Autonomy is a paradox.
Tom and I are in the car about to drop him off at a weeklong arts program working with kids on a small gulf island off the British Columbia coast.
In front of us through the windshield is a farmstand: berries, eggs, a hand painted welcome sign on sun-starched wood. Sun drifts through tall cedar trees.
Every year for the last six years we drop him off here on a July day, and he goes into a black hole of noncontact for seven days, and I or one of our other close friends pick him up on the other side. He will be one of a group of staff who will enter the full-on schedule and be completely present for the kids and each other for a week, uninterrupted. Camp schedule is incredibly intense. Staff don’t get breaks. They run program all day and plan the next day each night after the kids are asleep. It is, by design, a highly social and immersive experience, so Tom asks us not to bug him while he’s there.
In the car beforehand we make that possible.
“So, if I actually need you, you’re always there, right?” I ask.
I have a serious abuse and neglect history and serious attachment trauma – I don’t take this question for granted.
“Of course,” he says. “Look, I really need to be able to focus on being here, so I need you to do your best. But if you really need me, of course you can just come by the desk and ask where I am and I’ll come help with whatever you need.”
“Whatever I need” from tom typically means either to be held and cuddled in an emotionally safe way, or simply to seek physical proximity (literally to be near – like ducklings) when I feel shaken or just need trusting human connection.
Universal human needs, in other words. Regardless of gender or of attachment style, if you have a tripartite brain, you have these needs. How individual human beings experience these needs, how conscious they are of them and how comfortable they are with them, varies. The needs themselves – being able to be near someone you trust, being held in a comforting way – are universal. He knows these needs are normal, so he meets them easily.
Their little limbic brains tell them: nearness is safety!
I don’t trust easily after the high-betrayal harm I have lived through. I may have had my first real experience of trust in my life with him.
“Ok.” I say. It has always been true. In the 12 years I have known him, he has always had my back and acted in an accessible, emotionally responsive way whenever I’ve needed him.
In the first few months we were together, Tom got an incredibly cool job installing science equipment on a glacier in Norway for a month, near the arctic circle. It was an exciting job and he was virtually out of connection. The only contact possible was via satellite phone when weather allowed. When the credit card company called the house to say “someone used his card in Norway, card frozen, he must contact directly,” I could yell a short message to a colleague of his through the sat phone, if the clouds stayed clear, for about a dozen dollars a second. Pretty much the definition of logistically out-of-reach.
I already trusted that he was always emotionally available by this point, because he had never, ever given me reason to question his presence – from the day I met him he had always just been there, available as needed. He has never betrayed my trust, so his job is easy. Whatever our status, whether we were friends or lovers or a couple, as long as I’ve known him he had just been around, accessible and responsive. He does this for all women he gets involved with, consistently, whatever stage of their relationship they are at, because he is a safe man.
So this time apart was easy and pleasurable even though we still, in retrospect, hardly knew each other. I taped his first postcard up – a blue polar moon scene – on the headboard and kept his shirt next to me in bed. He left me a surprise box of special cookies I could eat a bit at a time if I missed him, and a card on my pillow to keep me connected while he was away.
These same ‘acts of care’ by a guy who was afraid to be relied on would have had a very confusing and destabilizing effect. What matters was not the acts, the postcard, the cookies, the card. What made these objects work and gave him autonomy was that he kept up his end to be emotionally available the whole time, and thus infused these objects with his accessibility.
Because he openly greets every single attachment need I have as the normal, healthy, eminently meetable things they are whether he is logistically available or not, he could go away for a month with no distress from me.
He was teaching me how an adult man does safety, something I’d never had before in my life.
As a result, this month of solitude was a deep pleasure for me of feeling loved and held and safe and knowing I had a responsive ally in this person, even as he was away having an adventure and I couldn’t call him up.
I’m a massive introvert and I love alone time. I loved feeling safe and held and getting to be in the quiet of our room, the peace and stillness of this free time by myself, which I could enjoy because I was held in a human bond.
It didn’t matter that I couldn’t call him up at the Arctic Circle to tell him about my day, because by being consistently attuned, accessible, and responsive from the day he met me, he had firmly and quickly established beyond a doubt that he was always emotionally available, whatever the details of our logistical situations.
