Breadcrumbing and Signposting
Transcript
So today on making polyamory work, we're gonna talk about breadcrumbs and sign posting. Now, what am I talking about here? Well, if you have listened to my episode called Stand Up and Rock the Boat, which is one of my most popular episodes, not the most popular, but one of the more popular ones, you know, that I believe we have to be willing to talk about the hard things with our partners because they're true and we owe it to the relationship to be with the truth together. But what if talking about hard things has a history in your relationship of just not going well in particular, what if your partner or someone else that you care about when you try to talk about the hard thing and you're willing to rock the boat with them? Instead, what happens is they get overwhelmed or they shut down, or they push back really hard, or they get super walled off, or they just get really, really reactive and then the conversation just doesn't end up going anywhere.
First of all, I wanna say that if this is a pattern that you're stuck in where you're trying to talk about something and it just doesn't go anywhere and it completely runs a ground for various reasons, there may be a lot of things that you might need to do differently or that your partner might need to do differently to help get out of a pattern like this. And, you know, you might benefit from some professional support or, you know, you might need to grow some other skills like active listening skills or having dreams within conflict type conversation. You know? But if you are with a partner who is generally relatively skilled and you can generally talk about things, but sometimes there just certain topics that feel like they're just impossible to talk about or, or you've got something new that you wanna talk about and you're really just not sure how to bring it up.
I think bread crumbing and sign posting can help. But I, before I talk about those, I wanna talk about some strategies that I don't think work super well, at least not all the time. So the first strategy is the hit and don't run strategy, which is you just kind of wait until you have their attention and then you just blurt out what you have to say and hope for the best. Fingers crossed you haven't checked to see if it's a good time or not. You maybe haven't even asked for permission to have the conversation. You just dive in. Now, if you have already been nodding your head along with this episode so far, maybe you've already tried that and it has not worked, and there are good reasons why that doesn't work. Some people just really are sensitive to being blindsided or they're easily overwhelmed or feeling blindsided or overwhelmed or just like unprepared can leave them feeling like they're on their back foot or can even be triggering.
And, you know, from those states, you know, overwhelmed, blindsided, triggered, just unprepared. It's really hard to respond well. So you're not really setting them up for success. I don't recommend that strategy. But that used to be my strategy for what it's worth. So if that's been your strategy in the past you're not alone. And sometimes I still blurt things when I shouldn't, but I'm much better at kind of just rolling it back and saying, Oh no, we don't have to do that right now. So okay, that's strategy one. Don't recommend it. Strategy two, you could like hyperfocus on looking for that perfect time to bring up the difficult topic. Tricky part about that is that time just may never come. You just may never find the right moment and not finding the right moment just then kind of kicks the can down the road.
And then the thing is getting more and more thought about by you and it's not getting talked about by the person. And then they're gonna feel even more blindsided when it comes up because the longer you wait, the deeper you get in it without them cuz they aren't on the same page with you. And then you're kind of to strategy one where they might feel blindsided or overwhelmed or unprepared or triggered. So I don't recommend just waiting for the, for a good time as the only strategy that you use. Okay, so then there's strategy three, which is you could try to make a good time to talk about it by maybe taking them on a date or, you know, getting them to a place where they're feeling really good creating a lot of safety and comfort for them. And then bring up the topic.
I hate this one. Like I honestly, I gotta tell you, if somebody does this to me, what I feel is manipulated. And I think a lot of people might feel manipulated, like they're, they're being set up to be, to feel, feel comfortable, to feel okay, to feel really good and feel really connected. And then wham, you bring up this difficult topic and they feel like they're being set up to respond a particular way or to be receptive to something that might, that they're just again. And so then you're going back to feeling blindsided, overwhelmed, and possibly triggered. So I don't recommend that strategy. Now I wanna throw out that all three of these strategies are lacking a very important tool all on its own, which is just asking to have the conversation like, Hey, I wanna talk about X. Hey, can we talk about X?
