455 - My Brain Understands, But My Body is Panicking (with Orit Krug)
Welcome, Orit!
We’re so excited to share Dedeker’s conversation with Orit Krug today. Orit is an award-winning Board-Certified Dance/Movement Therapist and Licensed Creative Arts Therapist. Orit helps individuals & couples expand their capacity for self-love and intimacy in relationships by processing past trauma stored in the body. Orit is polyamorous, partnered, and a parent to a toddler.
Some of the topics Dedeker and Orit cover today are:
What first drew you to doing movement/dance work?
When did you start working with non-monogamous clients? Is there anything in particular you notice about working with this population when it comes to working with the body?
Can you share about a time when you noticed a client's thoughts/beliefs about non-monogamy were in conflict with their somatic/body reactions?
Let’s talk about jealousy:
Do you mind sharing a little bit about what you notice happens in your body when you’re experiencing jealousy?
Is jealousy just a sensation to be regulated? Why or why not?
What somatic skills have you found to be the most helpful when you or a client are in the throes of jealousy?
How do we know when jealousy is “normal” vs when it’s a trauma response?
Can also get into tracking, uncovering past attachment injuries, etc.
What’s your perspective on New Relationship Energy (NRE)? How can people harness it while still staying regulated?
Using somatic awareness and regulation skills in a healthy way versus when it tips over into a form of spiritual bypassing.
How can we access a sense of safety, indulgence, pleasure, and support in a world that full of anxiety, terror, and all consuming “shoulds”?
Find more about Orit and her work on her website, follow her on Instagram, access free somatic meditations here, and visit multiamory.com/retreat to learn more about the polyamorous couples healing retreat in Costa Rica that Orit and Dedeker will be co-hosting in April 2024!
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.
Dedeker: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we are discussing non-monogamy, and the body. We're doing something a little bit different today. Jase and Emily are out for this episode. It is just me, along with the wonderful Orit Krug, who is a board-certified dance and movement therapist. I am very happy to have finally completed my credentialing program for Somatic Experiencing Therapy, so today, she and I are going to be discussing our experiences working with non-monogamous clients from a somatic approach. Diving into why there can be such a disconnect between your body and your brain when undertaking something new and scary, like a non-traditional relationship.
We talk about moving through sensations of jealousy, generating a sense of safe boundaries, and so much more. This was a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate the opportunity to geek out about some of these things, and I hope that you enjoy. Just a quick note, before diving in, that Orit and I do talk a little bit about trauma. We talk a bit about assault. We talk a little bit about intimate partner violence, so just a heads-up in case that's something you're not in the space to listen to today.
Orit Krug is an award-winning, board-certified dance and movement therapist, and licensed creative arts therapist. Orit helps individuals and couples expand their capacity for self-love and intimacy in relationships by processing past trauma stored in the body. Orit is polyamorous, partnered, and a parent to a toddler. Orit, thank you so much for joining us today.
Orit: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.
Dedeker: People who've listened to the show know that I'm also in the somatic therapy world, and so I'm curious to hear from you what was it that first drew you to doing somatic movement dance work? I think this is a type of therapy that is not usually the first type of therapy that people go to, when they're ready to go to therapy, necessarily.
Orit: No, no, that's really not usually the first choice. I grew up dancing in a local studio, and at the same time, I was going through my own trauma growing up. Dance just became this safe space for me to express myself, and to feel my emotions, and to release emotions. As I was growing, I also just intuitively knew that I wanted to be some sort of psychotherapist. When I was a senior in high school, my mom read about dance therapy in the newspaper. I was like, "Great, perfect. This is my soul's calling, let's do it."
Dedeker: Wow. It was so clear to you from so early on that this is where you're going to be. I feel like that's rare these days.
Orit: Yes, definitely. I didn't know it was a real thing. I got my master's degree and did thousands of hours of supervised work, and been a dance therapist for a little over 13 years now.
Dedeker: Do you find that people have a particular assumption, or a particular image in their head when they think about dance or movement therapy, that you have to dispel?
Orit: Yes, absolutely. It's rare that people really understand it. I actually didn't understand it either, even when I was like, "Oh, I really want to do this. This sounds right." I think the most common assumption that isn't accurate is that you have to know how to dance, or that there is a technical kind of dance, and really it's about understanding the sensations in your body, working through trauma if that's what you're working through, and how does your body organically want to move through it. That just looks like a whole wide range of things, which I think we'll cover in our conversation today.
Dedeker: Yes, that's interesting about the technical thing. I think that maybe in the States, many of us have some baggage of being forced into baby ballet, or something. I know for me, honestly, my journey with really actually trying to reconnect with my body was a lot of baggage of just feeling like a big failure in PE class. My entire childhood, and coming out of my public education with this weird assumption that I'm just someone who's not good moving her body.
I'm just not good at sports or dance, and the weird irony is that I went on to become a professional dancer after that. Yes, I know I think it is interesting that already culturally, it seems like we have so many obstacles in place preventing us from moving, in general, without it being I think either competitive or highly technical, but also moving organically. I imagine that's a struggle when you're working with clients who are new to doing any kind of movement therapy.
Orit: Not even those who are new, but those who are big into yoga, who have a history of moving. Most people, if they already have a relationship with movement, they're doing it in a very structured way. Yes, organically, being the keyword here, not the way I think I should move, not the way I think other people think I should move, but how does my body really want to move through this emotion, or to express myself organically, which we can really translate to all kinds of relational experiences. Other than all the cultural baggage that you've already mentioned, our bodies are the vehicle for which we interact, which we feel emotions, we experience our lives and relationships through our bodies, so everything is happening through us.
