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. Jolie, let's talk today about...
what it takes to reimagine a relationship, and how is that different from de-escalating, which we've already talked about? Well, we have. We've talked about de-escalating and conscious uncoupling. I mean, I think that the concept of reimagining a relationship for me comes from having done the work, right? Having done the work to reimagine some of my own relationships and having done the work with people.
For me, it's not necessarily that different from uncoupling or de-escalating, but it does imply a couple of things that make the process a little different. Maybe at core, it's that reimagining a relationship implies that there will still be a relationship, that there's something that we're acknowledging. an intention to continue there's going to be some kind of continuity whereas de-escalation for me implies that we
We escalated. We went on a particular path and now we're going to undo that path, right? We're going to come back down that and maybe bring things down to less intensity or less entwinement or less enmeshment. or less obligations shared, something like that. Reimagining can also look like leaving a lot of things in place.
But opening up space for what could this relationship be if we moved beyond our current imagination of what it is and what it was supposed to be. I like the invocation of imagination in there. Right. You can take the girl out of depth psychology, but you can't take the depth psychology out of the girl. Actually, this phrase comes right out of James Hillman's work.
Many depth psychologists, that's depth, D-E-P-T-H, depth psychology. Many of them talk about the, I mean, well, they're all talking about the imagination. The imagination is central to depth psychology, but. Hillman specifically talks about reimagining things, revisioning things as a primary way that we can take an active role. in what our soul is calling us to do. Like we feel some impulse, but now we get to participate in it.
Right. So I can feel an impulse to end a relationship or change a relationship. But the act of reimagining and just having this word, I feel like it's a really empowering move. That's what I was just feeling out of it. Yeah. it's my imagination i mean i will collaborate but i'm the one who's imagining i'm the one who's considering the current state and i'm i'm taking the steps that is empowering and it requires a level of participatory engagement right so i
I've done reimagining processes with couples, with relationship groups. It is possible for anyone to reimagine their relationship. from just their side, from just an individual side. But... Really, to get into the reimagining process, I'm thinking about how can everyone involved in this relationship that we're talking about, whether it has two people or more in it, how can everyone involved?
collaborate on creating a vision. And this is tricky, right? Like we're at a point where something is not working enough that we're like, We got to change this. So frequently I find people who want to do a reimagining feel pretty stuck because the monogamous imagination only offers us a couple of options. We either stay together or we break up.
we become the long suffering people that won't be holding hands on our 50th wedding anniversary. But it's not, there's not a lot of talk of like, well, what do we do if something is uncomfortable, if something isn't feeling right? And we want to continue. So we have to deal with the fact that there's probably some hurt, some pain, some challenge going on. Maybe there are communication struggles. Maybe there's been some attempts already, maybe some floundering attempts at reimagining.
In fact, one of the places I see people come to me for reimagining help is help. We opened up because we thought it would save our marriage. Oh yeah, sure. And now it turns out that wasn't a solution so much as it introduced a whole new set of conundrums. Yeah. And so now we have to reimagine, but now there's also, now there's the hurt that happened while we were monogamous. Now there's new hurts that we added and good stuff too. Great stuff that happened during all of that time.
And now we want to reimagine, so how much energy do we spend on repair? versus actively trying to create something new. And often this creates the new tension point where one person is entirely focused on, we have to move forward. Let's not look back.
And often the other person is like, whoa, there's so much pain. If we don't look back, I can't move forward. And it's a false dichotomy. We're not actually, it's not really one person needs this and one person needs that. But we become polarized and it feels like. We're holding each other sort of hostage. So the concept of reimagining is wonderful, but I want to acknowledge how much effort it takes. This is...
You know, it's like full-time emotional work to get in, to dig in and do this. Just a little bit that you've just described. It certainly sounds like there's no recipe. There's no like flow chart. Because everybody's got their own set of history and what they're imagining. But that said, what are some of the things, what are some of the common approaches that people take? Well, there is...
Okay. I'll challenge that a little bit. I think there's – because I do this work and I have to create systems and tools for myself so that I can do this work with people in a – in a way that's replicable. Like I need to not exhaust myself. I do follow a particular trajectory. There's a, there's a path that I'm guiding people through so that we, mostly so we don't miss steps.
