Welcome to Playing With Fire, the podcast for people who are ready to custom build their love. We're talking about non-monogamy, however you design it, as an individuation opportunity. Want to leave the default and make your life spectacularly you? You're in the right place. Hey, Ken. We're back.
Hello, Jolie. We're back. It's been a little bit. Well, I mean, other people may not have experienced it being a little bit, but we haven't actually recorded, yeah, since early autumn. For us, it's been a while. Or maybe even late summer. We really got ahead of ourselves, which was great. That was exactly what we needed because it was a wild ride. We did a good job in making the space for that. Yeah. Winter. Yeah. And I'm excited to be back recording.
After a break, because I feel like the stuff that we've done over the last. like four or five months has really, I feel a shift in a bunch of the conversations I've been having into a new deeper layer of my own thinking about non-monogamy. Definitely my thinking around how individuation can be accessed through our relational growth. And I'm definitely feeling that. One of the places I felt like I learned a ton was.
hosting the first year of opening retreat in Nicaragua at Malibu Popoyo. Wow, that was so valuable. We all leveled up while we were there. Yeah. I mean, I really felt it. And as the host, I felt the shift in conversation that really happened as a whole bunch of us who've gone through the whole year of opening. dove into an in-person exploration of the same principles. I loved it. And one of the things that came out of that was a conversation about integrity and what it means to be in integrity.
I told everybody there, like, y'all, this is going to be a podcast episode as soon as I get home. Yep. Because it was such an evocative. conversation like I it got me right in the gut it would have made for a good podcast all by itself yeah honestly yeah if we had just live recorded that conversation it was amazing but I did take notes and I would love to talk about this word integrity, right? And what it means for our practice of conscious relating. And before we get started, I'm curious.
If you have anything that you wanted to say before we talk about integrity, how does it make you feel? Well, I struggle with integrity myself. Well, me too. I mean, don't we all? Don't we all? I mean, it's a tall order to have the kind of integrity that I would like to have in the kinds of relationships I would like to have, not to mention work.
Everything. So how does it feel? It feels like a really valuable stretch. And the more I talk about it, the happier I am about understanding it. How about you? Well, one of the reasons I was happy to talk about it is that I think that the idea of I am a person of integrity, like it's a great idea. And I think that.
you know we want to be and and many of us identify as a person of integrity but then when we really get in and look at the difference between what it feels like on the inside to be in integrity versus what it looks like. to actually live up to the standard of integrity and for me a lot of the struggle is am i living up to the standard of integrity that i require from other people especially my partners and that's where i start to notice like
No, I like I definitely have a double standard and I think many of us have a double standard and it's tricky because it's not in just one direction. Sometimes I hold myself to a higher standard than anyone around me. Sometimes I hold myself. to a lower standard than the people around me. But I think that this conversation can also help us move through some of the powerful internal material that comes up around it. Because when your integrity is called into question,
I mean, it hits, it brings up shame. It just, I mean, instantly. And that's really where this conversation came from. I was in a discussion with A member of you who I value very, very deeply and who heard me say, hey, you know, integrity. And it hit her. It landed for her. And she said, you know what? I felt my whole body going to shame.
Oh, yeah, this is a deeper conversation. We need to have this again. So let's define integrity. I know it's cheesy to start off with a dictionary definition, but in this case, I think it's helpful. Rather than just my off-the-cuff definition, a dictionary definition of integrity that I do like is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.
I like that definition because the difference between moral and ethical is kind of important, right? Living up to the ethical principles is really about living up to your, like the social container and the principles at a larger level. Your moral principles, that's your in. internal sense of what have I decided is right, your moral compass. The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, I mean, I want to be known as that.
But the second definition is the state of being whole and undivided. And that's why I think this is interesting, right? Oh, yeah. Think about like the integrity of your skin, right? If my skin is broken, I've lost my dermal integrity. When we talk about being whole and undivided, I'm instantly caught by how we are all experiencing inner conflict all the time. Maybe not every second of every day, but a lot.