Dedeker: How do you convince a skeptic? I think that we're in a time right now where, I do think fortunately, therapy in general is way less stigmatized than it once was. It's much more normalized, and for better or worse, we have the rise of the Instagram therapist dropping pithy little quotes, and nuggets of wisdom in our feeds every single day. However, it's still very much rooted in, of course, roots that go all the way back to traditional psychotherapy, still very much rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy, the approach du jour.
These are all approaches that are very heady, I think, and headiness is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think that people can sometimes see something like, "Oh, I'm not going to be necessarily talking through my feelings, or using all this therapy jargon. How do I know that this is effective? How do I know that this is something that's going to be for me?" That was also three questions at once, so just pick whatever you want out of the spaghetti there, and we'll get started.
Orit: My first instinct was I don't convince anyone anymore. There are plenty of people who are ready for this, there are plenty of people who aren't, there are plenty of people who are skeptical, but there are so many people who are reading The Body Keeps the Score, or they're looking at polyvagal theory, and their understanding that trauma is stored in the body. There's also a lot of people who come to work with me have this intuitive sense. I know I've done decades, I worked with people who've done 10, 20, 30 plus years of talk therapy, and even other kinds of alternative therapies.
A lot of people I work with also tried EMDR, and a lot of other kinds of therapies that have been helpful, but they're still left with this feeling of their head is disconnected from their bodies. They know, and are aware of what they want to do differently, and how they want to show up in their lives, in their relationships differently, but it's like the body isn't on board. There are so many people who are in that place that I think when I started-- I started my work as a dance therapist in a psychiatric hospital.
Dedeker: Oh, wow.
Orit: That's a very different setting, but when I started my business over five years ago taking private clients, I was more in that space of like, "How do I get people to do this work?" I don't think I have to convince anyone anymore. I think even people who are listening to this now, those who will resonate will be like, "Yes, I really feel that." That feels like where I'm at. They're pretty far on their journey and they know-- it's like the movement and the body piece scares them, and they know it's going to be a challenge, and that's how they know that's what they need to do next. That's what a lot of people tell me.
Dedeker: Interesting. You've described what was very much my own journey through working through my own PTSD, I had really horrible PTSD from a physically violent relationship that I fortunately had escaped from and it was that same thing, right? Of course, the prescription is, go to a talk therapist and after dragging my feet for a long time, I did get into a talk therapist, and when I think about that work now, it is this odd thing where it was very important for me to do that work, it was very important for me to be heard and it was very important to have someone reaffirming, I guess, some very important, again, I'll label them as cognitive messages around, this wasn't your fault, you shouldn't feel ashamed, you should be happy that you've gotten through this, you don't have to experience this again, you're safe now, it's okay.
My brain did need to hear that, but I was so confused because it was like the PTSD symptoms kept happening. My brain knew everything of like, okay, I know I'm safe now, I know it's okay, I know I shouldn't be ashamed, just like on repeat in a loop, on a spin cycle over and over and over and my body was still just freaking out constantly and for me, I don't know if I would call it an intuitive sense that brought me into somatic work and eventually put me on this path of also doing somatic therapy training. I would say it was like desperation, honestly, like an actual desperation where, yes, I think like you described it, my head is not connected to my body, or one of them is not talking to the other like how can I get these parts of me a little bit more aligned?
Orit: Thank you for describing that so clearly using your personal experience, which really feels powerful. I think that's part of the way that if I were to convince somebody that I would relate what you are saying to the science behind that. The research shows that we store primarily the majority of our trauma memories in the amygdala of our brain and when people are going to traditional talk therapy, they're using their prefrontal cortex, which governs logic and verbal language and because trauma is largely stored as non-verbal memories really sensations in the body in the amygdala, it affects the hippocampus, which is the part of our brain that helps us distinguish past from present. We're only using the prefrontal cortex and therapy, we're just talking to one part of the brain that isn't even storing most of the trauma.
The disconnect that you describe, like you heard the words, it helped to an extent, which is my experience too because I also spent several years in talk therapy, but you were still getting triggered because you weren't accessing the memories that continued to get triggered. This is a very common experience and the research includes brain mapping and it shows that when we get triggered and when we're highly stressed, which can be this similar response of cortisol increasing the prefrontal cortex "goes offline."
Dedeker: I think when I was going down a rabbit hole on this stuff, also I learned that the part of our brain that converts our thoughts actually into speech also can go offline. For me, it was this weird double bind because I knew that if I was going to try to talk about something or if I was accessing a particularly traumatic memory that I wouldn't wanna talk about it, it would be like often very overwhelming sensations, emotions, feelings, images, memories, stuff like that but I felt that the message I was often getting in talk therapy was sort of this like, once you can talk about it, that's healing.
Once you can tell your story to someone else, automatically that means healing. It's not like that's a total lie because I'm at a point now where like I can tell my story to people and it's not this incredibly activating, triggering thing, but at that time it was so confusing for me where I was just like, well, but when I start to talk about it, I feel horrible. I just feel absolutely awful and so what?
Do I just need to force myself through this situation again and again and again and treat it like exposure therapy? For me finally finding a somatic work, finally being able to move through some of those sensations that were in there and have someone help make those sensations less scary to help increase my capacity for that, and also increase my capacity for feeling a sense of safety and security and care was just so vital for me.