Because most people, when they're ready to have something new in their life, they're struggling because they want to get to point B. But they don't want to have to travel through all the sub-steps between A and B. Or maybe a better way to put it is, okay, well, you got to get from A to Z. We have to actually go through all of these other points. They don't all have to look the same. They're not all going to be in exactly the same order. And it's a windy road.
You know, there's going to be some need for iterations and winding and pausing, right? Pausing might play a part in a reimagination or taking a substantial break might play a role. But there are certain like way stations and some plans we can make that are important because if we skip making a plan, it can just feel like, okay, we're reimagining. And now the new format of our relationship is just amorphous.
I don't really know. Am I even in a relationship? What's happening? It sounds like I wouldn't even know what kind of progress I had made. So what are some of those way stations? Well... First, can we deal with the fact that our imagination is our relationship in a way? Since I'm saying we're reimagining our relationship. There's some depth right there. I just want to.
explore for a moment the fact that each of us has an imagination of what our relationship is and a set of assumptions about what's in there. We have all that stuff. You know, you and I talk all the time about let's move stuff out of implicit assumptions into explicit agreement, but we will never move all of it. into explicit agreement. It's not possible. I'm not even shooting for that. Where would the mystery be? Where would the space for us to change in a moment be? I don't.
I'm not trying to explicate every single ounce of everything. I'm trying to move the things into explicit so that I can co-imagine with you so that we can be in that. But we're each individuals. I have. I don't see you like flattening your whole self and like, this is who I'm bringing to the relationship. Here it is on this poster board. Right.
So to reimagine a relationship, I have to acknowledge the fact that some of what I'm experiencing, I actively created thoughtfully, intentionally with the person I'm now wanting to reimagine with. A whole ton of it. Absolutely not. It's the stuff that happened. It's what we imagine that is between us. And it's the stuff that happened along the way that we both made separate meaning out of.
And all of that means that we can wind up in this space where we don't actually even agree on what we're doing now. So as we start to move forward. We can be incredibly confused about, are we unpacking what was to move forward or are we just envisioning some future? What are we doing? When we get confused, right? So all of that means we're going to wind up in a spot of like, oh, it's all so much and confusing. And when we're confused, we tend to rely on social norms to help us find the way.
Right. So that brings us back to like the monogamous standards can all of a sudden reenter the chat. Even if we left monogamy behind and we were practicing non-monogamy. the mono standards, mononormativity can now creep back in really strongly and the mono standards can start to become like, well, you know what? At least I understand those, right? Like, and we default to them being like,
more appropriate, more proper. And they're like the worn paths in our imagination already because they're all so many stories. Right. So this also puts us into a spot where when we are... experiencing turmoil in a relationship, if we're feeling confusion about what to do next, it can be easier to think along the standard mono paradigm of either staying together or breaking up. So even that, even just getting out of that, like, wait.
Wait, what if we made some space for what we don't know could exist yet? What would that be like? What would happen? So the very first thing I need to do is can we open enough space to say, This is going to be neither this or that. It's not staying together as in maintaining what is, but it's also not breaking up. So often I need people first to establish that they're taking...
a complete ending to this relationship off the table, at least for a period of time while we reimagine. There needs to be some kind of, can we create some liminal space for this exploration?
yeah so i hear two things there the the taking that taking that off the table so it's not like this real easy downhill that we just slide into and there now we've we're done um and it's tempting it's tempting because i don't want to do all this work let's just i don't want to be here in the unknown anymore let me just finish it let's just get to an end point and that's a a really well-defined end point uh and Earlier you said something about a pause.
And that's kind of what I'm hearing when you're describing this space of the unknown. It's not a pause of everything because you're still going to be thinking and talking, but it's sort of a pause of we're not going to commit to what's next yet. We're going to hold that. And we're going to talk about what's next and think and imagine and collaborate. And what a pause. Like we have a whole episode on taking a productive pause. So we'll link that episode here because.
If part of your reimagining is a need for, hang on, we need to pause this long enough for each of us to do some individual work. I think that the first steps to this really are creating enough spaciousness so that we don't just keep playing out the same cycle. Like if we're just having the same argument, if we're just having the exact same...
black and white thinking just keeps coming up. We just keep falling into rigid patterns. Then we need to allow ourselves to move into a space of, okay, maybe there could be some, some. room. And a pause can create that space, but we also need to establish, so what is the pause for? And how long is it going to last? And what exactly is a pause? What are we pausing?
