When Life is Turned Upside Down
In this episode, Libby talks about disruption and offers a 5 step process to move through it more easily.
Transcript
So I am recording this episode on April 14th, 2020. So right now, if you're listening to this episode, your life is likely very disrupted right now, although that can likely vary quite a bit, depending on who you are and where you are in the world, while disruption can certainly have tremendous costs and present a lot of tremendous challenges, I believe it can also hold tremendous gifts. And while this new pandemic world we're living in represents a pretty major disruption in all of our lives, it's also not the only kind of disruption we encounter. And this is especially true for those of us who are some flavor of non-monogamous. So I'd really like to talk about disruption, your relationship to it, how to move through it, and how to be able to find the hidden opportunities that disruption may have for all of us.
It feels like every day in this new pandemic reality is an exercise in disruption, large and small in my life. The large includes things like no school, no in-person time with friends, the nearly every place of business that I might normally go to is shuttered. And the small things might be like disinfecting. Every item coming into my home, everyone is wearing masks. Now, everywhere we go we all have to carefully consider every grocery trip and every outing, the list of disruptions right now is pretty long. Actually, they zaps my energy. Sometimes I imagine it's the same for you. Although I, I do realize we're all impacted by this new reality in different ways. And all of these changes came on so quickly. Few of us could have anticipated our lives looking so substantially different even just a month ago. And none of us really asked for this and we didn't get to choose it.
And we've all been handed this new existence and we're all having a figure it out on the fly and just do our best and feel our feelings because there's a lot to feel about all of it along the way. And you know, some of us might be really angry right now because it didn't actually have to be this way, or maybe it didn't have to be this way. If you're in the United States, you might be feeling like if only our government had just taken this seriously, if only people had not been so insistent on traveling when they were sick or doing business until the government made them stop. If only we had had a better healthcare system or had made better tests and rolled them out sooner, if only people hadn't voted for the people who were running the show right now, so many things just didn't go the way that we might have liked for them to.
And instead, I'm wearing a mask to go on a walk in my neighborhood and I've had to completely rearrange my work schedule so that I can balance running my business with dealing with my kids at home 24 7, I've had to move my office into my bedroom so that the room that my office was in can be a full-time bedroom for one of my partners who just moved in because they lost their job. I have written a whole post recently on Facebook about how responses to disruption can really vary quite widely, but that they often lie up with the different kinds of stress responses or whoosh responses that I talk about. In a previous episode, they can look like fight-flight, freeze, fix fun. And if you're interested, you can go check out that post that I made on Facebook. And if you listen to my episode on taming, your woosh, you might notice right now what type of survival mode that you are living out of a lot right now.
But what I wanna talk about today, isn't stress responses that can show up, but more deeply, how we relate to disruption overall and what this current crisis can teach us about how we can respond to other kinds of disruptions. We face in our law lives. So many of the people I work within my coaching are experiencing disruption in their lives. That's why they need my help. A thing that often happens is that something has shifted in one of their relationships and how it works often. It's something like this crisis that they didn't choose or plan or expect. And those shifts that have happened have turned everything inside out and is causing them to basically renegotiate their whole relationship and maybe even reimagine what it is and what it means to them. And this may be something you're confronting right now because of the pandemic.
I'm hearing a lot about how these stay-at-home orders are impacting people who are partnered with people that they're not living with. People are sometimes choosing to move in with people and not choosing to hunker down with others. Maybe people are cohabitating before they plan to, and that's really shifting how that relationship looks. Also, there are people whose nesting partner isn't necessarily their main romantic partner, but that's the person that they're seeing all the time. Maybe the person that you thought was someone that you're really close to and is really invested with. You suddenly doesn't have a lot of bandwidth or energy to put into that relationship because they are focusing on taking care of their kids or taking care a sick relative, or working their butt off because they're an essential employee. A lot of things are shifting around right now.
