434 - The Polyamory Paradox with Irene Morning
Welcome, Irene!
We’re excited to welcome Irene Morning, MS, to the show for today’s episode to discuss her book, The Polyamory Paradox. Irene is a somatic pleasure coach, intimacy educator, polyamorous human, and author of the bestselling book, The Polyamory Paradox: Finding Your Confidence in Consensual Non-Monogamy. Through her coaching, workshops, writing, and in-person sex-positive events, she guides others in creating relationships that fulfill their unique needs and desires. Both her work and personal life revolve around the belief that centering our own pleasure is not only healing on an individual level, but also in service of interdependence and collective well being.
Some of the topics we’re going to explore with Irene during this episode are:
Her somatic pleasure coaching practice and how it differs from other types of coaching.
What made her decide to write The Polyamory Paradox and who it’s for.
Discussing her tumultuous and painful journey into polyamory and how it mirrored a lot of cycles of abuse, yet was not abusive.
How not asserting her own wants created pain for her partner.
Why is pleasure such a focus in her work?
“The window of tolerance.”
Opening up relationships as slowly as one partner wants or needs, and discussing whether that effectively holds the other partner back and how to do this without restricting others’ autonomy and gauge if they’re making progress or not.
Which emotions that we might mistake as jealousy that are actually something else (such as feeling disrespected, left out or rejected, disappointment, being gaslit or mistreated, envy, or fear).
Reconnection rituals.
What is the ‘polyamory paradox?’
Find more about Irene on Instagram at @irene_morning or on her website, where you can also get her book (which is also available on Amazon)!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of The Multiamory Podcast, we're going to be getting into topics that are especially important for people who are new to non-monogamy, or if you know someone who's new to it and maybe you're so old hat that you forgotten what that was like. If you're opening a relationship or just getting into this for the first time, a lot of really intense emotions can come up. Those can sometimes be ignored or not really given as much attention as they could be from the larger polyamorous community who's figured some of that out already. To do that, we are joined by Irene Morning to talk about some topics from her book The Polyamory Paradox.
Irene Morning is a sematic pleasure coach, intimacy educator, polyamorous human, and author of the best-selling book, The Polyamory Paradox: Finding Your Confidence in Consensual Non-Monogamy.
Through her coaching, workshops, writing, and in-person sex-positive events, she guides others in creating relationships that fulfill their unique needs and desires. Both her work and personal life revolve around the belief that centering our own pleasure is not only healing on an individual level, but also in service of interdependence and collective well-being. Irene, thank you so much for joining us today.
Irene: Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Emily: We're really sad that Dedeker couldn't join us because I think the two of you have a lot of overlap in terms of the work that you do. She also does somatic coaching as well, so I'm curious because hers I think focuses less in the pleasure aspect. Can you talk a little bit about what it is that you do, and what somatic experiencing and what somatic coaching means to you?
Irene: Yes, totally. I think the place that feels important for me to start with that is just in clarifying my background as far as training and credentials here. I have about a decade of operating in the wellness industry and doing mostly body-based, yoga-based stuff. I have a master's degree in yoga therapy.
When I talk about somatic coaching, I mean adapting everything from that background, primarily in yoga, and fusing it with my other professional background, which is in sexual health counseling, and bringing those together. I'm actually not trained in somatic experiencing, which is a specific modality.
When I'm talking about somatic coaching, particularly somatic pleasure coaching, I'm talking about, how are we getting into the body in terms of postures, breath work, guided meditation, a self-awareness as we're journaling, to be pleasure oriented, and to work on whatever it is that we're working on through the lens of pleasure. I feel really strongly, especially as we're approaching relationship stuff and sexuality stuff, that centering our pleasure is the only way to really feel whole in it. When we're approaching healing work, people are really coming from a place of pain in some capacity.
Understanding that pleasure gets to be a resource for that, and pleasure is actually essential for balancing that out and being able to move forward from the pain is really important to my body of work.
Emily: You touched on this a bit in the book, but when I heard the word pleasure, my head did immediately go to sex. I thought, okay, this is going to be a book more about sex than certainly our book is. While you do touch on sex some, you talk about pleasure as being a whole body thing that isn't just about sex, and can, as you said, be used to help facilitate healing. Can you talk a little bit about that? Why write a book with pleasure being so intrinsically like a part of what it is the book is about?
Irene: The framework that I put forward in the book, the framework that I use with all my clients, I call it holistic pleasure, but it's really just to say that we as humans, everything that we experience can be boiled down to, "I like this," or "I don't like this." Obviously, that's a very reductionist framing, but most of how our body is set up is to give us that yes or no.
If this is a no for me, I want to move away from it. It doesn't feel good for me. It's probably not serving me on a biological basis. If it feels good to me, I'm going to lean into it and try to get more of it.