But what this is leading me to though is that, of course, when I think about a population of clients that like to be very heady and like to talk things out a lot in their approach, I think about the non-monogamous community because I think for better or for worse and maybe my sample is biased because I'm thinking mostly about like listeners of this podcast, but a lot of the people that I either work with as clients in the non-monogamous community, or people who are my peers, I think this is a population that tends to really enjoy understanding therapeutic concepts, tends to enjoy education about relationship concepts, learning about attachment theory, learning about neurodivergence, learning about different communication styles, which of course, I love and here at Multiamory we absolutely love.
Also, I think that there's some particular quirks when it comes to approaching non-monogamous clients with a talk-based approach versus a somatic approach. I'm curious to know from your experience when you started working with non-monogamous clients, are there things that you've noticed about working with this population when it comes to working with the body or with movement?
Orit: Yes, great question. I think we love our terms and we love putting things into categories because non-monogamy is already such a paradigm shift that we need all this stuff, we need to understand and make sense of it because it can be so unsettling like it was unsettling for me becoming non-monogamous and I'm still working through the paradigm shift but when it comes to the body, when it comes to working with the body and the nervous system, there really isn't a huge distinction between my work with monogamous folks and non-monogamous folks, whatever their relationship structure.
Well, that's because I work with people who have already identified that they are often storing trauma in their bodies and their nervous system, which creates hyper-vigilance and an intensified fear around abandonment, jealousy, insecurity, which as we know, can be even more heightened whether we're new or experienced in non-monogamy. At the level of working with the body, all of this looks similar working with the trauma that is stored in the body because the body experiences a trauma trigger or a trauma memory, which again, research shows are stored as fragments of sensations, which you talked about like a memory or a feeling in the body.
It's like you could be having the best day and you walk down the street and you smell a certain smell and all of a sudden a flashback is triggered out of the blue and it's because that smell is similar to the memory of a smell that you experience at the time of your trauma and when that happens, the body often reacts in one of a few ways, fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Then we react in a way where I'm going to say we believe, but it's really not a conscious thing.
The nervous system does whatever it needs to do to keep us safe and usually those behaviors are behaviors that can really sabotage relationships. If it's a fight response, we might get aggressive. If it's a flight response, we might just leave and drive away in the middle of a conversation. A freeze response, we may withdraw from the relationship. And, fawn, people-pleasing, abandoning our own needs to please our partners, which I think we know leads to nowhere great.
Again, whether I'm working with a couple or individual who are monogamous or non monogamous, this all looks similar but when we zoom out and focus on the story, that's where the difference lies. For a monogamous couple, it can be this fear of abandonment that was triggered by their partner not coming home at a certain time and not communicating about it and that could be the same exact story for a non-monogamous couple, but maybe it's because their partner was on a date with someone else, so that complexifies or adds another layer to this fear.
Dedeker: I think that something I've noticed sometimes when working with non-monogamous folks, even people, again, who are very experienced at this, who are very comfortable with relating in this particular way, I do think there's many layers of cultural messaging. If we're looking at it in these two different channels, of course, there's the cognitive messaging that we get around monogamy is the only way to do this. What you're doing is immoral, or it's wrong, or it's bad, or whatever. Then I feel like there's this other layer where people can do a lot of work around, no, I feel very solid in my identity. I feel very solid in my choice to relate in this particular way. I feel very comfortable having conversations or debates with people who disagree with me, or I feel like I have good boundaries around that and can protect myself.
Then I do think that there's these messages that can come in through this more felt-sense channel, something that's more stored in our emotions and in our body sensations, around things like the experience that we had the first time someone ever broke up with us for someone else. Those feelings around finding out that our parents were getting divorced, those body sensations that got stored around, and this one comes up a lot with hinges, of being a child of divorce and running interference between two parents.
That one happens a lot with hinges, I find. Or even these bigger messages around, "Oh, when you're here at home, while your partner's out on a date, this imagery really matches with the imagery of someone essentially being taken advantage of." Or, "Oh, when you're on this date with this married person, this imagery really matches this imagery of you being a homewrecker." I do think that as fortified as your brain and heart can be against all of the obstacles and all of the pushback that non-monogamy gets, that I do think there is something below the neck that still stores these deep feelings of shame, fear, rejection, all of those things.
It's like there's this big kind of primordial soup that gets built up over time. I know when I'm working with people, yes, that's what often people talk about is this weird sense of feeling this deeper exhaustion or this deeper sense of malaise, even though they feel very affirmed and safe in their relationships or in their community.
Orit: You bring up a good point about the disconnect between the mind and the body. The mind is firm and secure, but the body is still like what you're naming is there are these unresolved traumas that are being remembered through these new situations which is exactly what happened to me when I opened up my relationship. I was secure and I am secure with my husband. We've been together for over 10 years. I'm like, "Great, I'm secure." I guess I healed all my traumas and anxious attachments.
Dedeker: As soon as that comes out of your mouth, the universe is just like, "No, no."
Orit: I didn't have to think about it. Then when we started dating separately, it was like, "Oh, okay, rude awakening." You have not resolved all this, you just got secure with your partner and you haven't had to work through this in over a decade. That's the beauty of non-monogamy is we almost get a second chance to work through these unresolved traumas that we may have never had the opportunity to if we didn't open up.
It comes with a lot of work. I see this in my work too. I was working with one couple where the female partner was saying verbally, "I'm happy with this. I'm good with this." Her partner was dating someone new, "I'm happy for you." The male partner was communicating, "I feel like you're not okay with this," which made her upset, and unvalidated her, and they were starting to go around in circles talking about this.
