Facing~In To New Experiments About 5 Body Intimacy and Partnership
I have in my life done many unconscious experiments about intimacy and partnership.
From the ages of 14 to 21, I was rarely “without a boyfriend” for more than a few weeks.
It may come as no surprise that by 20 I was, without planning, a mother. I became a single mother when my son was 14 months old. The responsibilities of single motherhood took partnership off the map for me for several years. When a willing candidate for partnership appeared…I became a mother again, but… remained single.
For the next 5 years, as the Single Mother of two little boys, lonely, angry, and stretched, I wanted things to be different in many ways. I soul-searched and read self-help books. I learned to mediate and got spiritual healing. I learned to give spiritual healing.
I made a stark realization:
Since becoming an adult, I had been relating to men either
- from a fantasy-based perspective of fairy tale love, or
- from personal-position stance-taking that essentially led to war.
In the beginning of a relationship, it would be one. After a time, it would become the other.
I wanted a life partner. I wanted a father figure for my sons. I vowed to learn to do things differently.
When my sons were 5 and 10, I married.
This was not a wild romance. I shared more openly and honestly with my partner than I ever had before. I made an effort not to argue about things. I accepted and compromised. I rationalised and stayed in better control. I followed rules that I used to flaunt.
The marriage lasted 11 years. I was constantly, at times desperately trying to do the right things, the things that would make it work, the things that would make us all happy. It seemed that no matter what I tried, I became more and more exhausted, isolated and depressed, though I kept up a spectacular front.
I became a ticking time bomb. I had swallowed so many feelings. I was pretending so hard to look like everything was okay and like I was not starving.
One day, the pain got so great that on a rare outing driving alone, I started to pull myself in front of an oncoming semi truck and trailer to end my life.
A voice in my head said, “Nicole, no child is better off with a mother who killed herself, and you have FOUR.” By that time I had become mother twice more to daughters. My foot went to the brake and I took myself to the doctor. She talked with me about ‘my personal crisis’. I cried and talked and cried. It was cathartic.
I went home having agreed with her to speak up more, to stop compromising so much. I didn’t know how to do this without things getting heated.
Not long after, in the heat of argument, my husband told me, “you should leave.” I interpreted that he wanted me to leave and not come back. To leave the marriage.
By the time he clarified that he had meant for me to leave the house, to get a break and cool down, I had already agreed, body, mind and soul to leave the marriage. Leaving the marriage had not occurred til then as a possibility. He had inadvertently given me an out. I took it.
As a half-time mother, with rest and space to choose for myself, my energy for life came back. During the next two years I “caught up on my lost 20’s,” doing some experiments about working, and some about consensual non-monogamy, also known as polyamory.
Again, as in my youth, I was rarely without a partner for more than a few weeks at a time.
I was ever on the lookout for the fantasy fairy tale trap. I was ever on the lookout for signs that I might be becoming a time bomb again. I became better able to avoid circumstances that caused reactivity.
Even so, time after time, I’d find myself in relationships that just didn’t work for me. There was lots of love, with physical and mental and enegetic intimacy, but there was still hunger for something. I began to glean more information about what this something might be.
Relationships weren’t the only thing not working for me. My work experiments weren’t working well either. Finally I broke down enough to be diagnosed with a mild form of mental illness, enough to have therapy put in my reach. I took it, and started some deeper healing.
The spring that Covid hit, I turned 50 in the wake of a short work and partnership experiment disaster. Compromises, unclear communication, unconscious assumptions and reacitivty had once again snuck in and wrecked havoc. My long distance polyamorous partner started to talk about coming to live with me, but that blew up, too.
I had started to study and practice using Distinctions, Maps, Tools and Processes from Possibility Management (PM). These made it possible for me to notice and use pieces of the blow up as Doorways for Transformation.
I could more clearly see how my Box limited my possibilities, especially in regard to having a working partnership.
I found that it was largely my Emotional Body that was starving and in need of feeding, and, adding PM to what I had learned for decades as a mother, I quickly got the hang of both navigating and holding space for Emotional Healing Processes.
Despite some brave and consious experiments making proposals to potential partnership experiment partners, I spent the next 18 months single. I filled these months receiving and giving Emotional Healing Processes, experimenting to build Matrix, and jacking-in to my Archetypal Lineage.
I built my capacity and ability to ask for and receive feedback, to use my Emotions for healing and my Feelings for handling things, with ever more Radical Responsibility. I began having High Level Fun using my Conscious Anger to find out what I want and what I don’t want, and making proposals to create the life I want.
I got to the part where I noticed that I wanted to make a proposals to a man to begin an experiment about creating 5 Body intimacy.
I have been using my Conscious Fear to discover what information my it has for me. Alongside the information I have been getting from my Conscious Anger about what I want, I am becoming more adept at noticing, clarifying and offering each next proposal.
I have given my Gremlin, (aka the part of me that has been protecting my Box, to avoid the responsibility of transformation, but who is now my ally and source of non-linear possibility), the job of catching me when I go on automatic pilot. With clarity from the White Widow Distinction, it is no longer a puzzle how romantic partnership used to so easily become a minefield and war.
With my Gremlin’s speediness at catching me in old patterns and his access to infinite possibilities, this terrifying territory is becoming the kind of adventure I always longed to be living.
The man with whom I have been practicing proposals (proposals!) is becoming a dearer and closer friend. My friends are becoming dearer and closer as we share the gold of our discoveries about how White Widows, Boxes, and Bright and Shadow Purposes go, and how things can go when we take more Radical Responsibility. I have been catching and taking back assumptions, clarifying communication, and setting boundaries for myself. I cannot so easily compromise.
Thanks to Possibility Managmeent and my Possibilitator Pirate Crew, the fantasies of my youth are maturing. I no longer imagine I can bypass the transformational work it takes to have my wildest dreams of living a legendary partnership and life come true.
These… are the best days of my life.
(the video by American Authors speaks to me of befriending the Gremlin, if not unconsciously. My Gremlin is the part of me who would say yes to alcohol and staying up late, and he has taken me to get tattoos. Mine is more like a shark and is, I discovered when he was Initiated, named Shark.)
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