As I dive deeper and deeper into the world of attachment theory, there's one piece that has been especially intriguing to me.
Excitement and Boredom in relationships. What drives excitement in insecure connection? And why does security appear "boring" to those working with insecure wounds?
Here's some of what I've discovered.
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“The line between madness and stubbornness is a very thin one.” ~Philippe Lewis
You want your relationship to work? You don’t know if you should stay together? Get stubborn. Stop the whining. Take a stand for your commitment. It doesn’t matter if you made it near an isolated lake with five thousand humping frogs in chorus or in front of two hundred of your closest friends and relatives. You made it. You spoke your word. Is your commitment that small that you would leave now that things have gotten hard? And by hard, I don’t mean, “We’re fighting over domestic duties again. We’re not having enough sex. We wish we had money”. By hard, I mean your soul has been gutted from your body and you’re looking for a triple-soul-bypass. That’s hard.
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🖤Nearly everyone has experienced trauma or wounding in their lives. Left unhealed, this can lead to all kinds of behavior, choices, actions, emotional states, unconscious survival patterns and illnesses that end up lowering the quality of our lives and negatively impacting those around us.
🖤Every person on this planet has a different threshold for, and response to, traumatic events. What is traumatic for one person may go unnoticed by another. If it landed as traumatic to the person in question, then it was traumatic for them. Likewise, what can trigger this unhealed wounding is also different for each person. The fact that it may or may not make sense to you is irrelevant to the fact that, for them, they may be reliving unhealed wounding and may not even be aware of it.
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I’m not sure where to start with this...it’s so close to my heart for many reasons. I grew up in a crazy level of privilege in terms of the race, gender, and socio-economic status of my town and school...and my family was one of the poorest in our town. So I supposed “rich-poor” would describe it.
Watching my classmates have every possible opportunity while I wondered why I couldn’t seem to function, even with a great education and many things paid for just by being a part of the town I grew up in...yet I couldn’t seem to understand why I was so...different. ADHD? Anxiety? Depression? Was I just lazy? After 30 years of bad choices and a few good ones, and MANY mixed feelings, I discovered that I had C-PTSD.
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The non-clinical population has an even amount of male and female people with anxious attachment, as well as those with avoidant attachment. The differences in gender are nuanced, but for the sake of understanding attachment from a human perspective, it’s important to step outside of the need to separate men and women’s differences, and step into the human nervous system free of gender distinctions...from there we can look at differences, but connection must be made first in order to cultivate safety in the nervous systems of BOTH partners. This is an art form that requires tremendous patience, but the payoff is well worth it.
Stan Tatkin suggests a method called “catch and release” for anxious partners who have avoidant partners who seem to be “too distant.”
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Anger is a neurophysiological state that drives upholding boundaries. This is so often misunderstood, it’s nearing epidemic levels. Rage is unchecked anger. Anger is simply the feeling and impulse to protect when boundaries are threatened.
When anger is suppressed, or when it’s not acknowledged as the subtle awareness of a breached boundary (or about to be) internally, it can easily escalate into rage.
When rage happens, anger has been bypassed unconsciously in lack of awareness, or it has been suppressed, resulting in an amplification of that feeling.
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When we begin to show up as a leader, we begin to have impact. We want to make a difference and we begin to develop the skills of social, emotional, and intellectual influence. This is power.
Many also, by the same token, begin to explore the skills of primal and sexual influence, some of it consciously, some not.
We may not want to take responsibility for it because we didn't ask for it. Because we didn't consent to it. Or perhaps it's because it's not our problem, because it's not something we chose. Or perhaps it's not something our "group" has been known to impact others with.
But we do choose to speak up into the world to make a difference.
THIS RIGHT NOW IS THE DIFFERENCE WE ARE MAKING IN PEOPLE'S LIVES, to speak up and be heard.
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Calling out has been used to get the right people to LISTEN.
It's both a form of social signaling (to garner attention towards a problem) and a way to get attention from the person who NEEDS to listen to the impact they had on the speaker, or someone the speaker loves,
or a community the speaker loves,
or an ideology the speaker loves,
or a philosophy the speaker loves.
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This article was also posted on the Good Men Project.
You might have read articles about about how boys and men -- at least in the US if not in the western world -- are deprived of touch because of the scripts that narrowly define masculinity, manhood, what a man does and what a man wants (Here’s three: here, here, and here).
I, too, have experienced some version of it, and this is my story.
I grew up in Canada, a progressive country, in a progressive family. I went to schools that taught morals alongside catechism (students could pick either), personal development, and the social side of sex education (not just the biology). My parents never said to me “Be a man!”, never shamed me for crying (both of them cried in front of us), and never taught me and my sister the scripts of masculinity or femininity. If anything, they taught us what it looks like to be a family and making things work by doing the best we can and getting help when we couldn’t.
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Sexual abuse and assault can happen to anyone. Most often, we hear about it happening between partners, but what is the best course of action when we hear that our partner was just assaulted or that they reveal to us that they have a history of trauma or abuse? For most couples, this is a challenging situation rife with triggers and hurt. This list is a simple way to begin the support process with a partner who needs it. Each item could be a blog post unto itself. If you require further support, please contact me or any other mental health professional directly.