I just was like, "All right, let's have this conversation in movement." I had them do a call-and-response thing where instead of saying, "Hey, I'm okay with this, your body gesture, put these words into gestures." I know that sounds really abstract, but I was talking them through that. When she did her movements, they were moving in all different directions and her movements were not direct or straightforward at all.
They actually felt a little bit chaotic to all of us who were witnessing this. What she ended up connecting from this movement is that actually, she does feel pulled in many different directions. She's happy being non-monogamous, she wants it, it feels right but she's also scared. She's upset. She's grieving the monogamous relationship that she once had with her partner.
Of course, this is all so normal to be experiencing the whole spectrum of emotions but for whatever reason, she was either wasn't realizing that or she didn't feel safe to feel. I think there are also messages of like, "You can't feel jealous," or, "You have to just be happy and happy for me." That movement revealed so much in just such a quick time that we were then able to acknowledge the feelings that were there and work through them.
Dedeker: I think that what strikes me as so interesting and powerful about doing this kind of work is, I know we're all familiar with the aphorism because of the book title, you know about the body keeping the score, but I feel like the body is also worse at lying than our brains are. Maybe to say lying is a little bit dramatic, but I know I can show up to a talk therapy session, and whether it's by myself or it's with a partner like you said, my prefrontal cortex is online to a certain extent, that means I'm putting my best foot forward to a certain extent, I know I want to get an A-plus in therapy.
To a certain extent, I know how to tell my particular story, express my emotions verbally in such a way that maybe can still keep me relatively safe and protected and not having to be too vulnerable. Then once we turn off that particular channel of just being able to word salad our way around our feelings and provided that someone feels just safe enough and comfortable enough to actually move organically in that particular way, I think there's so much information that comes out that's much more difficult to hide.
At least in my experience working with people somatically and also my experience being on the client side of things, it's just so much harder to, I guess, put a nice pretty package on the things that I'm experiencing or feeling because they just come out the way that they're going to come out and there's no peeling away these layers of intellect or cognition or stuff to get to the heart of it. It cuts straight to the heart of what's actually being felt in that particular moment.
Orit: Absolutely. We are really good at filtering our feelings through words. We are experts at choosing what we say, but when it comes to the body, it's very hard to hide the way we feel, which is what's scary about doing this work and also what's so powerful and efficient, like that story that I just told you about my clients that was revealed in just a few minutes of moving.
To add to what you're saying, it's not just that we are great at manipulating our words to sound a certain way, but there are simply things we just-- A lot of people who have experienced trauma, they don't even have the words for it yet, whether they experienced trauma pre-verbally in the first two years of life or there are trauma memories that are so stored in the non-verbal space that until we move together and until they feel safe to move this, they don't even realize it's there.
I was working with one client who a few sessions in, we started moving with more powerful movements. Her main issue was that whenever she and her partner were getting into conflict, she would freeze up and she would go silent and she would be re-triggered. She really wanted to be able to stay in the conversation and be able to work through this conflict with her partner. In moving that, we moved these more powerful, firm movements and immediately this fear came up.
Usually what people want to do when fear comes up, especially in this work, is freeze. They want to stop it. Again, I'm saying that in a conscious way, but that's the nervous system that automatically reacts in a freeze response, which is quite an intense response because the freeze response helped us tense our muscles so much to the point that we wouldn't get eaten alive by predators. We'd be less appetizing. That's a pretty intense response.
When you're feeling a feeling and then you freeze, it's like you don't feel safe. Her instinct was to freeze and this is part of the work. It's like regulating, staying present in the relationship with me as the therapist and also in their body so like how do you want to move your body right now and allowing them to start moving? She started swaying and then as she was getting more in her body, how do you want to move your body now? She started moving bigger movements, which show that she was starting to feel more comfortable expressing a bit bigger, taking up more space, and then I ask one more time, "How do you want to move now? How does your body want to move?" That's actually how I ask that, "How does your body want to move?"
She started doing more powerful movements again, which is more regulated, but it brought up this memory. She realized just in that moment why moving power felt so fearful because the way that she witnessed domestic violence was in abuse and misuse of power. This very specific memory came up when she was 13 years old, she stood between her mother and her father.
Her father was holding a gun to her mother pointing a gun and she's like, "Oh my God." She had been in therapy for so long and that never came up. Some of these memories they can just come up through movement. She's actually really relieved by that. Is like it came up and she was able to let it go. She's like, "Wow, I was holding onto that for 25-plus years." It's powerful. Sometimes you can't access this stuff through words.
Dedeker: Yes, it's funny. Sometimes I know when I've been on the client side working in this way, there's almost this sensation of within everything that makes up me, all of my memories, all of my traumas, all of my personality quirks, all of my neuroses, everything that goes into me, there's this secret behind the scenes Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia pointing to the conspiracy theory board of the things that are connected that I don't even realize are connected.
Again, our brain can make certain connections. I think especially in this day and age when therapy and therapy language and therapy concepts are becoming so normalized that our brains can be really good about like, "Yes, I'm anxious attached and I know that it's because this thing happened with my parents. My dad was always this way and my mom was always this way and then this kept happening to me in my relationships and that's why I'm anxious-attached." We're good at connecting those dots but then sometimes when you just open up this channel either through movement or whatever, that something completely unexpected can come forward.
