Of possible interest to my Polywogs

The Youtube collection of colossal fuck-ups and the lessons so far:

1. Don't be a Dick.
This sounds simple but it's actually a multiple part series. You see, not being a dick requires constant check-ins and feedback. On this journey we are not carving new relationships out of the living rock. We are not pristine blocks of marble from which we simply carve away everything that is not a statue. We are heaps of precariously places boulders and rubble all set as temporary fixes to immediate problems that seemed to hold, so we forgot that the layer was mostly bubblegum and duct tape and built on top of it. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Indeed it is what all us irrational pattern seeking monkeys do from the time we are born, we fit the world together the what it makes sense to us at the time.

As we grow up, we start to re-structure. We learn new names for things, new ideas, new ways to stack the rocks we already have and get new ones to fill in the cracks. The important thing to remember is that we are never done with this process. There are always new rocks that will fit somewhere.

As anyone who is familiar with blocks and piles knows, when you move something in the pile, the rest shifts a little. And there's no way of knowing whether that giant boulder will cause no movement at all or that tiny pebble will be the thing that starts an avalanche. It is because we want a strong foundation that we take that risk, and really, if a pebble can cause a landslide, the stack wasn't that stable to begin with. These moments of failure are really blessings, helpers, universal forces who undo our childlike attempts and show us the right way. We can be childish when this happens, throw a fit, pout, cry, make it someone else's fault or quit. Or, we can be childlike and curious, seeing there are things we do not know and keeping a heart of gratitude and adventure to learn the strength of the true thing, and not just the flash of the appearance.

This is when the pile is just us. When there are other people we care about in our lives, things get more complicated. Our piles start to get closer to each other, and a shift in ours can have a small or massive effect on those we love.

A good rule of thumb is, if you have discovered something new about yourself, if you've changed something, learned, decided to do something better or different, the people around you are directly affected. Odds are really, really good that those closest to you have been compensating and adapting and working with that thing, and when you change and grow if you don't deliberately ask your partner(s) how they feel, how it has affected them, what their thoughts are and *thank them* for their support thus far, it doesn't feel awesome to be them. No matter how trivial a thing may feel to you, it may have been a colossal burden to them. One that the bravely bore, to be sure, because they love you, but think of it like taking something heavy off a waiter's tray without asking. You think you're helping, but unless you talk and listen there could be a spectacular display of physics as they try to adapt. Or, more like you've been holding a door closed, and they've been helping you, shouldering a good part of the burden and straining to help. You suddenly decide that door doesn't need to be closed anymore and move without warning. They stumble to catch their balance, and when they do, they *will* be waiting, wanting, yearning for some sort of acknowledgment that their help was appreciated.

If you have changed any rules, or figured out things that have been bugging you stop and evaluate. My most recent example is coming up with specific rules for different partners for dates and parties. I discovered after writing them down, the things that made me feel not-awesome were the very things I'd been doing to those I loved. If it is a rule for someone else, hold yourself to the same standard unless you've explicitly agreed to do something else. And not just consent, Enthusiastic Participation. If they have to be home at a certain time, so do you. If they can't leave/have marks, neither can you. If you decide to change a rule, say, that marks are ok now, this is one of those shifting boulders that needs settling and checking in and talking and agreeing before one acts on it.
Ad hoc changes are for people who don't mind swimming for the bridges they've burnt.

Coming up with party rules was a very recent development, and we've yet to find the time to go over them. I imagine I've got a bit of emotional fallout coming because of events past. I was, in fact, a dick. I made assumptions and decisions based on what I thought I would be fine with and told my partner he should have been fine with it too. I based my expectations of his experience on my own and couldn't understand why my introverted, stoic partner at his first event full of people he didn't know would possibly feel hurt or left out when I wanted to leave him while we were on vacation together with no clear rules or expectations other than that he was on vacation with his wife, to go out with some guy I just met.

Clearly he should have introduced himself better, been clearer about volunteering information that wasn't clear to him, asserted needs he wasn't sure he even had and just gone out and met some hot thing to keep him occupied while I was away. Easy as pie.

Total Dick.

Sure, he needs to be responsible for making his needs known, for telling me how he's feeling and for how he presents himself to the world. But I need to think about what *I* want too. Do I want to have a brief fling with lots of drama, or do I want to pull my head out of my clit for 5 minutes and built a future? Do I want this to be fun just for me or do I want everyone to have fun? This could mean I have to pull back, I have to give up some things I want to make sure everyone is pretty happy and wanting to do it again and better next time instead of having me ecstatic, until the aftermath where I discover that my fun came at the expense of making others miserable, hurt and angry. Do I want a disposable toy or do I want to build clan, with all the shiny and all of the work that separates the Poly community from the swingers.

How I discovered I was being a dick was twofold. One, I have two fabulous men that are smart and I trust tell me they both observed the same patterns in separate conversations. One person says you do a thing, you can argue the point. Two people tell you, it's not them, it's you (DAMNIT!) Second, I got a taste of my own medicine. At an event the person I was with found something shiny. He wanted to go play and instead of asking questions and thinking about what I really needed, I gave the answer I thought I should to make him happy and answered from a place I wasn't but thought I should have been. I consented, but not enthusiastically. So, when it came time to do the thing, the things I'd not stopped to consider became big, red, candy-like buttons and I wound up walking alone, in the dark, through the woods looking for something to do. This story does have a happy ending because my people are awesome and this person in particular reads me like a book no matter how much I try to hide it.

But the point is, if the extroverted bubbly one who knows half the freaks there and can get into adventures and have fun during *JURY DUTY* was feeling alone and abandoned and emo and not awesome, how much more for the others before me that I'd treated thus? Clearly, they are better men than I because I'd have had a screaming pouty fit if I'd done that to me.

