When I had my Non-Naive Trust Insight in mid-2020, I initially conceived of it as a patch on what we were doing at the cultural incubator I’d been living in for years, and I drafted this intro in Roam intended to convey it to the people I was living with. Things got pretty weird and I didn’t quite get it to the point of finishing it to share it with them at the time (although it wasn’t private—technically they could have looked, since it was in our shared Roam). So I don’t know how it would have landed. Some of the terminology or assumptions referenced below may be opaque. Feel free to comment asking for clarity.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius
“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” – Rudyard Kipling
Malcolm’s initial introduction to the Non-Naive Trust Dance, mostly written early October 2020
The [[[[non-naive trust]] dance]] is a framework created by [[Malcolm]] for modeling how [[non-naive trust]] is developed within and between people, which of course includes the nurturing of self-trust within each individual.
So far, in this document, I at various points refer to “distrust” or “doesn’t trust”, which is a somewhat incoherent concept in the context of [[non-naive trust]] based on [[self-trust]], where all trust is “positive”; there’s no such thing as distrust.
This applies to all scales:
A guide to being as trustable as you are.
This means that if someone is not choosing the collaborative mindset, there must be something they don’t understand about it, or some part of them that has a different understanding that they haven’t yet integrated. Whatever their concept of “collaborative mindset” is, is in some way confused or incomplete.
This also means that if someone experiences “choosing the collaborative mindset”, there is still some unintegrated part, because if they had a fully-integrated understanding of H3, it wouldn’t feel like a choice, it would just be the obvious way to operate.
To be clear: incomplete versions of the collaborative mindset are not a problem to be avoided—by contrast, they are a necessary element within the bootstrapping process, both internally and interpersonally.
One thing I mean by this is that it cannot start from the assumption that any particular person (or group, or part) is trustable.
Historically, the LRC/Upstart/LSA ecosystem has functionally operated with Jean in the role of trustably-operating-from-postjudgment. This has been vital as part of being able to learn the new mindset to have someone who is consistently not judging and able to say that they’re not judging, because:
However, this approach is fundamentally limited.
One limit it encounters is that, in the learning process, people may not be able to distinguish between “the role model is not judging me” and “the role model won’t enact patterns of behavior that result in pain/suffering for me” (including but not limited to the pain/suffering of feeling judged)
As a result, they will tend to not know what to expect, nor how to clearly articulate their expectations in order to get shared reality on them.
So they may—appropriately—feel betrayed, and this creates a big experience distrust that ultimately needs to be digested.
Even if the role model is operating from a consistent stance of postjudgment, that doesn’t mean the role model can be relied upon in various other ways, and this needs to be talkaboutable without it calling the role model’s postjudgmental stance into question.
Some of the limits are related to us not having been able to adequately point at what “judgment” means in such a way that people could recognize when they or others are doing it, independent of someone else pointing at it.
But the bigger element is simply that in order to truly develop [[self-trust]] and [[non-naive trust]], one needs to start on a foundation of not assuming that someone else is trustable.
(EDIT 2025: H2/H3 is short for “Humanity 2/3” and is similar to “Game A/B”. We’re referring to the cultural platform based on judgment and coercion that has broadly underpinned most of human culture for the past 10,000 years or so. I don’t use these concepts as often any more.)
…in the same sense that there is no such thing as an “H2 person”.
One can talk about “a person who was socialized in H2 and doesn’t know how to do H3” or “a part that is operating with H2 assumptions”.
In much the same way that Game B isn’t about having a tiny minority who understand it rule over everyone else, Getting to a place where a whole person is operating consistently from H3 doesn’t involve anything resembling “handing control over to H3 parts instead of H2 parts”, but “all parts learning what H3 means for them.”
All of these parts are caring for things, and they all need to learn to work with those cares in collaborative ways.
This is related to the above principle, The collaborative mindset is always preferable to the coercive mindset, which is true on all scales. If a given part of someone’s experience is not collaborating, there’s something it needs to understand better.
Nor does it remotely contradict person C trusting B, or B trusting their own relevant capacity.
Different people have both:
(this applies to A & B being people, or parts/perspectives of a person, or could even apply to whole groups)
Often, A has a different perspective, internally, that does trust B.
In this case, one way the scene might go could involve A flipping that part into consciousness/control, which would result in leaning in but would still in some fundamental sense be naive.
