Values and Belonging Pt 1
Libby introduces a new season of Making Polyamory Work with a very personal reflection on belonging, fitting in, values and integrity.
Transcript
Oh, y'all, I know it's been a while. I have missed you. I know that many of you have probably missed me, and I want you to know, I have not stopped thinking about you. I have not stopped thinking about this show for one minute. And, I am sorry that I haven't been able to get on an episode until now. One thing you should know about me is that, you know, my life right now is complicated. I've been a little like tightlipped about what's been going on in my life for the past several years. And that's, it's not because I, you know, I have any shame about it or, that I'm protecting anybody necessarily. But I always wanted my work to be about the work and not necessarily about me, but I recognize I'm also a person here, and I actually get the sense that y'all care about me.
So I wanna tell you a couple things. The first thing is one of my kiddos, is special needs. And that has been rocking my world, and my schedule and my capacity for a while. Some of you may know that in August of last year, I relocated from the DC area, and specifically, uh, Maryland to Atlanta, Georgia. And, one of the big reasons that I did that was because, I thought that I would have access to better and more affordable resources for my kiddo, here in Atlanta. And, at the same time, we placed him in a school and, in April of last year, he had to leave that school. And that left us, and specifically me absolutely scrambling. And it was really, really hard on my kid. And it was really, really hard on all of us as a family.
And I actually had to take a, not only a hiatus from the podcast, but also a hiatus from, coaching, like, well, not a full hiatus, but I stopped taking clients. I really reduced my workload because I really just had to spend a huge amount of my time figuring out what to do next and how best to support my kid who's just really, really struggling and making us all feel it. Fortunately, now, he's in a much better place and we have a lot more support, and we have a lot more stability, and it's still flipping hard, y'all. It's, and I mean, I'm not gonna say poor me, woe is me because I know that many of you are going through your own stuff, but I just wanna be accountable for, this is my life right now. And the impact that that has on my capacity to create amazing content for this podcast, for my social media, which is abysmal, is just, limited.
And, and yet I really, really care about what I'm offering on this podcast. And I know that so many of you really value what I'm creating here. And I want you to know that, again, I've never stopped thinking about it, and I'm constantly coming up with new ideas and new things to say. And yet, first and foremost, my responsibility is to my family and then second to my coaching clients, because that is the bedrock of why I'm here and what I am meant to be doing. And, also to the people who are in the relational non-monogamy circle or any other, workshops that I'm teaching. So those are the first things. And then the content that I can create is sort of like my offering to the world. Cuz it's always free. I don't take any advertisements for this show, you know, I don't get paid anything.
This is an independently produced, podcast. I actually pay people to help me, produce it because, it's so important to me to be able to offer what I have to offer to you. In that vein, I want you to know that we are changing a little bit how this podcast is going to be, run, moving forward. And the reason for that is just like I said, the reality, like looking at the writing on the wall, and here I wanna give a huge shout out to my, producer and editor and cheerleader and friend, Finn from Normalizing non-Monogamy, who has been for about a year now, helping me, make this podcast even better and helping me strategize around content, around production. He edits all of these episodes now, and, he has just been amazing. And I don't know how I ever had this show without him.
And, he and I put our heads together over the past, month and, ultimately came to the conclusion that what we really needed to do was do this show in seasons. That way you have a reliable sense of when you're gonna get the show and for how long. And then I have a reliable time when I am not trying to constantly produce content, because it's just not possible for me. And, and also for those of you who, you know, can't necessarily keep up with a weekly podcast because you've got a lot of other stuff going on too, doing it in seasons means you have a chance to catch up. So that is what we're gonna be doing moving forward. The season starts today with this episode, and we will go through, about 12 to 14 episodes and then we'll be done.
And I'm gonna take the summer off, and then we'll start up again in the fall with another season. And, I welcome hearing from you about how that works for you. but ironically enough, when I really looked at how my podcast had been coming out, I'd already basically been doing seasons. Like I had a period of time in the spring where I was producing episodes weekly, and then I had the summer off. Like, I didn't choose that, but that was what happened. And then I had a period of time in the fall where I was producing, I produced about 12 episodes all in a row, weekly, and then had to take off. So now we'll just be doing it in a more planned way. But, you know, life happens. I'm human. this is, the current iteration of what we're gonna be doing, and we will see how it goes.