So much of how our culture is set up is to actually disconnect us from listening to those body signals. For most of us, as we're coming into our adult selves and realizing that we're unhappy with some aspect of our life or we want to be working on something to feel more fulfilled, to feel more connected, to feel more in tune with ourselves and our relationships, our work, whatever it may be, learning to reclaim our own sense of pleasure can be really, really directive in actually getting to that sense of fulfillment. I like to present to people, we-- Obviously, I'm biased doing somatic work, but we always have a body. The body is the vessel through which we experience everything. For cutting ourselves off from it in all these ways, and learning to ignore it and suppress its signals in all these ways, we're not actually experiencing ourselves to the fullest. Because we live in a society that has so closely paired the concept of pleasure with sex, and we're such a sex-negative culture, in order for us to move through some of that, we have to reclaim our sense of pleasure.
Jase: It reminds me of some conversations we've had on the show before about that idea of, what does pleasure mean? Yes, we do tend to think of it only as being about sex. There was an exercise at one point in the book where you talk about these four particular categories I guess of pleasure. We have, I wrote this down here in my notes, the physical, so sex would fit in that category, as well as other things like massage, or working out, or cuddling, or eating good food, or something like that.
Then you have mental, which might be learning something or really engaging intellectually on a topic. Then you have spiritual or energetic, which could be something like meditation or listening to music, or doing art, or something that's fulfilling in that way. Then you also have relational, which I thought was interesting to add that category. It felt a little bit different from the others, but relational being that feeling of connecting with someone, which could also be cuddling, or sex, or things. There can be a lot of overlap between these. For you, that could also be spiritual. You could have something that fits in multiple categories.
I liked personally going through that exercise to think about, what are some things that I find pleasure from that I don't immediately associate with the word pleasure? I think something like learning or even listening to music is not something that would usually come to mind right away, but those were things that made it on to my list. That was an interesting exercise.
I'm curious for you, in working with your clients and with yourself, what are some things that really surprise people or that they can get out of making that type of a list?
Irene: There's two things that immediately come to mind for me. One is, the clients that come to me wanting to work on things related to sex, we always start with that inventory of like, we're not just going to dive into what's happening in your sex life, we're going to look at, are you engaging your sense of pleasure in other areas of your life? If not, that's probably creating even more pressure on your sexual pleasure.
Usually, when we go through that exercise, people will figure out one realm or maybe two of them, or somewhere in that chart that they wind up making. They'll have an aha moment of like, "Oh, here's this place where I'm actually really not getting this nourishment, where I'm not even thinking about pleasure in this part of my life." Nurturing that, focusing on that for a little while often helps to take some of the pressure off whatever they're feeling in terms of sex and relationship pleasure.
That's one, and then I think the other is helping people understand that when we're talking about pleasure in that way, small is actually really best. I find the other thing that comes up for people around the concept of pleasure, again, particularly sexual pleasure, is that women or vulva-bodied people need to be having orgasms from penetration, or that sexual pleasure has to be this big explosive pornographic expression that they just have never been able to tap into. There's a lot of internalized bigness around sexual pleasure.
Helping people understand that in relation to that, starting really small and tuning in to actually the smallest embodiments or the smallest expressions of pleasure is what will help you grow it with more ease and actually fast.
Not like we're trying to go bigger and faster. That's actually exactly the opposite of what I'm saying, but paradoxically, when you tune into the really small experiences of it, that is what grows it more easily, more quickly. That winds up being true in all the other realms as well.
Emily: There was a section in the book a little bit later on where you were talking about blockages in pleasure. You used an example of clients of yours that were having triggering feelings come up after their partner was coming home from a date. They were having a really challenging time with it, and you went through the exercise with them. Basically, the conclusion was that they found a blockage in pleasure or a blockage in a different part of their life like their work life. That once they untangled that, they were able to not have as much challenge and distress over their partner having a fun time with somebody else outside the home.
That was really interesting to me because we so often will have issues with something that our partner's doing, but it really may not be about them. I'm curious for you, how do you tell the difference? How are you able to parse out, "Okay, I'm having an experience of something that's difficult with my partner, but it's not about them. It's about me and this other avenue of my life."? To me, so often we're just going to go immediately to blaming our partner and not looking inward and questioning those other things that might be happening. How would you tell someone to figure out the difference there?
Irene: I'm not sure that we always can discern, and that might actually be a lofty aspiration, to always be able to discern. I think there's a really important part of being in relationship in terms of accepting that sometimes we're not going to be able to parse that out, and sometimes we are going to be projecting. Sometimes that's just going to be complicated and messy. I say that because I don't want to set up unrealistic expectations for people that, "Here's the tool that will always get you to the crux of it."
Emily: Sure.
Irene: One of the things that I say to my clients often is, when we're in an uncomfortable place with a partner, we want to be looking at both of those things. Is there a request that I need to make of this partner that will help appease the tension or the conflict? Is there some need from this relationship that isn't getting met that I actually just need to advocate for differently? Also, what's the piece in terms of my own history and my own feelings here? Can I look at my own experience and do some assessment?