I know that's happened to me so many times where I'm like, "Oh my God, this very specific memory of a fight that my parents had actually is connected to the feelings that are coming up in the conflict that I'm experiencing right now with my partner." It's a little bit more direct than just, "Oh, the reason I'm experiencing these feelings and this conflict is because I'm anxious-attached or whatever." Yes, it is uncovering this amazing constellation that you're inner self has put together and untangling some of those knots, and understanding things a little bit better.
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I wanted to shift the topic just a tiny bit. When you were talking and sharing that story earlier, it started making me think about boundary work. Now, I'm really excited about boundary work it's something that I do with my clients pretty frequently but I was wondering about what you've noticed. If you've ever had clients who've approached you feeling like they're having trouble with figuring out their boundaries or they're having trouble with enforcing their boundaries or stuff like that, is that ever something that has come up in the work that you do?
Orit: Absolutely, yes. I feel like the pattern usually presents itself as it's one polar opposite, one polar side or the other. People are either so strong in their boundaries and they're like, "I have to. It has to be this way and I can't have it this way," and it's so firm and direct to the point where there's no wiggle room, or the other side where it's like, "I abandon my needs side. Abandon my boundaries because I'm so afraid of abandonment that I'll just do whatever you want." That's one of my favorite things to play with in this work is these polar sides of anything. That firmness and that softness on the extreme sides, we can move being really firm and being really direct, truly like physically in movement.
We can also play with softness, like actually exploring softness in your body. Then what does it feel like to connect those two? That's been one of the most mind-blowing discoveries in my clients. Not in their minds, but in their bodies. I can be strong and soft at the same time. I can move directly with softness. Actually, trying that on in physical movement gives them this embodied confidence and awareness and experience of being able to do that in their relationships. We can test that out even in the way we speak. Like I'm going to speak with this firmness, but I can speak with the softness at the same time. That's part of integrations. Integrating these different parts of me that come out in these situations.
Dedeker: I love that. I love that image of moving directly with softness. Moving in both strength and with softness because I do feel like that perfectly encapsulates when our own personal boundaries are working the most effectively for us. The work that I tend to do with people, especially people who are coming in with maybe a history of assault or a history of being severely taken advantage of in a relationship, basically a history of their boundaries being plowed over multiple times often. There's something so powerful about generating that felt sense of strength and security within the boundary.
I feel like we're both going to sound like broken records here, but again, that's not just this heady sense of, "Okay, I've figured out what my boundaries are and I can state them to people clearly," but this actual felt sense of, "No, there is something that is protecting me that is generated from within." When I work with people, sometimes it's repairing a sense of even being aware of the fact that your skin is a boundary that's protecting the inside of you from the rest of the world. Repairing and feeling into that sense of the fact that your limbs provide a particular boundary for you. It creates this particular bubble of space around you that actually protects you and then again really fortifying that sense that, again, this is going to sound dramatic, but almost that there is this inner power within you to protect yourself in this particular way.
If you've had a really long relationship history of feeling like your boundaries were completely plowed over, feeling like you couldn't really enforce them, or feeling like they were never considered or never given the time of day, it's easy to lose that sense. I think that that can lead to this very anxious sense of maybe that overcompensating of I have to be super hypervigilant about my boundaries. I have to be very tight-fisted about my boundaries. I have to make sure that everyone knows exactly what they are and I have to really lead with that in every single interaction.
Then when someone shifts into feeling a little bit more grounded in that, I find that that need often melts away for people. There's almost a little bit more of a self-trust in their ability to express a boundary, protect themselves when it's necessary when they have to, and to do it in such a way that's not a very aggressive violent way of protecting themselves.
Orit: Exactly. I was going to say the exact same thing. It's a lack of trust in self. If I have to be super firm in setting, saying, and stating these boundaries, almost like word vomit, it's like I have to let everyone know because I don't even know if I'm going to be able to set them when I'm triggered or when I'm feeling a certain way. That is an embodied experience, trusting yourself to move. I'm not talking about dancing or moving. Again, when we're in interaction, we're moving, we're gesturing. We may be going closer to someone, we may be moving away. We're deciding how much space we want. It's trusting ourselves how we want to move or how we move in relationship to others.
We can talk about that. That is where we started with this podcast, is that the body doesn't often align with the intentions. The body isn't quite connected. The mind knows when my partner does this or when my metamor does this, I want to be able to speak up in a calm, loving, but assertive way but the body is just like, I don't know, maybe there's a sensation of heated energy going through the arms and it's like, "We have to say this," and it comes out really strong and aggressive and body is not on board. The body doesn't quite know how to move in this soft but firm way.
Dedeker: Well, speaking of heated, aggressive feelings, always the hot topic when it comes to non-monogamy that everyone wants to work through, talk about, think about, get more tips on is about the sensation of jealousy. As I've started to work more with people in this particular realm, some questions have come up. For some people, it's the sense of, "Okay, when I connect with these felt sensations of jealousy, is this just a sensation to be regulated away or is this a deep trauma response? Is this a deep attachment panic that's happening?" I think jealousy can straddle many different spheres or at least the feelings that come up can straddle many different spheres.
Sometimes I think people do get confused around, for lack of a better question, like, "Oh my God, how serious is this? Is this just something I need to just let this wave pass through me or is this some kind of PTSD that's coming up?" I'm curious about your thoughts on that or your experience working with that.
Orit: Yes, that's a great question. Jealousy in non-monogamy and in life is normal to have, so I'm going to say that first. I don't think we can hear it too many times. Is jealousy a sensation that we just need to regulate, is the question, and that depends. For those who are experiencing a "normal" amount of jealousy that comes with the territory of non-monogamy, then, yes, when we come back to the notion that all emotions at their core are sensations that we feel in the body, which we label as jealousy, anger, fear, whatever it is, then, yes, we can move through jealousy by regulating its sensations first.