Trust me, if you don't stop and ask other people if you are being a dick, you are. If you think everything is fine and others are just being too sensitive or needy or demanding or dumb, you are the dick. Poly is about finding the Pareto Optimal point where everyone wins. If you're not actively seeking that level, actively engaging in looking at what other people need and checking to make sure you're reading correctly and getting the whole message, and if you're not doing these things with a gentle, open heart, ready to hear that you may not be perfect and the people you love need you without throwing a fit or getting defensive, you are the one everyone is walking on eggshells around. If it seems too easy, that's because others are picking up your slack. Don't be "that guy."

Don't be a dick.

Teamwork

There are lots of great things about having multiple partners at the same time. You get to do things with one that the other thinks are silly, or at least not their cup of tea, stretch different parts of yourself that meet in different areas, when one is busy the other can play, and having multiple people being nice to you makes you more nice to them.
There are also some good parts that are less fun. Like when they gang up on picking on you and suddenly it's like having two older brothers in the house and you ahve to remember that you did this deliberately. Or when you've been having conversations with your primary for years and years in a certain way and you do this thing that you don't think you do but you totally do and when he gets to talking to the other man and they're all "oh, ya, she totally does that" and I'm all "crap, maybe I do."
Those are great learning moments.

Between the two of them, I learned that when I have a "discussion" or when I sense that someone is upset...wait. back up.
I'm very uncomfortable when people are angry around me. It doesn't even have to be *at* me, just in my vicinity and I start to go all kinds of alarm and warming up systems and checking missile bay doors and escape routes. This comes from growing up in a house where "mad" was a step away from physical or verbal abuse. And as I think back on it now, there was a specific marker that heralded the crossover. My mum would get angry, and common to her particular brand of broken, would get what some in the kids-with-borderline-parents community call "hunter eyes" or my favorite, "shark eyes" Her pupils would get really big and she would start to loose control. Apparently it's not uncommon to experience a blackout during that period, so she'd not remember all the terror of her rage. Must be nice. (maybe that's why people's eyes on "substances" that dilate pupils freak me out a bit...hmmm)
Anyway, another component of this exchange was the fact that at the best of times, borderlines don't have the strongest grasp on objective reality. They see the world in black and white, there is no middle, no "good person who occasionally makes mistakes" and so in order to survive her head monkeys she had to rewrite history to make her totally right and someone else totally wrong. So when we started to sense the Change, the only real recourse we had was to present a counter-story that pleaded to her rapidly retreating rational brain presenting the facts as you understood them. See, part of this was the assumption of intent. She assumed you did things for a certain reason, because that's the way it makes sense in her head and no one would do anything for reasons she didn't understand, right? So you had to lay out your intent as rapidly and convincingly as possible to try to bed the beast down again, but not go too far, because you couldn't say that she was wrong, only that you weren't deliberately attacking either.

Naturally, some details got smoothed over in the process, because when you're arguing with a mind-shifting crazy person who doesn't believe in gray area, to admit any fault was to admit total fault, and thus alleviate any guilt over what came next because obviously I deserved it, right?

So, when I'm in any sort of conversation with someone who has a point that implies i fucked up, the instinct is not so much to say "no I didn't" but to present the case of my intentions and background and reasoning that makes it perhaps a wrong thing but a forgivably wrong thing so can we review what to do next time and move along before this gets bad and you loose track and I....oh, wait.

I'm not under attack any more. There was a very good reason this very important and useful strategy developed, pretty much as soon as I could talk. Problem is, with people who are sane, or at least crazy in different and fun ways, this can be very invalidating and frustrating because it feels like they're not being heard. Which they're not. Because I've left the room and am running a completely different program.

So when the boys start to compare notes, or rather when I have "discussions" with both on the same day and tell the one about the other and the one is like "ya, you totally do that. I thought it was just me and I'm not as articulate or organized with my thoughts so I start to doubt myself and assume you're right." Soo, ya. When two people you love and respect and want to have good relationships with are telling you the same thing, perhaps it's time to listen.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: It's hard for me to get out of that pattern once it starts. I have a feeling it would be easier to keep me out of it from the beginning. So saying something like "so, I have this thing that I need to say, and I need you to hear me, so please don't interrupt until I'm done and just listen." might be helpful. And if I seem to be getting deflective, asking something like "so can you reflect back to me what you think i just said" could keep me in, you know, the conversation I'm actually having.
And it doesn't have to be all flowery and clinical. "I need to say something and I want you not ot get your knickers in a twist and actually listen to what I'm' saying instead of jumping in to redefine things because I love you but you're working my tits and we need to talk"
"art of war, chapter one, shoosh and get all the information first, eh?"

B: so basically what you're saying is that you were trained from a young age to become a master of the ninja way of deflecting and invalidation. And P and I get to try to retrain you bit by bit. Because the skills that you learned over the course of a decade on a Tibetan mountain top are inadvertently getting in the way of us feeling like you understand and care about what we're feeling, and you want to fix this so we can all be in a better place together.
That about sum it up?

me: two and a half decades, and yes. except instead of trying to beat the ninja head on, which is unlikely, because I'm very vary good at this game, because there were times when my life literally depended on it, and I like being alive, I'm trying to show you and P how to "sweep the leg" and come at me from the side. Because I'm pretty sure I've got that whole "being and staying alive" part down, and now what I'd like to be is happy. And to make the people I care about happy.

B: ok, well then tell P that another sweep technique is that when you start talking a lot and going on and on and explaining yourself and your perception of things.... that's a sure sign that you are in the zone, and he/I/we need to interrupt you and hit your reset button."

See? They're helpers. And that is why my life is awesome.