That is how he creates his autonomy. It is the hallmark of an emotionally adult man: a peaceful way of relating in the world in which he can have his autonomy because he maintains safety for himself and those who rely on him.
This is called the dependency paradox. It is a reality of human relating. It isn’t going anywhere.
This is also, as it happens, what it means to be a safe man.
Here is where things get interesting.
He has reliably responded to those needs and been emotionally available whenever I need him from the very first day he expressed interest in me. This is, at times, effort, but it isn’t scary for him, because it is how he was raised.
Because he has always been accessible and responsive, I am capable of assessing whether I really need him or whether I can handle something on my own.
Since he is always willingly there for me and accepts greeting my normal emotional safety needs as what they are – normal and meetable – I become increasingly able to meet his need for space, willingly and voluntarily.
In other words, we both become increasingly autonomous.
This is what autonomy means.
Stop and absorb that for a second.
In order for Tom to experience autonomy, he needs to willingly and consistently meet my need for unlimited availability.
He doesn’t determine for me when I need him; I decide that. He just responds. Always. Even if the need is simply for connection and assurance that he is there.
He trusts me in turn to respond to his need for space by assessing his current needs and mine, and coming for connection only if I do actually need him. He doesn’t tell me I need any particular logistical reason to need him; connection and emotional safety is its own reason, the best reason there is.
This is how he gains autonomy.
It makes sense. Since I have experienced him from the very beginning always just being there, accessible, responsive, and attuned, his job at being a safe man is easy because now I can rely on imaginary him to comfort me.
When he is emotionally available every moment of every day, and has successfully inculcated in me the knowledge that I can readily count on him, I need him less. I can rely on a shirt that smells like him or a familiar habit we have together for connection and safety even when he is busy. I can comfort myself with a kind of tea we drink together, or a favourite cup I have seen often in his hands, or a special place we usually sit together, because I know that real him wherever he is in the world at that moment always willingly welcomes and meets my safety needs as the perfectly normal thing they are. Completely normal, without shame, any time I need.
This only works as long as he fully wants me to rely on him. That wanting to be relied on, that subtle turning towards and full owning of his responsibility, is the condition that makes his autonomy possible.
I have a memory of a few years ago, a time I was much more shaky emotionally, when I did need him while he was at camp, and it was not easy for him schedule-wise, but he found a way to come be with me until I was ok again.
He expressed to me while he did it that it was really hard for him because camp demands his full attention, but he heard and saw I needed him, so he sat with me in a field together near the treeline for around a half hour before a performance and let his presence comfort me in a responsive way, even though it was extremely inconvenient for him. Because he readily does meet the need – with a subtle inner turning towards me, recognizing my body’s signals and greeting them kindly – it doesn’t typically take very long.
I remember that moment, now, at the farm stand and the handpainted welcome sign, as I say “Right. I know you’re always there when it matters.”
And we say goodbye, unload his bags, and I drive off to go sit by the river.
Tom is safe. He doesn’t only treat women this way temporarily when he is excited about them or lusting after them or in love with them. They don’t need to do or be anything in particular to be treated this way. It is a quality in him, that he learned is normal from his parents growing up, so he doesn’t withdraw accessibility when he gets bored or when you fight or after he’s used up your worth to him as a conquest. That is not safety, and only a culture folded backwards on itself could possibly normalize using women in such a disposable way.
Watching him spend time with his mother makes it clear where he learned this; they are connected, they respond to one another, the tether never breaks. It is quiet, this kind of bond, easy to overlook in its incredible significance. Only in seeing a whole, healthy bond in action does one understand what all the rest of us are hurting over, what the shape of the whole picture is that so many of us spend our lives attempting to complete. Tom is not actually unusual: according to attachment research, about 50% of the men on this earth work this way. Those who do not have this capacity may be inclined to believe no one else does, either; and this selective blindness prevents a realistic understanding of reality. Look around at the couples and families who are, on the whole, feeling trusting and loved in their intimate bonds, and you’ll begin to see that this is what they are doing.
He treats every woman he gets romantically involved with well, by being attuned, accessible, and responsive to their needs, regardless of the status of their relationship or the strength of his romantic feelings at any given time, because that is what he expects is normal, and because that is what it means to be an emotionally safe man.
