Sacred Unraveling in Polyamory with Joli Hamilton
Part two of Libby's conversation with Dr. Joli Hamilton where they discuss how navigating differences can open a relationship and the people in it into transformation
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Transcript
Joli [00:00:00]:
You. The thing that I see skipped most frequently is the grief work involved in reinventing what relationships are reimagining, not just like, oh, how do I renegotiate this relationship? People often think I'm going to start with agreements in my work, and I'm like, oh, no, sorry, you.
Libby [00:01:07]:
And so here in part two, we get down into the nuts and bolts. And if you haven't listened to part one yet, this second part may not make as much sense. So I would recommend hopping over to part one first. But if you've already listened to part one and you're ready for part two, we'll just dive right in.
Libby [00:01:29]:
And that just brings me back to, you cannot. And I really want people to hear this because I find that one of the hardest things to do when you're in this process, and it comes up, not just in this moment that we're discussing, it comes up all the time. We find ourselves in this partnership with somebody, and we have to reckon with the fact that we're actually quite different. And maybe we haven't always been vocal about how different we are or the ways in which we have been sort of compensating to be in the partnership or what have you, or the way we've been compensating in our lives or whatever, but we have to reconcile with the difference that we have reckon with it. And there's no way to get to that beautiful stage that you're talking about, of harmonizing and being willing to see what we need to change, what we can change. Where can we negotiate from a place of mutual empowerment and mutual respect instead of that shaming, blaming dance that we're talking about. Sorry, this is the hard part. It's bad news.
Libby [00:02:34]:
It's not really bad news, but it is. People get mad at me when I say this. There's no way through that that doesn't involve grief. And we don't like feeling grief. Grief feels like this dead end sometimes. And so often we'll get to this place where we start to feel it, and then we're like, no, I don't have to feel that. Let's just try something else. Let's move it this way.
Libby [00:02:55]:
Let's move that way. And when I hear you talk about the dark night of the soul, I feel like that's a big piece of. It is like diving all the way down into that place where it's like, this is not what I thought it was. I'm going to have to change everything like that. And that is not fun. I would never say, sign me up for that retreat.
Joli [00:03:24]:
No.
Libby [00:03:26]:
And at the same time, I do not think you get to the place on the other side of it. Like, you can't go around it, you can't go over it, you can't go under it. You got to go through it.
Joli [00:03:39]:
Yeah, I'm in complete agreement. Because the thing that I see skipped most frequently is the grief work involved in reinventing what relationships are reimagining, not just like, oh, how do I renegotiate this relationship? People often think I'm going to start with agreements in my work, and I'm like, oh, no, sorry. I meet with people over the course of a whole year. That's a minimum. That we work together is a whole year. And when we get to weeks six and seven, everybody's doing grief work for the first time, and we're all doing it together, and it is not optional. And when I look now at the people who've graduated from the first cohorts and they're coming back and they're saying, so I thought I did it then. Are you back at it? They're like, oh, yeah.
Joli [00:04:31]:
I didn't realize that that was going to be part of a cycle of how I shed this stuff, that I'm not, how I reckon with, how I'm different, but now at least I have the skills to say grief is something that, yeah, I may not want to sign up for, but if I want to have the whole human experience, I'm going to have to learn how to do it. And the more I learn how, yeah.
Libby [00:04:53]:
You learn how to handle it, right? You just learn how to handle it. You learn how to accept it as one of things that is okay to have happen. Because I just want to be honest, it happens to me on probably a weekly or monthly basis now. I mean, it happens to me as a parent, it happens to me as a partner, it happens to me as a daughter, happens to me as a human being living in a body that's aging. So I guess it's important to say, again, it's not just this one place where you're going to experience it. But I think we do so much dancing within relationship to avoid it and to avoid anybody else having to feel that, too. Sometimes it's not about us not wanting to feel it. Sometimes it's us not wanting to let someone else feel that.
Libby [00:05:36]:
Maybe we're fine, but they're wrestling. And so we kind of want to go in and fix and soothe. And again, sometimes you can do that too much, and sometimes you can do it too little and be harsh. But I think it's important to know. Sometimes you just got to go down into the depths and say, okay, here is reality. Reality is hard. Not what I thought. And that means I may not want to talk to you for a few weeks.
