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Nothing builds intimacy like shared vulnerability. We’ll never discount all the wonderful things that we get from sharing love—laughter and happiness and sex—but nothing
deepens intimacy like the experiences we share when we feel flayed, with our skins off, scared and vulnerable, and our lovers are there with us, willing to share in the scary stuff. These are the times that bring us the closest together.
What’s in It for You?
Some people find it surprising to learn that a slut can experience overwhelming insecurities, but the truth is that sluts are just as nervous as anyone else, and skills to allay our anxieties were not taught to us in our cradles.
Your own
freedom might turn out to be a lot easier to accept than your partners’—or vice versa. Going out and staying home are separate functions, like eating and cooking, each with its own rewards, and each requires specific skills to accomplish.
“Nothing builds intimacy like shared vulnerability.”
When problems arise, a good question to ask yourself is “What am I hoping to get out of this situation?” Why are you doing all this hard work to become a slut? The answer depends on your own individual situation, but for many of us,
the payoff is our own freedom, and we have to learn to give freedom to our partners if we’re going to get it for ourselves.
Giving and getting freedom means we also need to have some good ways to deal with the inevitable conflicts that will arise when strong emotions are at stake. There are lots of good ways. Start by checking in with yourself on what you already know about conflict. You already have very strong ideas about this; you learned them, literally, at your parents’ knees, or perhaps while cringing in the corner.
Studying the scripts you had to live by in your childhood will explain a lot about how you react to anger and conflict today. As a child, you had no choices; you had to fit in, somehow, to your family’s script. How did you keep yourself safe?
Was this never an issue? People who grew up in healthy families are often both easygoing and unafraid. The downside of growing up in an unusually healthy family is that it can be hard to understand why everybody else gets so scared.
Most people, though, learned to hide for their own safety or to
fight back to protect themselves or to become small and pathetic so that people would take pity on them. If you have any of these
responses to conflict—defensiveness, rage, withdrawal, weepiness, whatever—it is certain that you developed them for a good reason.
Once you understand how you learned your reflexes, more choices open up. Talk with your partners—what are their scripts? What’s going on when A really wants to hear how B feels, only B is trying to get safe by hiding? Maybe you each have different skills you learned about dealing with conflict. Maybe you could learn new ones from each other.
Fighting Fair
Thinking about how intimate bonds are cemented by sharing vulnerable feelings brings us to perhaps the ultimate act of intimacy: fighting. Many people believe that fighting between partners is to be avoided at all costs, but most relationship therapists disagree. Fights between partners appear to be a universal experience: not many people actually enjoy them, but they seem to be necessary, a constructive element in the
building of solid relationships and supporting growth and change, like the fires that make new growth possible in old forests.
There has to be a way to
communicate anger in a long-term relationship, and there has to be a way to struggle with disagreements. First you may need to vent some anger, which will include finding a safe and constructive way to experience it and release some of it. You’ll probably need to make agreements ahead of time about how to do this: Not at your partner? Not in front of the kids? Not behind the wheel? Not after getting high or drinking? Where is it safe for everybody for you to get really loud?
The problem, as we see it, is not to avoid fighting, but to learn to fight in ways that are not destructive—physically, morally, or emotionally. A good fight is very different from abuse. In a good clean fight, there is respect for safety and mutuality so that both people get to fully express their feelings and come out the other end stronger and closer than before: bonded by fire, as it were.
The concept of “fair fighting” was first expounded by Dr. George R. Bach in his wonderful book, The Intimate Enemy: How to Fight Fair in Love and Marriage
. Published in 1968, the book is terribly outdated, but the material on communication and detailed descriptions of constructive ways to share your anger with a partner are priceless. You might also consider reading any of the books listed in Further Reading. Whatever book you choose, reading a book together with your partner will put you on the same page, with some of the same information, and get you talking about how you communicate about what’s important to you.
Occasionally, you may decide to dismiss something that’s bugging you because it seems too trivial. However, if that issue comes into your mind three times, it is obviously still bothering you. Perhaps you could start a conversation with, “There’s a small thing that’s been bothering me.”
So, if feelings like to be heard, and anger is a feeling that can be very hard to hear, how can we vent anger without creating more trouble than we relieve?