Children wrap themselves around his neck like scarves. After playing with him for an afternoon children begin to say his name reverently, stretching the vowel out like his name is sacred.
Because Tom has created so much emotional safety around him, this week while he is working at camp, autonomy emerges between us. I love knowing I am meeting his need for space. I love it because I love taking care of him and this freedom is what he needs.
There is great pleasure in meeting his need for autonomy, because it means I belong. My responsibility to meet his need for autonomy means I am connected in the most human sense.
I love the luxury of knowing he is always there if I want him, and I love the utter freedom of fulfilling my responsibility to create his autonomy.
It is thus precisely in this binding we do with other human beings that our autonomy lies.
This week while he’s at camp I can use an old beach towel he has dragged around from place to place ever since his childhood home. It’s an endearingly ugly towel, dating from his 80s childhood in Québec: black and green rectangular shapes and red lines on a faded white background, thinned by many washings.
Because of his consistent emotional availability, wherever I am and wherever he is I can wrap this old comforting familiar thing around my shoulders, that he has put his very real emotional availability into, and feel comforted and loved by him, whether I can access him logistically or not.
Limbic brains make ‘rules’ about relationships before we reach our first year of age, and these appear to us as unquestioned laws of reality, encased in ‘neural cement.’ Since his unquestioned limbic pattern holds that people who care about one another shall of course remain connected, he does this for me consistently, and I become able to give him his autonomy. I keep his funny 80s towel as a pillow and I ask myself happily: do I need him right now, or can I wait?
I give this freedom to him; he does not take it against my will. If he were to take it, to angrily and firmly tell me “my needs matter and I will meet them regardless of the impact on you,” autonomy would never emerge. Instead, he would remain endlessly trapped by ballooning guilt and by terrifying, ever-growing needs that appear to expand behind him as he runs.
Because he gives me this power to access connection with him any time I need to, I can now almost always give him his space when he needs it. As a loving adult I understand and empathize with his need to be left alone while he’s at camp, or on a work deadline, or in a meeting, or on a train between Paris and Lyon when he can only send “wifi cutting out sending love” before losing his signal.
I know he fully, without inner withholding, is attuned, accessible, and responsive, so I can receive the safety he is trying to give. Logistics are irrelevent as long as he never withdraws acting in an emotionally safe way.
This may sound like a small or hard to pin down distinction but it is the only distinction that matters. To be safe, and to get autonomy, you must want to be relied on.
He knows this. So he can, like an adult, think ahead. Because he was raised in a healthy way, he understands that if you want autonomy, you meet emotional safety needs promptly and consistently, and your task gets smaller and smaller. So it was a pain to be there for me at camp last time. But here we are next time and I can use an ugly old towel to meet his need for space. Because he showed up then, he has autonomy now.
If you do not want to be relied on, you can do all the same ‘acts of care’ – a towel, a postcard, cookies, wifi from the train – but you will find people whose trust you are attempting to gain never get safe and neither do you.
If you do not want to be relied on, if inside you, you turn angrily away from connection instead of lovingly towards it even as your body mimics the gestures of care, everyone close to you will get more and more hurt and more and more unsafe, no matter the effort you put in to do ‘acts of care.’
Without genuine attunement, accessibility, and responsiveness, acts of care don’t land as emotional safety. Your autonomy will spiral further and further out of reach as you fight harder and harder to get everyone you care about away from you.
Emotionally immature men who believe that autonomy is something you take, rather than something you create, may live their lives in a continual nightmare of ‘needs they can’t meet’ that they never come to understand. They may blame everyone outside them, never perceiving their own inability to create safety is the cause, as needs and hurt spiral up around them.
If instead of greeting my normal, meetable needs as what they are: normal and meetable, he were instead to get angry with me because I need him, or to try to ‘teach’ me not to rely on him by being unreachable, he would find his carefully-built autonomy evaporating.
Even if he went back to being loving and supportive the next day, all of his efforts at building autonomy would become shaky and unstable because – hello? – trust is by its very nature about consistency. Trust is fragile, alive, and powerful and needs to be handled like any object whose strength lies in its subtlety. Like your own eyeball, or a glass art piece whose power derives from fineness rather than force, it must be handled with great care to protect its structure.