We are all experiencing our own inner multiplicity. And so what does it mean to be in integrity if I have different parts of me that have different wants, different needs, different boundaries, different... ways of being in the world, possibly even different moral principles. What does that mean? How do I bring myself into enough alignment, enough self-leadership or alignment or wholeness or whatever that I can?
Whatever this thing is that I call myself, my capital S self, can say, hey, I know we have this multiplicity inside. How are we going to align enough that we can actually be in integrity? Well, that's a great set of definitions because, yeah, I definitely have slippery parts that are definitely part of the whole. Right. But they're not great at being honest and holding strong moral values or moral principles. Well, and sometimes our parts are great at holding on to a part of our principles.
but they're not all prioritizing them all the same, right? I mean, we're going to have to make hard decisions if we're talking about being in our real life. we're going to wind up having to make some hard decisions. And sometimes those hard decisions, a lot of time, a hard decision is hard because we need to prioritize a bunch of things that all matter to us.
And we still have to choose where to spend our energy, where to spend our resources, where to direct our attention. So if I have two or more parts of me. that have prioritized differently. They might all be feeling very strongly about being of moral principle, of integrity, but they prioritize differently. And realistically, we're talking about being these like we're real creatures living in these bodies in time and space. And so.
Being able to choose and actually make a hard decision is part of being able to be in integrity over the long term. Right. Yeah. And now when we bring that into the context of non-monogamy specifically or conscious relating specifically. We are often in hard decision-making points where I'm going to have to grapple with different, yes, different wants of my own, but also different needs of other people.
different wants of other people and then figure out, okay, how do I prioritize all of that too? So if you're out there feeling like it's kind of hard to do really conscious relating, yeah. Like, can we all just give ourselves a little credit? Yeah, it is hard. It's worth it. I will stand by it being worth it, but it is hard. And I'm super proud of everybody who's out there doing the best they can to live that way.
And to keep coming back to it when they feel like, oh, I've fallen down. I've had a real problem with this. You came back. If you're grappling with this, you're working on it. Awesome. I love that. So we have all these decisions that we make that actually determine whether we're living in integrity or not. And if they were easy, we wouldn't really be talking about integrity. People would just do it. But these.
are often tricky questions of balancing, like you said, multiple priorities across multiple relationships, multiple domains. Well, and so that brings us really quickly into agreements, right? Because when I think about integrity, sometimes it's so vague, right? And we think about our principles, but again, they seem vague. One way to start wrapping our heads around, am I just a, you know, am I just living in integrity? And it's just sort of out there. It's just sort of a concept. Well.
how do you do upholding your agreements? And oftentimes when I ask this question, people immediately start thinking about the agreements they have with other people. I've agreed to text at this time. I've agreed to come home at this time. I've agreed to keep in contact this frequently. I have agreed to contribute this much to our household.
We think about the agreements that we've made with other people, but what about the agreements you make with yourself? Because for me, when I really, I mean, I talk about agreements all the time, but if you boil it down. Every agreement you make as an agreement with yourself. Yeah. You have to be able to do the things you said to someone else that you would do. And that's about self-agreement. Right. So if I'm making an agreement with you.
which we do all the time. I make tiny little agreements. I make great big, huge overarching agreements for our whole life. Every time I'm doing that, if I accidentally imagine. that my agreement is with you and you hold it, that I'm actually asking you to police me. To hold me to it. I'm asking you to be in that position. And I think this is where some people really struggle with the idea of agreements. They're like, I don't want to have agreements. I will act.
Well, I will behave well. I will be a good person. Just believe me. It's because they're imagining that their agreements are about their partner policing them. I don't see agreements that way. I see agreements as always beginning. with you. It's your job to decide what you are agreeing to do, how you're agreeing to behave, how you're agreeing to attend to your duties, your responsibilities, the things that you commit to.
how you're going to handle yourself in the face of the unknown and what unfolds that you can't actually predict. Those agreements that you make with yourself, can you hold yourself to those? Right. Because if you can do that. Your partner doesn't need to hold you to agreements. You hold you to the agreements you make. So at that point, it's about clarity. What do I do? How do I decide what to do?