Win-Win Solutions
A good fight starts with the understanding that for a fight to be successful, everyone has to win. If one person wins a fight and another loses, the problem that caused the fight has not been resolved: it is naive to imagine that just because you’ve “lost,” you’ve given up your interest in whatever issue is at stake. When you feel overpowered, outgunned, or shouted down, you will be resentful, and the problem will go on being a problem. The only real way to win is to come to a solution where all parties concerned feel that they have won. So in a good clean fight, each person’s feelings get heard and considered, and solutions are decided on by agreement, not rhetorical “might makes right.”
We make a fight fair by agreeing on rules and limits and by respecting everyone’s right to express their feelings and opinions, including our own. It is usually helpful to schedule a time to fight and make an agreement to do so; it does not promote constructive hostilities if we waylay our partner in the bathroom or on the way out the door to work. We need to schedule discussions at a time when we can give them our full attention.
Scheduling fights has the added advantage that you can prepare for them, organize your thoughts, and know you have a time when this particular issue will be dealt with. If you feel upset about the grocery bills on Tuesday and you know you have a date to fight about it on Thursday, it’s pretty easy to put your stuff aside until then. Most people don’t put their stuff aside very well when it seems that their issues will never get dealt with.
“Whaddaya mean, schedule a fight? Don’t they just erupt, like volcanoes? And when we have a fight, we are not likely to obey any rules or respect any limits, right? Aren’t we talking about intense emotional outbursts?” Well, yes, but we don’t believe you can settle any issues when you are in an intense emotional state. When your feelings erupt, it is important to acknowledge them and pay attention. However awkwardly you may be expressing yourself, this is your truth; you obviously feel strongly about it, so it’s an important truth.
Triggering
How is it that we sometimes get triggered into very strong emotions, particularly at times of intimate conflict? We all do it; it’s not just you. Dossie recalls at nineteen having panic attacks that seemed to come out of nowhere—until one day she noticed that something had moved fast near her face. Her father had been prone to sudden bursts of temper accompanied by a hard slap across the face, and Dossie realized that whenever something moved suddenly near her face—even her lover—some part of her believed that she was about to get hit. Once she understood this, she became able to look around and see that nothing was threatening her in the present, and these panic attacks disappeared.
New research into brain functioning has given us a lot of very useful information about how
triggering works on the physiological level. We have an organ called the amygdala that does the job of remembering situations associated with strong emotions, both pleasurable and terrifying, and setting us into action. The most familiar form of this phenomenon is its greatest extreme, the flashbacks experienced by abuse survivors and combat veterans.
The amygdala has a direct line to the pituitary gland and can set off our emergency response systems before our intellects can catch up. Adrenaline pours into our bloodstream, norepinephrine floods our synapses, our cells release all their sugars into our veins to give us energy to fight or to run away from tigers. Our entire system gets hijacked by chemical reactions, and everything instantly feels terribly, terribly urgent. Triggering is particularly common, and intense, in intimate arguments, where all of the old triggers we learned as children may get stimulated. To complicate matters, many of us have learned for one reason or another to suppress our feelings, so we are often triggered without even knowing what happened or why.
The first thing to recognize is that nothing can get resolved in this adrenalized state. The flight or fight responses to adrenaline give us tremendous energy to survive a crisis but not very much in the way of common sense.
But two things happen during this physiological stress response that we can learn to use. The first is that if we can occupy ourselves for fifteen or twenty minutes without restimulating the stress reflex,
our physiology will return to normal and we will return to sanity. The process of taking a time-out to get calm again is described below.
Better yet, every time we succeed in spending that fifteen minutes taking care of ourselves in the kindest way we can muster, we actually physically heal our amygdalas—by growing more integrating fibers that deliver soothing neurotransmitters—and thus we increase our capacity to soothe ourselves in a crisis every time we manage it. So practice, practice, practice being kind to yourself.
Here’s how to take a time-out when you or a partner gets triggered. Find a way to stop and separate. Then, find a nurturing way to take care of yourself for about fifteen minutes without retriggering your emergency system, until your adrenaline gets back to normal, and you feel relatively calm.
There are some agreements you will need to negotiate beforehand with each of your partners. First, everyone should understand that a time-out is absolutely not about whose fault this is. If what you’re doing or talking about is what triggered the emergency overload, then both of you need to stop doing that to stop the adrenaline. Stopping can be difficult: someone is almost certain to feel abandoned, cut off, interrupted, or unheard. Remember, this is for fifteen minutes, not forever.
