Choose Your Relational Economy
need and scarcity underpin a specific emotional economy. but there are others available
Need and scarcity underpin a specific relational economy which requires that we race to the bottom in competition for limited resources.
This economy relies on the idea of things going wrong, the idea of lack, the idea of fixing, the idea of working toward change, and the evaluation and distinction between good and bad experiences.
Things get righted, in this economy, only when they go wrong enough. Only when the severity of need reaches a certain threshold, the intensity of emotion exceeds a stated capacity, are we finally in a position to require and receive nourishment and replenishment from the world and from others.
Rupture and repair. Crisis and cure. Crime and punishment.
Appealing to the intensity of your emotion or the depth of your need in order to claim resources or evoke changes in others is emotional manipulation.
This is manipulation because one person's experience must necessarily overtake the other’s—that is, whosever emotional experience is the most intense receives the resources, and everyone else, regardless of their capacity, must provide the resources, because their need is not as severe.
This economy naturally accrues resentment, requires us all to dip into depletion, and rewards emotional overwhelm. It reinforces our learned programs of avoiding "bad" emotions, because when the bad emotions come we must drop everything else that matters and tend to those. Better to make sure they don't happen.
This economy empowers victimhood, disempowers or even punishes sovereignty, and operates outside of personal responsibility in the realm of blame. Anyone who desires to control someone else in this economy only needs to enter and express their emotional intensity, and thus they become entitled to resources in the eyes of those who participate in this economy. If the person they assign as the cause of the emotional intensity doesn't show up for processing and repair and supply the demanded resources, i.e. if they remain sovereign, they are villified within the community.
The entire economy I speak of is negatively oriented, centered on what we desire not to happen. It's reactionary, where new rules come into play all the time to prevent bad experiences, and bad experiences become the center of attention.
Partnerships running this economy tend to spiral into problem-solving and constant processing within 4-8 months, and either this ends the relationship, or the resistance within this pattern maintains the relationship in a state of high tension and dissatisfaction for as long as both people are willing to strive to mend it. That could be decades, it could be an entire lifetime.
Relationships in this economy do not mend. Working on the relationship IS the prize, and the willingness to work on (or fight for) relationships is the thing they all seek.
Relationships in this economy cannot mend, they cannot go "right." Emotional intensity is guaranteed in every human life. In any moment, we can each conjure a list of unmet needs stretching back to childhood. The practice of assigning these inevitabilities to something going awry within a relationship means there will always be something to "work on" if you're relating within this economy.
Maybe you LOVE THAT and it feels meaningful and important to center life on emotion and need. It's not for me to say this is wrong, it is a value system that seems to be working for many people.
When it stops working, when the obvious flaws become too obvious, many people choose to come to me to learn their value and currency according to another economy.
Devotional Love is based in intimacy, in the positivity of what we desire, in the savage assurance that we are always whole and never safe, in the abundance that is available in each and every moment when we are the sovereign stewards of our own attention and action.
I imagine someone trapped in the economy of need and emotional intensity would question everything about how the Devotional Love system can work. What happens when need arises? What do you do about someone continually hurting you with their carelessness?
Need does not arise, because we are each responsible for our own non-negotiably nourished state. We are all awake to the inevitability of our existential pain, and to the grief that lingers from our early experiences, and we own that these are aspects of our individual experience, managing them accordingly.
As for the person hurting me, I may choose not to show up any longer, I may own that I am choosing to walk into something painful for me, but I certainly do NOT gather up and display my pain in a righteous demand for something different, or for sympathy or pity from others. If I want something different I serve it to myself.
Devotional Love is based in the truth that all is perfect in this moment, and that this moment is all there is. All emotions and experiences are welcome, which means that we are free to let them naturally arise and transition. None of them are evidence of a crime.
When attention is freed from emotional processing, no longer tied up wondering what went wrong and how we can prevent it next time, we are able to see more of what we desire in the world and move in those directions. This system is based in the positivity of what is and what we desire.
Things change in relationships, we receive resources, we make gradual tunes to improve the connection, as an act of committed cocreation. Serving others feels great, and that is why we do it; their need is of little consequence, we're seeking only their willingness to receive.
We aren't waiting for something to go wrong, we are in an easeful, emergent process of tuning to our mutual delight, providing for mutual prosperity. Rather than "making each other better" or "meeting each others' needs," we simply LIVE and enjoy our time together. We create in pleasure and play. We have nothing to fight or fix, we can simply agree with the experiences each of us reports to the other, be present and understanding and sovereign, and trust the other with their experiences.
It is very difficult, possibly impossible, for someone in the need/scarcity economy to align with someone in the economy of Devotional Love. Those who look for needs to serve can't find them. Those who only adjust when experiences get "bad" enough are quickly left behind, not keeping up with the pace, waiting for an eventuality that will never arrive. Those accustomed to throwing a tantrum to receive resources are disappointed when their loved one simply allows that experience for them as the gift it is, feeling no compulsion to comfort or "make it right." Intimacy knows it IS right.
Manipulation wants a level of control to serve a delusion of safety, a level of control which cannot be attained over another sovereign being, and will not be tolerated by anyone awake to their own sovereignty.
For my one and only life, I choose to relate in the economy of Devotional Love. Connection is easy and sweet. It’s all available right now.