If you unilaterally ‘take’ autonomy, hurting people when they need you, rather than building autonomy by being attuned, accessible, and responsive, needs around you will appear to grow and grow and expand behind you, ballooning, terrifying. People who care about you may forgive and forgive and forgive, but if you do not understand what you are doing and do not repair the harm, eventually the task begins to feel impossible.
Like a mythical creature whose body creates volcanoes everywhere they walk on the earth, you do not understand why the world appears to be made entirely of volcanoes.
Trust is a kind of magic; learn the subtle art, or it blows up in your face
The first few days and weeks of a new relationship are crucial. This is when you establish that you are always accessible, responsive, and attuned. At first, good faith makes rebuilding breaks in trust not too hard.
As David Howe writes in Attachment Across the Life Course, in practice, people do not have to be perfect. The phone rings, people are at times distracted. However, if your underlying belief is that you want to be relied on, and your limbic brain holds as an assumption that human connection is healthy, normal, and expected, then you will note small breaks in connection and quickly mend them.
These small ruptures are moments when you do not greet her bids for connection with accessibility and responsiveness, moments when you abandon her emotionally. These ruptures can be quiet, as they are not about the location of your body but about your inner orientation to and beliefs about human connection. “The hallmark of a sensitive caregiver,” Howe writes, “is that the ruptures are managed and repaired.”
Stop. Take that in. This is key.
If in these early moments of harm and disconnection, whether they are quiet or loud, instead of doing prompt repair you make the additional mistake of angrily blaming the woman you’re hurting for her expected feelings of fear and hurt at your hurtful actions, you may create serious harm by not seeing your own limited capacity is the cause of the distress.
If you distort this reality to make it somehow her fault that you are not acting in a safe way, this is unconscious gaslighting.
It is emotional abuse, and it will be very hard for her to trust you after you do this to her, even if she doesn’t quite know why, or even if she continues to believe you are trustworthy as you are doing this to her.
Patriarchy teaches women to be pliant and receptive, to adapt to maintain relationship, and most brutally, to doubt our perceptions. It may take a while before confusion and mistrust builds up to a point that can no longer be sustained. She may just feel crazy, or like the earth under her keeps shifting as you say you are being good to her and acting safe.
If you do this unconscious crazymaking repeatedly without owning it fully, you actively break fundamental trust. If the larger patriarchal fabric of our culture – if the people around the two of you – allow this process to be naturalized, you are contributing to psychic violence against this person, and you and those around you may not even realize you are doing it. Because water, fish. Because a sky-blue marble does not show up against the sky.
Because patriarchy.
I cannot express the incredible feeling of insanity and powerlessness of hearing everyone in a community laud the tremendous nurturing feminist qualities of a great guy who secretly gaslights his partner in ways he doesn’t even see, ways only she, alone and exposed in this vulnerability with no reference points as anchors, can feel. In a world that tells her she is crazy, he’s being so good to her, he’s so good, what a crazy girl.
What a relationship looks like from the outside and what it feels like from the inside can be incredibly mismatched. We so badly want our feminist men to be as whole and loving as we need them to be. We assume the private inside of the relationship must be nurturing and caring, because it hurts too much to know how far there is to go.
This kind of betrayal from inside trust is extremely damaging to people. If this is you, you will find your desperately-hoped-for autonomy always out of reach.
If you talk up your feminist commitments or have cultivated a nurturing, feminist reputation, you can gain trust more quickly than most guys. If you gain women’s trust by talking about how safe you are while you are also unconsciously doing this to them, the gap may lead them to slowly begin to act ‘crazy’ around you over time.
You’ll think it is them. You may tell them it is them. You may really believe this, even if some part of you suspects you are hiding something from yourself that you have yet to understand. You may tell your friends or family how ‘crazy’ your ex is.
And because we live in patriarchy, in which women’s normal emotional needs are routinely deemed crazy, people will believe you. Policing women’s normal emotional needs to protect male fragility is a long and well-established tradition. Just because a paradigm is dominant and naturalized, and happens to work in your favour, that does not mean it is real, or healthy, or just.
Her distress may show up visibly to others while its causes get silently disguised, taking place as they do behind the scenes, on a set structured by patriarchy, that makes this violence so hard to perceive, so easy for us all – including you – to ignore. This is what it means that we are all inculcated into systems of power. Unless we choose to see, privilege disguises its operation. We are never forced to see how we enact it, unless we live with integrity, and learn how to believe those whose experiences we do not share.