And I suppose I wanna say this to anybody who's listening, who themselves has, an internet business or who is a content creator, or who provides services to people that you know, you always have permission to create in a way that actually works for you and for your life. And I think it's essential to do that. And I have been on such a journey figuring out how I want to work and how I want to produce what I have to offer the world. And I have been honestly ignoring and actively rejecting a lot of the mainstream wisdom about how to do that because I have to do it in a way that works for me and that works within my value system. And that is something that I can consistently do, so that I am, you know, reliable and accountable. And, you know, that's an ongoing process.
But I just wanted to let, I just wanna say for those of you who are listening who might be in the same boat, I wanna give you permission now, if something isn't working for you, just stop doing it and find a thing that does. So today's episode, it's gonna be a little bit personal and it's going to be a little bit or a lot, vulnerable. I gotta tell you, as I was writing my notes for this episode, I got so triggered, that I had to stop and then I, started again and I got triggered and I had to talk about it with like a whole bunch of people because what I'm gonna be sharing with you is, is a story from, one of the toughest moments in my life. And I'm gonna be sharing some things with you that I am not proud of that I did. so, I hope you'll hold me gently in your hearts as you listen. But I wanted to share this with you because what I'm really here to talk about in this episode is values and why values are something that we need to be clear on with ourselves and why it's sometimes hard to be clear on values with yourself and why it's sometimes hard to hold onto your values and stay in your integrity. And then I wanna talk to you about what I've learned and about how to do that better. So,
Again, this is a personal episode. There's a lot of personal story in here, and I guess I'm just gonna stop talking about it now. We're gonna just dive in. Okay,
So before I go into this, I want to let you know that I'm going to be referencing a TV show that I recently watched. Well, it's actually a mini-series, I guess. The show is called Fleischman is In Trouble. It's available on Hulu streaming, and it's, produced by the FX Channel. And the reason why I'm mentioning this is because in, as I talk about some aspects of the show, there are definitely some minor spoilers. So if you are planning on watching that show and just can't stand any spoilers at all, you may wanna skip this episode until you watch Fleischman is in Trouble. And if you haven't watched it and have no intention of watching it, that's totally okay. But honestly, it's a really good miniseries. So I recommend just going and watching it now if you haven't. But I'll also just say, I honestly don't think I'm revealing things from the show that are gonna totally spoil it for you or anything like that.
I'm not like revealing any like, big plot twists or anything like that, but I'm just letting you know that there, there are some things that I'm revealing that are like minor spoilers. Okay, you've been warned. Here's your chance to stop listening if you don't want any spoilers Okay. On with the episode. So now I'm gonna go into my story. So for those of you who've been with me a long time, you may have listened to my interview on normalizing non-monogamy that I did back in 2019. And one of the things I say in that interview is that I actually started dating after I had my first kid, not because I wanted more romantic partners, like that wasn't actually something that I really was looking for in that moment. But instead, what I was looking for was more friends. You know, drew and I had been practicing non-monogamy together for years, but I hadn't dated a ton from the time that we, decided to start start a family.
But after a year of being a mom, a lot had changed for me. I was a totally different person and I was crushingly lonely. So now I'm gonna tell you about Fleishman is in trouble because, one of the main characters, her name is Rachel and she's played by Claire Danes on the show, there's a part of the show where, where it tells her story, and I'm not gonna tell all of it because it would totally ruin the show, but there's this one part where she flashes back to when she had just had a child and she's also crushingly lonely and isolated and having a hard time. And she hoped to make friends with some other mothers in her mommy and me group. And, it wasn't quite working out. And then one day she's, pushing her stroller in the park and she sees some of the other mothers there all hanging out together without her.
And, you know, they're like, oh, hey, oh, we should hang out. But they say it in a way that she knows and they know that they don't really mean it, and she feels that rejection and it is just crushing. And I swear to you, I mean, the whole episode, which again, I cannot spoil it, but the whole episode is just so triggering to me. But that part just really, I felt it in my, in my gut, like, ugh, I gotta say, there's nothing like what you go through when you become a parent. I found out relatively recently there that there's a name for the transition into motherhood. It's actually called Matrescence. And it's, it's like a phase, like adolescence. Like you are reorienting yourself to a totally new version of yourself, complete with body changes and hormones and a nuisance of identity and different parts of your brain getting activated.