Libby [00:06:09]:
And please don't. Please don't try to take me out of this. I need to just be here. I will be back. I'll be back, and then we can figure out what to do. But right now, I just have to sit here in what I thought was true. That isn't what I wanted, that I'm not going to get. Terry, real calls it a relational reckoning.
Joli [00:06:32]:
Yeah.
Libby [00:06:32]:
It's just this moment where you're like, I am not going to get everything I want. And there's no avoiding the process of grieving that and then figuring out, am I getting enough of what I do want? Or is there enough opportunity to create what I do want with this human that it's worth just grieving what is just never going to be? It just is what it is.
Joli [00:06:57]:
That's it. Grieving the imagined future. In my experience, I think of this as ambiguous grief. The person's there. They exist. They're not gone. This isn't like the grief of a death. I have grieved many people's losses, like, death is just polka dotted my life.
Joli [00:07:19]:
That kind of grief is profound, and it has helped me learn how to deal with this other kind of grief. But ambiguous grief is more complicated because we can rush back out of it. We can pretend we don't have to do it. We can people please our way out of it. We can try to over function and save other people. And at any moment, I can just decide, like, no, I'm just going to pretend that my truth isn't my truth or that this situation is workable. We'll just pretend. And this is reminding me of the episode you did where you said, the heart wants.
Joli [00:07:50]:
What the heart wants is not actually going to get you there because it doesn't take you. That path doesn't wind through grief. And we got to go there. And I find that people just don't know what to do when they're there. They don't know what the actions or non actions are of being in.
Libby [00:08:11]:
You know what I tell people to do? What? Find someone who can just sit there with you and who won't take you out of it.
Joli [00:08:19]:
Not always the easiest thing.
Libby [00:08:22]:
That's it. And again, I have a whole list of things you can do when you're in grief. That is part of it, which is allow it in. Sometimes take a break, do something else, but not as a way of avoiding and bypassing the grief, but just giving yourself a break because you don't want to have to spend all day in bed.
Joli [00:08:44]:
Right? Yeah.
Libby [00:08:46]:
And make sure that you're mindfully indulging in pleasure, as opposed to indulging in pleasure as a dissociation tactic, just to remind yourself, life is worth living. The sun continues to rise and set. But honestly, I also believe in really just trusting the process of grief the way I trust the process of walking through a labyrinth. You just keep walking. You just keep walking. You don't know when you're going to be done.
Joli [00:09:11]:
You look further away, closer up.
Libby [00:09:14]:
And the other thing to do is, in my view, notice when you bump up against it, because what's going to happen, and what often happens in a relational situation where there's that disharmony is you're going to have repeated moments, especially when you're close to somebody and having regular interactions with them. You're going to have repeated moments where, oh, there it is again. That moment that I wish was not that. That is that. And now I'm feeling the grief. And I don't want to explode it out on my partner. I don't want to use it to beat myself up. I just have to go and hold it.
Joli [00:09:54]:
Right?
Libby [00:09:55]:
And hold it and not ignore it, not bypass it, not discharge it, not use it to hurt myself, but just hold it. And I can understand why people describe that process as spiritual, because I actually think it is.
Joli [00:10:11]:
I agree. I ask people all the time to decide, how is this going to unfold for you? Because some people go into it, and I find that they do. They walk down into the underworld and then they hang out there, and that's the work that they need to do. But I tend to attract a lot of engineers in my world, personally and professionally, a lot of that type of person. And sometimes they need to actually create structured time to intentionally take the elevator into the underworld. Be like, okay, I'm going to go dip. Because they don't operate that way. They do it different.
Joli [00:10:50]:
They're not going to go spend the next week or day or whatever. They're just not. And so I ask them to figure out how to be with their grief some, because some is better than nothing, right? And I don't know what your path will need. I don't know how long you need to do this for. I don't think any of us can tell you. But I know that if you take no actions to actively invite this in, that there are a million ways to avoid it, and there are only a.