What is real is that when men treat me well consistently, I am easy to comfort. When men are good to me, I trust, and I get comforted in seconds. Tom and my other long term partners have been teaching me how normal these attachment needs are by meeting them, which is the only way the nonverbal limbic brain learns. Because my distress is and has only ever been about having healthy normal needs met – proximity, eye contact, being cuddled in a safe way – when guys who ask for my trust meet those needs, I get comforted. It is easy. All it takes is showing up.
All it takes to be a safe man, in other words, is to meet the normal emotional safety needs involved in having a mammalian brain.
You can begin to build autonomy at any time, by beginning to act attuned, accessible, and responsive. You can realistically expect, however, that rebuilding trust after you damage it is a lot more work and takes a lot more time – logarithmically more work and time – than just keeping it in the first place. Imagine repairing an eyeball.
The longer you act unstable, damaging trust without doing prompt repair, the greater your task becomes.
That does not mean it is impossible; it just means you may have spilled an awful lot of milk, and need a longer while of mopping up if you want safety to emerge. You don’t need a bigger mop, or grandiose one-time gestures. You just need to trust time – days, weeks, months of willingly acting in a consistently safe way, knowing it is normal, deriving your inner good feeling from these acts of connection for their own sake.
You do not get to be a safe man by wanting to be. Or wishing you were. Not by telling me how safe you are, how good of a feminist you are. That’s like getting a hot body by wishing you had one, or telling me how often you work out, without ever actually exercising. And in a culture that loudly rewards men for even the smallest acts of reliable nurturance while attacking women who do not quietly, invisibly hold together the world around them, you have an extra responsibility to keep your integrity whole: to name these shearing moments between cultural perception, and reality.
If women you get involved with actually get safe around you, because you are attuned, accessible, and responsive, you are a safe man. You don’t get to determine this. They do.
Faced with the prospect of a new potential lover, the male capacity to bullshit can fill galaxies. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
***
Tom and I haven’t been partners in three years. To my knowledge we haven’t thought of one another sexually in at least two.
When we broke up we went on a camping trip together, and at the top of a volcano at sunrise did a divorce ceremony in which we told each other what we were no longer giving each other, and what we were continuing to give each other.
What we are no longer giving each other is sex, romantic feeling, and partnership – we are no longer committing to live together or have children together or make our lives in the same geographical location. His new girlfriend and eventual life partner will have priority decision-making power over how close he and I can be. We cried and grieved those parts.
What we are continuing to give one another is connection, trust and safety.
The grieving of our sexual and romantic relationship did hurt – we both cried on the mountain that day, and I grieved in many small moments over the following year – but it was healthy and manageable, because our breakup involved no betrayal of trust or catastrophic pain.
He never retraumatized me by repeating the high-betrayal harm I had had done to me growing up. We remained connected, attuned, accessible, and responsive to one another throughout the change. He knew he had accessed the inside of my trust, and understood this great gift and the responsibility it entails. He handled it with the skill that this honour deserved. This is safety.
There has been healthy grieving, the kind that keeps you whole and lets you move on. There was no traumatic grieving, no getting all the way into one another’s trust and then smashing everything up from the inside. He was and is still an utterly safe person in my life.
Held securely this way, I become able to range further and further afield. I have room to expand my inner resourcefulness. Knowing a human bond is there for me at the shore, I have the security I need to swim further out into the middle of life’s current: to develop my inner self-love, build my connection inside myself and my direct connection to the universe.
This is what it means to not retraumatize a woman you get close to. It is a normal amount of emotional maturity, in a culture of exceptionally immature men.
As we have grown accustomed to the parameters of our new relationship, he has needed room and time to date and build relationships without his ex girlfriend hanging around.
I am responsible to meet this need.
I won’t lie, I didn’t get it right at first. At first I got triggered watching him with his arms around a new person, and I had growing to do here. Had we frozen in despair at this stage we may never have gotten to where we are now.
I had to push myself hard to get here, but I owe him his autonomy, and I want him to be happy – and he never gave up on me or on himself, so I got here after a while.