And what, if anything, are we not pausing? Because a lot of us already have a lot of responsibilities and entanglements. And some of those come from nesting together or having children together, but some of them just come from like. no, we already agreed to go to that wedding overseas together. One of us drives the other one to work. Are we ending that too? What's happening right now?
I mean, the very first step is simply to acknowledge that there's a need to reimagine. And that starts within each individual that's involved. And immediately, I need to also deal with all the grief that comes up. Oh, yeah. So I may not even be able to get to the space where I can create a pause before I grieve. The fact that there's a change happening at all, even if the change is entirely internal yet. Yeah.
That's one of the first things I thought I was like, what does it take to reimagine a relationship? And the first thing is to acknowledge that it's not the old relationship. Yeah. And whether that was good or bad. You know, however it plays out in the balances of your own mind and heart, it's changing. It's going away and there will be some grief involved in that. And this reminds me of, there's a wonderful book on grief by Francis Weller called, what is it? The Wild Edge of Sorrow. There it is.
And he talks about the five gates of grief. And I think that this falls into the first gate of grief. And he titles that everything we love, we will lose when we're facing the grief of. This relationship can't continue in the way it is. There is a level of like, oh, this version of this relationship is dying.
It's coming to an end and no amount of focusing on the thing that I could have, the re-imagination, all of that, no amount of the re-imagining will save me from the reality that this too, I will lose. It really brings us in touch with finitude and the fact that we are alive and we will not always be. I don't mean to be dramatic, but that's often what I see happen is when people are faced with...
We have to change this. The panic, the attachment panic that comes up is because this feels like a survival level and it may actually be a survival level decision. Yeah. And you're facing the complete uncertainty of. What in the heck happens next? What and how long? It's not just uncertainty, but uncertainty for an uncertain amount of time in uncertain numbers of domains.
That's a lot. It's a lot. So to pretend that the shift in a relationship isn't enormous and doesn't have enormous psychological implications. It's foolhardy. Yeah, it robs you of the ability, the presence of mind to deal with it. It would just be shoveling it under the carpet. It's still there. And this isn't just about people who are married or in, you know, really established long-term partnerships. This is for anyone who has...
has given their heart to someone who has allowed their soul to intertwine with someone, has allowed their life to be turned and shifted and changed. I think about a friendship I lost a few, what, three and a half, four years ago now. that it was a platonic friendship, deep partnership. It changed my life. The loss of that friendship changed my life in very significant ways. I had to grieve it intensely.
Grieving the change is going to happen differently for everyone. But if you're moving towards some kind of reimagination, I would even more strongly encourage you to... actively participate in the grieving, like do the mourning. We have an episode on grieving relationship change that might come in handy here because at least in
In my experience of our culture, we haven't been taught very well how to grieve. No, definitely not. I certainly wasn't. I haven't been supported in thinking that I get to grieve these non-death. griefs, right? They get diminished and we get told to just move on or that there's some appropriate, very small amount of time that we get to be sad about this and that sad will be the only real big emotion.
Anger comes up huge for me in this kind of grief. Resentment. I'm dealing with all sorts of maybe shame about the fact that the relationship changed at all or whatever I might have participated in that created the need for change. All of this is in the grief work. And without the grief work, and this is from my own experience, I got caught in. In two ways. One was I tried to hold on to both. Um, which. Both as in the relationship as it was. What was going away and what was, um.
I tried to hold, I tried to carry the relationship I had into the new relationship. It didn't actually come to closure. No, it didn't come to closure. And so that had its own psychological. sort of dissonance. But then the fact that I was not letting go of the old one really was a challenge to imagine the new one. Because the old one kept creeping in. All the strictures and features of the old one are just right there.