Another way the scene could go would be to get those parts in dialogue, so they could come to some sort of larger shared understanding, that would potentially allow leaning in, though might also set a kind of boundary, or whatever.
Sometimes, for A, speaking to the sense of distrust etc and having that be received, is enough to disconfirm at least the surface level of what is happening, and create space to lean in. We’ve experienced this a lot over the years. Sometimes, for whatever reason, it’s not.
There’s a kind of stance that someone in B’s position can access, that says something like “Of course you can’t trust me. That makes sense.”
It’s great when B is able to understand deeply the historical context for the distrust, whether specific to the A-B or related to A’s childhood or [[School-Prison culture]] trauma.
However, being able to understand the specifics is entirely unnecessary to be able to respond from this 100% validation place.
The stance requires only these two things:
From that perspective, one can say “of course you’re having the experience you’re having and interpreting it the way you are! how could it possibly be otherwise?”
We’ve done a lot of this validation here in a kind of implicit way, and my model and experience is that it actually can be remarkably powerful to do it explicitly, repeatedly. There’s a lot of unlearning to do of the H2 culture within which we constantly had our experiences & perceptions invalidated.
This is core to all 3 of the elements-to-be-nurtured in the center of the [[Collaborative Circle]]:
H2, [[School-Prison culture]]., is constantly saying “you should trust”. (EDIT 2025: see Oppressive cultures: you don’t get to know what you know)
As far as I can tell, nurturing H3 requires not just not making that demand but actively subverting the implicit presence of that demand whereever it could arise. This is something that everyone has 100% co-responsibility for.
I think to some extent we’ve avoided doing this explicit validation from a fear that it would set up an external source of validation which would reinforce H2 in some way.
From my experience, that doesn’t appear to be what happens!
I think part of what makes the difference is the unconditionality of the stance described above:
it’s clearly not validating some specific response, with an implication that other responses would be invalid
it’s instead inviting the person into a paradigm where all experiences are valid
Another part of what makes the difference is that everyone is being validated simultaneously.
Even if A says to B “I think you’re judging me” and B is really clear internally that B is not judging A, then B can still say “it makes sense that you can’t trust that I’m not judging me” while also clearly holding “it makes sense that I can trust that I’m not judging you” (although in practice this often does not need to be stated; it’s simply embodied by an utter lack of apology, submission., on B’s part)
People are multifaceted. A may feel safe leaning in in some situations and not in others. Neither A nor B nor anyone else may fully understand why, although with adequate time, space, and technique, it can basically always be untangled and figured out.
It’s common for people to respond to someone feeling less trust than they did some other time by trying to get the person back in touch with the trust they had before.
It’s my current model that this is almost entirely counterproductive.
Here’s how I relate to this now (when I’m on my game)
When I take this perspective, it’s obvious to me that trying to get the person back in touch with the trust they had before ends up pushing away the part that is actually present, which does not build trust with that part. This means that even if I succeed at getting the person to flip into some other perspective, that distrustful part that was there before still distrusts me just as much, if not even more.
I think that in practice part of why people find doing the move above hard is that they become internally disturbed by experiencing an apparent loss of the former connection, and are unable to hold that disturbance.
This could be articulated as an internal trust gap:
and what’s needed here is for both parts to recognize that they’re holding part of the truth:
these don’t contradict
People in B’s position also often seem to think that what’s necessary is for A to internally-dialogue and sort out A’s parts that disagree on how trustworthy B is. This is sometimes possible but even when it is it requires substantial skill and emotional capacity that A may not have (and that B can’t assume A has).
But often the kind of evidence that A1 has used to know B is trustworthy is not valid evidence to A2, and so it’s actually approximately not possible for A to get in sync with B while A2 is active (as opposed to suppressed or compartmentalized or inactive because it isn’t relevant to the situation as construed by A). This is fractally equivalent to how just because Person X trusts both Y and Z in some ways, doesn’t mean Y and Z trust each other. Trust is not transitive like that when it comes to anything complex or interpersonal. (It somewhat is when it comes to deferring to experts on external matters.)
^^< TODO: summary of this model – needs to define what “intrinsic error” is so that the below paragraphs scan; TL;DR = PCT is a cybernetic model of action and perception. some control systems are created by other control systems, but others (such as hungry, thirst, temperature-regulation, sleep, as well as probably more subtle things like belonging or orientedness) are “intrinsic” >^^
First we might ask: what is punishment and why doesn’t it work?