And the strangeness of the experience can be so isolating if you don't know anybody else who's going through it, to be able to talk about it with. And, you know, it's not that I didn't have that. I remember actually what I would do is I'd kind of grasp it, any connection I could find, with other moms, even moms that I didn't really actually have all that much in common with. I honestly wonder if I like just stank of desperation whenever I'd go to like a mommy meetup or something like that, or when I'd like approach moms at a playground. And, you know, it was, I remember this moment where I was like, I was talking to this mom. We were both like playing with our kids in the park, and I was thinking, oh gosh, when can I ask her for her number?
I mean, I really felt like dating and, and I was just, I was so desperate. I was so lonely. And, and it's not that I didn't have friends, I did, but none of them had kids and they were all living in the city. I had moved out of the city a little bit. And so our lives were just really different. And I was just really eager to meet people who were willing to talk about breastfeeding and nap schedules and the quality and frequency of our baby's bowel movements. And I tried, I really tried, I was determined to, find my village, you know, we're supposed to have a village. And I was, really sad that I just didn't have one and, that it hadn't magically materialized the minute I had a kid.
So, yeah, that was hard. It was a hard time. And, by the time my kid was one, I still didn't have really anything that was consistent or reliable. And so I decided to try something different. And so I, decided to start trying dating, and I focused my search on folks who openly identified as polyamorous, said that they were parents and who lived in a reasonable distance away from me. And I thought that that would be a recipe to find some friends. And like I was thinking, you know, if we sleep together and we have like, we have sexy times or we're in love with each other, like, that's just a bonus, honestly. Like that would be great. And fortunately back then I was at OkCupid and you could just like set search parameters and filters and so I could just get like a very nice tidy list of all the polyamorous parents within a 10 mile radius of me.
And so that's, that's what I did. And it worked. It worked. I met, I met some people. I connected them to each other actually. And, they then connected to more folks that they had met who are also polyamorous parents in the area. And it sort of snowballed over the course of several months until there were actually like 16 of us. There were like seven pairs of parents and a few bonus partners, and we were all like this freaking group together. We were, a village and it was amazing. We started hanging out. We, uh, we had a few different people who were sort of really good initiators and instigators. It wasn't just like one person. And we were organizing all these, things to do together. We started a slack group. At some point we started calling each other a Polycule, even though all of us weren't dating each other.
At some point folks even would reference the group as like their chosen family. And I thought that was amazing. I mean, and it really did feel like that, like a friend from that group attended the birth of my second kid with me, like held my hand as I pushed him out. Another friend from that group, spent every Friday at my house with, their kid following a parent-child class that we were both taking at a local Waldorf school. As a group, we would meet every Sunday sort of rotating at someone's house and let our kids run around together while all the adults just talked and bonded. We organized family events together, like going apple picking or going on a hayride at the pumpkin farm. You know, we also started hosting like grownup things. Like I started hosting cuddle parties and then like sexy parties and other people held like whiskey tasting parties.
And like, we didn't just invite our small group, although sometimes we did. We also, you know, were part of the larger polyamory community, but as a group we shared so much and we coordinated with each other so much and spent a lot of time together. And during this time, I was also not working because I had just had my second baby and I decided I wanted to stay home with him. And I ended up staying home with him for like, almost two years. It was exactly everything that I had wanted, had wanted for such a long time. And, and more like, these folks weren't just parent friends, they were friend friends. And yeah, I didn't actually get into any dating relationships with any of them except for one person we dated for like a little while. But I was, I was still in love.
I was so in love. I was in love with the group, I was in love with my friends, and I definitely went through that whole NRE . The tricky thing about NRE though, as I've said before, is that sometimes it can cause you to gloss over red flags. And I wanna come back to that though, but I just wanna name that like, sometimes when you're really excited, and especially when you've been longing for something, you don't notice things that you needed to notice. at first the things that I noticed were small, there were some parenting decisions that didn't feel right to me that I observed. There were some communication differences that were tricky for me to navigate. There were also when, people within the group would date each other, sometimes that would actually get pretty messy and hairy.
And you know, I mean, some of the folks in the group were newer to polyamory. Some of the folks in the group were not new to the concept, but maybe new to this kind of dynamic. And so it, you know, there was a lot of, for lack of a better word, kind of drama that kind of cropped up. But honestly, I really challenged myself on all of the things that kind of gave me pause. You know, I asked myself, maybe I'm being judgmental, maybe I don't have the right idea. And, you know, I even actually like kind of copied some of the behavior that I saw that was bothering me. I mean, you know, maybe they knew something that I didn't, you know, and especially as a person who's autistic and who really has to, you know, operate on manual when it comes to social skills.