I see it taking up all the space in your imagination. Yeah, exactly. There it is. It's just already existing. The furniture is already in a place. People are already there. It's all there. This is why so many people find that creating... actual liminal container so liminal meaning from the latin meaning threshold lyman for threshold this space where you're neither here nor there you are you're in the betwixt in between
rather than being in the liminal as in, I don't know, who knows it's happening and I'm in the liminal as in, I don't know, actually creating some containment to. I'm going to intentionally enter into this, this time where there's grief work that I'm going to do. There's going to be some reckoning with what was. internally for me and maybe between us. Maybe there'll need to be some identification of like, where does there need to be repair work? What hasn't been done? All of this.
How do we create a space and some dedicated time and energy to do the work that's needed for reimagination? So I think of this as like a really necessary piece of the puzzle is how do we create a container so it doesn't just feel like... Oh my God. So now we're just doing this. Our relationship is just a constant reimagining every second of every day forever. That's overwhelming. That said.
The liminal time is often a lot longer than people wish it were. It was for me, has been every single time. It's frustrating how long it can take to reimagine, but we have to think about. all the things we are actually addressing here. We're addressing everything. Everything in our life has to be looked at for how it touches this relationship and how we would like it to.
You're bringing intentionality to the design, not just of this relationship, but of your whole life. So it does take dedicated energy. And that kind of, I mean, I've heard you describe that. it can take three to five years to change a paradigm. Yeah. I don't think it has to take three to five years to reimagine a relationship. No, but a relationship does have some...
It does have some structures in it, some like mental structures. We put together these sort of shortcuts of relating. Yeah. That we, when we were humans, this is what our brains do. They find shortcuts. Yeah. To make repeated stuff. less energy, less of an energy spend. But here we're taking apart the shortcuts. Right. And coming up with new ways. Right. And when I do that, I immediately come up against, oh, here's all the stuff we also haven't been looking at the whole time.
So now I'm aware of, oh, there were all these things that we politely in this relationship container just agreed not to look at. And that was implicit. It was just there, but we hadn't. And now all of that rises to the surface. When I see people reimagining a relationship, the dedicated, you know, intense work of it, I mean. Six months to a year, easy. Yeah. Easy. 18 months. That's not asking too much. And if you think about the length of the relationship and how much.
how inextricably it feels like you are tied together right now, that's going to have a factor, right? How intensely are you wound together right now, both on an emotional level and a practical level? What will it take to reimagine that? And how much space and time will you need to actually experiment and explore who you are as an individual in order to be able to imagine something new with this person? In many ways, I think that, you know.
Uncoupling completely and setting down this relationship so that you can just move on is the more straightforward approach because you don't have to find yourself. At the same time, hold this open framework for, and we're going to find each other again on the other side of me finding myself more. It can be comforting to just say, yeah, I'm going to just be done. with that. Yeah. It feels simpler to
To just answer the questions all with the same answer. Nope, not doing that. Nope, not doing that. Versus, well, that's not quite working. What could we do instead? Right. It's a very more complicated question. If I have two or more people where everyone is willing to dedicate some energy to the process, willing to be patient with the fact that... Everyone is going to move through this at a different pace and willing to be in the unknown.
with each other, which also means allowing each other to have a new level of autonomy and agency, right? There has to be a letting go. And this is part of why the grief work is so important because there's a bunch of stuff to let go of that. Typically, we associate with breaking up, letting go of having some of the relationship agreements and the expectations that we have had in order to create more individual agency and more space for each of us to actually get in touch with.
what we need and want. That can be really, really hard. A lot of people are like, no, no, no, no, no. I can only stay in this relationship if my agreements stay intact. And I understand that. If we're reimagining, there is going to be this time of we have to let what was actually be done. We have to allow it to come to closure.
It requires an immense amount of fortitude to stay with the process and then to start digging into your personal work because it's also really tempting to look at your partner and see all the things. that they are doing that clearly cause the disruption, that make it not work. But the liminal time, a huge amount of it needs to be spent on really getting clear on what is it that you need and want.
What do you need and want? Yes, with this person, but also allowing yourself to broaden into weight, like from relationship. Right. What do you need and want? And this is a good time to be thinking beyond what do I think I can get into what do I want? Which also helps to actually, if we... if we take this out of the context of a specific relationship, often it does free up the imagination some to, Oh, okay, wait, what do I want in relationship?
very, very different from what do I want from this person in front of me who I already know so much about. Yeah. Which also invites you to later come back to them with a level of. naivete yeah which is i okay imagine that i don't already think here's what i can get what if i make my requests and we actually negotiate on on on the
On the fair ground of who are you now? And what do you have? And can you meet these requests? Can you meet me in that space between us and create something new? Is that possible? I like that. I like the... And in my experience, that is a very sort of refreshing way of approaching someone. It can also be nerve wracking, but.