Perceptual Control Theory can articulate this beautifully in a few paragraphs:
Before going on to consider possible complications of this simple picture of learning, we must consider aversive reinforcement, which I have left out of the discussion to prevent confusion. Aversive reinforcement, or punishment, is anything that causes or increases intrinsic error. If a behavior pattern regularly causes intrinsic error, the reorganizing system will be driven into activity by that behavior, and that behavior will be reorganized out of existence. (I trust that the reader can supply his own reminders that avoidance behavior can be a learned control phenomenon, too: reference level of zero.)
As B. F. Skinner (1968) has proven beyond doubt, punishment is a poor way to teach anything. All that punishment can do is cause behavior to reorganize; it cannot produce any specific behavior, because reorganization can be terminated by any change that destroys the feature of behavioral organization causing the intrinsic error. Using aversive reinforcement, one can be sure of eliminating some aspect of behavior, but can have no way of predicting what the resulting new organization will do. Behavior is capable of change in too many dimensions to permit a person to think of controlling it by hemming it in with punishing consequences that leave only the desired behavior unpunished. It would seem that neither punishment nor reward is a good way to change behavior.
In spring of 2018, I had a conversation with H
in which we had an exchange something like this:
H: “I just feel so uncomfortable here! And I know it’s not supposed to be comfortable.”
Malcolm: “Well, it’s one of the most comfortable places in the world to be operating from H3. And one of the most uncomfortable places to be operating from H2.”
I now understand my comment there as having been accurate to how we were holding things at the time, and no longer in line with my understanding of how to make learning work effectively.
Making things maximally uncomfortable for H2 patterns causes rapid reorganization, including:
Similar to the section on validation, I think there has been a model, sometimes implicit, sometimes more explicit of not wanting to “reinforce” the H2 patterns.
The concept of “reinforcing” comes from a conditioning-based model of learning (Skinner etc), which is not compatible with the cybernetic systems model of change that
^^< pull in stuff from the 5k deal doc >^^
Me doing internal NNTD that day in August:
(A & B are both parts in me)
A: I’m afraid I’m not doing a good job
B: No! I know I’m doing a good job.
B: Wait… A, I hear that you can’t trust that we’re doing a good job. That makes sense. I know you’re scared.
A: *feeling seen, cared for*
EDIT 2025: There are now more case-studies of internal trust-dancing. I’d like to publish some of interpersonal trust-dancing as well but they, oddly, tend to feel a bit more personal and/or more of my experiences of them were not in contexts where I was recording. Maybe they’re also just more complicated.
There are now also many other introductions to NNTD!
Explicitly “NNTD”:
Subtly/implicitly “NNTD”:
how do we bootstrap from trust we already have, to the trust we want to have to thrive (and need to have for problems we care about)?
[This post written in about 15 minutes, as part of my new experiment in Writing It Live!]For a much much longer take on the same question, with more examples and angles, read my mini ebook How we get there: a manual for bootstrapping meta-trust.
If you like one-pager bullet-list style posts, I have more:
Suppose you and I are out having a canoe trip. We’re spending the day out, and won’t be back for hours. Suppose there’s a surprise wave or gust of wind and… you drop your sandwich in the water. Now we only have one sandwich between us, and no other food.
If we were in this situation, I’d want you to have half of my sandwich.
That wouldn’t be a favour to you, or an obligation, or a compromise. I’d be happy to give you half my sandwich. It would be what I want. It would be what I want, under the circumstances. Neither of us wanted the circumstances of you having dropped your sandwich, but given that that happened, we’d want you to have half of mine.
Yes—this is more accurate: we would want you to have half of my sandwich.
However, this requires us having a We that’s capable of wanting things.
To explore this, let’s flip the roles—suppose it’s me who dropped my sandwich. I’m assuming that you feel the sense in which of course you’d want me to have some of yours. If you need to tweak the story in order to make that true, go for it. Eg maybe you wouldn’t if “I” dropped my sandwich but you would if say an animal ran off with it—not a version though where you lost my sandwich and you’re trying to make it up to me! That’s a very different thing.
So suppose my sandwich has been lost and your initial response is like “of course I’d want you to have half of mine”.