Since you will probably need to be at least in separate rooms for a few minutes, a prior discussion as to what room each of you might want to be in is a good idea. Where are your computers, your books, your reading chairs? If someone likes to listen to music or watch television, are headphones needed to provide quiet for the other? If someone needs to go outside, it’s useful to agree on a phone call within twenty minutes to check in and make sure everybody’s all right.
Some people like to agree on a safe word to call a time-out; maybe time-out
or perhaps red
or maybe something silly that might help defuse the anger.
If you have kids and they are home, who will be responsible for them? Children may get nervous or want reassurance when the adults fight, which is in no way wrong. But they might feel needy or clingy at a time when you’d rather be free to focus on your own needs.
Make an agreement to honor a time-out with silence. Trying to get in one more thought is likely to trigger another adrenaline release and prolong the problem.
You’ll want to talk these things over with your partner to plan your initial practice time-out. Then look for an occasion to practice. Try calling a time-out over an issue that is only a little bit disturbing, just for practice.
When you feel your most familiar uncomfortable emotions flaring up and you recognize you’re being triggered—perhaps at the level of irritation or frustration, perhaps rage or grief—call a time-out. Strong emotions often appear very fast and can be hard to predict, so as soon as you remember the option when you start being flooded with feelings, call a time-out.
Wrench yourselves out of the conversation and go to your agreed-upon places. Do whatever you’ve thought might be calming and not retriggering. Take a few deep breaths and remember to exhale thoroughly; reducing the carbon dioxide in your lungs will help the adrenaline subside. We like activities that occupy the mind—neither of your authors has much luck with meditating when we’re feeling triggered; if you can do it, go for it, but don’t put yourself down if you can’t empty your mind right now. We tend to turn to a novel or magazine, surfing the Internet, solitaire, music, or maybe an old movie. Try to steer clear of things that create more adrenaline: be careful of “shoot-’em-up” games, online arguments, or music with violent lyrics. Some people do very well with dancing out anger to raging hip-hop, while others find it too stimulating. You will learn from experience what works for you.
You might want to
write out your feelings, or draw them. The quality of the art is irrelevant; this is for you. One of your authors has
journal sessions that start with frankly insane projections complete with terrible accusations and gradually grow into a remarkably
nonjudgmental
investigation of what she and her partner were fighting about, sometimes ending with new insights about what upset her so much.
After fifteen minutes, check in with yourself—are you feeling better? Your
time-outs could take longer the first few times until you learn what works for you and gain some confidence in your process.
When you are ready to come back together, do something easy and comforting. Go for a walk in a park, get your favorite takeout, cook something together, watch a video in a companionable way. Make an appointment to resume the discussion that triggered the time-out.
The process of a time-out is seldom elegant, pretty, or even remotely resembling okay. We need to take time-outs when we are emotionally overwhelmed and definitely not at our best. Be ready to forgive each other for being human. Be ready to forgive yourself. The results are well worth it when you come back together ready for harmony and understanding.
I-Messages
Good communication begins with everybody talking about their feelings, long before they get to discussing the pros and cons of any solutions. Good communication is based on identifying our feelings, expressing them, and getting validation that our partner hears and understands what we are saying, whether or not they agree. Emotions are not opinions, they are facts—truths about what people are experiencing.
Try speaking in sentences that begin with “I feel.” There is an enormous difference between “you are making me feel so bad” and “I feel so bad.” The
I-message is a pure statement of feeling, and there is no accusation in it. When your lovers don’t feel attacked and don’t need to feel defensive, they are free to listen to what you’re actually saying. Conversely, if your sentence starts with “you,” and especially with “you always,” your partner may well perceive an attack and respond defensively.
“Emotions are not opinions, they are facts—truths about what people are experiencing.”
The words “I feel” then need to be followed with an emotion—sad, mad, glad, angry—or a physical feeling like queasy, tense, wound-up, shaky. Messages that begin with “I feel that” more often express a belief than a feeling, as in “I feel that we should not be enjoying so much sex,” or a covert you-message, like “I feel that you are crazy.” We are often tempted to describe our emotions in words that end in “-ed,” as in “I feel judged/attacked/betrayed.” This is a covert you-message: “You are judging/attacking/betraying me.”
Most of us resent it when another person tells us how we feel—whether or not they are correct, it is a violation of our boundaries when another person presumes to tell us what our inner truth is. Try asking
a respectful question. “How are you feeling right now? I’m wondering if you’re sad.”