I'm having a hard time right now because one of my partners who I consider to be an anchor partner is also someone that I don't live with and who has four kids and is very in enveloped in his domestic life right now. I'm also not close with his nesting partner. So there are times when I find myself struggling to feel a part of his world, or like our relationship has any space to truly be what it is to both of us in our hearts. I'm so used to us getting together out in the world, having kid playdates and outings and family dinners at each other's houses. And none of that is available to us right now. And because we both have our kids home all the time, we're just busier than normal, more higher than normal. And so it's actually harder to maintain virtual contact than it used to be because we both just have less downtime and less brain power.
And so right now we're in the process of figuring out how we navigate that and figure out what we are gonna do about that. And the future is so uncertain. And so we can't really hold on until things just go back to normal because we don't really know if that's gonna happen or what that's gonna look like, or how long that's gonna be. So we're actively trying to pivot and adjust to what is right now and figure out how to make whatever is right now sustainable. It's funny, cuz I've always said that I don't do long-distance relationships cuz I never have done well in them. And there are many ways in which right now my relationship with my non-nested partner feels like a long-distance relationship. Even though he only lives a 20 minute drive away in the same way that this pandemic has illuminated weaknesses in our healthcare systems, our supply chains, and in our leadership.
So too, it is illuminating a lot of things about us and perhaps showing us sides of our relationships. We weren't seeing. I'm honestly curious what you are seeing right now in your relationships that you weren't seeing before. Some folks I've talked to said, they're really reevaluating their priorities in their relationships. And some people are really thinking about how they've structured their lives and whether that is something that they wanna continue in the future. This is what disruption does. Disruption tends to have many surprising and unexpected consequences. And, and I wanna talk a little bit about how, when you decide to do something like open up your relationship or just choose to move away from dominant cultural ideas of monogamy or what a relationship is and is meant to be and how that sometimes has unexpected and disrupting consequences. When you choose non-monogamy generally you have some reason for wanting to some kind of disruption.
You have something that you're hoping will happen. Some intent, something that you'll hope you'll get out of it that you don't already have in your life. I'm pretty confident about this because otherwise, if you were just satisfied with the status quo, you'd just stay with it. You'd be with the dominant culture and you'd continue monogamy or you'd engage in monogamy. So there are all kinds of reasons why you choose to not do that to do non-monogamy. Maybe you were just looking for some more sexual variety or maybe you were hop to ease some sexual incompatibility in an existing relationship. Maybe you are BI or pansexual and you want to have the experience of relationships with multiple genders. You don't want to limit yourself in that way. And maybe there are some unmet needs that a monogamous relationship was not fulfilling. And you were hoping to get those met by being non-monogamous.
Maybe you were looking for a wider base of connection because you know, one person just can't be your everything. Or maybe you discovered that you could be in love with more than one person and you just really needed to embrace that about yourself. All of these are reasons I've seen for why people open up. But another thing I've seen is that often a lot of other things happen that you didn't anticipate when you took those steps away from monogamy things I've seen are you like you might discover your and into power exchange. And maybe you're only into that with one partner, but not another. And maybe the partner who isn't into it finds that whole scenario, really threatening and insecure making. You might discover that while you were cool with your partner, dating people who are a different gender than you. It's scary to see your partner dating someone. That's the same gender as you, you might find out that you're mega sexual and you didn't know that. Or maybe you find out that you're asexual and you didn't know that or you find out you're a romantic or you find out that you're actually not the gender that you were assigned at birth.
Maybe you realize that you're not just non-monogamous, but that you're really a relationship anarchist. And you reject a whole lot of things about how mainstream society thinks about relationships and you are wanting to make some big changes in how you do things. You also might just find yourself falling madly in love with someone so deeply and that it completely upends your whole life and who you thought you were, And that ends up challenging everyone else, who you love and anchor your life to Your relationships with others might become a catalyst that exposes challenging things in an existing anchor relationship, things you weren't seeing things that you now have to confront. All of these are things that I've seen and I've seen more and all of them are pretty major upheavals, pretty major disruptions.