I can now hang out with him and his girlfriend, know my safety with him is solid without needing to check, and duck out happily when he needs me to. I no longer get triggered watching him with someone else, not because we shattered the trust we had built, but because in our current configuration, we deepened it even further into something sustainable and free.
We kept at it without giving up – him asking for his need while consistently meeting mine.
We kept at it, and I love him, so I adjusted, and here we are.
Part of how we got here was we decided together that it would be a good idea if we were in different places for a while as he was dating new people. I teach at a community college, a job that lets me be elsewhere part of the year, so I arranged to spend six months in another city as he was building his relationship with his new girlfriend, so I could keep out of their hair and explore my own autonomy as they were building trust.
He continued to be rock-solid emotionally available for me if I needed him, which happens less and less often these days, organically. We were in touch maybe eight times over that six months. Mostly just for fun, saying hi; a couple of times it was because I or he had a connection need and we comforted and supported one another in the way we always have. I get to be the best friend who gives him relationship advice, and he gets to model for me – not tell me in words, but actually embody – how I deserve to be treated by future men I date. He’s still utterly, utterly reliable.
At this point I get comforted just by reaching out to him in email even before he writes back. Because I know as soon as he gets the message he’ll call me up, with kindness and empathy, and will meet normal needs for nurturance in a normal, healthy way: quickly, kindly, in person, and with goodwill.
His new girlfriend gets a guy who is deeply emotionally mature, and who will always be capable of working things out without running or cutting ties. In this world full of children in grown-up men’s bodies, who start families and then take off, or who live as though they have no ties, or who become cruel when they are no longer excited about you, a man who can see their ex through to safety like that is a huge fucking catch.
This is how autonomy works.
Tom and I can now stretch the tether effortlessly for a week, a month, six months, longer. I can comfort myself easily with this knowledge of his welcome and consistent availability, and so our autonomy works effortlessly for weeks and months at a time.
And Tom has the special knowledge that he has gained and kept my trust so successfully that he, and only he for now, is capable of talking me down from the worst crises in – we have timed it – 15 minutes. More commonly in two. I can get calm in seconds just hearing his voice.
The three men I have been with since him have been terrifically disappointing in comparison, but I’m hopeful there are other safe guys out there.
This emotional reliability – attunement, accessibility, responsiveness – is the core, the absolute core, of being a safe man.
This is what we mean when we say ‘don’t be rapey’ does not get you a cookie. ‘Don’t be rapey’ does not make you a fucking feminist. That is kindergarten.
Shit is so bad we are trying to get a lot of men into kindergarten, but that doesn’t mean that is the bar. So ok, lots of men are getting good at kindergarten. Yippee.
Being a safe male presence in the lives of women you get close to – attuned, accessible, and responsive – is the bar.
That is what is expected. It is the minimum, minimum requirement expected for men who get into women’s trust (or pants) by talking up feminist commitments.
If “don’t be rapey” is kindergarten, then “attuned, accessible, and responsive” is elementary school. Somebody’s gotta set the bar.
And some of all y’all need a little remedial.
So what to do if you recognize yourself in this post?
You may read this and realize you have been hurting someone you care about without understanding why, and you may want to put it into practice.
Here are some common pitfalls to look out for. They fall into the category of cognitive distortions. The key is to catch the distortion when it arises, and not fall sway to it. Eventually you can replace distorted thinking with accurate awareness of reality, but at the very least, you must catch distortions if you want to avoid common traps.
1. “not good enough.”
Internalized feelings of inadequacy are a massive block to moving forward in a good and healthy way. It is crucial that you recognize these thoughts and feelings are taking place entirely in you. These feelings of shame have no, zero, no, valid external referent; if there were no Velcro inside you for external triggers to stick to, you would not experience shame when someone you care about is in distress. They are creating the reality you are witnessing and think is outside you. I mean this not in some cosmic sense, but in a very practical, very pragmatic application.
The reason it matters so much that you catch and begin to recognize an internal shame landscape is that your inner beliefs about yourself contribute the primary push in a vicious cycle in which you feel unconscious shame, so you act in a hurtful way, so the other person feels hurt, so they express hurt (in constructive or less constructive ways) and then you feel more shame and you perceive it as coming from them when in fact it comes entirely from you. You must accept this to begin the climb out of your dilemma. Because turning towards one another rather than away is the healthy optimal pattern, the spiral begins in you, and you must fully recognize this if you are to end it.