Libby [00:11:24]:
Few ways to go be and they want to honor. And I said this to one of my clients a couple of weeks ago. I said, what I'm hearing is there's a lot going on for you right now. And what I'm telling you is that there's this grief that I think is there that is going to have to be faced. You don't have to do it right now if you're not ready, if you don't have the energy or the time or the space. Don't do it. Don't do it. Because one of the things it's interesting, you said you have these engineers who are just like, they want structure, and I'm making up that they want to know where they're going and they want to know what's going to be like when they get there.
Libby [00:12:01]:
And then they want to know when it's going to end. And, boy, can I relate to that feeling. I think I did a lot of very intentional work when I was younger, finding the comfort with being completely out of control in a situation, partly because, I don't know, some message came to me at some point where I was like, any idea of control is an illusion. Anyway. I had to relearn that lesson when I had children and was not fun. I'm still relearning that lesson, but I can really respect that desire to know where you're going to go. And so I like the idea of what you're suggesting of having a period of time where you drop down into not knowing. You're just going to take the elevator down into the darkness and you do not know what you're going to find there or what's going to happen.
Libby [00:12:56]:
But you can set a timer and basically that'll send the elevator back. You can have a plan for how you're going to come back out of it so that at least you know that, right? At least you know I'm going to set my timer for 15 minutes. I'm going to do this process in the morning or maybe before bed or probably not before bed. I wouldn't recommend it, actually. But have a period of time where you do that and then you stop and then you can go about your day, because it can be scary to go into grief and be afraid you're going to get lost there or that you're going to be in a place of full collapse when we got shit to do.
Joli [00:13:31]:
Yeah. I ask people to use tools a lot because I have so many people who come into my world who are. Structure is, if you're attracted to my work, you probably like structure. That's just a true thing. And so I ask them to give themselves the tools, give themselves some guardrails, because that's one of the ways they seek safety. And sometimes their partner doesn't do it that way. And this has been why they've had trouble, because their partner is doing this really spiritual thing and they're in their dark night and they're able to access that more easily. And they've just been kind of holding steady, maybe white knuckling it for sometimes years.
Libby [00:14:11]:
Yeah, because that probably looks really erratic to them, right? Yeah, it probably feels so chaotic and it probably feels like, I'm not going to go on that ride.
Joli [00:14:19]:
Right.
Libby [00:14:19]:
That ride, if we're both going on that ride, our whole life is a mess. Like, I'm the only one keeping it together here.
Joli [00:14:24]:
Right. And they may be right to a degree. That is not what's going to work, especially if your life is complicated. And most of our lives are complicated. So I will ask them to use a structured tool, like create a playlist that will walk you down into the darkness and then walk you back out. Create a playlist that's going to last. Yeah, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, that walks you down into the sadness that you need to feel. It's going to have to have your specific sad songs on it as well as you can use some random stuff and walk you down in.
Joli [00:14:54]:
And then your rescue. Right? Like, okay, how am I coming back out? What's my path? For me, the path out of that is lullabies that I would sing to my kids. I lullaby myself back out because all of that grief is true. The underworld is there and there is a day world. And I don't actually have to decide to forget either of those.
Libby [00:15:15]:
Exactly.
Joli [00:15:15]:
Again, standing in the tension of, oh, it's both.
Libby [00:15:21]:
Well, and I think when you describe individuation and this process as a maturing process, you describe two different things. The first one is what you just said, which is being able to hold two things as true.
Joli [00:15:34]:
Right.
Libby [00:15:35]:
Being able to hold this can be really important to me, and this is how I want to be, and it's aligned and it's right. And I can be partnered with someone who they're really different. And we're both right, we're both good, we're both honoring ourselves, and we get to figure out the messy middle. Holding those two things to be true, that's like one skill. And often I tell people this is one of the key skills to be in a complex system like non monogamy is. Is to be able to hold multiple truths at once. That's so important because otherwise we're not going to be navigating these differences with respect.
Joli [00:16:16]:
Yeah.
Libby [00:16:17]:
The second skill that I heard you say earlier was this ability to be an observer of yourself, to be able to notice. Step a little bit outside of you and be able to notice what you're doing, notice what's happening inside of you. Notice where your shadows are there and where your light is there, and how they're playing with each other and with an impassive acceptance rather than a lot of judgment and self monitoring. Because I think a lot of people, especially neurodivergent, queer folks like me, are really good at being self aware. But it's self aware from a hyper monitoring, like, a lot of self discipline, a lot of management of ourselves. And that's not what we're talking about here. If you're good at that, I mean, I love you. That's me too.