But also refreshing, like literally refreshing, like it refreshes the connections because it helps remove some of the expectations of, oh, I think I know what they're going to say. And yeah, the places where we've frozen our imagination of who they are. And we've actually done a disservice not just to ourselves and what we can get out of this relationship, but to the other, right? We're not actually honoring them as a sacred other. A sacred growing other.
Yeah. So all of that is important, but there's another piece of this I want to bring in that all the hurts that were there. All the places where there was betrayal or rupture. A reimagination, to my mind, is not a way to escape the need to repair. But I have seen people try to use it that way.
Usually this is posed as sort of, well, I want to look forward. I can't do anything about what's behind me. I want to look forward. I want to stay focused on what's in front of me. But the hurts that have collected around the relationship and inside the relationship, right? noticing where you're hoping for repair or where you'd like to offer repair, right? All of that is...
incredibly important. Otherwise we're apt to enter back in with now a whole bunch of unspoken, like, Ooh, now I, I've dealt with the fact that there were all these hurts, but I never actually asked for repair. I never offered repair. Repair can look like a lot of things. It can look like holding space to really hear the impact of past actions in something like an Imago dialogue. It can also look like...
Deciding to engage in therapy or an educational experience together. It could look like engaging in some really intentional like relationship intensives, like going away and doing that or doing it even remotely. It could also look relatively simple. It could look like honest, heartfelt apology, like real apology and like a reckoning with this. I see that this is where harm has happened.
And I want to honor that and show you that I can see where this happened. And that kind of repair, we've talked about this before, it often needs to happen iteratively. You just said something beautiful about this. retreat. You said, patterns of harm require patterns of repair and new behavior. Yeah. And when you said that, I thought, right. And that...
That need to have a pattern established often rubs the wrong way, right? If I want to reimagine it, I just want to be the new person. I just want to be the new person, yeah. I don't want to have to iteratively come back and revisit this hurt. That's what repair looks like for many things, not like physical things in the world. Many times we have to come back and like keep tending this weak spot or keep tending this place like, oh, that, that.
That area needs me to come back to it and give it gentle, loving kindness over and over and over again. And I was trying to think of like a simple, a simple sort of counterpoint to something that would require. um a pattern of repair and i couldn't come up with one because even if if i say i i dropped your favorite vase it's an event it's not a pattern of behavior it's an event
And I apologize and I'm so sorry. And then maybe, you know, a couple of months later, somebody gives you a whole bunch of flowers and you'd be like, oh, I want to put them in my vase. Oh, I can't. And all of a sudden the hurt comes back up. Nobody did anything wrong, but you are a multidimensional person. And so events trickle out. Right. And that's what forms the pattern is not just more action happening necessarily, but, oh.
The memory came up. The memory came up. I am experiencing it as an emotional experience, even though it's not happening right now. Right. And so I'm also beautifully available for repair again. Right. So now, and this is where if you do this so, so well, you stay out of a shame story. You don't go into a shame story of I'm bad and that's why I have to repair again. That took some work. But you do it so well. So, oh my God.
God, so well. When you notice that we're back in a spot where I am available to receive repair, you just lean in and offer it and you don't make it about you. You just offer it like, oh yeah, that face was. It was important to you. It mattered. I'm so sorry that I broke it. It's beautiful to watch you do that and it's beautiful to receive it. Thank you. Because you do it without recentering yourself.
Sometimes we recenter ourselves and it's about, I feel so bad. I don't want to face that. And sometimes it's, oh my God, I feel so bad. Make me feel better about the thing that happened. Yeah. Make me feel better about needing. You needed to repair from my action. Yeah. Yeah. So all that to say, repair is a part of reimagining. And if you hope for it not to be.
It's probably not going to go that well. The reimagining is probably going to be incredibly surface level and not terribly satisfying. It might be okay. It might be okay, but I wouldn't expect it to be a truly satisfying experience. There are so many small things that we can do in the liminal space. So we talked about creating a liminal container. The container is about creating a dedicated amount of time. How long?