I have lived a lot of my life just bouncing around, making my decisions on the fly. And the result was a fairly dissolute life in a lot of ways. Like I never quite got. a plan. It was hard to get toward my goals because I wasn't clear about what I was doing moment to moment or what values were driving them. And I have found agreements to be tremendously valuable in
helping to qualify for me. What am I doing and why? Now that's completely separate from integrity. That's just like a little self-reflection about values and whatnot. But then the next step is, OK, this is what I said I was going to do. Will I do it? Right. And I have experienced.
you specifically needing a lot of support around the agreements that you make. And I think this, I mean, some of this comes down, we've talked before about birth order. I am an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, but you know, it's. There has been so much responsibility both placed on me and also I like it.
With great responsibility comes great power. I like taking that on. So I do. I volunteer for it. I don't want this to just be about, oh, people put lots of responsibility. They do, but also. I enjoy it. You have lived a very different mode of being. Youngest son of an almost youngest mother. Almost youngest daughter. Out of a lot of them. Yeah, eight of nine. And I don't know. It's just a...
It's a different vibe that we approach responsibility with. And if everything else, if we were talking in some other context, maybe this wouldn't be such a big deal. But when we're talking about living. together sharing a lot of responsibilities or when we're talking about overlapping our um our sexual health or we're talking about overlapping our vulnerabilities, our deepest like sharing of our emotions or our sexual fantasies, right? These ways that we overlap with another person, how we hold.
responsibility can definitely impact what it feels like to each other to be in these agreement containers, right? And one of the things I feel we've struggled with quite a bit, and I see it with clients too, is I tend to take too much responsibility, which isn't actually fair to you at all. It diminishes your actual authority. I have felt like you have taken too little responsibility for upholding your own agreements.
But also I have volunteered to be the holder of agreements, which isn't appropriate. Which can in fact interfere with me doing it. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it wouldn't for everyone, but it does for me. I'm like, oh, I just unconsciously sense that you're handling it and I just lean back. And when you say handling it, you mean things and it's super subtle in some cases. I, I automatically am clocking and paying attention to, we said we would be at this place at this time. And so.
I am likely going to be the one who makes sure we're in that place at that time. Even if it's just the subtle things of saying, hey, I see that you haven't, you haven't gotten dressed and brushed your hair yet. And even those little caretaking things that I'm popping into our life, yeah, in some ways that is me over-functioning and also under all of that. policing you a little bit, like watching you, paying attention, and upholding your self-agreements.
I'm robbing you of the opportunity to face your own consequences, the things that were going to happen, because I don't want it to impact me in some cases. But also, I mean, that's actually, I mean, legitimately, sometimes I do. I overfunction because I'm like. Yeah, I don't want you fucking up my shit. Please don't. Totally. I'm going to take the reins here. Sometimes it's that I don't want to be partnered with someone who behaves the way you do.
And sometimes I imagine the same is true for you of me. Like, because I. am operating from another perspective. I'm not going with the flow. I'm too controlling. I'm overbearing. I get too anxious and nervous about getting everything right. That can't always be fun for you either. And I see this dynamic play out over and over again. But when I think about being in integrity and upholding our agreements, we're getting in the way of each other's growth. But actually,
like bearing the tension of these two opposite ways of handling our self-agreements, there's also a lot of opportunity there to actually see, oh, this is where I could grow. This is where I could lean in. I keep having to pull myself back and be like, ooh, my job is to stop over-functioning here. Yeah, and that's tricky for you, and I know it is. It feels unsafe. Because it feels unsafe, not just because of your life history.
like your long-term life history, but because me, not... approaching the world the way you do means when I'm like okay let me grab a hold of this situation figure out what needs to happen what we need to do and this is what we'll do here's my plan it doesn't work all the time Like a lot of times, particularly as I first started, it would like constantly fail. I'd be late. I wouldn't have everything I needed. I would panic.