Even if there are at times external triggers – if she voices her need for you in a distressed way – if you have a strong inner shame landscape, it doesn’t really matter if she just cries and says she loves you and asks for you to come close, or if she yells and accuses you. If your inner landscape holds a lot of unquestioned shame, you will receive both the same way. She will in turn feel utterly powerless to reach you, even when she sees your goodness at a time you do not.
Keep in mind that for someone who loves you, it may seem absurd that you could be in any way shameful. This is the reality your limbic brain cannot take in. We believe horrible things about ourselves that we would never believe about one another. In their bids to keep our genetic ancestors alive, these parts of our brains learned to create ‘rules’ out of random early experiences. To catch the distortions in these unconscious ‘rules’ is extremely hard.
It may be impossible for her to reach you about this, because no matter how many times she tells you how good you are, you will be unable to receive, perceive, or internalize what she actually believes and feels if there is no place to connect it to inside you. You will literally not hear the good things being given to you. So catch these kinds of beliefs about yourself, and recognize they are completely inaccurate and also are occurring inside you as a significant distortion.
Logic doesn’t really touch these distortions because the relationship between the verbal neocortex and the nonverbal limbic brain is more complex than that. If you have not accepted that the shame landscape is yours and yours alone, no matter how she perceives you in real life out there, you will still believe you are “not good enough” and that will prevent you from exiting the spiral. You are good enough. You are. And chances are, she has told you and shown you and told you this, and you have not been able to take it in. You have to have the gate in order to receive the gift.
The only way to heal this and get able to connect with the reality of your inherent goodness (which, if she has chosen to be with you, is likely much more obvious to her than it is to you) is to work directly on self-love, to recognize and work directly with your inner feelings of self-worth. If you have not done this work you will remain unable to receive the love and care that is likely coming your way unbeknownst to you, and will instead feed the hurt spiral by acting on your shame feelings.
Recognize just how deeply and profoundly any feelings of shame you have are a distortion woven deeply into your limbic brain based in earlier experiences, not the present. That “not good enough” experience is not coming from outside you, even if she yells at you to pick up your socks or cries when you run. The sooner you can begin to understand and work with the true location of the distortion, the closer you will be to sidestepping the engine that generates the spiral. As long as you continue to believe this experience is external to yourself, you will continue to feed it, and it will continue to occur.
2. Despair and hopelessness
Cycles have rhythm. Processes are just that: they have beginnings, middles, and closings. If a cycle does not complete, it begins again in an effort to run its course. This is a good thing, as it means there is hope and you can always try again. When you cause harm and then recognize it and apologize, a process of forgiveness and repair may be attempting to move inside her. When someone has been hurt by a person they trust who realizes belatedly the harm they have caused, a genuine apology initiates a cycle that must be allowed to run its full course. Panicking and freezing it in the middle by becoming defensive is like turning off the washing machine when it is on agitate because you believe it will be on agitate forever. Panicked thoughts freeze one moment in time and do not know what comes next. You must wait and be calm and loving and stay genuinely present, connected, and remorseful while the cycle runs. Stay with it until it arrives on its own at the rinse cycle and then the spin cycle, when clean clothing – trust – becomes available to you again.
In other words, when you have hurt someone you care about, if you want to get to a good place again, you have to understand how healing from that hurt looks and feels so you can ride the cycle through the crest and down to the other side, without interrupting the cycle at a scary point midway. There may be stored up tension from not being believed or hurting from the weeks or months of harm. It has to come out before she can feel heard and the hurt can resolve. You must trust the process.
If you have realized you’ve harmed her, and apologized, and a wave of hurt comes your way, she is not attacking you, she is absorbing your apology and finally feeling heard. The middle of the cycle can look like anger or hurt that finally is able to be voiced, as she absorbs that you are now with her again. You must not listen to your feelings of despair and hopelessness at this moment, as they will lead you to give up before the cycle has completed, which will “prove” to you that there was no hope. This can happen to anyone who had less than optimal nurturance growing up; I suspect that avoidant attachers, because they gave up on getting essential needs met at a very early age, are particularly prone to despair and hopelessness and must recognize these as the distortions they are if they want cycles of forgiveness and repair to complete themselves so moving on becomes possible.