Libby [00:17:08]:
But doing it from that place, there's no compassion. There's a lot of judgment instead, and a lot of beating up on yourself. That kind of happens in that place. Oftentimes we're talking about being able to observe yourself and just go, oh, that's happening.
Joli [00:17:26]:
Yeah, that's cool.
Libby [00:17:28]:
That's weird. What's going on there? And just being able to engage with yourself with curiosity. And again, also compassion. Oh, I'm feeling this. That makes sense that I'm feeling that. Of course that's hard. Of course I just lashed out at somebody because I didn't want to feel my grief. Okay.
Joli [00:17:46]:
Right. Yeah. That's the difference to me between being in connection to myself, my capital s self, that part of me that is connected to. All right. That's the part of me that is part of the. All the unity or managing myself also an important skill. There are plenty of times when I'm like, what I need is to remember how to get up, brush my teeth, drive, and put my clothes on and.
Libby [00:18:15]:
Do the thing, not yell at my child when I'm mad at them just because I, yeah, all of that.
Joli [00:18:20]:
But they're two different ways of talking about the part of you that's watching.
Libby [00:18:26]:
Very different ways and different brain systems. They're actually totally different parts of the brain. And I mean, what I've been doing a lot of lately over the past couple of years is studying neurobiology and in particular interpersonal neurobiology. And what I know about that ability to observe yourself with neutrality and compassion, we all talk about, like, how do I calm my nervous system? How do I calm things down? How do I stay chill? And there's two things you need. You need safety, you need enough just grounding. But I think you also need compassion and sort of that ability to sort of, again, witness yourself in an impartial way that actually, I found out releases GABA in your brain and goes, we're okay, we're okay.
Joli [00:19:16]:
Yeah. I think of it as recognizing my animal. I can see both my animal body and also I'm seeing it. I'm literally seeing it. I'm incredibly visual in my references here because that's me. But when you have that capacity, these problems feel different. When you can do that with more fluidity, when you can more easily drop into, oh, right, I'm going to let that space exist. I'm going to set down the burden of trying to manage it all and just observe myself for a moment.
Joli [00:19:54]:
The more you practice that, the easier it gets.
Libby [00:19:56]:
Yes, I want to get to that because I'm feeling like I want to bring this full circle to, okay, nice that you both have these really great intellectual ideas about grief and individuation and dark night of the soul, blah, blah. What do I actually do, gal? What do I do? And I guess we have been saying what you can do, but I want to distill it down. And so the first thing that I heard, I'm going to actually go to this thing that we're talking about now is sort of the first thing that I think you can do, which is learn to an observer of yourself, but without any judgment. And there are many ways that you can actually just practice that. That is actually like an intentional practice you can do. My favorite is to use Tara Brock's reign practice, which is just going through the process of recognizing something's going on for me, allowing it to be there instead of pushing it away, investigating why it's there and then nurturing. So giving intentional compassion. Of course I'm feeling that way.
Libby [00:20:55]:
That makes so much sense. I totally understand. Even, like, tending to myself a little bit. So that's rain. Do you have a favorite for helping with that?
Joli [00:21:05]:
So I often will ask people to simply sit with what I call your inner counsel. I have them populate their inner council so that they can visualize them with external objects. These external objects. Bring those objects there and remind yourself of all the myriad you that there is. And then as your embodied self, just be with, oh, of course it's noisy in there. Of course I have contradictions in there. Look at all of me and practice that. And I really do ask them to physically build that out, even if it's just on a piece of paper in circles of, like, all these parts.
Joli [00:21:49]:
Okay. And allow yourself to be in that recognition through some sort of physical action, especially if you're struggling with it at the beginning. I still do it. I mean, I have a whole set up so that I can see the various.
Libby [00:22:08]:
Well, and I know a lot of therapists do that with something called.