The concept that was coming up for me as you were speaking about that was doing that pleasure realms inventory and actually looking at how am I accessing pleasure in each of these four categories at this particular moment to see where maybe I'm not getting what I need in my own life, and see if that might be bringing up old feelings from another chapter of my life or another relationship.
If nothing comes up in that inventory, then nothing comes up, but sometimes it does. For me, it's always the both end. What am I looking at in myself, and also, what am I looking at in the relationship?
Jase: I like that idea of-- Where you started that is that you may never know for sure or you might not-- Or maybe you do figure it out in this one moment, but that doesn't mean in the next moment you'll also know. I think that's, in general, just a good thing for all of us to keep in mind, is that, I think when people are doing relationships, which involves a lot of feelings, intentionally so, right? Relationships have a lot of feelings involved. Is that because that's scary and because that kind of introspection can be hard, and we don't see it modeled a lot, right? Instead what we get is people posting some kind of relationship advice on social media that's a very black and white, "Do this and you're happy, do this and you're not." It takes all different forms, right? From the more pickup artisty world or a very woo-woo spiritual tantra kind of way of approaching it, and everything in between. There's this whole realm, but where we all want these easy, "If I just do this or if I always follow this, then I'll always do it right."
I just think it's so important to take a moment to sit with that and remind everyone, that's not how it works, and that part of this is learning to be better at realizing that it's always an exploration, and that honestly, if it wasn't, we would all lose interest in relationships immediately anyway. If it really was just like, "Follow these rules," and you do it, we'd all be like, "Yes, relationships are boring," and move on to something else.
Irene: The thing that comes up for me as you're saying that is-- Thinking about people's intentions as they're getting into non-monogamy and as they're approaching the transition from monogamy culture to trying to participate in non-monogamy, whatever that means for them, I feel like I've been having a lot of conversations lately of people curious about it. This is something that I see I think as non-monogamy is becoming increasingly mainstream. Not that it's mainstream, but gaining popularity, gaining visibility, gaining resources importantly. A lot of people have curiosity about it and want to start dipping a toe in it or think it sounds appealing for X, Y, and Z reasons. I'm watching people get really fixated on figuring out before they're in it fully. Thinking that they can figure out what structure would suit them best, which I think is an important exercise. I want people to be having that thought process, and you really don't know until you're putting it into practice. Understanding like, not, "What are the tools that I need to get it right?" but "What are the tools that I need to keep evolving? I'm going to keep evolving no matter what the thing is in front of me."
Jase: I think it'd be great if people kept that in mind for all types of relationships too, not just non-monogamy. We have this idea in monogamy as well that, "If I just do it the right way or find the right person, then nothing's a struggle, everything's easy." That's also not how that goes, right? We're just less likely to blame it on monogamy because it just seems like that's the water we're swimming in so we don't even see it.
I remember years ago-- Gosh, where was this? I can't remember if I read this somewhere or someone told this to me or what it was. This story of this woman who had been married for 50 years and someone younger was asking her, "How's that been? What's that been like, being married to the same man for 50 years?" She was like, "Oh, I haven't been. I feel like I've been married to at least 10 different men. They were all the same body and they all had the same name and they were the same person, but he's a different person at different points in our 50 years. He's continued to change and so have." We have this idea that, oh, you find this one thing, it stays static, and that's just not how it works.
Irene: Which honestly brings me back to the focus for me on pleasure, which really for me is a focus on embodiment and understanding how to stay in the body as the body changes, to keep attuning to what feels good to me in this chapter of my life or today versus tomorrow. Letting it be what it is in each present moment, again, as we evolve, because none of it stays the same.
Jase: This is something that you didn't really get into in this book, but I was curious to hear your thoughts about. When we talk about pleasure, it's related to a topic-- I was actually just listening to an episode of The Secular Buddhism Podcast where he was talking about kindness to yourself. Talking about the difference between kindness and niceness. That's the distinction he made, where being nice is that avoiding anything that's difficult or just eating ice cream because it feels good, or self-care to get away from the bad feelings. That's nice. It's right there in the word, but that that isn't ultimately the best kindness we can do for ourselves. When it comes to pleasure, I feel like there's that same concept of, how do you distinguish between what's just seeking pleasure all the time versus what's, I don't know how to describe it, a more holistic, more kind type of pleasure for yourself or more long lasting or however you want to describe that? You'd probably do a better job than I would.