Then once we let that sensation move with us or we move with it, it often uncovers deeper, uncomfortable sensations. I find that jealousy covers up usually a heaviness that often comes with sadness and grief, like grieving the monogamous relationship you once had with your partner, if you opened up together or a heated energy running through your body that we often associate with anger. Once we give these sensations the attention and care that they need, then we can also work through the stories that our mind are making up around it which connects the mind and body.
Then on the flip side, if the sensations and reactions coming up around jealousy are so intense and uncontrollable, then that indicates a trauma response. That does require a deeper process of processing trauma and rewiring the nervous system around these sensations, and expanding one's window of tolerance of safety to be able to navigate jealousy without exploding or dysregulating, or withdrawing to the point that it may sabotage their ability to be in relationship.
Dedeker: Yes, that leads me to, I guess I'll throw at you the impossible question that clients also sometimes like to throw at me, which is this. Sometimes I think people may identify through doing some of this work like, "Ooh, yes, there is actually a trauma response underneath this." My experience of jealousy is much more overwhelming than I was expecting that it would be or it's much less controllable than I thought that it would be. Does this mean it's always going to be this way? Does this mean that choosing any kind of non-normative form of relating is just not an option for me or can I work through this or not?
I think that I see a lot of people suffering around that question of, "Okay, so I feel this particular way. Is that something that if I can just fix it, then all my non-monogamous relationships are going to be okay or is this just a part of what makes it me and maybe I shouldn't be in this type of relationship?"
Orit: You had originally said that they are having a trauma response, so I don't think your trauma is you. Your trauma isn't you. It's the way that you are currently wired to react to certain situations, especially one as fragile and intense as jealousy. That would be my first answer is, no, this isn't you. The other thing that came up when you were asking that question is it's not a this or that. It's like go slower. There's so much coming up. That's what happened for me when I opened up my relationship and I was like, "Whoa, there's a lot to work through." I took a break from dating.
I had to take some space and really work through this stuff. It's okay to slow down your journey. I think that's hard when you are with a partner, for example, who is maybe dating and it's bringing up more stuff. It's like, "If I just have my own partner, then--" Right?
Dedeker: Yes. The perfect on-paper solution, yes.
Orit: Guilty. Yes, go slower because these things feel intolerable when we try to rush through them and we try to find that fix and that resolution so quickly, but when you're working with trauma, it has its own process. I've worked with clients where we can resolve the trauma really quickly. I've worked with clients where it takes longer. It really depends on each person, each couple, and the co-creation of the trauma happening together. Either way, it's a neurophysiological shift that needs to happen. If you have a nervous system, which we all do, it can be shifted. It's just, I think, people get impatient which I understand. I do too. It can happen.
Dedeker: I really appreciate you bringing that up. I want to tie this to what we were talking about earlier with labels and concepts that I think that there's a particular journey sometimes that we need to go on. Something that I know has been shared a couple of times on this show is this idea that some people finding a label, and let's say for the sake of example, their attachment style. For some people finding, "Oh my goodness, I'm avoidant. I'm so glad I have a word to put to it." At the very least, I have a word to put into Google to find some more resources. I have a word to act as shorthand to share with people like, "Oh, this is so great."
For other people, they're very millennial, and it's like, "No, labels, oh my God, I can't be boxed in by labels." That's totally fine, but then something that could happen is, I think, sometimes the joy and the comfort and the peace that sometimes comes from finding a particular label, whether it's labeling your attachment style or the particular type of trauma or the particular type of PTSD that you're dealing with, I think there can be this tendency to collapse it into the sense of self, to collapse into, "I am this attachment style. That is who I am. I am this particular flavor of trauma. That is who I am and that is how I'm always going to operate."
I think there is this delicate dance where on the one hand, I know I never want to just tell someone like, "Oh, just get over it. You can fix that." Just get over your avoidant attachment and you can just fix that because that's not really how it works. Also, there does need to be this differentiation, this sense that this can be a part of you that you maybe literally or metaphorically have to dance with sometimes. Also, it can be shifted and it can be shifted in a direction that's more sustainable for you and also more supportive of your human relationships at the same time.
Orit: Absolutely. When it comes to trauma, we're working with the nervous system. If the nervous system doesn't feel safe, if the nervous system feels pushed too hard, it's going to constrict back into safety. That is a huge inner dilemma that I see with a lot of clients is wanting to move through it faster, wanting this intense experience, especially on retreat. It's an intensive experience, but actually, we don't do anything super intense. We don't rush through the process. It's this gentle, gradual release and working through the stuff that actually creates the most change.
Yes, I think when we try to, and we can feel this in the body, when there's this urgency around healing or just getting to this place already, it's counterproductive. We have to feel relaxed and open and safe, literally physically in the body. I do think those terms, while they can be helpful, can serve as another way to disconnect from the body when we overanalyze and we think and we're looking for more labels. I call it toxic self-awareness, which some people don't like.
Dedeker: I love that. I'm going to write that down. We're going to do an entire episode just about that. That's wonderful.
Orit: Actually, I came up with that term a couple of years ago and I wrote an article about on Elephant Journal. I was like, "I feel like this has to spread," but it hasn't yet. Yes, let's do it.
Dedeker: Okay. Nice.