Joli [00:22:11]:
So Santra is directly out of jungian theory. So it's very similar to that. And I just simplify it so that it's really about who's loud for me right now, who's loud? I don't know. To me, rain, once you start practicing it, it can become this normal way that you talk about yourself. So I love that. I think that's a great option.
Libby [00:22:38]:
So then the second thing is, again, to be able to hold two things is true, instead of being in the place of right versus wrong. So getting out of that, I need to convince somebody that my values are the values, but instead I need to hold. I get to be a separate person. They get to be a separate person. And I love this thing that Julianne Taylor Shore says about that. Because what that really is is it's a boundary practice, right? It's a boundary practice of I get to be me and I get to have some level of protection for myself, for my mind from you, and you also get to have some level of protection in your mind and your system from me. And the protection isn't, like, to keep bad stuff out. It's just to honor that we're different and that we're both allowed to have different experiences.
Libby [00:23:20]:
And what she says is, it is one of the most benevolent things that you can do for another human being to allow them to be having their own experience and to just be present with them with acceptance, and that nothing that they're thinking or feeling is anything other than their expression of their becoming, their evolving selfhood. And that if I reject that and try to tell them, no, don't be that way, then I am pushing away them. Right? And so instead, I want to be loving, and I want to be accepting, including accepting the differences. And then I can hold, and I'm different, and I am also okay. And there's also nothing wrong with me. And so that would be another practice to do. And the way that I like to practice it is. Again, I teach this in my program.
Libby [00:24:10]:
We create an embodied boundary around ourselves that holds us and holds all of the complexity that we are alongside another person who may be having a different experience, and we just kind of hold. There's nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with you. I get to be me. I don't get to tell you who you are. I have to contain that. But you don't get to tell me who I am. I have to protect myself from that.
Libby [00:24:37]:
But if there's the place in the middle, we can be curious about what's there.
Joli [00:24:42]:
Yeah. I totally love that you're building on the core of so many spiritual practices there, thinking about the sacred self, the sacred other, and the I thou relationship. I am, thou art. It doesn't feel irrelevant to me to recognize that we're talking about what humans have done to manage the fact that this is hard and messy for thousands and thousands of years of recorded history. I find great comfort in that. And I wouldn't add anything to what you just said. It is just. And it's worked.
Joli [00:25:21]:
It's worked for so many people. So when it feels like new to you, just sitting with that. Right. But it's worked. There's evidence. I find that calming.
Libby [00:25:34]:
Yeah, me too. Then the third thing would be grief work. What do you want to say about grief work?
Joli [00:25:40]:
I'm a big fan.
Libby [00:25:41]:
Like, a practice for people?
Joli [00:25:42]:
Yeah, I'm a big fan of embodying our grief work. So I ask people to ritualize their grief and to think of it as an iterative process. It's not done. It's not something like, oh, I did my grief work, I'm done. But I hand people a template, and I ask them to box out time to create a grief ritual and to be very clear about what they're letting go, what they are resisting letting go, what they're celebrating letting go. I ask them to love that. Yeah.
Libby [00:26:11]:
What are you resisting? Letting go. What are you celebrating? Letting go. Because of course there's going to be both, right?
Joli [00:26:17]:
Some of them are the same things. You're like, I'm really in it. How do I do this? And then I ask them to create a ritual that works for them. I give them some specific ideas for how they might embody this. I've had people go to the ocean and write something on the sand and allow themselves to watch the waves, watch the tide, take those words away. I've had other people create a fire ceremony where they're writing down things, processing it, letting those things go in a very physical way. There are so many options, but I ask them to do this so that they can start creating that time to actively grieve. That isn't actually.
Joli [00:27:00]:
It's very easy for many of us to go to an intellectualizing our grief place. Me too. So if I just say I'm going to sit with it, am I sitting with it, or am I sitting with it in my prefrontal cortex, or am I trying to work out how to.
Libby [00:27:15]:
Fix it, how to move on from it? And again, I'm very good at intellectualizing. There's nothing I can do about this. There's nothing I can change about it. I should just be done now. And then I have wrangled myself away from my emotions and my reality, which is, I'm feeling this.