However… suppose that in response to this event, I’m kind of aggressive & entitled about the whole thing and I’m demanding some of your sandwich (or all of it, for that matter). My guess is that this would dramatically reduce the sense in which you would want to give some to me. You might anyway, from fear or obligation or conflict-avoidance or “wanting to be a good friend” or whatever, but it would no longer directly feel like “oh yeah of course I’d want that.” Part of why, is the breakdown of the sense of We that is implied by my demand—my demand enacts a world where what you want and what I want are at odds, which didn’t seem to be the case back when you felt that sharing the sandwich would be what you wanted. I seem to only care about my needs, not yours, thus I’m not caring about our needs, so it seems like you might get exploited or overdrawn if you try to open yourself towards my needs. (And by “seems”, I don’t at all mean to imply that this isn’t what’s happening—maybe it is! “If you give them an inch they’ll take a mile” is a real interpersonal pattern.)
» read the rest of this entry »Ninth and final (for now) post in “I can tell for myself” sequence.
I know the secret to co-gnosis, aka “we can tell for ourselves”. In a sentence the secret is:
Nobody knows the secret, in the sense that nobody can simply say “I know how it works and this is it and if you’re not doing it then well idk what to tell you but it isn’t gonna work.” There is no once-and-for-all secret, articulable or ineffable.
Everybody knows the secret, in the sense that everybody is acutely sensitive to what it feels like for their sense of “I can tell for myself” to be respected in a dialogue, and so if you’re in a dialogue with them, then the secret of how to have “we can tell for ourselves” is right there inside the “I can tell for myself” and “you can tell for yourself”. It’s whatever satisfies both.
I’ve been having trouble finishing my “I can tell for myself” / gnosis sequence, and part of why it’s been hard is that my answer to the problem I spend the sequence framing is the same thing I’m already trying to point at in most of my posts. This is the meta-protocol all over again.
And so every time I went to write the conclusion to this sequence, it felt like it was just another post I’d been meaning to write for awhile and which might stand better on its own. Having said that, since we’ve built up some new ways of talking, let’s see if I can give some reflections on the meta-protocol puzzle in terms of “I can tell for myself” and “we can tell for ourself”.
I wrote in the previous post: merely getting everybody in touch with their own knowing isn’t enough. When multiple people are both operating from a grounded sense of what they know, they tend to avoid each other because they see things differently and either don’t know how or don’t want to bother sorting out those differences. It’s HARD. But it’s possible.
Bridging between what I can tell for myself and what you can tell for yourself is an additional skill beyond each of us being in touch with our respective knowings in the first place.
On further thought… it’s a bunch of skills.
» read the rest of this entry »Part 8 of “I can tell for myself” sequence. Previously: The eyes-open student: “I can see things my teacher can’t acknowledge”.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
— Bertrand Russell
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the messes wouldn’t end if we could just somehow get everybody (within some context) to have grounded confidence in their sense of “I can tell for myself” even when others say something that seems to contradict it (or find enough people who already have it and herd them into the same room).
Instead we get new messes!
If I can tell for myself that “X”, and you can tell for yourself that “Y”, and it seems to us that it’s not possible for both X and Y to be true at the same time, then we’re going to be pretty stuck! The resulting communicational impasses can be pretty intense, depending on what’s at stake (and how emotionally resilient participants are, such that physical stakes feel more or less gripping). I described above how it tends to play out when there’s a major power imbalance on some relevant axis. What happens when there’s not?
When the conflict isn’t too central, what happens is: they have relationships that work out. This is pretty good! They have enough overlap in what they each want, and how they each already see the world, that they’re able to found a company together or get married and have kids, or co-run a community or some other kind of project, or just be lifelong friends. There may be other arenas where they don’t see eye-to-eye, and can’t figure out how to bridge, but those arenas are sufficiently inconsequential to the relationship that they can be ignored (or periodically explored in a low-stakes way, as friends sometimes do with philosophical questions).
But when the conflict is at the core of their identity and/or purpose and/or worldview (which is broadly the case when we’re talking about spiritual teachers and/or those who are aiming to discover and embody pragmatically & philosophically workable answers to life’s big questions (I count myself as one of these))… well, I may be missing something, but as far as I can tell what usually happens is, oddly: “nothing”. The really high-self-trust people just don’t interact that much. They keep to their own contexts where nobody is self-trustfully challenging their worldviews that are based on generalizations of their direct-knowings. They run their training center, or monastery, or company, or online community, or whatever, where their wisdom can flow and so can others’… to the extent it doesn’t contradict theirs. These contradictions may not even be on the level of “what’s so”; they can even just be “what’s relevant”.