Uh, be in the airport being like, Oh my God, where's my passport? You're holding it. No, I'm not. Yes, you are. Oh yeah, I am. I mean, just how many times have we been in an airport when you have thought that you have. You didn't have earbuds or a license. Okay. Yeah. The license is a while, but the earbuds is recent. No, and multiple times. Oh, and multiple times. Multiple times. Yeah. And so. So the panic response, right?
But actually, this is a growth area for me. I'm very excited about this. The last time you didn't have your earbuds, well, you thought you didn't. Because here's the thing. Every time you've actually had all the things, you're just having a full panic, right? You think you haven't upheld your agreement to handle all of your own marketing. Yes, exactly. I don't. Get your own stuff. I'm not in charge of that. I don't touch your stuff. You panic. You go into a tizzy.
I think it's a point of growth for me that the last time you did it, I just sat and watched you. I was like, that looks like, yeah, that'll be a bummer if you forgot them. And I watched you take care of it. which got very messy and complicated in other ways. But it was...
I thought that was growth for both of us. You handled your problem. Because the reason that I would panic is I didn't believe in myself. Yeah, I got I packed myself. I had everything that I needed. And then I get there. I was like, there's no way I must have screwed it up. And then.
in this particular really minor incident of the earbuds. Yeah, because it really doesn't matter whether you have them. It doesn't matter. Not at all. So I think I can raw dog it on the plane. I have books. I don't raw dog. The yeah, as a result of that experience, I trusted myself a little bit more like, oh.
I didn't need to panic. Of course I took care of it. It was just in the moment in the airport, all dysregulated, I couldn't find them. That's more likely than that I just didn't pack them. So, you know, that's apparently true about me. And that, for me anyway, leads back to integrity from the point of view that do I believe in my ability to hold myself to my agreements?
My belief in it is necessary for me to actually do it. It's, it's, it's ass backwards. Um, but. No, no, that matters though. That's just what it is for you. It is. It's, um. Well, I don't think I'm going to hold this agreement, so I won't hold this agreement. Not exactly a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's just that I won't do the things and expose myself to possible failure, therefore failing, and then...
Whereas in this and with the over-functioning, with you over-functioning nearby, I would get like halfway through, I wouldn't complete the experience for myself. It would get completed for me. I still wouldn't have the data for next time to go different. What's really funny to me is I'm really good at not over-parenting my children. I let them make their mistakes and then learn, and I'm there to support them. But I'm terrible with my partners. I over-function so hard.
They have a stronger impact on your life experience. If your kids don't have earbuds, well, I mean, they would yell. I mean, they can make things unpleasant. Mine wouldn't. These kids are good. No, no, they wouldn't. Yeah, but I understand how when it's a partner. There's a different, shoot, can't think of the word, but there's a different level of risk about what happens if things go wrong. We affect each other more strongly because we have brought ourselves into close relation in this way.
I keep coming back to as well, though. There's something about I want to be partnered. I want to see myself as a person who's partnered to a very competent person. Yeah. And that, so it's also affecting my self-worth, my self-concept. Oh, yeah, yeah. And if I withdraw and I'm like, if I am unattached to your way of, you know, packing or doing things or upholding your agreements.
If I'm less attached to that, then okay, that's not about me. Ken's making that decision or he's made that mistake and that's his. But instead, I'm part of the making it my problem is the enmeshment. I'm over-invished. I've over-invested my own self-concept in you. Right. Okay. So yes, there's risk, but also – But also – I mean, you need to look at this from a lot of directions. But you're experiencing my emotional response.
And my practical response as part of you rather than just as over there being me. And then realistically looking at how are other people going to judge me, not you. I'm not worried about how they're judging you. I'm worried about how they're judging me. Of course, right. I mean, I don't like this. I'm not enjoying admitting that, but it's true.
So there's another piece to this puzzle though. I think we should get more clear about what does it look like to be out of integrity? Because again, like if we come back to, I am a person of integrity. Most of us. would say that sentence, right? We would have no trouble saying, I am a person of integrity. What does it actually look like to be a person who is out of integrity?