Joli [00:27:37]:
I'm feeling this. Exactly. That's it. So that's why I asked them to create an actual ritual. Because rituals are technology that humans have been using for thousands of years to manage transition. To me, grief work is part of experiencing your transitions, which is all of life. So I think of it as like, you're going to go through this process. It's like an iterative cycle.
Joli [00:27:59]:
Get used to the idea that we aren't going to only grieve at funerals and instead create these spaces for yourself to take on that work. It also makes it more sense why it's called work. Like, oh, it doesn't have to be just sitting in this for the next year. I can actually make a little boat to get in to do this work and then potentially experience enough of it to be done with this piece and have moved to another shore.
Libby [00:28:27]:
Well, and I think it's important to say that that other shore that we're talking about is transformation. There's this meme that I keep seeing over it, like, all over the place, about the caterpillar turns into a puddle of goo before it becomes a butterfly. And I just think that feels so honest about what it really is to transform that. You don't just go from caterpillar and you just grow into a butterfly. You become a puddle of goo inside a cocoon, and then you come forth to become a butterfly. And there is this new emergence that comes on the other side of that grief work. And I love the idea of it being something you show up for, like, on a regular basis, the same way you might show up for any other kind of physical practice. Because what you're doing is you are.
Libby [00:29:19]:
You're building new neural pathways, you're building new muscles within yourself that then once you have them, you're like, oh, now I can lift so much, and I can do so much and live and imagine living in ways that I never thought possible.
Joli [00:29:35]:
Right? And you're totally right to say, we don't just grow wings. We have to reemerge, and then we don't recognize ourselves. If a caterpillar thinks, imagine what they think when they're like, who is this? Who is this? So it takes time then to get to know who this is, who the new person is. Yeah.
Libby [00:30:00]:
This has been such a beautiful conversation.
Joli [00:30:02]:
Thanks.
Libby [00:30:02]:
And, yeah, it really is that loves. I wanted to say it again, being in that level of a rumble where it's like, I want this, and my partner wants this. Yeah, that can mean emergence of new self. That's how deep it goes. And also, you don't have to. You also don't have to. But I do. I want to do it.
Libby [00:30:27]:
Jolie wants to do it. And what we really love doing, too, both of us, is supporting people who do want to do it. So, Jolie, how can people find you if they're like, sign me up for all of this.
Joli [00:30:40]:
Sign me up for that mess. Where's my dark night of the soul?
Libby [00:30:43]:
I don't want to do it alone, but the reality is you can sign up to not do it alone.
Joli [00:30:48]:
Right? I love that reality, that you don't have to do it alone. So if you're interested in doing that in a small group, and especially if you know that taking this at a pace is helpful for you, just not trying to rush through it and figure it out, because I embrace the long haul. The year of opening might be just the right place for you. So you can go to theyearofopening.com and hop on a waitlist. Because we open cohorts four times a year, and the groups are small. We're 20 people tops per group, and we spend that time in a structured pattern, but also getting to know each other. It's the same people showing up to this work. And I love that.
Joli [00:31:34]:
I feel so passionately about it. I love doing my private work. I do work with people privately. You can find me on my website@joliehamilton.com. But, you know, there's something really magic about seeing. And I was just sitting with a group in their 7th week doing their grief shares, the first iteration of this. And the two people who went last both said, I thought I was alone. I thought what I was feeling was, but, oh, it was every single person.
Joli [00:32:05]:
I resonated with every single person. If that's not magic, I don't know what is.
Libby [00:32:11]:
Well, and I don't think we're meant to grieve alone. That's why we go to funerals and groups. That's why we participate in holiday rituals around letting go. We are a social species. Human beings are our biome. I think that's awesome that you run a group. I run a group, too. And so if it's not with us, make sure you find your group.
Libby [00:32:31]:
Your.
Joli [00:32:32]:
Yeah, exactly. And I don't think we should discount. I hang out on your instagram page to remind me that I'm not alone in my like, I think we should count the fact that there are a lot of us out here. These conversations are happening. And remember that you are part of a group, you are part of a community, even as you're just taking your first steps in. Here we are. Hi. Nice to see you.
Libby [00:33:01]:
Yeah, it is nice to see you. I'm so glad you came and joined me for this beautiful conversation.
Joli [00:33:06]:
Jolie, thank you so much for having me. Libby.