Like that gives your partner just a little bit of time to get themselves ready to receive and hopefully say yes to you, but they might be a no. And so asking for that permission, if they're really not ready and they might say no. And then what do you do? Like you're hoping for the answer to be yes. But if the no, you do have to actually sit, you know, back off and not have the conversation. But then you know what if you just keep asking to have the conversation and they just keep saying no. So this is where I think bread crumbing and sign posting can be really helpful. Cuz I think if you're getting a no, they don't wanna talk about it either because they're not prepared or they don't wanna talk about it because they just don't wanna talk about it. And you might wanna use a combo of bread crumb sign posting or one or the other.
And I'm gonna, so I'm gonna talk about these two strategies now. Now, the goal of these two strategies is to prepare your person to have the conversation with you without having to have the conversation yet. Now why is this useful? Well, so let's say there are, there are these kind of big topics that you might wanna talk about that again, might really just leave your partner blindsided if you just sort of bring them up and expect to find out what they think when before they had a really a chance to think about it. Now, one example that has probably would come up with a lot of the folks listening to this show is, Hey, I'm thinking about opening up their relationship. Or, Hey, I wanna change something about our relationship. Maybe we're swinging and I'm interested in maybe having a deeper relationship with one of the people that we're playing with.
Or I'm realizing something new about my gender identity, or I'm realizing something new about my sexuality and I wanna be able to talk about that with you. But it could also be something as simple as like, I wanna move to a new house, or I wanna buy a new car, but money's tight. Or I'm thinking about whether or not we should have a second child. Or it might be about wanting to deescalate a relationship. Any of these things are, are big and, and potentially difficult topics. So it doesn't always have to be about non monogamy, it's just that, you know, this podcast is about that. So that might be one of the topics. Here's the reason why it's so important to give your partner a chance to know that the topic is out there for you without having the conversation yet, which is, if you've been thinking about this topic for a while, which is why it's rumbling inside of you and you need to rock the boat and bring it up, your partner or other person that's important to you in your life may not have had a chance to think about it.
And so when you start to have the conversation, you are not unequal footing you, you're really, really prepared. You've thought a lot about what you think and how you feel, and maybe to the person you're bringing this up to, they haven't had any time to think about it at all and, and or they've thought about it, but only a long time ago. And so they haven't thought about it and knew and they haven't thought about it in the context of your relationship, et cetera. So, you know, it, it just creates from the get go, putting that other person potentially feeling like they're at a disadvantage. And they also might have some feelings of like, not exactly a trust violation, but their trust might be a little rattled if you've clearly been thinking about this a lot, but you haven't mentioned anything about it yet. And of course, like you may have been holding onto it and thinking about it before bringing it up because you didn't wanna share your un uncooked thoughts about it.
But here you are asking them for their uncooked thoughts while you have some very cooked thoughts. So that's why that this, this, this bread crumbing and sign posting thing can be really, really helpful for leveling the playing field and making a difficult conversation go a whole lot better. Another reason why bread crumbing or sign posting might be a good idea is if you have a hard time about having difficult conversations. Maybe you've talked about difficult topics before and they have gone down a really reactive path and so maybe one or both of you has gotten into a pattern of avoiding or maybe you or they have a lot of anxiety about having difficult conversations and maybe you've talked about it and you're trying to do it better, but there's just a tenuousness about it. Maybe in the past around big decisions one of you has also felt railroaded by the other.
And so, you know, there may be walls up around talking about difficult things because that feels like the only way to protect boundaries and make sure that the person doesn't feel railroaded or overwhelmed. And again, you know, just if you have someone in your life who is sensitive about being blindsided bread crumbing and sign posting have the opportunity to give that person a chance to feel into their reactions and gives them a chance to have a better sort of second reaction because they can maybe have their first reaction on their own instead of having their first reaction within a high stakes conversation with someone they really care about. It also helps keep you from like this being a test or this feeling like a test when you bring up a difficult topic because they just may not be ready. Okay, so I've talked enough about why bread coming and sign posting are a good idea.
Now I'm gonna tell you what they are. So they are two different things. Bread crumbing is one thing, Sign posting is another thing. And there are gonna be times when you're gonna lean harder on one than the other. There might be times when you would only do one or the other. And there are sometimes when you're gonna wanna do both. So first bread crumbing. So bread crumbing is a pretty subtle thing. Bread crumbing is essentially giving someone the opportunity to be exposed to a thought or an idea that you have been turning over in your mind without inviting them or requiring them to weigh in on it at all. And without even directly saying that it's something that you wanna talk about. But it's just like kind of exposing them to information. So an example would be like, let's say you're thinking about opening up your relationship.