Orit: It further disconnects us from the body when we're trying to figure out more terms or trying to figure out more category. You know what I mean? Going back to jealousy or any powerful emotion, we can feel so hijacked by these feelings, by these sensations. If we go back into our heads through it like, "What is this about? Why can't I figure it out," you're not really working with this sensation. What's most powerful is to be able to become in command of these sensations. Again, when we're just so much going back into the mind, it's taking us further from that.
Dedeker: I'm curious in your work because this is something that I've noticed sometimes when people start getting into somatic work or movement-based work and they're having a lot of success with it and they're really enjoying it a lot. Sometimes I see it tip into a place that I might call some spiritual bypassing. Because sometimes it can be, "Oh my God, I'm having a jealousy freak out today because my partner did yada, yada, yada, yada.
Can you just sit with me and guide me through some movement to work it through or just sit with me and help me generate some sense of feelings of safety and security and feeling good and like, okay, great, awesome, okay, now I can pop back into my normal life now that I've, I don't know, I guess sort of erased the feelings of distress that I was feeling in a particular way"? There are some clients where doing that work is the work itself. It's connecting to that sense of safety and security and connecting back to feelings of goodness in the body is the thing that they need and they need that repeated in order to work through some stuff.
Then I see some clients where I feel like they're on a merry-go-round on a carousel in that relationship with the same things coming up again and again and again and again and they're coming just as like a pressure release valve to then jump back into it. Is that something that you've ever encountered in your practice?
Orit: Yes, of course. We just want to chase the good feelings, but healing isn't about just feeling good. Healing is about feeling all the feelings, the ones that feel good and the ones that don't. I find that the deepest healing, which I'm still really deeply embodying, is acceptance of all of our parts and the full spectrum of our experiences and our emotions. Which when we accept the full spectrum and all the parts of ourselves, the part of me that feels jealous and insecure about my partner being in a relationship, but then there's also this part of me that feels really happy and excited for him to be experiencing this.
When I can integrate these parts and have acceptance for this experience that I'm having that seems conflicting but is really just human, I not only accept and love myself more, but I can hold all of that at the same time for my clients, for my partner, for my friends, because when I accept that in myself, I accept that in other people.
Dedeker: Beautiful. Yes, that was good too. That was good. I'm going to write that one down. Let's see.
Orit: I guess I want to say that you mentioned spiritual bypassing, and I think that happens because people aren't accepting their full spectrum of emotions. This can look like bringing some uncomfortable feelings to one of your partners about something that happened and your partner gets defensive. They feel like they've done something wrong because you're experiencing a negative emotion. They're not an acceptance of you having a negative emotion, which is a reflection of their own stuff, that they're not in acceptance. It's a reflection. It's like a clear exposing mirror of like, "I haven't done the work to accept all of my emotions, so I can't hold that for you."
Dedeker: This is a good segue because we've been spending a lot of time talking about, I guess, the emotions and the feelings that are nobody's favorite emotions and feelings.
The trauma, the jealousy, the panic, the anger, the grief, the sadness. Within the spectrum, there's also these really wonderful emotions, things like pleasure and care and safety. I want to spend some time talking about the whole sensational whirlwind that is also new relationship energy because this is also something that can show up that can be, maybe dare I say, destabilizing and dysregulating at times. I want to hear your thoughts also about working through those sensations.
Orit: Yes, thanks for bringing that up too because I feel like so far we've made this work sound really difficult. Also, this work is, of course, profound and life-changing, but it's so much more enjoyable than people expect doing this work through the body and through movement. There's just this freedom and lightness and openness that people experience in their bodies for the first time, so I wanted to mention that. Then going back to NRE, yes, destabilizing, I think is the word that you used. Oh, such a unique sensation. It's so exciting, but often a dysregulating experience, dopamine is surging, serotonin is dropping, and this is happening at the same time in our reigns and bodies.
It's like we want more, but we don't have enough. It can feel so overwhelming, so powerful that it often feels like we have to do something about it. Like I'm feeling so strongly, I have to do something about it. I have to tell my partner a thousand times in a row that I love them. I have to move across the country to go live right next to them. It's all these things that you're not supposed to do in NRE and I experienced this too. The feelings in my body were so intense and have been so intense that it's like I have to do something.
Again, if we come back to the notion that these are uncomfortable or overwhelming sensations happening in the body, then we can work with them without making real-life rash decisions. We can take action in our bodies without actually taking an action we might regret in the real world. I find it helpful for myself to acknowledge that I don't have to do anything about it. I can feel it and be with it. When that's not enough, then I can just follow what my body needs. Sometimes I can channel that surge of energy into movement or a workout or I might go for a relaxing hike for something a little bit more gentle.
It can be a little bit discharging discomfort around the new relationship energy, which can help us enjoy and harness the excitement and the pleasure without being too overwhelmed by it.
Dedeker: I really feel like you hit the nail on the head, that sense like, "Oh, I have to do something about it." Not only is there so much energy, but there's also this discomfort, this tickling discomfort underneath it that pushes us into making some kind of action, whether it's small actions like I'm going to text them a billion times or those big actions like I'm going to completely upend the structure of my life right now.
I'm realizing, again, to tie it back to some of the cultural messaging that I was talking about earlier, sometimes when I see people struggle with not doing something, when people struggle with just sitting through it or, "Oh, I'm just going to move through it or I'm just going to take an action with my body, but not necessarily out in the real world, that I think we get also this cultural sense of urgency around relationship formation. I think especially from our more traditional monogamous culture when we're first falling in love with someone or first attracted to someone or first interested in someone, there is this received urgency around like, "You better get that shit on lock right away."
