I recently had an experience where an inner truth living within my body/mind/soul finally had enough and let itself out into the world. It was a painful, heart-wrenching experience of deep resistance. Even though I knew that the more I resisted, the more intense the feeling would be. Acceptance may have diffused it, but it didn’t make the process less painful. Sometimes it’s the letting go part that hurts more than the thing that initially caused the pain.
The dance of denial
The first part of this process is what I’m referring to as “the dance of denial.” I frame it like this because long before I finally got to the “acceptance & release” phase, I was in a back-and-forth dialogue with myself. Usually activated by something in my relationships or environments, an inner knowing would swell up in response to these events and force me to confront its message. I would move with it, let it move through me (a bit), and allow myself to feel it. Just when this part of me would feel like I was accepting it, I would push it back aside and return to the other parts of myself that I wanted to focus on.
Like a retaliation, this part would march back to my center and force me to engage with it again, and again, and again. I would continue to excuse its recurring presence with stories about my stresses in grad school impacting other areas of my world, like my capacity to tolerate change, my emotional sensitivity to certain trigger points, etc. We danced this dance for months until finally my Ego collapsed from exhaustion.
Remembering radical acceptance
It took me a while to get to the stage where I could remember what radical acceptance actually is about. It’s not about just “going with the flow” and being okay with any & everything. It’s not about masking my feelings to continue fitting into a narrative that doesn’t work for me. In this case, radical acceptance was about accepting a reality that I felt resistant to because of internalized narratives about what and who I thought I “should” be.
Feeding into an attachment of how I thought my ideals would manifest
I wanted to be “poly enough.” More than anything. I wanted to be easygoing and open to new energies, free-flowing and full of so much love and compersion that it stopped being painful. I wanted so much to be enlightened and strong enough to “handle it.” I tried so hard to fit in to a mold that wasn’t working for me. I learned a lot along the way, though.
It’s hard for me to admit all of this, especially in a blog post, but it also feels good to say what’s been stirring inside for so long.
I still believe in the ideals and values of Relationship Anarchy. So much so that I stuck with relational structures that felt harmful for too long as a means of clinging to my attachment of what those values looked like. That was the real trap. At some point along the way, I stopped being in praxis with these values and started trying to embody a narrative that I assigned to them. The whole point of relationship anarchy (as far as I’m concerned) is that it’s a philosophy from which to build any kind of relationship, not a specific structure or practice itself. I stopped listening to my inner guide and tried to play a role, which took me out of my authentic self-expression and harmed both myself and others along the way.
Becoming Radically transparent with myself
There came a point where I stopped fighting with myself about these stories. I started listening to what my emotional body was telling me when I became activated. I communicated with others around my experiences and my needs. Things got better, and there was a quiet period where things were calm, stable, and secure. Life was continuing on, and repair was happening where it needed to.
Then a change came suddenly and I felt the recently closed wounds re-open. I felt flooded with trauma flashbacks and memories of hurtful experiences. My partner approached me with loving and gentle kindness as this happened. We talked about the rupture - where it came from, why it felt so intense. I had to sit with myself and listen to all the parts within me. I had to hear what they wanted and find where they had common ground. After some time, I found my truths.
Changing priorities
One of the truths that came through was about my general life priorities. I realized I was moving into a space where the time spent on relationships and relational processing felt consuming to other areas. As I’m moving toward the end of grad school, moving into a lifelong career, I want to focus my priorities on these areas and on my creative pursuits.
Any healthy relationship takes a lot of time and work. Healthy non-monogamous relationships take even more time and energy. I realized that part of my frustration was from how much time and energy processing these aspects of both myself and my relational sphere took away from other parts of my life. Rather than spend as much time co-processing relational ruptures and changes with my partner, or co-processing our feelings about other relationships, I want to spend that time collaborating on creative projects and supporting each others’ dreams and aspirations.
My relational priority has always been for a partnership that allows for authentic relating and autonomy. For me, that could take any form. In some relationships, I chose to continue in non-monogamous structures at the detriment of the connection because of what I felt I needed in that time. Now I feel that I want to invest in the connection with my partner more than in maintaining a non-monogamous lifestyle. I think we could work through these complications in non-monogamy, but I realized my priority was to heal my relational wounds through other means. Mainly, through building a trusting and committed bond with someone, which felt too difficult with so much possible change and instability in the air.
the direction of my inner growth
While I value the ways that non-monogamy forced me to accept change and relinquish control, I also began to realize that my personal growth trajectory was not working with this structure. As a neurospicy person with a history of environmental instability, I really struggle with change. For the majority of my adult life, I have been striving for stillness.
As someone who grew up with a chaotic divorce custody schedule, part of my healing journey as an adult is about building a stable, grounded life and home. I’ve known this for a while, but it took me time and a stable partnership to realize how non-monogamous relationship structures continued to stunt this part of my growth process. I had to sit with this one a while because I feared that by admitting this, I was engaging in conflict avoidance. I decided that this wasn’t the case because my need is for consistency, and this is just too difficult in polyamory (for me).
I just had to admit that the constant changes that come with a fluid relationship structure were not supporting my need for a slow, still home and life.
my body felt calm when i asked if it wanted this
To me, the biggest indicator that I was making the right choice was that all the alarm bells in my body started to quiet when I asked if it wanted this change. It didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be conflict, or that things wouldn’t be difficult, but that this particular series of activations would not be as much a part of the healing process.
It felt like my body was thanking me for finally choosing to not overstimulate it to a harmful degree. I tell this kind of stuff to my clients all the time, but it has been so hard to take my own advice here. Listening to my emotional body’s wisdom, I finally decided to make life a little easier for myself.
It doesn’t have to be this hard all the time. It’s okay to take a step back.
Finding new balance with my new truth
I don’t regret the years I spent trying to make non-monogamous structures work for me. Through those experiences, I learned a lot about myself, my strengths and weaknesses, my trigger points. I learned how to communicate equitably and accept when things are out of my control. I also learned how to let go of my desire to control, at least to some significant degree. These lessons have served my growth in so many ways, including in my growth toward building a more authentic and equitable relationship with myself.
The point of my journey into relationship anarchy and conscious relating has always been to deconstruct my assumptions about relationships. That includes new assumptions that show up.
In coming into alignment within myself about my need to move towards a less overwhelming relationship structure, I also asked myself (and my partner) how we could find balance between a monogamous relationship and our non-traditional values and ideals. We found that our wants, needs, and priorities were aligned, so developing new agreements that reflected these felt easy. We agreed to allow space for checking in about our relationship structure over time, after certain milestones, etc. We also gave ourselves permission to continue to choose this new relationship structure when we reach those check-in points.
The work is never done. Just because we changed our relationship to a more structured, less complicated form does not mean we have solved all our issues. We still have ruptures and repair work to do. Now it just feels like we have more space to work with. We created a structure that feels supportive to both of our needs, which can help us both feel supported in exploring vulnerability and interpersonal healing in a different way.
I still feel emotionally raw from all the changes. It’s taking a while to settle into my body. Still, I feel that good things are on the horizon, and the next layer of my inner work can begin.
Thank you for reading!
— Emily Lichtenberg