Irene: If I didn't take a stab at synthesizing that, the word that comes forward for me as you're asking that is fulfillment. That feels like an important differentiator for me around what I would maybe call holistic pleasure versus straight up hedonism. I'm a fan of hedonism. I can get down with hedonism. Not bashing hedonism. It's not the framework from which I coach, because we can burn out. It's not sustainable for most of us. For some people, cool, but I think part of what I'm getting at in those four realms and asking people to look at them all together is, if we're just following the thing that feels good in one of those realms, if I'm just leaning on a body-based pleasure that is actually somewhat fleeting, and I'm not tending to what is mentally or emotionally or relationally or spiritually also giving me pleasure, I probably won't actually be able to stick with that for very long. It probably won't serve me for very long. There's something about looking-- Also, I should say for the therapists out there listening or anyone who knows this model, this model of pleasure is actually adapted from a biopsychosocial approach to humans and healing, which says we need all of these different layers of ourselves to be met and supported in order for us to be our fullest self. It's just taking pleasure and applying that to, okay, we have different parts of being human, we have different aspects of being human. How do we make sure that they're all working together? That for me is the distinction between the fleeting-- I guess the parallel for your example would be the nice pleasure of just what feels good, versus the deeply fulfilling pleasure that helps me actually really be connected to myself and others, and living a robust life for an extended period of time.
Jase: I just wanted to explore that a little, because it was something that I'm thinking about a lot, that getting to know ourselves is always this challenge, this push pull, like you mentioned earlier, of we don't have a foolproof way to always know where a feeling's coming from or where a discomfort is coming from, to just, I guess, emphasize that idea that we're always exploring it. That it's not even quite so simple as just, "What feels good right now? Go do that," and that's it.
Irene: I think the other thing that feels important to mention on that is that I don't think of pleasure in terms of avoiding what's uncomfortable or challenging or even painful for us. I like to talk about it as resourcing for facing those things. If we recognize that we're using pleasure just as certain forms of escapism, that's not really what I'm after here. It's more like if I'm in a really challenging period of my life, for example, I had two family members die this year, and it's been really hard in a lot of ways. There's been a lot of grief and a lot of stuff to sort through psychologically. In facing that, it means that I've been more conscientious and more specific about how am I going to support myself by making sure to also access pleasure while I'm grieving. It's not like, "Let me just get out of this."
Jase: I like that distinction a lot, that it's not just about avoiding any discomfort, but about, how do we approach those things? I like that distinction a lot.
Irene: I talk about that some in the book too in terms of facing conflict with partners. It's like, how can you actually use pleasure-- When I'm talking about pleasure in that realm, it's really meant-- When I talk about it as a resource, it's really meant in terms of self-regulation or co-regulation. How do we use pleasure to regulate so that we can be in the parts of our nervous system where we can communicate effectively?
Emily: We just had an episode about spiritual bypassing, and I think it is tricky because so often we want to use things in our life that really are there to deepen and motivate us and make our lives better, but sometimes they can be used as a crutch. You essentially just said that, that sometimes our pleasure, we can tap into things because we want to escape the challenges that are happening in our life. I think it is that tricky thing of making sure that we can tap into those things when we need them and that they can help enrich our life, but not that they're there only to make us turn away from the challenges that we have to face in order to evolve and get better in our life. I appreciate that you talk about that and the distinction a bit there.
Irene: You actually, in this moment, just gave me an aha about my own work. Thank you.
Emily: Oh, good. Excellent. I'm glad to be of service.
Irene: Often when I'm explaining this framework to people, I'll set it up as, for example, dancing might check off all four categories for you. You might be doing a pleasure inventory and put dancing under physical pleasure, under mental pleasure, relational pleasure, and spiritual pleasure. What I have not framed yet, that I think I'm going to dig into a little bit more, is it may actually be a good way to check if something is in support of you in a holistic way, to say, "I'm tapping into this as physical pleasure in this moment. Does it also support my pleasure in the other four realms?"
With spiritual bypassing, if we're doing something that gives us pleasure, let's say I'm eating ice cream to feel good, but that's not actually going to support my physical pleasure. It's going to give me a stomach ache, but I'm doing it because it gives me emotional pleasure to avoid something else or to be a placeholder for something else. I'm regretting this example a little bit because I actually really don't feel that way about ice cream. It may actually be helpful to put that in the category that you're trying, that you know you're using it for in the moment, and then say, "Does this serve my other realms of pleasure or am I actually using it to the detriment of a different realm of pleasure?" Like a checks and balances system.
Emily: Yes. That's an interesting distinction.
Jase: That's a fun way to think about it.
Emily: Yes. I think definitely you can have certain pleasures that really do only check one box potentially, and that's okay. I agree if it's at the detriment of other things, then that's where maybe the issue comes into play, and that's where maybe it's not going to be serving you in the way that you ultimately want it to.
Jase: Awesome. We want to get into a little bit about the book itself, why is it called The Polyamory Paradox, as well as some of the things that we found a little bit challenging in this book. First we're going to take a quick break to talk about how you can support this show if you appreciate this content and want this to continue being available to everyone out there in the world for free every week. Take a moment, listen to our sponsors. If any of them seem interesting to you, go check them out. It does directly support our show, and either way, we will see you on the other side.
I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about the book as a whole. The book is called The Polyamory Paradox. I guess first question is, what made you decide to write this book and who's it for? Then I want to get into the paradox itself. Starting out, what made you decide to write this and who's the intended audience, who it would help? We have some thoughts about who we think this would help as well, but we're curious to hear from you first.