We can’t ask our lovers to hold still while we sling accusations at them, using them as a target for our frustrations; that would be asking them to consent to being abused, and they would be right to resist. But we can ask them to listen to how we feel, because putting aside their own agendas for a few minutes and
listening to our feelings is a doable task. To learn how to use I-messages, try talking about an issue that is current for you without ever using the word you
, and without talking about what anyone else is doing but only about your own feelings. This technique takes a little practice but is less difficult than it may seem at first.
When it’s your turn to listen to how your lover feels, put yourself in listening mode. Remember, feelings like to be heard and validated, so don’t analyze or try to explain things. Just listen, and you may be surprised to hear something you didn’t know. You can learn how the world looks from someone else’s shoes, you can appreciate that person’s feelings, and you can validate that person’s position and express understanding. Then the solutions can flow more freely and more naturally. There are no wrong solutions and no right ones—only the agreements that fit well with how we all feel.
The purpose of this
exercise is to speak about your own feelings in such a way that your partner can hear you and to listen carefully to your partner’s feelings. Each person gets three minutes to speak while the other listens.
Choose a time when you and your partner(s) can spend half an hour or forty-five minutes with no interruptions. Choose who will speak first and who will listen. Set a timer for three minutes.
Feelings like to be heard. So while you are listening, all you are going to say are things that indicate listening, like “Okay,” “Yes,” “I hear you,” and “I understand.”
Read about I-messages, earlier in this chapter. Remember that we can ask our beloveds to listen to us talk about our feelings and how we are doing. It’s not fair to ask anyone to stand
still and be a target for accusations and blame, so for this exercise, sentences beginning with “You” are out of bounds.
Both of you should try to maintain eye contact during this exercise.
Try this as a safe way to talk about jealousy; you can use it later to discuss any emotional situations. Here is a script you can follow:
Listener: “About jealousy, what would you like to tell me?”
Speaker: “When I look inside, I find…” (speaking as long as is comfortable).
Listener (throughout): “Yes.” “I hear you.” “Okay.” “Uh-huh.” (and so on).
Listener (when Speaker stops): “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about that?”
Speaker (may continue, or say): “No. I’m through for now.”
Listener: “Thank you.”
Listeners will often find themselves full of ideas, suggestions, and so on, which they need to keep to themselves. Put your own ideas aside for these few minutes and pay attention to what it’s like to just focus on listening. Because you may be full of responses to what you have heard, we suggest waiting a bit or doing something else before switching roles.
These are intimate conversations. Show your appreciation to your partner for being brave enough to talk about these struggles. Hugs work great.
Help Is Available
You don’t have to do all this on your own—many wonderful books, classes, workshops, and other
resources are available. It’s a good idea to put aside some time and energy to learn about communication and to do it with the person you’re trying to communicate with.
Many excellent weekend workshops focus on communication for couples; some churches offer weekend marriage retreats, and some medical centers offer classes for couples in communication and anger management.
Workshops and classes are worth attending even if they don’t specifically address sluttery. We’ve never known a couple who
went to a communication or intimacy workshop and didn’t gain some good new skills and insights from it. Some workshops exist specifically to work on issues arising from nonmonogamy. Don’t hesitate to take these workshops, and remember that the facilitator has expertise in creating safe environments to explore highly charged issues. Many couples repeat these workshops when a new issue has arisen in their lives. We encourage you to take a class or a workshop; if money is a problem, some workshops offer discounted admission in exchange for help with logistics and physical tasks. Just knowing that others struggle with some of the same issues that you do can help.
Support, ideas, and information can also be found through in-person and online groups and tribes. See chapter 19, “Making Connection,” for ideas on how to find these.
A more expensive but still excellent option is to do some sessions with a
couples’ counselor. In general, we recommend this as a second-level alternative, after you’ve already done some classes and workshops, unless you have privacy concerns that make classes and workshops difficult for you.
Screen any of these resources about whether they’ll be accepting of your open relationship. Some old-fashioned psychologists, and the leaders of some workshops and retreats, may believe that your lust for many people is a symptom of psychological disturbance; you may not feel adequately supported in such a hostile environment. If you need help finding a sympathetic therapist or group, try asking your friends or checking “polyamory counselors [name of your location]” in your favorite search engine. Most therapists now have websites where they list their skills and experience and something about their philosophy: you can email them to ask what their experience is in working with relationships that are not monogamous.