I see a lot of evidence of people who are struggling with integrity day to day in my work. And I mean, it looks like relatively simple things. It looks like lack of follow through. It looks like inconsistency. It looks like making rationalizations for when you can't follow through on things or when you have to change the plan or when you don't uphold an agreement.
It is also way easier to see a lack of integrity in someone else. So much easier to see it in someone else. It's hard because those rationalizations, I mean, they can be true. And the reality is you may still be, yep, I'm out of integrity. So if I make a promise to myself, one of the ways we can just look at this very simply is if I make a promise to myself,
If I promise myself that I am going to go for a walk every day because it turns out that, yes, going outside for a walk is good for my mental health. It's annoying. But it's just true. No matter what else I've done during every day, that is a thing that is good for me.
And if I make the promise to myself that I'm going to do that, or if I make the promise that I am going to hydrate, I'm going to drink 100 ounces of water every day, these are relatively simple things. They are within my reach. They are... things that I don't need to rely on anyone else in order to do, do I do them? Am I willing to look at the fact that when I make a different choice?
It's so easy to say, oh, yeah, I had a ton of Zoom meetings today, so I didn't drink my water because I was talking the whole time. Or I had that extra thing to take care of, so I just didn't go out for my walk. Right. But I told myself I would. I made a commitment. That's the kind of simple moment that if I say to you or if I say to myself, I'm out of integrity, it is really easy for that to be a full shame trigger. Like just whoosh.
into, oh, I said I was going to do this thing. It doesn't matter what my reasons are or how good my rationalizations are. I am, as a matter of fact, out of integrity. And I can feel the lurking shame just in an abstract description of a situation. I can feel that lurking shame of, oh, right. That's what that would be like. This is what it would feel like. So, and one of the things that has helped with that is that saying I'm out of integrity.
Is actually increasing my integrity. Yes. Yes. That's actually the whole point of this conversation right there. If you can acknowledge that you have, you're not upholding a commitment that you had. without excuses. You may have explanations. You may have reasons. But if you can acknowledge that first to yourself and then if you've impacted other people to the other people, right there, right away, I'm, oh. okay, I, yep, I'm calling myself in. I am acknowledging that, in fact, I am not.
keeping this commitment. I am out of integrity. And right away, if this is me, I can trust myself more because now I have acknowledged that at least I'm not going to hide and lie from my, that I'm not going to keep the secret for myself. And if I'm talking about a commitment I've made with another person or to another person, I have the opportunity to say, okay, maybe this person doesn't keep this word. Maybe...
Maybe the agreements we're making together don't actually work. Or maybe this was just a one-time situation. Maybe we go back and we try again and we have the same commitment. And maybe it just keeps... not being held? How many times, how many times does an agreement need to not be held for one of us to say, this agreement doesn't work? And it doesn't work because you don't like it. So in this situation, imagine that you and I make an agreement that I will always come home before midnight.
I will always come home before midnight. That's just the agreement that we've made. How many times do I come home and sometimes it's five minutes late, an hour late? Three hours late. How many times do I come home and say, this is why? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm still committed to that. But here's why it was different this time. How many times before we say, you know what?
regardless of whether Ken wants Jolie to have this commitment of midnight as, as like you turn into a pumpkin at midnight before I realized, yeah, Jolie doesn't want to. She doesn't, she's not going to. And this is a breakthrough moment when we realize, yeah, I keep making an agreement I'm not actually agreeing to. Right. You're not. actually consenting to this agreement internally. Right.
So it's really easy to find yourself out of integrity and then to protect your ego, to protect your self-concept. You go to, okay, but there was an excuse. There was a reason. This was a really good reason. This time it was just because, well, I was five minutes late. You can't. five minutes isn't even real time. Okay. Maybe it's not. Maybe, maybe that's even okay. Maybe that's acceptable. Maybe you start building into the agreement. Maybe there's a little wiggle room of midnight and
you know what, what really matters is that I know you're on the road. So text me when you leave. And as long as I know you're on the road, we won't worry about the exact time. So at that point, you start getting into the why. of the agreement the actual if we if we rush too fast to getting into the excuse the reason the rationalization we start troubleshooting an agreement that at core
I might just not actually want. And I may be continually agreeing with you like, yep, I will come home. I agree to keep this agreement that I'll come home by midnight because I think I have to. Because I'm not actually here for this. It's not what I want, but either I'm struggling to admit what I actually want or I don't know what I want. The thing is you're getting the evidence.