Irene: I'm really curious to hear your thoughts. I decided to write this book because when I started actually practicing non-monogamy, it opened up a lot of triggers for me. As someone who has complex PTSD, it brought all of my relational trauma right up to the surface in a way that knocked me out, like screwed up my sleep schedule, interfered with me working, really was debilitating. It was this very confusing experience because everything that I was learning about non-monogamy resonated with me deeply. I felt like I'd found who I really am, and was like, "Okay, now I have a word for this thing that I am at my core. I'm coming to understand I am polyamorous. This is me. Holy shit, I can't believe I've been not exploring this my entire life." Then actually in putting it into practice, was having the experience in my body of utter panic and dysregulation.
Most of the resources that I was looking to at that point-- This was years ago now and we didn't have nearly as much stuff out there that's actually helpful in the non-monogamy helping world. My shame was essentially exacerbated by a lot of the resources that I was looking to. I wasn't finding stuff that was talking about how intense that experience in the body was. I felt like more of the messaging I was encountering was like, "Figure out what your insecurities are and handle your jealousy."
Emily: It's a little more theoretical.
Irene: Yes. It didn't feel practical for how intense the experience was, and it didn't make me feel seen in terms of having that type of trauma. Also, I think the therapy world is getting a little bit better with this, but I was really struggling to find a therapist who was competent when it came to non-monogamy. I kept running into the question, "How would this be different if you were monogamous?" and I was like, "That question's not working for me." That took me into focusing on this. Once I figured out a lot of it for myself and talked about it a lot more openly, obviously, that influenced my work, and brought a lot more people to me who were going through the same thing. The book was really meant to be the resource that I wish I'd had at that point, that a lot of my clients were wishing that they had to help with some really practical stuff of, how do we think about moving through this transition, shifting from monogamy to non-monogamy, when it brings up some really, really, really hard stuff in our bodies?
Jase: That deprogramming aspect or the unlearning and the lack of role models and things that we have, all makes it challenging. To go to my impressions reading it, who I think this book is best for, it definitely feels like-- It's a lot based on your own story of coming to this. I would say it's great if you want a book that really acknowledges those struggles and that feeling of panic and stuff when you're new to it. Particularly for people opening up previous relationships, that that seems to be a throughline through a lot of it. A lot of it's based around a lot of focus on this one primary couple that's opening up and exploring this, and the ruptures and challenges and things that can come up through that process, as well as I guess just being someone who's new to it and going through that unlearning process.
It was interesting. Emily and I were discussing, before you got on the call, our own experiences of, which parts of this do we relate to and which don't we? There were some sections in there, specifically, there's one where you talk about this feeling of when one person goes off on a date and maybe spends the night with someone else and then they come back home. Again, we're assuming these people live together and that they have a home together, but coming back home, that there's some repair that's going to be needed between those people. It's interesting because when I read that, I was like, "No, I disagree completely," because that's not even at all my experience of my relationship right now. My relationship right now with Dedeker is one that we're almost to our 10-year anniversary and that we've been polyamorous literally that whole time. We're not in that situation. We're not who this is really written for, I would say.
Then Emily and I talked about, when we first opened up, we could definitely identify with that feeling of, "Oh, gosh. This is an uncomfortable feeling that we need to somehow fix." I'd say ironically, sometimes our efforts to fix and do that repair can actually cause some of the other problems.
Irene: Totally.
Jase: I feel like, thinking back through our experiences, being like, this book is written for that, "Oh, my God. I'm just starting on this and have no idea what's going on and freaking out. No one seems to understand." I think that was my impression of it.
Irene: It's definitely meant for that transition period of trying to open up, trying to explore. I'll say it's also, in my opinion, fairly basic in what it's putting forward as far as embodiment stuff, and explaining nervous system dynamics and regulation practices and all of that kind of stuff. It was really meant to be a book that took beginning non-monogamy and beginning to understand somatics and put them together, so that making that transition could be supported by an understanding of somatics.
I wasn't trying to do any advanced-level stuff there, but just to help people in making that very particular shift in their lives, and not just from that intellectual place of, "Oh, I like this idea, so here it is."
Emily: I did try to tell Jase, we have been in this spot before. We're just not there now. If you do recall, at the beginning, there was a lot of challenge when he came back from a date and I was having a lot of feelings. Then we would need to at least talk about what was coming up, and collaborate on the best ways to make ourselves, and me in the moment, or him at later times, feel as good as we possibly can with those challenges that arose.
It's interesting just because I think that even though the book is geared to that transitionary time, a lot of these things can come up when we don't necessarily expect them to in other relationships. We may have a primary partner and that's definitely not the case for everybody. Even if you are a solo polyamorous person who's had a long-term relationship and then your partner just starts dating someone new, for instance, you may unexpectedly have a moment of like, "Whoa. I'm getting really triggered by something, even though I haven't felt that in years, but for whatever reason, this is bringing up these types of emotions that are really challenging for me." I do think a lot of what you wrote can still be applied in various stages of relationship, even though I understand that it is geared towards one specific group of people.