Trust is a physiological process, not a conceptual one; learn how to trust the signs of the body and trust it to move through the stages of hurt, anger, forgiveness, and resolution.
If this seems like a lot of work, well, so is learning how to walk, talk, tie your shoes, brush your hair, or read. Typically we are given these tools and experiences over a long developmental period when we are young, inculcated by caregivers who themselves had healthy models, over many healthy years of development. Parenting oneself as an adult when there were gaps or missed developmental capacities is a lot of work, but it’s work that we need to have a healthy world. One in which our next generations can grow up more whole, and free of the distortions and violence that we unconsciously enact on one another when we do not recognize and heal what was not given to us originally.
This is reality. After a break of trust in which you are not attuned, accessible, responsive, if you really want to protect relationship and build autonomy, the only way to fix the harm and move back towards trust is to do prompt repair. Hold the person, let them come near, look at them, turn subtly towards them inside yourself in a loving way, and apologize. Let them express their hurt. Hold the container, and keep your inner orientation turned towards them lovingly until you move through together to the other side. A calm will emerge if you give the cycle the time it needs to reach completion.
3. Testing for effect
The key to nurturing is to give it because you love giving it. It does not take effect if you nurture while waiting to see if some expected result will emerge. If you give reassurance while waiting to see what effect it has, then Schrodinger’s cat style, the observer will wreck the experiment. No one feels safe when they feel they must get safe or their safety will vanish.
If you reassure while checking to see if you are allowed to go be disconnected soon after, it will land without effect. If she does not respond the way you want while you are waiting and watching for her to, you may fall into the trap of hopelessness and repeatedly disrupt the iterative cycle that is the emergence of trust. Even if this happens quietly, and you think only you notice, on her end it is very loud. It is your contribution to the despair you are feeling. Just like repair, trust is an iterative cycle, too.
Herein lies the paradox: if you seek autonomy, you must genuinely enjoy and want to be relied on in an unlimited way. The truth is that connectedness is the normal resting position for most people, and if your resting position differs from connection, you will have extra healing to do.
If you can subtly turn towards her inside you, instead of turning away, and if you can stay turned towards her, choosing it moment after moment and carefully repairing breaches of safety when they occur; if you can catch your own distorted beliefs and do your inner work to heal whatever landscape of shame is in you, you may find that all your distortions and fears are for naught and that you move through to emotional connection and safety much, much faster than you might expect.
If you would like some books that you can share with others to help you along this path to autonomy and interdependence, these are ones I’ve found helpful in making sense of limbic reality:
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, Bell Hooks
Wired for Love, Stan Tatkin
Hold me Tight, Sue Johnson
A General Theory of Love, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon
Attached, Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller
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*men: I want to be clear here that I am using this term, and all gendered terms, in a trans-inclusive way. Here “men” refers to masculine-identified people. I have chosen not to write ‘men and trans men’ etc in the piece above because I’ve been told and understand trans men do not need their own separate signifier as that suggests they aren’t already part of the main signifier. I also want to recognize and own that the piece above is written from inside a gender binary that isn’t actually real. The dependency paradox works for all kinds of people with all kinds of bodies, but I write best from inside what I know. Gendered violence and power dynamics in binary relationships is where I have insight because it’s writing from inside my life experience – and it’s a serious limitation in my work for folks who want to see themselves in this and who are not properly represented here! Queer, genderqueer and nonbinary folks who have insights as you read, and want to write from inside your experience, your expertise is very welcome. If you have a post to propose, please get in touch – I’d be honoured to promote and amplify a post of your own.
New interview with the author in Australian magazine The Vocal expands on the original Nurturance Culture piece: http://www.thevocal.com.au/violence-nurturance-turned-backwards-nurturance-culture-solution-toxic-masculinity/
See the original viral posts The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture and Dating Tips for the Feminist Man
Do you love speculative fiction and social justice? I am working on a speculative fiction project that deals with the transformations our planet is undergoing, and the undoing of cultures of domination. Cipher is currently seeking collaborators, advisors, an agent, and a publisher. Learn more about Cipher here.
I love hearing from readers! Reach the author at nora.samaran@gmail.com