» read the rest of this entry »Sixth post in “I can tell for myself” sequence. On the last episode… Reality distortion: “I can tell, but you can’t”, which opened up our exploration of interactions between one person who is in touch with their own direct-knowing and another person who is more just taking others’ word for it. With this post we’re finally reaching some of the core ideas that the other posts have been a foundation for.
(I left “guru” in the title of this part, because “guru dynamics” are what I call this phenomenon, but I decided not to use the word “guru” in the body of the text. It’s a loanword that originally means “teacher” but of course in English has the connotations associated both with spiritual teaching in particular and thus also with the dynamics I want to talk about here, some of which are well-documented in The Guru Papers. To be clear, I don’t think guru’ing, as a role, is necessarily bad—it’s just extraordinarily hard to do well. But “guru” as a frame… the roles are probably best not thought of as a student-teacher relationship at all. Instead, perhaps, “one who’s remembering” and “one who’s reminding”: ancient wisdom tradition words for this like “sati”, and “aletheia” mean “remembering” or “unforgetting”. Those are awkward though.)
Things get weird when a person who has consistent access to their sense of “I can tell for myself” across many domains—especially spiritual, interpersonal, esoteric, subtle, ineffable., ones—finds their way into a position where they’re trying to help others develop this capacity for themselves.
This happens remarkably often! There are many factors that contribute to this, of which here are six:
So it’s very common for someone who has developed their sense of self-authored direct-knowing to find themselves surrounded by a bunch of people who also want to develop this capacity. (We’ll explore in a later post why there’s often precisely one teacher per learning context; the previous post also hints at it.)
But attempting to teach “I can tell for myself” (or self-trust, or whatever you call it) leads to what is nearly a paradox:
Suppose that when someone says something you don’t understand or resonate with, your two available moves are either to reject what they’re saying or “take their word for it”—a condition which is tautologically the starting point for someone who has learned to not trust themselves in the face of what someone else is saying, and is wanting to develop that self-trust—then if I’m trying to convey “how to tell for yourself”, you’ll either… reject what I’m saying as senseless, or… take my word for it that this is in fact how to tell for yourself and you just need to do it exactly as I say yessirree!
…which is not “I can tell for myself”. Or is it?
» read the rest of this entry »There’s a capacity for knowing, that every human being has, that as a society we’re out of touch with in many important domains. It’s the knowing that comes from trusting our own experience and understanding. It’s not incidental that we’re out of touch with it—our societies are largely organized around this fact. But we could organize a different kind of society where everyone is in touch with it. It’s not easy or straightforward, but it seems to me to be both possible and worthwhile.
There are various fancy terms for this kind of direct-knowing—eg “self-trust” or “trust in one’s own experience” or “wise knowing” or “gnosis”—but in this piece of writing I will speak of it in plain language: “I can tell for myself”. This phrasing is cumbersome but concrete, and forces me to be very clear about what I’m talking about rather than letting the idea float off into some vague attribute one “has” or “doesn’t have”, or some accomplishment or attainment, like “awakeness”. It’s also particularly useful for contrasting it with a different kind of knowing we can call “taking someone’s word for it”. It could also be “received knowing”. I’m particularly interested in what happens when what we can tell for ourselves seems in conflict with what someone else says, and problems that occur when we override what we can tell for ourselves by taking someone else’s word, which I’ll get into in a future piece.
All of this is part of a project you could refer to as “descriptivist epistemology”. Epistemology is the study of how we know things. Much of epistemology is sort of external and prescriptivist: it is the study of “how people should go about knowing things”. Descriptivist Epistemology instead asks: how do we actually go about knowing things? There’s a thing it feels like to know something. Where does that come from? Sometimes we discover that things we knew before, we would now consider incorrect, not because the world has changed but because we’ve learned something or matured in some way. When and why does that happen? And when someone’s very way of knowing evolves, how does it evolve? In what sense did we nonetheless “know” something that was in some sense untrue? How is this different from simply “being misled” or “being confused”?
In order to explore all of those questions, let’s first, explore, concretely and intuitively, the kinds of things that we can know for ourselves, where we don’t have to take someone’s word for it.
Here’s a wide sampling but still totally incomplete list of some examples of different kinds of direct-knowing:
» read the rest of this entry »My friend Visa challenged his friends to explain their thing rapid-fire style, and specifically DM’d me to ask me to do one on my Non-Naive Trust Dance framework. So I’ll write a 6th introduction or whatever this is now, and try to get all the way through the basics to the depths in about 15 minutes of nonstop writing.