Irene: Absolutely. I didn't touch on attachment styles at all in this book. I felt like well, if I really think about it.
Emily: It's been done.
Irene: Yes. I'm like, "We don't need one more book with one more person explaining attachment styles. Polysecure was enough for the whole poly world in that regard. Just go read a chapter from that." That reminds me of, we can have different attachment styles with different people and in different relationships. Our attachment style is not this fixed thing. Similarly, when dynamics change in whatever the relationship landscape or ecosystem, it can bring up stuff that we didn't realize was in there.
A lot of that earlier expression that you're talking about between the two of you of, "Okay, this is bringing up feelings and we need to talk some of it through," and then moving to a much, I'm going to call it a more secure place later on. Part of the thing for me in that transition from monogamy to non is actually just learning what trust in non-monogamy is and learning a new type of trust in a romantic or sexual partner. If we're coming from monogamy culture, we don't have that model of, "Oh, I trust you in how you date other people." That's a very new, very particular type of trusting someone else.
Emily: That you wouldn't really know until you do it.
Irene: That you wouldn't really know. That's some of what you're building in-- If you're having fear or anxiety or feelings of abandonment when a partner is going out on a date with someone else, part of it is that you're learning how they date. You're learning how they navigate relationships outside of yours, and humans really don't like unknown. You sitting there not knowing that about someone that you feel so close to can be really scary in the beginning. Or when you see them dating someone completely new that maybe you have questions about, or there's some projection that you're not aware of, they remind you of someone from your past and you're not quite putting the pieces together. There's so many elements involved that can stir up stuff that asks for our attention.
Emily: You talk about this concept in the book a lot called the window of tolerance and I really, really liked it. Can you explain to our listeners what that is? Maybe we can talk about it a little bit more.
Irene: The window of tolerance, I always forget who actually coined that term, but I'm sure it'll come right up if you Google it. It is essentially to describe in our nervous system, which dictates our entire experience of how our body's operating and how we perceive the world, and how we interact with everything. In our nervous system, there's a range of, I'll call it optimal functioning. In that range of optimal functioning, we are able to digest food and feel relaxed and access the parts of our brain that give us logical thinking and communication and reason and creativity, and all of the really beautiful connective things about being human. In short, that's our window of tolerance. Outside of our window of tolerance is when we are physiologically triggered, so stress gets us to the edges of the window of tolerance and then actual triggers. When we're talking about trauma, we mean getting outside the window of tolerance for an ongoing period of time. Stress gets us to the edges, and then we can come back down. When we get to the outside of the window of tolerance, it's really hard for us to communicate properly. Sometimes people will go non-verbal. That's where we might experience panic attacks and the body shutting down in certain ways. Or you might have been in an argument with someone where you actually had the sensation in your body that you wanted to bolt and leave the room or get out of the house. That's your flight response actually trying to get you away from a situation where your body feels threatened. All of those kinds of things that feel like extreme reactions in the body are outside the window of tolerance.
When I'm talking about pleasure, like what I said earlier about it resourcing us for the challenging stuff, I'm talking about us being able to stay in that window of tolerance, in that space of optimal functioning so that we can be communicating in the ways that are effective and connected in the ways that we want to be.
Jase: In the book, you gave the analogy to a muscle, and how the way that we increase the strength of a muscle is by putting it under stress and it breaking down and then repairing. You stopped there with the metaphor. I really liked it as someone who's really into physiology and stuff like that, was that thing of-- People in the sports or just fitness world will talk about the concept of overtraining. That's that if you're constantly putting that muscle under stress, like you're lifting really heavy weights every day, you're actually going to make that muscle weaker. It's not going to build itself back because it's constantly at that edge. You talk about that in the book in terms of, by always being right at the edges of this tolerance, that actually, the window decreases because our body is trying to keep us safe. It's like we're at this edge too much. I'm going to push you outside of it so you stop, so that you shut down or you get away or you escape or whatever it is. That idea that we also don't want to just be comfortable all the time. We do want to grow and push ourselves, but it's finding that balance of you can't be in that state all the time or you're just not going to grow. Also, if you're just in the middle of that comfort zone all the time, you're never growing and will probably feel lackluster, and bored, and interestingly, a lack of pleasure, if you just stay in that comfort zone all the time.
Irene: Yes, exactly. I was bringing it up in the book in terms of talking about opening up an existing relationship or building a relationship that's going to be open in some capacity, where if one or both of the partners are experiencing that as intensely stressful or even triggering, we need to look at the pacing of it. I see a lot of people in my work who feel like, "Okay, now I've made the decision to put this into practice in my life. I'm non-monogamous now. It's balls to the wall. We're dating everyone." That doesn't actually allow for our nervous system to fully integrate our sense of safety in what we're doing. They're trying again and again and again to get more comfortable with it, but not taking the pauses or the downtime in between those experiences to fully integrate and digest them and orient to how safe they can feel with what has happened, to then take that sense of safety into the next experience and have it hopefully be a little bit less challenging.