You might say something like, Hey, I was listening to the radio the other day and there was this segment on this couple who opened up their relationship and how great it was for them. And I thought it was really interesting. It's something I never really thought about before. And then you stop there, you stop short of asking them what they think. You just put it out there and then you let it go. And you don't, you actively just, you know, do what you can to make sure that a conversation doesn't happen about it. You're just putting the information out there with breadcrumbs. You really just want a little piece of information. You can nibble on it if you want to. I'm, but you know, I'm not asking you to do anything with it. It's just a little, a little something I'm putting out there and there's nothing to do about it.
And I wanna say that bread crumbing is also distinctly different from dropping hints because I think dropping hints, it's, there's sort of an aim that you're trying to get someone to do something or get someone to see something. And that's, you know, anytime you're trying to get someone to do something, there's an element of manipulation in that. And the goal here isn't to try to get the person to see things your way or to persuade them. That's really not the goal. And I really wanna be clear about that. The goal is to expose them to the information so that it can start a conversation within themselves about how they feel about it. And you know, really honestly, it's an opportunity that if they do disagree with you, they can get really clear on where they might, you know, so that's a piece of it.
So again, the goal isn't to get them to do what you want that's manipulative or coercive. What you wanna do is set them up to be informed enough to be regulated and grounded so that they can have a good conversation where they can feel heard and where you can feel heard as well. So that's bread crumbing, sign posting is a little bit more direct. So with sign posting, what you're doing is you're letting your person know that you want to talk about something eventually, but not right now. So a way that you might bring that up is you might say exactly that. You might say, Hey, I have been thinking about open relationships, I've just been thinking about it, I've been reading a lot about it. And it's something that's just been on my mind and I know I'm not ready to talk about it right now cuz I'm still thinking about it.
And I know that this is the first time that you might have heard that I'm thinking about it. So I wanna give you some time to think about it too. But I just wanted to let you know it was on my mind. And at some point, maybe, I don't know, in a month or two, maybe in a few weeks, I don't know, whenever we both feel ready, I wanna talk about it. And then you leave it there. And then if it comes up again, like just sort of incidentally, you might mention it again. Like you might say, Hey, you know, ugh, I really do at some point down the line, wanna talk about this with you. But no pressure, it's probably not a good time right now. So sign posting, like I said, it's way more direct and, and for some people sign posting may be too much.
And I so you really do have to know your person. Some people are really ready for sign posting and some people might need some bread crumbing first and then some side posting. You really have to, you might have to feel it out and really just trust your intuition, but, but some people really, really won't respond well to bread crumbing because they just might not be as sensitive to subtlety. Like I myself am not super great at picking up on subtle cues and I, I tend to I think historically be a little more self absorbed. But if a person says directly, Hey, this is something that I'm interested in at some point to talk about, that's gonna click in my mind more directly. So if you have somebody who's like way over sensitive and way overly anxious, though bread crumbing is probably gonna be all you need because a sign post might send them into an anxious spiral <laugh>.
So again, you gotta know your person. And again, some people are gonna benefit from a combo, like a little bit of bread crumbing, a little bit of sign posting. I'm gonna say this again because I think it's important to say again, the goal of bread crumbing and sign posting is not to drop hints, to get a person to feel a certain way or to think a certain way. Instead, it's just to try to put them on a level playing field with you to have a high stakes conversation about a really important topic instead of them feeling like they're playing catch up with you.
That's, that's the whole point. And, and it's also gives them an opportunity to have, you know, whatever their first reactions or second reactions, give them a chance to have their first draft without any pressure to share it with you or respond. And to really leave them a lot of room to feel their feelings about it and to think their thoughts about it. And then when they're ready, they might actually bring the topic up to you. It's pretty cool. So to recap, sometimes it can be hard to bring up a difficult conversation just because the other person just may not be ready to have it. And you know, there are all kinds of reasons why people might avoid having a difficult conversation that rocks the boat. But one way that you can help is by bread crumbing and sign posting, which gives people an opportunity to be exposed to the idea without any pressure to respond. Then that puts them in a better place to have the conversation when they're ready. And when you're ready.