Now I wanna be clear monogamous folks, go through disruption too. As long as we are, are people who grow and change and evolve and respond to the changes in our lives and gain new information about ourselves. Our partners, the world, our relationships have the potential always to end up in places we didn't expect or want. And we may end up facing difficult choices that we wish we didn't have to make. Frankly, a lot of the things I just described are things that also happen in monogamous relationships. There are also things that can happen in any relationship like physical or mental illness or injury loss of a job, some other economic hardship, even just changing careers, having to move discover a new hobby or a new religion or a new political ideology becoming parents needing to care for a parent or another family member who's ill or having a special needs child wrestling with infertility, losing a loved one.
I could go on. I mean, there are so many things that come into our lives that can create these seismic shifts in any relationship that we're in, whether it's monogamous or not. And it can just turn everything upside down and even tear things apart. You know, I've actually thought that it's possible. That one reason why monogamous people sometimes just look at non-monogamous people and are scratching their head going, why would you do this? The reason why they might is, because it looks like we're intentionally disrupting the stability of our lives. And our hard one partnerships.
I mean, what I would say is that I would make the argument that stability is an illusion and that disruption again is part of life. But engaging in non-monogamy is often inviting disruption. I actually find it pretty funny how often I encounter newer opening up couple who think that they can make such a fundamental shift in how their relationships work and have it not be profoundly disruptive. And I'll tell you no matter what happens after a couple opens up, I have not met a single one that hasn't had a profound disruption in their relationship. And of course, I'm gonna be real here. Lots of relationships that open up don't survive it. It's not great polyamory public relations to admit this. But that's the reality that I have seen though, many folks who have had this happen to them say that it wasn't the non-monogamy that caused the breakup, but just that the monogamy made it no longer or possible to avoid the truth, that the relationship just wasn't sustainable for them anymore and maybe never was.
And that's actually the value of disruption. Sometimes, when you disrupt or are disrupted, that is the catalyst that shows you the, that you can't avoid anymore. It can end up forcing a reckoning, whether or not you're ready for it. You're faced with having to really look at and be with where you actually are. And in the case of a relationship who you're actually with and who you are in that relationship. And then you have that opportunity to then evaluate whether where you are, is working for you and whether things need to change. And that reckoning can end up actually being an extremely positive thing. If your relationship survives the reckoning, it is like a Phoenix from the ashes, born a new strong and better because of the difficult things that had to be confronted and not hiding from uncomfortable truths anymore. But instead holding them in the light, I've seen people solve problems in their relationships that had previously felt unsolvable.
I've seen them heal old wounds, rewrite old and create a new relationship with their partner that was more loving and more connected, and more secure than the one they had before. If the relationship doesn't survive, the reckoning offers the gift of letting go of a relationship that was not serving the people in it and then clearing space for whatever needs to come after it. However, all that sounds really great. I'm sure, but of course, it can be nearly impossible to see any positive about a disruption until after you've had your reckoning and made it through to the other side, when you're actively in a disruption, it generally just feels like hell and many of my clients come to me when they're in the middle of a disruption. One of the first things I often tell them is that one of the things that they're going through is that the relationship that they had together, the one that they used to have is now over, it's gone, it's disrupted what was, is no more.
There is no going back to normal. And so now the choice is you can fight the disruption, increase your suffering, or you can welcome it and see what's inside it. And what's possible. On the other side, I wanna be honest that disruption can be devastating, excruciating, and exhausting, even traumatizing, but disruption can also force us to get unstuck. It can force us to confront hard things. It can rattle us out of a rut. It can force us to deal with uncomfortable truths that we're avoiding. Disruption can also push us to become, come who we need to be. And often it's all those things. One thing that I can say about disruption, no matter who you are or how you love is that I think disruption is inevitable. Disruption is a part of life. You can hope to avoid it, but that honestly has its own consequences.
