Welcome to Playing With Fire, the podcast for people who are ready to custom build their lives. We're talking about non-monogamy. as an individuation. Want to leave the defaults and make your life in the right place. Ken, let's talk about a very hot button topic. Something that often raises the ire of people in the non-monogamy world. Want to talk about hierarchy?
Hierarchy. Nice. Oh, yeah. I can hear the people getting rattled right now. Okay, so... I want to talk about hierarchies in a kind of specific way and dig into what... both what it seems to mean, what our collective use seems to be, and how that seems to be pretty split. and also maybe some other language that can help us really dig into what we're trying to convey when we're talking about hierarchy. So first off, there is this
There's an old, well old, old in the realm of, you know, modern white people talking about non-monogamy. There's this old delineation between descriptive and prescriptive hierarchies. The people who originally named this wrote it down in a book. They have many, many
posts about it, they have also retracted their statements about it. So I'm just not going to dig into all of that right now. Instead, what I want to talk about is like, what's the conversation right now? Because I have a lot of people show up in my world who are like, I have a hierarchy or I want a hierarchy in my relationship. And also, I have lots and lots of people who are like, ooh, hierarchy, that is a red flag for me, and I'm going to run the first time I hear somebody say the word. Yeah.
And this tends to create division. And you know what? We just already have a lot of division. So I want to talk about it here so that hopefully we can have a more nuanced conversation amongst the people who are listening to this podcast. When I think of a hierarchy, like the version of me who started non-monogamy 16 years ago, I was turned off by it. But for some pretty simple reasons. I was a person who really early in my relating was told that I was secondary.
So I immediately was brought into the idea of hierarchy. Without anybody even using the word hierarchy, I was brought into the idea that there is an order. There is an order to this and when I look at dictionary definitions of hierarchy, some of them just say like a system in which people or things are arranged according to their importance. but some of them say something even more Tricky, difficult, challenging, horrible. They talk about hierarchy being a system, an order in which...
people at the top of that list have power over the people lower on the list. Okay, yeah. And my experience of having a hierarchy sort of thrust upon me without me realizing it was that Yeah, I definitely experience it. Oh, it's not that you want to just be more important in some sort of esoteric, ethereal way, like some sort of amorphous feelings way. You also want actual power over my decision.
You want to have that power over me. And that was scary. And then it played out and it was very scary for me. So when I think about hierarchy, That's where my mind goes. What happens for you? What do you think? Well, um... now i do think of it in terms of power i i at least think about the fact that power enters into it, even if it's not explicitly a, you know, top down, the person at the top has power over all the people underneath them.
Even the first definition that you gave that didn't talk about power talked about importance, which is a weird thing to apply to people. But then we start thinking about relationships and values and values are like what we think of as important. And anyway, all that said, the first definition didn't talk about power, but it's in there. It implies it. At the very least, it implies that power, well, by not saying power, we have to actually guess. And that's the deeper conversation to me.
So many people who I have worked with, they struggle to really get across what they mean. And that's because it is hard to talk about what do I mean when I say I want to be. I want, sometimes people will say, I want primacy. I want to know that I will be chosen over other people. Or I want to know that our relationship will get put first.
I want to know what tomorrow will bring. Right. And so obviously it's pinging off of our desire, deeply held desire for safety and our nervous system's need for safety. So it makes sense that we want this, that we want to use these shortcuts to claim that we have it. But right in there is actually, I think, the...
The real, the soft spot in it. Because even if I say, I'm doing hierarchical non-monogamy, or even if we claim, like, yep, that's it, I have a primary relationship, and that relationship will always come first. Even in there is a delusion that we know what tomorrow will bring. That's right. And that we can claim that. And I say delusion, I'm like, yep, I remember reckoning for the first time with... Actually, I never know.
I don't actually know what will happen. What I can know is what this person... can verbalize and tell me. I can know how they are talking with me and how we're co-creating our day-to-day reality. We can make promises to each other. But I don't actually know what will happen. And for me that came in the form of going from a person who was monogamous and thought, I thought of myself as a person who would never get divorced. to very quickly being a person who absolutely was divorced.
And even that change, in some ways that was more stark than, I also went through a whole series of deaths in my family all around the same time. And in some ways, Finding myself in the uncharted territory of, wait, I thought if we made this promise to each other, then I couldn't wind up a divorced person. Yeah, right. Somehow death was easier for me to grapple with and understand because I had known since I was a child that that was inevitable.