We strongly recommend that you investigate these types of help sooner rather than later. Just about everyone can use an occasional communications skills tune-up, and if you wait until your relationship is in crisis, you’ll face much harder work than if you’d been practicing your skills all along.
Time Is Your Friend
In some cultures it is customary to wait several minutes after a person speaks before responding: it is rude and disrespectful to fail to think about what the person has said, and to speak immediately would indicate that you have simply been waiting for the speaker to be quiet so that you can then attempt to change his or her mind. We recommend
taking some time before responding to any serious communication, especially when it’s important to the speaker. Often, when you deliberately slow down communication, you’ll hear something new.
People frequently approach a disagreement as if it were urgent that it be resolved right away. They strive for a resolution within minutes of discovering that they don’t agree about something—something that they have in fact never agreed on.
But you’ve probably been living with that disagreement for a long time, and a little while more is not going to make a lot of difference. Thus, consider this strategy: acknowledge the disagreement, give each of you a chance to state your feelings using the principles you’ve learned in this chapter, and then take two days to digest what you’ve learned.
When you return to discuss the disagreement, you will probably be in a much calmer mode. You may have a clearer understanding of what is important to you and an appreciation of what is important to your beloved and why. Thus you may find yourself in a much better state to negotiate a solution that might make everyone happy.
Or after two days, maybe it will have become so easy that you won’t need a special script to come to an agreement. Remember, where emotions are concerned, time is your friend.
Writing It Out
Sometimes our feelings are so complicated that it seems impossible to deal with them in face-to-face conversation with our beloveds. Under such circumstances, you may want to write a thoughtful
letter to let your honey know the entirety of your concerns in a measured way that can be absorbed and processed at their own pace. This correspondence isn’t a substitute for actual conversation, but it can be a good precursor to it, a way to open up the discussion that may feel a bit safer.
It is vital, however, that you send this letter only after you’ve had time to think about it. The downside to correspondence is that it can’t convey all the fine points of communication—facial expression, body language, touch. The upside is, or should be, that a letter can be composed carefully, without undue emotional overload. If you click “Send” or drop the envelope into the mailbox before you’ve had a chance to think about its contents, you’re taking on all the downside without any of the upside.
Start by writing a letter you’re not going to send, expressing all your feelings and concerns. Janet keeps letters like this in the “Drafts” folder of her email program; Dossie writes them in her word processing program and pastes them into an email later. Write out all your feelings, letting go of any worries about how your partner may respond so you can express yourself fully. Then close the file and go do something else. Come back and add stuff (or edit things out) for a couple of days, and then check what you’ve written, making sure you’re owning your own stuff and using I-messages. We usually delete sentences that begin with the words, “You shithead.” Later, when you can read the message and imagine your friend truly understanding whatever you are disturbed about, it’s time to send it.
We hope we do not have to remind you that your blog or your social media page or your private email list of a few dozen very intimate friends is not the place to rehearse this private correspondence. Struggle with it yourself—or, if that seems impossible, perhaps you can run it past one trusted friend, someone who would be acceptable to your lovers too, to make sure you’re saying what you’re trying to say.
Dossie wrote such a letter recently to a lover of hers. She wrote the first draft at a time when she was terribly upset, on a Friday. She was busy over the weekend but managed to revisit her letter from time to time. By Monday, the issues were still there but, after some processing, seemed more manageable, so she called her friend on the phone and they talked…and resolved the issues quite easily and peacefully. The letter never got sent.
Owning What’s Yours
When you are willing to own your distress, it becomes possible for your lover to comfort you, to offer you reassurance and love when things are hard. Even when you don’t agree about how you are going to handle an issue, you can still exchange love and comfort. We recommend that everyone be open about asking for reassurance, love, hugs, comfort, and stuff like that. Many of us grew up in families where we were taught not to ask for what we needed and, if we did, were scorned as only wanting attention.
“When you are willing to own your distress, it becomes possible for your lover to comfort you.”
So what’s wrong with wanting attention? Isn’t there plenty? Remember about starvation economies: Don’t shortchange yourself. You do not have to be content with little dribs and drabs of comfort, attention, support, reassurance, and love. You get to have all you want. You and your intimates can set yourselves up to share lots and lots and lots and, in the process, learn how much more you have to share than you ever thought. So focus on abundance, and create a relationship ecology rich in the good things of life: warmth and affection and sex and love.