Avoiding disruption means blocking out a lot of beautiful things about life. So instead, what I wanna offer you now is a way you can embrace disruption and use it as an opportunity to cultivate resilience in yourself and your relationships. So there are five things that I do that help me move through disruption. I'm using them all right now. So I'm very, very present to these things. So first I invite you to focus on what you can control. So I'm not religious, but I actually have a plaque that used to belong to my grandmother, hanging on my wall of the serenity prayer. Here's the shortcut though, to the serenity prayer. Okay. Most often the only thing you can control is yourself and how you respond. That's the only thing you can change, what you can't change and what you need to wisely accept that you can't change is pretty much everything else and everyone else.
And there's a tremendous amount of power though, in focusing on what you can change, which is you. Learning How to really be with your feelings, learning how to take responsibility for your choices, working to control your reactions and continually making a practice of reaching for the best parts of yourself is one of the most worthwhile things you can be doing right now, or really in any time of disruption. It's so rate to learn how to get really quiet and listen to your inner compass and stay open and listen, and look for the next right thing, and then giving it your best shot and then letting go of the outcome because that is out of your hands. And if that's all you manage to do right now is work on those things. That alone can be tremendously powerful. The second thing that I'm doing right now, and that I wanna offer you is to work, to let go of feelings of victimhood.
Victimhood is so tempting to give in to when you're stuck in a disruption that unwelcome, it is so easy to slip into resentment and rage and self-pity. I do this sometimes I'll wake up in the morning and I will think about what's gonna come that day. And I just, I clench myself and I get angry and I start to feel sorry for myself. This also happens to me oddly enough, when I get home from the grocery store and I have to wipe everything down with disinfectant, I just get so angry. But when you position yourself as a victim, you are saying to yourself that you are a person without agency upon whom forces greater than you are acting. And that it may be true, but it is fundamentally a disempowered place from which to act and move through the world. And it often takes you in the opposite direction of the first thing I said, which is to learn to focus on what you can control, what you can change, which is you.
Instead, what happens when you're in a victim place is you tend to focus on forces outside yourself instead of looking inward and you tend to lose sight of being accountable for your own part in your own situation. It can also lead you to something called offending from the victim position, which is basically that eye for an eye attitude being hurtful or acting out because you feel victimized and then entitled to whatever reactions arise for from you. Self-righteous indignation is a hell of a drug, but I have never seen it not do tremendous damage to a relationship. I'm gonna be honest. It's not fun or fair to have to take ownership of whatever hand that life has dealt you because it's not always fair. But at the end of the day, just accepting responsibility for the choices that you have and how you play your cards. But that is all we have. We may be entitled to claim victimhood, but I have never seen it be anything but poisonous it's junk food for the soul. It feels good going down, but it just ends up making you feel like shit.
The third thing that I wanna offer you is to acknowledge and allow the grief. When disruption happens, there is always something lost and sometimes it's something precious, something real and tangible that you've lost of something that once was sometimes the loss was something you never had in the first place though. Maybe it was just an illusion of something, an illusion of stability, an illusion of perfection, an illusion of safety, some story that you were yourself that you realize now wasn't true, but that's still a loss and it's still worth grieving. I think it's so important right now, especially, but anytime there's a disruption to allow the grief to really feel it, because if you don't allow yourself to feel it tends to just get stuck or you end up engaging in some really harmful coping mechanisms to numb it or run away from it or fight it.
So the more you can just welcome it and allow yourself to feel it the better off. I think you'll be the fourth thing is to find or create joy and pleasure wherever you can. This is the step you'll need. If you're afraid that if you allow grief, you'll never feel anything else because the truth is in every situation, there are ways to find joy. You just have to look for it. And, and if you can't find it, you can make it. You can cultivate it. I realize this is like more super cliche advice because this is like basically, you know, look for the silver lining, make lemonade out of lemons. Psychologists, call it cognitive reframing, looking on the bright side. But like the there's a reason why this is something that is a broadly-offered piece of advice is cuz it, it actually works.