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It seems like everywhere the #metoo movement is leaving men wondering what to do – which is not surprising given that men like to DO things. Sometimes, of course, the incessant doing of men can get in the way and camouflage a feeling of inadequacy or a need to get attention. However, there are men out there who are truly seeing how much work there is to do and are simply ready, willing, and (hopefully somewhat) able to take action, and just need a sense of direction. Because, while this article may be preaching to a choir of clear conscious healthy men (as opposed to their pale substitute, the Sensitive New Age Guy, or SNAG or other types – and then again, even conscious men are apparently committing assault), there’s a multitude of men who are just waking up and looking to make a responsible and healthy difference.
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I'm so honored to be included as one of the many amazing experts in this article by my friend Maddy Moon! Together we offer amazing value with these practical tips on harmonizing your masculine and your feminine!
Read the article here.
Here’s my piece:
“Your masculine and feminine energy can be experienced as two different energetic/emotional aspects of you: The Brother, who relates to other men as “brothers”, and the Sister, who relates to other women as “sisters”. Because of how we are socialized as we grow up, one is usually less developed than the other. In some cases — especially those who didn’t engage socially with either boys and girls as they grew up — both need to be developed. The trick is to grow them to a degree that they feel mature and in graceful relationship to other brothers and sisters. Do you have close or best friends from the opposite sex? What about of the same sex? Do you have friendships with those you would normally perceive as “other” such that you can feel into them as a mirror for you, as another you?
This tip is simple yet rich: which of your inner Brother or Sister has the least friendships? Ask each of them. Then, consciously allow the one you picked to engage deeply with others and create these friendships such he/she can develop a more harmonious relationship with itself through relationships with others. This is not about “getting” anything from the relationship, but rather about connecting and engaging. Harmony will come from this practice.”
Recorded at the Hawaii Tantra Festival 2017
This recording begins about 1/3rd of the class in, after the initial connection exercises that involved walking around being a yes, a maybe, and a no (without specific actions required by the participants)
A lot of lessons can be learned when we can consider that someone's "yes" can change from moment to moment, and when we have to remain curious about someone's feelings, pace, desires and boundaries as time goes by.
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If Stage 1 of a relationship is the bliss bubble, then Stage 2 is reached when the bubble bursts when one or more of the following events happen:
The Big Fight: the very first and biggest fight so far, where you get to see how weird and strange and intense and childish and far and deep you and the other person can get when things spiral down. And sometimes, how stupid the initial reason is. For me and Paget, it was about licking a knife at breakfast.
The Big Turn Off: where you get to see a piece of the darkness of the other person (or in each other), or how nasty and mean the other person can get, or how you hurt each other and get really turned off by it.
The First Betrayal of Trust: where one or both people betrays the other in a really deep way, killing or sapping the other person's trust. This usually leads to the Big Fight and the Big Turn Off
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But don't just take my word for it.
I love articles about the "Love and Light" spiritual bypass crap that goes from the indirect bypass/shaming/guilting/shunning all the way to the loud "calling out" of anyone that doesn't behave with pure "love and light" in their heart.
Well, I've got news for you: unless you've lived under a rock (or in cave, how spiritually romantic), and were raised by the perfect parents (which simply don't exist), then as you've circled the sun you've come to realize that you're not only living in a REAL and GRITTY world, you're also likely accumulated shadow/shit/stuff faster than you can integrate it. And if not you, then the people around you who you have to live with, deal with and be in relationship with.
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Read on by clicking the title!
Our society has evolved you to think that your erection is a sacred thing.
When you are hard, women are told that something needs to happen: you need to be pleasured, touched, you need to fuck, hump, grind. Everyone has to do something about it.
When you are soft, it apparently means you're not interested or that the person who is with you is not doing something right, not hot enough, not touching you right, not doing what you want in bed. It's someone else's fault.
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There is a sensual animal in all of us, waiting to be awakened. Quite often this totemic intelligence becomes inhibited from expressing itself through us, because we can grow up with very mixed signals about touch. Touch is always a sensation, and yet often, our experiences can lead us to developing mixed signals about the inherent pleasure of touch and touching. Sometimes we need practices to rewrite our relationship to touch, so that we can expand the fluency of our ability to communicate with it, and thus, to expand the quality of our social and intimate interactions.
Continue reading article here.
For many of us, touch is both something we seek, and something which, perhaps due to unpleasant experiences, we avoid. Unravelling the hidden meanings we associate both with our touching others and with our being touched by others can open us to new possibilities in our enjoyment of social situations, and our feelings of safety and trust in intimate ones.
Continue reading article here.
We’ve all seen it or imagined it: the man or woman who is supremely confident in their ability to embrace their lover and see them immediately surrender and open. It’s as if they were able to silently communicate their desires so powerfully that their lover was instantly seduced, as if under a spell. In many ways, you are right: this person is in fact able to speak to their lover in a way that is much deeper than with any words: they are speaking with their body.
Continue reading article here.
My friend Alex Allman created this video based on a technique I originally shared at a panel discussion at Burning Man 2014.
Click the title to see the video.