You better lock them down before they get pulled away by someone else, before they get interested in someone or something else. I find that's often in conflict within people. That, again, cognitively they can be like, "I know it's not a good time for me to move across the country for this person. I know it's probably too early for me to say I love you to this person," but there's this deeper sense of like, "If I don't, something terrible is going to happen. If I don't, I'm going to lose them in some way. Or if I don't, they're going to think that I'm horrible" or something like that. I find that that's often a flavor that people are having to sit with in the midst of all of this.
Orit: I'm laughing because I've just been through all of it, so I'm laughing at myself. What you're really speaking to is control.
Dedeker: Oh, I love control. That's my favorite thing.
Orit: Oh, yes. I have to control the pace or the intensity or the flow of this relationship. Yes, I love it too because it helps me feel a sense of control in my body. I'm so uncomfortable with these feelings that if I can control something about the situation, I can change the way I'm feeling inside. Actually, we don't really have that much control over our relationships. I think when we really think about it, it doesn't help to try to rush or force or pressure anything, at least in my experience that I've found that to be true. It really does come down to I need to control this discomfort or these sensations that I don't want to be feeling. If I change the situation, it can change that up.
Like if I get my new partner to commit to something that gives me security, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with asking for what you need and your partner may very well give it to you and that's great, but I think it's a great question to ask ourselves what's our intention here? Is it because I'm trying to regulate my emotions? Would it look different if I regulated my emotions more so as a baseline and then ask for what I needed? I am stumbling upon saying this because I don't want it to sound like it's a bad thing to need validation or to need a certain level of commitment.
Those are all such normal things that even the most secure people want validation and need it to an extent, but this is where the opportunity lies for more self-security is if you can play, and I like the word "play", and be curious about how much can I expand my ability to be in the discomfort and how might that change what I'm wanting or asking. Sometimes I think I want things, like I'm still figuring this out, in, it's not even that new of a relationship, but it's very slow-forming relationship where I'm like, "I think that I want more. I'm convinced that I want more," but do I? Every time I'm not even asking for more, I'm playing with just completely surrendering to the flow of it, which is so not my usual thing.
It's like this space opens up for me to heal even more and gain even more security. Yes, I might decide at one point if it doesn't progress a certain way or shift a certain way that it's not for me and that's totally okay, but right now, it's so fulfilling and healing in itself. That's another point that I want to make is there is a lot of talk and content on social media that's like, "You have to be healed in yourself before you can be in a relationship." Actually, a lot of healing happens through relationships. If we do that in a healthy way and not just relying on the relationship to be healing for us, then I call BS on that.
Dedeker: Yes, it's funny. I think that for some reason, I don't think that I tend to fall victim to the like, "Oh, I have to be 100% healed or I need to completely love myself before I can love anybody else." Yet every time I get into another relationship, I'm always surprised for some reason that I'm still learning things. I think I still am just like, "I thought I already knew everything. I thought I already knew how this all works. When am I going to reach the point where I'm just, 'I've already learned all the things,' and then I can go into a relationship just knowing I've learned all my lessons and I don't need to learn anymore?" I think that's a weird meta-level lesson that I'm still working through myself.
Orit: I resonate hard with that.
Dedeker: Also, that would be boring, right? If we knew all the things all the time.
Orit: It's so true.
Dedeker: All right, so we're drawing this conversation to a close, but the very last thing is you mentioned doing some retreat work earlier. I'm super excited that you and I are going to be co-leading a retreat together in Costa Rica in April for polyamorous folks. Why don't you share a little bit more about what that's about, where people can find more information about that?
Orit: Yes. I am super excited to do this too, by the way. It's in a nutshell, so much of what we talked about, if you've listened to this episode and you're resonating with, "Wow, yes, I know all the things. I've got the understanding of what I need to do differently, how I want to enhance my relationships, really essentially my self-security and being able to regulate through these very normal challenges in non-monogamy, but my body isn't on board, but my body keeps overreacting, but I'm so overwhelmed by these feelings that I'm not making any progress," we will get to work on that for three nights together in Costa Rica in this luxurious space.
I'm saying luxurious because that's a very intentional part of the treat where we really get to go in a space, a container where we're taken care of, where we feel pampered, our nervous systems feel safe and relaxed to really make a lot of progress in a short period of time. Besides the intentional sessions that you and I are going to be doing, the whole experience is really curated to become more safely connected to your own body and to become more connected to each other, your partners, and the other folks on retreat with our chef cooking us food and the infinity pool and all that good stuff.
I know from running retreats in all different capacities that people have a hard time going to a weekly session and then going back to their normal life, and it just gets hard to integrate. When we take the space somewhere away from home in a magical, luxurious space, again, saying luxurious, it creates such powerful, efficient shifts. That's essentially what we're doing.
Dedeker: If people want to find out more about that, you can go to multiamory.com/retreat. Feel free to mention the fact that you heard about it on the Multiamory Podcast, and hopefully, you can join us. Also, speaking of, thank you so much for joining me on the show to have this conversation today, Orit. This has been fantastic. I know that we could geek out about this stuff for many, many, many, many more hours, but can you also share with our listeners if they're more interested in your work, specifically where they can find out more about you and the stuff that you do?
Orit: Absolutely. Thank you for having me on the show. You can all find me on my website at oritkrug.com. That's my name dot com. You'll see everything that you are potentially interested on there.