The evidence is being revealed by your actions. You don't want this. And I don't know in this particular example, like I don't know whether it's because I don't want there to be any timeline. I don't want to actually have.
and agreed on time, or whether it's just that midnight is just inconvenient because I have to drive 90 minutes to see the person I'm seeing. And so midnight, I have to leave by 1030. Really, if I want to make sure that it's good with traffic too, I basically have to leave just after 10.
wait, I didn't even get there till 7.30. That doesn't, it's not enough. Maybe it's not, but I don't even know because I've rushed into the negotiation of how do I keep this agreement before I really get to, do I want to? Do I like this? There's so much in here. And when we're working with people, we had two new cohorts start of year of opening. And I love new cohorts. We've got 40 new people in there.
sharing their experiences. And one of the very first things we do is start establishing what our needs, wants, bottom lines and boundaries. What are they? The amount of struggle people have. with their needs and wants. Of course, it's hard to hold ourselves in integrity if we don't even know what we want. but we're making agreements. Anyways, if I don't know what I want and I'm making agreements, all of that multiplicity that I've got.
They're going to be scrambling around in there. Some of them like, oh, I didn't agree to this. Somebody did, but it weren't me. What do I do? I have to acknowledge the fact that. I am learning about my wants, even through my broken agreements with myself and my partners. Yeah. Not an ideal way. I don't love that for any of us. It is kind of destructive testing, but it's still going to happen.
I mean, you and I have been at this for ages. It still happens. We find out, oh, I didn't want it to be that way. And the proof is in the pudding of, because I just keep not. Because I keep failing to. actually meet this agreement. Yeah. And knowing that the agreement is with myself helps me make it very clear to myself that it's me who doesn't want to.
Yeah, that's the key to this whole conversation. Because if I'm like, oh, I'm doing this for you, then I could lose track of the why behind it, the values inherent in it. They're yours. You can start placing that responsibility, demonizing my want. Yep. Start offloading all the responsibility for it, which makes it easier to stay out of integrity. There's the tricky part for me is sometimes I will make an agreement with myself that is in service to a want or a need that my partner has.
I make that agreement, but then I still don't take responsibility for the fact that I made the agreement. If I wasn't going to uphold it, it was for me to acknowledge and own the fact that I am not available for what they want. And sometimes I'm going to have to decide, you know what? I don't want this. I'm going to do it anyways because that's the kind of person I want to be. So I'm willing to override my want in the moment.
Because I want more than anything to be the kind of person who upholds their word. So I don't at all want people to lose track of the fact that we don't always get what we want. I don't, that's not even like, that's, that's not really the point. Yeah. And when we're making agreements that take multiple people into account, it's quite likely that. We're going to find some middle ground where we're like, yeah, this isn't a perfect fit for me, but I'm going to commit to it. And I'm not going to...
blame my partner for that. I'm going to be in this space between us and say, in the context of this relationship, this is what's available. If I want that to change. I have options. I have the option of ending a relationship. I have the option of asking my partner to do some really significant efforting to shift their want. That's a big ask, but we can. We can ask our partners that.
Or I can work to shift my want, or we can work to actually shift the whole context so that all of it feels different. When I'm thinking about, you know, as an example, coming home at midnight. One of the reasons in the past you and I have had some agreements about when we come home from dates, if they aren't overnight dates, but like they weren't planned to be like, you'll come home or I'll come home was because we got up.