Like, you know, I don't know that I that at that time, I felt very confident about, you know, how I was doing things. The most profound feature of the group that I, that was actually troubling and and harmful though, was, the gossiping. There was a lot of gossiping, there was a lot of gossiping about each other. There was a lot of gossiping about other folks in the larger community. And there were a few people in the group that were especially egregious about this. And one of them, them I was really, really good friends with. And, they would just dish everything about everyone. And, they were really skillful about it too. Like, somehow they could also make you feel like this was all just for you, that you were in their inner circle of confidence. Like this was a growing closer kind of thing. But throughout the group, gossip was kind of this tool for inclusion, and for connection and information about other people was kind of this form of social currency. And I'd like to say I didn't participate in it, but I absolutely did. And, you know, when I reflect on it now, how I behaved, I honestly, I cringe inside. I don't feel good about how I conducted myself, but I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be liked, I wanted to be valuable.
So Claire Danes' character, the character Rachel and Fleishman is in trouble. She also goes through this, when she finally makes friends with other parents, you know, they end up liking her because, uh, she's a talent agent who works with a lot of Broadway stars and, her friends are these wealthy, shallow, upper crest New York housewives who she meets through this very fancy preschool that she wants her kids to go to. And she's like, thank God, thank God some other friends. And, you know, they don't really get her, they look down on her husband who's a doctor, because, you know, that's not a, get rich profession, at least not by New York City, upper Crest standards. They kind of used her for theater tickets and access to famous Broadway performers. And she let them. She let them, and she kind of participated in their toxic behavior because she was just so desperate to have friends and to be included.
And man, I get it, again, another like really triggering moment for me, are the things that she's saying about really wanting a place in the world, wanting her kids to have a place in the world and really for her, like she was not really building this village for herself. Like, those relationships were clearly not nourishing to her, but she wanted them, for her kids. She wanted the social access. And you know, they, you know, cuz her kids would get to go to the, the other family's home in the Hamptons and experience all these luxurious things. And, you know, the character, she didn't have any of that when she was growing up. And so she was eager to create it for her kids. And man, I felt that too. I felt that too. Like, it wasn't just about me, but I was like, this is a village that my kids can live in. These are other polyamorous parents. And so if my kids are not accepted in other spaces, like at school or in their community, like they'll at least have these people to hold them and care for them and watch them grow up. I mean, I had so many dreams and hopes for how this group would last and last and last. so I, gossiped with all the people gossiping.
It got worse though. One summer after we'd all been hanging out together for like, about a year, there were three people in the group who had all been dating each other in kind of a triad, but then two of the people in that triad broke up. And so it became a V and that got a little yucky and messy, the relationship with the, between the two people who had been together, they were now metamours. That relationship got strained and then contentious. And then one night at a party, it got really ugly resulting in one person getting drunk and kind of physically attacking the other at one of our friend's birthday parties. And immediately after I was like, oh my God, like, can we talk about this together? Like, I reached out on our slack group and I tried to bring everyone together to like meet about it, to talk about it, to support resolving the issue collectively and, you know, having some repair to support everyone, and also hopefully making the person who had been attacked feel safe in the group.
And my attempt at that was immediately shot down. And subsequent attempts in that direction were also shut down. The person who had been attacked was also trying to like, get some group support, but that was also undermined. some people said it was just between the two of them, that we couldn't take sides. The person who had, done the attacking, refused to apologize, said the attack was actually provoked. That person refused to be accountable and, accused the other person of being a liar and being dishonest and being manipulative. And the person who was attacked said they felt unsafe and eventually they left the group. But really, I feel like they were pushed out because they, there just wasn't any support for them and their trustworthiness and everything was being undermined by the person who had attacked them.
Which now I know what that is. That's called darvo. DARVO stands for deny attack, reverse victim and offender. And that is absolutely what happened. But I didn't really understand it at the time. I knew in my body that that didn't feel right, like that what happened the day after from that person felt like basically damage control. It didn't feel like, oh God, I acted outside of my integrity. I did something that wasn't okay and I need to make it right. Instead, it was, I need to protect myself and I need to make that other person look as bad as possible so that I don't have to be accountable for what happened. And y'all, that immediately didn't feel right in my body, that immediately felt completely wrong and really not okay. And it rocked me to my core. And what I'd like to tell you is that I listened to that part of me and that I pushed back.
