades, even centuries, partaking in relationships with multiple partners was relegated to underground events and communities. The sexual revolution of the 1960s brought CNM out of hiding, but awareness and acceptance of people practicing CNM was not instantaneous. Only in the last decade or two have we seen a substantial increase in the number of books published, academic research funded and media such as podcasts emerge with CNM as their focus. Today, we see CNM pop up in our newsfeeds, discussed in the media, portrayed on mainstream TV shows and offered as one of many relationship status options to choose from on dating apps and social media sites. Researcher Amy Moors found that there was a steady increase in the number of Google searches for terms related to polyamory and open relationships between 2006 and 2015.42 Additionally, and tellingly, the American Psychological Association has created the Task Force on Consensual Non-Monogamy to promote awareness and inclusivity around CNM and non-traditional relationships.
CNM is unquestionably having its cultural moment, and it’s not just a passing trend. Distinct from cheating, where sexual or romantic relations with more than one person are deceitful, consensual nonmonogamy is an umbrella term for the practice of simultaneously having multiple sexual or romantic partners where everyone involved is aware of and consents to the relationship structure. People practicing CNM value transparency, consent, open and honest communication, personal responsibility, autonomy, compassion, sex positivity and freedom for themselves and others. Moreover, people practicing CNM typically embrace the following ideas and principles: love is not possessive or a finite resource; it is normal to be attracted to more than one person at
the same time; there are multiple ways to practice love, sexual and intimate relationships; and jealousy is not something to be avoided or feared, but something that can be informative and worked through. Mystic Life, author of Spiritual Polyamory, states, “This path requires owning jealousy as it arises, accepting others as they are, developing [one’s] own sense of personal wholeness, and letting go of the belief that loving someone more means loving someone else less.”43
Using two separate US Census samples, Haupert et al. found that over 20 percent of people in the United States admit to having participated in CNM at some point in their life, regardless of race, age, religion, class, political affiliation or level of education.44 Other researchers estimate that 4 to 5 percent of people in the US are currently engaged in a CNM relationship.45 That’s over 16 million people. When comparing people in monogamous relationships to people in consensually nonmonogamous relationships, researchers have found that CNM relationships have similar levels of commitment, longevity, satisfaction, passion and love as monogamous relationships do.46 Additionally, despite what people might presume, CNM relationships have also been found to have greater levels of trust and lower levels of jealousy than monogamous ones.47