Whew! Not quite one breath or one foot, but it was all in one go and it did fit on one page. It took more like 20 minutes though.
For slightly more uhhh edited introductions to NNTD or elaborations, you can check out these posts:
Or more straightforwardly:
“how to give feedback to somebody about something that you’re noticing going on for them, where you suspect that if you try to acknowledge it they’ll get defensive/evasive & deny it”
One of the core principles of my Non-Naive Trust Dance framework is that it’s impossible to codify loving communication—that any attempt to do so, taken too seriously, will end up getting weaponized.
Having said that, maybe if we don’t take ourselves too seriously, it would be helpful to have a template for a particularly difficult kind of conversation: broaching the subject about something you’re noticing, where you expect that by default what will happen is that you won’t even be able to get acknowledgement that the something exists. This can be crazy-making. I often call it “blindspot feedback” although for most people that phrase carries connotations that usually make people extra defensive rather than more able to orient and listen carefully.
To see more about how I think about this, you can read this twitter thread:
But I want the template to stand alone, so I’m not going to give much more preamble before offering it to you. The intent is that this template will help people bridge that very first tricky step of even managing to acknowledge that one person is seeing something that the other person might not be seeing, and having that be okay.
I’m calling this alpha-testing not beta-testing because while I know the principles underlying this template are sound, and I’ve tested the moves in my own tough conversations and while facilitating for others… as of this initial publication the template itself has been used zero times, so I don’t want to pretend that it itself is well-honed.
So I’d like to collect lots of perspectives, of what people think of the template just from looking at it, and of how conversations go when you try to use the template for them.
Without further ado, here’s a link to the template.
I’d love if you gave me your thoughts while you read it. To do that, make a copy, name it “Yourname’s copy of Template” then highlight sections and leave comments on them, then give comment access to me (use my gmail if you have it, or malcolm @ this domain). That would be very helpful. Even just little things like “ohhhh, cool” or “I don’t get why you’d say this” or “would it work to rephrase this like X, or would that be missing something important?”
To try it out, make a copy, then fill it out, and do what you want with it. Then, if you’d like to help me iterate on it or would otherwise like your experience of using it seen by me, fill out this form and let me know how it worked for you (or didn’t).
I’m back in the bay area for the first time in awhile
this has involved seeing some folks that I haven’t seen in a long time (4-6 years)
in a few cases, these were people that I was quite close to years ago (more like 7-8 years)
well, when I say close, I don’t necessarily mean emotionally close. but we had conversations, worked on projects together, and talked about important things
important things like the end of the world
important things like what we were supposed to do about the end of the world, and how to think about the end of the world, and how we were supposed to feel very scared and very determined to do something about it
and there were two people who, in order to be honest in encountering them again, I had to acknowledge that we had some reconciliation to do. it was scary but utterly necessary to say. any change of heart unacknowledged produces subtle weirdness. distrust unacknowledged makes it harder to get shared reality
as I wrote in 2021: Catching my Breath, I’ve done a bunch of healing over the past years about ways in which I was applying a kind of pressure on myself that made it hard to rest. physiologically I had a sense that there was something not right, something I needed to fix, something not okay about the world.
and I feel like my internal pressure has largely eased off. not that there isn’t more to untangle—I’m sure there is—but overall it feels quite integrated
thus in encountering these old acquaintances, I didn’t have a sense of needing something from them, for my own wholeness. but I needed to have a conversation about it in order to for the two of us to have wholeness, and by extension, for the larger community we’re part of to have wholeness.
I’ve been practicing confronting people, to acknowledge past boundaries crossed, even when there’s nothing to be done about it at this point. It’s really profound, just to have my anger heard and received—to have the loop closed. something laid to rest. I did a bit of that with my parents last fall.
in the first case, you arrive midafternoon, and you see me in the co-what-now corner and come over to talk. you start to just dive in with me about something interesting and timely and quite personal, and I’m finding myself needing to just slow down and acknowledge the tension from years past. you seem disappointed locally by the interruption, but overall appreciative that I’m naming it, and unsurprised to hear that it’s there. we agree to talk about it later. you ask if it’s okay that I don’t trust you, observing that in some sense it seems it might not be, and I say I’ll ponder that. I muse to myself that maybe there’s something in you that feels not okay with it, that is splitting and afraid of being tarred as plain bad.
» read the rest of this entry »