And that I insisted that the person who was the attacker, who was a good friend of mine, that I insisted that they'd be accountable for their behavior. I'd like to say that's how I handled it. I'd like to say that I stuck up for that person who was attacked and when they got pushed out and nobody would hold that other person accountable that I left. But that isn't what happened. Instead, I backed down when I shared that that didn't feel okay to me, the way that the attacking person behaved. instead I accepted their excuses for their violent behavior. I allowed them to convince me to give no support to my other friend. I allowed them to convince me that it wasn't any of my business to support a group resolution. And I participated in creating the circumstances that led my friend who had been attacked, who didn't feel safe to leave the group.
It's one of the, this is hard to talk about. The way that I handled the situation is one of my biggest regrets of my life, honestly. It's so outside of my value system now. And it was then too, for me as someone who had been socially excluded in so many ways and had so much pain around it over so many times in my life, that I participated in someone losing access to their friend group feels like absolutely unconscionable to me. And it did at the time. It felt terrible and I was really upset about it. I was really cut up about it, but I participated in it and, you know, it actually got worse. Because we were all part of this larger local polyamorous community. And remember, gossip was the currency and it was being used in this situation to great harm to both of the people involved, but more so for the person who had been attacked.
I mean, the person who had been attacked did start spreading their victim story, vilifying their acts. And that was my friend. And so I felt like yucky about that. But my friend who stayed in the group was also vilifying the person they attacked. And, doing that among people both in the group and within the larger community saying they couldn't be trusted, saying they were manipulative, saying they were narcissistic, et cetera. Both of them went around saying the other one was unsafe. Which led to a lot of people who organized events, excluding one or the other, saying that that person was unsafe. And like, you gotta understand, being invited to events is the way that you would make friends the way that you would find partners. It was, again, it was big social currency, big social capital. If you were an event organizer, I was an event organizer. I organized a lot of things. It was a nightmare.
One of my friends who had been part of the group and then left, actually did call me out on not really taking a stand for what he saw was pretty messed up. He did leave the group. He was clear that it was our responsibility to make the person who was attacked feel safe. And I agree with him. He was right and he gave me a real hard time cuz we had been good friends and he really thought like I should have known better. Although he was kind of mean to me about it. Uh, I don't blame him. He was right and I didn't see it. And I'll be honest, that whole experience, even though I stayed in the group and continued to have a place in it, the group from there was just cracked for me. It would take me much longer to understand it.
Though. The group definitely stopped feeling safe to me because, watching people I cared about weaponized social connections to hurt each other was like terrifying for me. I was worried that if I stepped outta line that I would be the next target. And that's why I didn't take a strong stand against it. I also just wasn't sure I, these folks the way that they were moving through things, they really seemed so confident about what they were doing. And I felt so confused. And so I was, and again, I just, I didn't have a lot of self-trust at the time. And I also didn't wanna be lonely. So, you know, when I was noticing what felt right or wrong to me, but my friends didn't agree, I was really stuck.
So I hate using this word, but the drama of the group did not end with that incident. There was so much more. And I don't wanna go into all of the things that happened. I wasn't so in the middle of all of them, but because they were happening to my friends and I was a support person to my friends, I would listen a lot. I would offer a lot of support. And I, it honestly really stretched me thin energetically a lot. And I also had a lot of, again, when I would hear people treating each other poorly, that would, that would be really upsetting and scary for me to be with. And, at the same time, some of the folks, including my good friend who, you know, had been the attacker, pulled away from me, because they could tell that I wasn't totally on the same page with them.
And I really hope that we could make it all better. I really hoped that we could repair things. I have, I actually pulled up like some old emails from this time in my life and I remember saying things like, Hey, can we really, can we talk about this? Can we work through this? Can we repair the cracks? I really had hopes that people would see things differently. I wanna pause here because, I do wanna say, this is my version of events. You know, this is my story, my reality, and I wanna just acknowledge that other people who were involved in this might have a different reality and might not see it the way that I do. And that's okay, because this story isn't really about what's objectively true. The story is about me and how I moved through this experience and what I came through with on the other side.
And that's important. I'm actually gonna pause the story here because, I want to offer the story to you in two parts. So there is a part two before I just leave you hanging because I know I left things hanging in a difficult place. I do wanna tell you a couple of things. First of all, I have, been accountable for this. So I'm not sharing this to you from a place of like unresolved pain. I've been accountable for this with the person who left the group. I've been accountable around this with the person who called me out on my behavior. And, he and I are really, really good friends now. But of course, it was a journey to get there, and I am, I can't wait to tell you how I got there. And it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy. So, stay tuned for part two where I tell you what happened next.
