Dis Rupture
I want to share the closest we ever get to rupture in my lovership.
(Before we get into it, did you know that my book is once again available for purchase?? Pretty neat…)
Recently I self-violated. I agreed to sexual contact before I was ready, recognized it, and stopped.
Then I cried for an hour and he held me. All he knew was that it had been too soon for me. I made no implication that he was at fault, and I just stayed with the expression my body needed to have.
The thoughts in my head weren’t all that kind toward him or about our relationship. I didn’t share any of them; I know they are not me or mine. I let them be like deep water fishing lines helping me pull up griefs from the depths. Those griefs are mine. They are not caused by this situation, they are in me, ready to be fished from the everpresent darkness with any worthy line.
I moved through it and he went home to sleep in his own bed.
The next morning I felt so grateful that I hadn’t said my thoughts out loud. Checking them in the light of day, many of the thoughts were plenty true, but the premises behind them were premises of fragility and disempowerment I have long been committed to rewriting.
All my grief-thoughts were centered in the ancestral grief premise of needing to be chosen by a man as a partner. This is an ancestral grief premise because it was true for my mothers and grandmothers for several generations. Their economic empowerment depended upon securing a man and making that marriage last.
Women’s dependence on a man as a provider is not a natural or biological reality, as many like to claim it is. It is not traditional to humanity, it is traditional to the engineered oppression of women, which seems to have begun around the agricultural revolution. Before this was engineered, women depended on *their entire tribe* to provide for them in times when their biology rendered them more dependent, like immediately after birth.
“He’s not choosing me” is a completely neutral thought unless it’s grounded in a premise where I value being chosen. It’s only distressing to not be chosen if being chosen has value.
Since I found The Work of Byron Katie about a decade ago, I’ve been terraforming my internal landscape to be friendly to reality and truth and hostile to lies which cause suffering. Even the most ancient lies, the ones which “everyone” believes, are still lies, and my system can tell.
The Work is also called Inquiry. It’s a practice now completely embedded in my consciousness to Inquire about thoughts that seem tragic to see if they are really true for me.
Not only the thoughts, which are often, as in this case, totally true, but the BELIEFS that make those otherwise neutral thoughts into suffering thoughts.
It’s not easy to drop a thought. It’s even harder to drop a belief, because if thoughts are leaves, beliefs are the trees which grow and scaffold those leaves. Byron Katie tells us to not even consider it possible to drop a thought or a belief, only to know we are allowed to see it, ask ourselves about it, and decide how true it is for us.
The beliefs about needing a man, needing romance, needing partnership are BIG, THICK trees. They grow many leaves and cast large shadows in my psyche. It seems the entire world is eager to nourish them. They continue to shape my behavior and my consciousness, the thoughts which feel true and the thoughts which feel false, even as I consciously divest from them.
I don’t know that I’ve ever felled such a tree. I think I’ve starved them, crowded them out with sturdier trees by offering those chosen ones all the nourishment I used to supply to those false beliefs.
In this case, that sounded like, “Do I need to be chosen? Do I need to be chosen by a man? In what ways am I already chosen, by men, by others, by friends, by family, by life, by fans, by clients, by the world?” Proof is nourishment for belief-trees, and when I nurture a new belief, I offer my brain lots of proof.
In this case, even the practice of meeting this moment was informed by beliefs I planted and began nurturing years ago, in defiance of the beliefs I inherited from my life experience.
I chose to believe that I can process all emotional intensity somatically.
I chose to believe the narratives have little to do with the actual grief.
I chose to believe that I can share my experience most faithfully without words.
I chose to believe that I curate what is most important into moments with my loved ones, and I chose to be the one who decides what is most important, divesting from a culture which asks me to give priority to pain, fear, and ideas of disconnection.
I chose to claim full responsibility for every moment of my life and divest entirely from blame.
The lack of blame creates a lack of conflict, which is why I say this is the closest we get to rupture. Conflict requires blame, it requires wrongdoing, and without beliefs of blame or things going wrong, I’m simply doing what I’m doing in every moment—curating for my experience of harmony in a world that offers both resonance and dissonance.
Dissonance in our relationship, unpleasant feelings, fear-based thoughts, all can be present without the situation or either person being or doing wrong. Life and relationships simply feel hard or bad sometimes. That’s just how it IS.
If I didn’t want to own that I self-violated, I could have blamed him.
If I wanted to hurt him, I could have shared with him about how mean my brain was being to and about him.
If I was attached to a right way the situation could be going, I could have tried to control him or the experience of us being together.
I could have initiated conflict, called a bad feeling a “rupture,” let it distance us from each other and insisted on repair and reconnection.
Instead, I spent that energy by simply crying, and that let us stay close while things were hard and bad.
I’ve stopped letting hard moments deprive me of the connection I know I deserve to have, which I desire to have most especially in hard moments.
I’ve stopped controlling the world to my preferences and deciding that it’s “wrong” for me to not get what I want.
I’ve stopped relating with people with whom conflict arises and refined my relationships so that I closely relate only with people capable of maintaining peace in difficult moments.
Conflict is guaranteed like a woman needs a man—it isn’t and she doesn’t. Just because “everyone” believes it doesn’t make it true.
Boom!❤️