For a long time, we were getting up very, very early in the morning. So it meant a lot of disruption to sleep. If we were going to share the same bed, if somebody was going to come in, we both had to get up at like 4.30, 4.45. It meant it was disrupting. And then we went through a period of time where quite honestly, I just, I'm a morning person. I was always a morning person. I didn't want to be kept up late at night and I had not learned how to sleep comfortably.
while you were out. So I changed that scenario. And you didn't actually ask me to, but I did the work of shifting that reality by learning how to be good to myself as I'm going to sleep, learning how to sleep on my own so you're not interrupting my sleep.
We also did some major things. We actually changed our house so that we don't interrupt each other. Not everybody has that capacity, but we literally changed the setup of our home so that you coming home at night or me coming home at night doesn't have to be. a wake up. It was just a thing. All of those things were in service to that middle space.
Well, I want to be in integrity and you want to be in integrity. What's this agreement actually about? Is the agreement to come home at midnight? What's it about? What want is it really serving? And is there another way to work with that want? That work has let both of us really practice more integrity because sometimes the real ask is, I don't like how any of this works. Can we like change how it works in our household, in our relationship?
And sometimes that feels out of reach, inaccessible, but a lot of times there's a lot of room there to really to negotiate and problem solve with each other so that we can actually be in. full agreement with the commitments that we make in integrity when we uphold them. Yeah. It's, it's interesting to see how, I mean, to see how talking about integrity kind of requires.
talking about agreements. If I never agreed to anything, I wouldn't have to even think about integrity. But what are my commitments? What have I said I would do to myself? At core. Yeah. I like thinking about your morals are, if nothing else, they're agreements you have with yourself about how you will behave in situations. That's not a small thing.
That's a big deal. But when we ask other people to hold us, to like hold us to things, we're actually missing the opportunity to do the reparenting that we need to actually be. our grownups to be mature in our commitments. And sometimes we're doing it thinking, I just want everything to be easy. I just want it to be like, I don't want there to be agreements. I just want to move with integrity. But I think you're bringing up a good point.
It's always about agreement and expectation, even if we're talking about implicit agreements, which I'm not a fan of, but the thing is they're real. But they're real. What are the implicit expectations going on in my relationship? And where am I using those to just sort of subvert my own integrity? just be to have lots of wiggle room, lots of Weasley space. Yeah. Humans are crafty. We're really crafty. I was a master weaseler for a long time.
Yeah, we have actually a whole episode on the weasel words, the ways that we can use our language to create space. I saw this recently. I had somebody who sent me one. I had actually a couple people. Yeah, they sent me their agreements with them. They'd really gotten on board with the idea of making this agreement with myself. But at the beginning of their agreement, they said, I would like to.
I would like to. That's not the same as I will. I will. No, it isn't. Yep. Right? And in that space lies room for you to let yourself off the hook. And I would love for all of us to treat ourselves gently. without letting ourselves off the hook. I think we can do both of those things. And how I think that is when you get that shame wave, when you realize, oh, I'm out of integrity, to deal with the nervous system response that comes up right there.
And potentially deal with the stories that start like you're having all these sensations. What are the stories you start telling yourself? You probably have a whole bunch of them. But the tools of nervous system regulation paired with. Okay, detach the sensations you're experiencing from the narrative, the story you're telling yourself, and just be here now. Be gentle with yourself and figure out what's your very next step to bring yourself back into right relationship.
with yourself and therefore with the other people in your life. That is an excellent skill to develop. Yeah. It's not easy. I have trouble with it. I know like it's, it's. It's a practice. It's not even, it's not a skill that we develop and like, check, I got it. We're all practicing this. We're all practicing. This was great. I really appreciate this conversation.
We have some other related episodes. I mentioned the Weasel Words episode. There's also several episodes on agreements. One of them is Relationship Agreements 101. And in there, we talk about how... Very small experimental agreements help you reveal what you actually need and want. So I will link those episodes in this one in case you want to hop on over and take a listen to those as well.
you have questions or thoughts about this, I encourage you to join us. We have monthly Playing With Fire AMAs. You can come, hang out, chat, talk with Ken and I. It's just a small group. It's just us. We're just hanging out and talking. We would love to hear more about what you think about this and what's coming up for you in your relational life. We're here for it.
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