And, and I would say this is, it's really, really individual. How long do you, how long do you want and need to be in this in between where you're, you're not in that anymore, but you're not yet in an established next thing. But it's also creating intentional time to spend individually doing work. to allow yourself to change, to let go, to grieve, to come to terms with the kind of repair, to learn how to do that repair, all of that. And then to actually get into the collaborative, like...
Okay, what is available for us? What is it that could happen? Is there some other form? Is there some other form of friendship or lovership or chosen family or colleague relating? Like what do we still want? What do each of us individually want? What are we available for? And as I'm thinking and feeling my way through that, it doesn't mean it's going to match up with what the other people are available for. And if that's true, just...
Just suggesting what you're available for can be scary. Right. Like what do I ask? Is this space for request? Do I wait to have stuff offered to me? What do I do? Even that is part of the creating the relationship. Are we, is this a relationship where it's okay to ask for whatever we want and receive a no, receive a I'm not available for that or I'm not available for that yet or. I'm not available for that, but I could offer this. Being able to ask for and receive.
is actually really important work. And it's hard. And the longer the pattern was of, I know what to expect out of this relationship, the harder that can be. How do I... How do I actually get into the, yeah, we're really reimagining this from the ground up? Because when I, if I think I know what your answer is going to be, and then it isn't what I expected it to be.
With the weight of that old relationship behind it, it can feel really jarring. It can feel like significant hurt for that matter, but not from the other person, from the... oh, I don't know what's happening now. Now I'm not sure what to do. That can be very painful. And as a hypervigilant person myself, I feel literally unsafe at that point.
And it's a necessary piece of the puzzle. I have to be with my own uncertainty. I don't know exactly how this is going to go. That is one of the hardest things I do when I'm Reimagining or engaging in a let's renegotiate this relationship agreement is what if I don't already know your answer? Because I base so much of my safety on the idea that.
I can predict what you're going to do. Which doesn't actually, again, really honor the fact that you are other, you are not me, and I don't know you better than you do. Even though at times my estimation of all the complexity in you might be a better guess than what you consciously have aware. Right. But I still have to let you do that work. That's your work. Bringing your unconscious material forward is your work to do. Take so much patience as a hypervigilant person to let you do that work.
It is absolutely imperative that I do that. It is not fair for me to decide that I already know your answers. And since you brought safety, the sense of safety into it. Let's talk about the benefits of neurosomatic regulation in the process of this, in the experience of being in this liminal space of uncertainty and the unknown. Yeah. You can expect.
your brain to tell you you're unsafe sometimes just from the fact of what I used to count on this old relationship. I could count on things going wrong the way I expect them to. Yeah, not even just the fun stuff. Not even just the fun stuff. I expect things to go wrong the way I expect them to. And I'm right. And now they're not. And that can feel unsafe. At which point.
You can regulate so that you can continue doing that imaginative work because it's very hard to imagine from a place of unsafety. It is. I would really strongly recommend everyone who's doing relational work have not just emergency plans or I'm freaking out, so I need to be able to regulate, but also.
hygiene practice. Like how are you taking care of your nervous system? What are the things you're doing? And not just, not just, Oh, I, you know, I, I go to yoga class, you know, once a week, but also like, what are the daily things that you can do? Small things that are. manageable for you to do all the time. Like I do a balancing exercise pretty much every day because working my vestibular system really helps me. If I skip that for a few days, I notice it. If I skip cold plunging too long.
I notice it. Those are the things I've built into my life. Everybody's are different, but building in some practices so that you're allowing yourself to be as flexible as possible. This is a really. It's a time to really engage all of your resilience skills. Yes. Thank you. That's the word. Yeah. Resilience to the...
Well, the uncertainty. I just keep saying uncertainty because that's the point. You're moving away from it. You're moving toward that. Yeah. So the liminal time is by definition a time of uncertainty. a time of disidentification with what we know that is by its very nature ungrounding.
And so bringing physical somatic grounding into the picture is a really important piece. Yes. Now I don't want to, we could talk about this topic for hours and hours and hours, but I, before we stop, let's talk about. What happens if we get to a spot where we are? Okay. We've come to some individual knowing and we've actually started collaborating on, okay, what's possible? We started sharing potential visions.