Emily: I like that idea that you do it just a little bit at a time to get your body to regulate. We're going to be potentially pumping the brakes if somebody is having a challenging time with non-monogamy. We're opening up the relationship as slowly as the partner who's potentially having a more challenging time in it needs or wants. Is there ever a time at which that might be holding the other person in the relationship back?
Maybe you need to just jump before you're ready, or you're holding the person back who really is excited about this, and they're not able to express themselves in relationship as much as they want. How can we move forward without restricting each other's autonomy or their needs, or how do we gauge whether or not we're making any progress in feeling better about opening up in general?
Irene: This question and the answer are so multifaceted for me. This is where I have some contention with some of the stuff, like the, I don't know, more traditional line of thinking around non-monogamy that I felt like I was encountering a lot when I was first starting, was along those lines of like, you'd figure out your insecurities, you deal with your jealousy, but you do not impede upon your partner's autonomy.
There's a couple pieces for me where I think about non-monogamy very much more in terms of ecosystems. It feels easier for me to say, "Can we go a little bit slower?" if we're thinking about this as a whole ecosystem.
Emily: What does that mean to you?
Irene: I feel like some of the pushback around asking to go slow is often like, okay, that means you're asking another partner to slow down, or it's not taking into consideration how a partner outside of that couple, like the other partner that someone might be dating, how they would feel about it. There's a communication piece with any external partners, and this is my ideal. This is my lofty ideal, is that we're all in non-monogamous ecosystems where when someone hears that a partner is really struggling with something, there's empathy and compassion around, if that means that we need to slow down a little bit in some way, as long as we can define those terms and agree upon those terms, as our default, we're on board with that. Where we get into some challenge around that is actually in the nitty-gritty, can we get everyone to agree to the terms? I think that's what the question is actually more about, is like, what if all the expressions of that are actually asking people to give up the things that they want or not even pursue the things they want in the first place?
For me, it's actually about, what is that negotiation of the terms? It feels important to also name-- The other skill set we need around that is forgiveness and repair and understanding that to make these kinds of transitions from monogamy to non-monogamy, we're going to make mistakes, we're probably going to hurt each other, there are going to be miscommunications. Can we set the intention to not take that personally, but to say, "We're playing with our edges here. That is what happens in this transition. We're going to bump into some boundaries that we don't know exist until we've hit them. That's going to probably be painful and a little bit messy."? Can we go in with eyes wide open about that and understand that no one's doing it from a place of malintent, and trust each other in that, so that when those things happen, we're orienting to, "How do we reconnect? How do we come back to the feeling that we care about each other?"?
Again, to actually answer the question a little more directly, I think what's really important to me in navigating those conversations is that people have a level of self-awareness where they're only making agreements that they can actually commit to. The person who's maybe asking for slowness, asking in very specific terms what that means for them, also agreeing to points where we revisit and assess and get clear about what is it that we're assessing, like what are our metrics for, "Are we making progress? Are we feeling better?" All of it gets very specific. Making specific requests for what the structure is, making specific dates that we're going to check in, making specifics about what's the assessment, how are we trying to measure this. Then the person who maybe is on the other side who's being asked to slow down a little bit, they need to really only be agreeing to those things or negotiating around those things if they actually can give in that way.
That's where I see really a lot of trickiness around this, where I see couples trying to navigate that and someone agreeing to it, but then constantly saying, "You're holding me back," or constantly bringing it back to, "I wish I had more freedom to go do X, Y, and Z, but because of where you're at psychologically or emotionally, I'm focused on you." It's not really that supportive or caring if you're making me feel bad about it.
Jase: Right. It happens on the other side as well, that thing of, "Oh, yes, I agree to this." Then it's constantly the story about, "Look at what you're putting me through because you want to do this thing and I don't." Both sides, yes, it's like finding that balance, and also, I think, sometimes being honest about what actually is a core value or those real significant needs or wants. That might end up meaning this relationship isn't one that's compatible. It doesn't have to mean that you don't love each other a lot or think each other are great, but this just might not be a relationship you can do. I think that's another hard thing that people-- If you come into that thinking that's not an option, I think it can actually get in the way of being honest and being clear about what it is that you need.
Irene: 1000%. The other thing on my list here is keeping the option to break up on the table. If you can't agree to that really genuinely, if it's not within your capacity, then thinking about other options for what that means.
Emily: I just wanted to point out, you talk about this later in the book as well regarding a story that happened to you and your partner that gets pretty sexy, I will add. You'll have to go check it out in the book, where the two of you vaguely talked about something and then it ended up becoming a fight because you had thought one thing and your partner thought the other, and neither of you got really granular in terms of like, "No, this is what I mean, and this is what I want." It was just an amorphous request that neither of you were able to fulfill or talk about, like, "This is actually what I wanted from this encounter that you're having with this other person or not."