Now. I'm not telling you that you have to be relentlessly positive and experience whatever disruption is going on for you as something other than what it actually is. False positivity is gross and unnecessary and it is actually a form of avoidance. So I'm not for that. What I want is for all of us to live at the juxtaposition of that grief and the joy, we do need to feel the sad feelings, but we also need to look for the joy and find it. And it's there y'all and our hearts and our bodies and our loved ones need it. And the memory of it to move us through those hard times.
The last step that I wanna offer you in this process is to look for or create meaning in the disruption. Now I wanna be the first to say, I don't believe in some intelligent universe that sends everyone exactly the sorts of challenges they need to grow. I don't believe that everything happens for a reason. I think plenty of disruption just sucks. Okay. And there are people who are going through some real, awful storm during this pandemic and none of it's fair and they don't deserve it. It's nothing that the universe sent them. It's not karma, it's just heart-wrenching tragedy, but just because there isn't some inherent meaning in suffering doesn't mean we can't create some meaning in it. And a lot of research has shown that finding meaning in hard things helps us be more likely to experience post-traumatic growth instead of post-traumatic stress disorder, AKA PTSD.
So maybe you have to make up some kind of meaning for what happened, but creating meaning is what helps us move through it. It gives us that resilience. It helps us move on and survive in a better place than where we started. One way that I like to create meaning is in telling stories about what's happening. Research has shown that families that have a sort of family story about like where we came from, what we through and how we got to the other end and what that meant. They tend to be more resilient and connected in my relationships. And in my family, I like to tell and retell our story to each other. This is who we are. This is why we're here. This is where we've been, and this is where we're going. And this is our purpose. This is what that means to us. And as new things come up, sometimes we have to rewrite our story. But the cool thing about stories is that they are alive. And with every retelling, they have a tremendous power to shape how we experience things and how we feel connected to one another.
So to recap, disruption presents tremendous challenges, but disruption's also a part of life. And I want to invite you to take a step beyond just coping with and surviving disruption. And instead, I wanna offer you how you might learn to welcome it, and allow the opportunities that it can bring. I believe embracing disruption can reduce unnecessary suffering. And the steps that I take to move through disruption are one, except what I can control and what I can't control which is usually just myself and not anything else. Two, reject victimhood. Three, acknowledge and allow grief four find and cultivate joy, and five, look for or create meaning. If you're stuck in grief, anger, victimhood frustration. If you're finding yourself overwhelmed or frozen or kicked into overdrive, I am so there with you. I get hit with all of that too. Sometimes everyone in my life is having up days and down days, we've had tensions.
We've had fights. We've had days where we all collapse exhausted before the day is over or just drop the ball. There have been many, many ways that we have all had to rearrange our expectations, our schedules, our furniture, our plans, everything. And there have definitely been moments of grief and loss with probably more to come, but I've also been blown away. By the way, everyone I know has been working to be their best self right now, taking ownership of what they can making space for compassion toward anyone who just can't carry on. In that moment. I've also been finding a lot of small joys. My kids have started sitting on our front porch every day to eat their lunch. While my partner plays music, I've been doing yoga with my mom every day to a video on YouTube. Having our partner move in with us has so far just felt like the next right thing.
They have their art hanging on the walls and it feels like it should have just always been there. I'm embracing the slowness and the way days blend together, instead of letting it get disorienting or numbing. I try also to remember to turn on music and sing and dance. And I remind my kids all the time, what it means to be a family together. And for us, that, what that means is that when times are hard, we take care of each other. But we also remember to have fun. Disruption is always going to be a time of the destruction of loss, of change, but disruption is also a moment, an opportunity for creation. So I'm asking you, dear listeners, in your moments of disruption that you're facing right now, what will you create?