And we've started to even figure out, okay, we think we have a plan for where we could move and we start engaging in some new relationship. There are two things that I see super important. One is... actively grieving together the relationship that was before we totally engage. Actually allowing yourself to ritually set down what was, acknowledge the work that you just did and what came before, honor it.
And also like, wow, okay, pick this up. The new thing can now be claimed and named and talked about. And that also means creating new relationship agreements. Yes, absolutely. We have to understand the new norms need to also still have clarity of like, what can I expect? Even if this is incredibly. An incredibly lightly held new form of relationship. Maybe you've shifted from being, you know, nesting, co-parenting homeowners together into.
friendship and casual romantic partnership. I know that sounds wild, but I have seen people do it. Yeah. If you're going to make that kind of switch, I want to know. what are the expectations in this new form of us? What's in, what's out? So I would go right back to my straightforward processes of experimental agreements. Can we start playing with
that MVA process, the minimum viable agreement to start seeing, well, what works for us now? What works for this new version of us? You and I often return to very short-term MVA processes when one or both of us has grown in a significant way because oh my gosh what we were doing doesn't work anymore and this can sound strange because like well we already knew how to do that big thing now we're doing this smaller thing so shouldn't it be easier
No, it's new. It's new. Let yourself be new to this. And to that point, I want to put a plug in for writing down your agreements because. it's new. And I could easily, like, this was my idea. Like here, I'm going, this is what I think we should put in our agreement. Okay. You say, yeah, great. So this was my idea.
I could forget it tomorrow because of the weight of the past, because of the habit. And just because of, I mean, for me, I, because I'm so much a creature of the moment. Well, this is what I always do. No, but I didn't, I said I wasn't gonna. And now we're talking about neurologically well-worn paths too. So yeah, we do forget. Don't expect the new behaviors to just happen because you agreed to have somewhere to go look them up again. And if you're...
If you have gone through all of this and you've created space and time and that liminal time to explore and maybe created physical space for each of you to explore separately and you found your way into a new world. form of you make a cake celebrate like can we celebrate something this is amazing and there are probably many cakes to have along the way too like i i think it's it's incredibly the monogamous uh
paradigm, like breakup mentality, the I either have to be together or broken up leads us into this adversarial positioning. If you If you manage to not do that, can we celebrate the hell out of whatever you do? Even if what you do is simply come to a space of, hey, we can be neutral friends. We don't even have to be.
close, like all up in each other's stuff, but we can be neutral friends. I would celebrate the hell out of that. That's huge because moving out of that adversarial move and into, well, this is change. This is simply change. This is a way that this relationship has evolved and become something new. I just want to really honor everyone who accomplishes that. No matter how long it takes, it's...
As you do that, celebrate it. So this is a really big topic. I really do. I feel like I could do six more hours on this. Yeah, let's call this an overview. Let's call it. If you are reimagining, I hope you know that you're not alone. Lots of people reimagine, but they don't necessarily talk about it because we don't use this language. I encourage you to pick this language up and use it. Language.
gives you the, the option to say, Hey, you know what? We're, we are actually doing a thing. It's not just, it's not just a nothing. Just the word re-imagining can help us say, Oh, what's this? What's this betwixt in between time? What's this in between? It's our reimagining time. That's what we're doing right now. Language really makes a lot possible. Thank you for initiating this conversation. I appreciate you. Thank you. you
We talk to you all the time. It is absolutely imperative to me that we get to hear from you as well. Yes, please. So we'd love to invite you to join us. Join Ken and I. We're holding monthly Ask Me. things. You can show up. Bring your questions from podcast episodes, from your relationships. Bring questions about non-monogamy, about individuation, about relationship skills. We would love to share space with you. We're hosting these AMAs.
free of charge for our podcast listeners. You are the Playing With Fire community and it matters a ton to us that we connect with you directly. Oh, I would so love to hear your questions and oh, it'd be so awesome. Yeah. Go to JolieHamilton.com forward slash AMA and you'll find a way to sign up real quickie quick and get an invitation to join us in a small group where we're going to get together and talk about all things non-monogamy, individuation, and relationships. you