I appreciate that you talked about that, because so often we do it all over the place in relationships. We just say something as a preference, but it's not actually specific in terms of, "No, I really would prefer it if you didn't do that thing." Getting really granular in those agreements, you get into that, which I really appreciated.
Irene: Back to that question of affecting someone else's autonomy, stating our own preferences is not affecting someone else's autonomy. I want to actually be really clear about that. Saying, "I would prefer if you didn't X, Y, and Z," is not me making them do anything. It's saying my own preferences, and then we get to negotiate, are we going to make agreements around that or is that just my preference? They're still going to operate however they need to, that's in alignment for them. I can have preferences of what my partners will and won't do, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those are deal breakers for us being in a relationship.
Jase: I think that right there, I agree. Also, I think that's a place that most people are not when it comes to their relationships in terms of--
Irene: That's true.
Jase: One partner expressing a preference usually means, "No, you have to do this thing," or at least that's how we're taught to interpret that. I think that is a cool, lofty ideal, but, boy, there's a ways to go to get there.
Irene: Yes. I think it's the difference between expressing a preference and making a specific request. If I say, "I would prefer if you didn't do this thing," I'm not actually saying, "Please, don't do this." I think that's where I get into, we want to be specific, we want to be measurable as much as possible. Relationships are more complicated than what we can-- We can't make all the aspects measurable, but if we can set ourselves up with some of those frameworks, it can give us a good structure for working through what can be really challenging.
Jase: That revisiting step. The reason why we talk about our radar framework all the time is that it's ongoing. It gives you that chance to check back in. You mentioned the importance of that it's not just like we decided once and now it's done, or I stated this preference once and now I expect you to always know that that's what I want, because that could change, right? That importance of checking back in is so key.
Irene: I think with both of what we're talking about here, those agreements around going as slow as the slowest person needs, and the radar model that you use, what's really important is everyone being clear what the agreements are.
I talk to people all the time who don't actually know what the agreements are in their relationships, because they've been having conversations where they feel like they're building intimacy and getting to know each other and hearing each other's desires and feelings and all of this really wonderful connective stuff, but they're not getting concrete in what the agreements are. I think that's really, really, really important. You need to actually be able to articulate them for you to have a supportive experience in non-monogamy.
Jase: I would say that goes back to what we talked about before, that I think that's especially true when you're first figuring out this transition together. Definitely my experience, and the experience I've found talking to a lot of people is that, over time, as you get more comfortable with it, yourself or with your partner, you'll have fewer and fewer of those. Starting out, it is like, because everything's so unknown, I don't know how I'm going to feel about something. It's like this constant needing to check back in and re-evaluate because you don't know. You're venturing into this new territory, so you want to stop more often and redraw the lines on your map instead of just being like, "Yes, we drew this up before we got to this land. Let's just go. This is the map we have. We can't change it. Let's go."
Irene: Yes, absolutely. Again, it goes back to that building trust in the new way of operating and building that security really with yourself to be in non-monogamous exploration.
Jase: To close out this episode, I want to get back to the question that we did not get to before, which is, what is The Polyamory Paradox? The title of the book, what is that actually referring to?
Irene: It's referring to two things actually, because I have ADHD and can never pick anything. One is the paradoxical sense of, as we start to explore relationships with multiple people, that deepening our sense of intimacy with others. In the example of opening a primary partnership, exploring relationships with other people can often deepen the sense of intimacy in the primary partnership. Whereas we think intimacy often has to be cultivated by focusing on that particular relationship, moving into relationship outside of that can actually strengthen and deepen it.
The thing that I focus on more in the book, the paradox that the book is really meant to support more is the paradox of what I was describing earlier of, oh, I really identify with this, I am polyamorous, and the experience in my body is that maybe being polyamorous is actually going to make me explode.
I think Clementine Morrigan actually has a perfect quote around this, of like, I want this, but I'm going to die, or I feel like I'm going to die. I really am drawn to this thing, but it is also entirely too much in my body.
Emily: Irene, this has been really great. I got the feeling as I was reading the book that there's just so many different things to talk about in this space. It's so fantastic to meet and read different resources regarding non-monogamy, just because it's such a vast, huge topic. I found myself, over and over again, as I was reading it, being like, "Yes, I hadn't thought of that before." We've been steeped in this for 10 years, and yet there are still times and there are still things that I can read where I go, "Oh, I have never thought of that thing in that way before." Thank you for your contribution to this space as well.
Irene: Oh, thank you. I take that as a huge compliment.
Emily: Where can people find more of you and your work, and where can they get The Polyamory Paradox?
Irene: Thank you so much for having me. My website is irenemorning.com. I-R-E-N-E M-O-R-N-I-N-G. I am also on Instagram as IreneMorning. Those are the easiest online places to track me down. The book is available on my website, but also through Amazon.