But divorce felt optional. And then came a time in my life where splitting up from this person who I had married to. was no longer optional. It was something that I felt I had to do for many reasons including safety. The desire to have hierarchies in place. I think it can come from different
Levels of awareness like what is it that you want? What is it that you actually want because I find many people What they really want is to know that they will be a priority and even the word priority is tricky because Technically, you can only have one priority. The definition of the word priority is first. It's that. There's just the one ordinal position. Our corporate world has muddied that world a lot. I mean, I get asked on a regular basis, frequent basis. So what are your top priorities?
What are my top things that are more important than everything else? Right. That's like trying to stand behind myself. Right. Except we also use those words to help us express that. We can have multiple things that all matter to us. and Now the real task is... How am I managing? These different things that all matter to me.
How do I manage the fact that many things are important to me? What do I do? And so I'm hinging all the time. Not just as a hinge partner, but also as the hinge of all the things that are important. All the things that are important. In my life.
i remember the first time um one of our kids was like i got invited to two friends houses at the same time and what a complete disaster it was for them because the first time i remember when i was the first time i ran i ran into that as a kid And the first time you run into it, With no tools, no, like, how do I pick? I don't know what to do. Right. And now, and instantly you're cast into the realm of
Oh, what I choose is then going to be interpreted by all the other people. So the two friends whose houses I was invited to and then everyone else. And it starts. This is the stuff that moves we make start creating a complex a social system that we exist in. And then we have to introduce the idea, of course, of the obligations and responsibilities that we have committed to with people. Because that, of course, so if I sign on a mortgage document with you,
And then I also have other partners who I do not have, even if I live with them, if I do not have like a financial obligation to this house. Well, that agreement that I made, technically speaking, that mortgage document is an agreement between me and a bank. It is also an agreement between you and I, but it's my agreement and I have this responsibility. So what does that mean? What does it mean when I try to make financial decisions? Let's say I start spending half of my time with someone else.
And they have their own place to live and they're already paying for it. Is my obligation, is my priority going to be given to the fact that I already signed on this document because I made this commitment to this house? that I own with you, but it often feels like it's the commitment to the partnership and maybe it is.
All I'm trying to point out here is that it really is incredibly complex and most of us have complicated set of things that are important to us already and then we add to it non-monogamy and in the transition period especially so the first three to five years When you're trying to figure out, well, what is this going to look like? I find a lot of people, so we rely on.
uh social norms when we're confused right we just do and so that pulls us back into mono mind and i don't mean monogamy i mean mono mind mono mind being the set of habits and expectations that come with a monogamous worldview, all of the mononorms.
just infiltrating so they're just there as like a precognitive commitment to if you don't know what else to do default to the rules that order the world as monogamous So as you start to open and you start to restructure your understanding of how you make relationships, there are going to be lots of confusing days.
And there's also the confusion of like, now you start imagining and you start thinking, and Jolie starts asking you questions and you start thinking, oh, this can get messy real fast. So I'm going to keep myself safe by saying, I need to know that this relationship will be first in all things at all times. Yep. Which is a...
It's a simplification of a complex system to try to make it more manageable. And it gets us in a lot of really complicated conversations because... I understand the want there and take this out of the realm of non-monogamy, put it into the realm of friendship. I have friends who I will drop everything for in my day-to-day life and leave and go to where they live and care for them.
That comes at a cost to the people I am leaving at home. And when it comes to friendship, there's like a certain set of social norms. If someone were to receive a medical diagnosis. somebody was in a car accident, somebody was all of a sudden dealing with the death of a loved one or a massive change to their job or...
Any number of other urgent situations that were also important. Yeah. My world, even a monogamous worldview, would uphold the idea that, yep, you can drop your life here and go there and tend to them. Now when we add non-monogamy into this picture, what I see happen is we want to have an agreement. So many of us, we want to have this agreement that says, no, I will always, my relationship will always be picked first. Now I want to ask you to grapple with it.
your partner has a partner who goes through an emergency. Or do they treat that person as less than you would expect them to treat a friend? For me, this came in the form of finding out that I had a broken arm and my metamor forbade my partner from bringing me to the hospital to deal with a broken arm in the middle of the night, essentially.
And it was the first time I found out that beginning a romantic relationship with you meant a downgrade to my friendship. I was no longer as I couldn't be as important.
My metamor did no longer have the tolerance because I have 100% confidence that if that if that had happened six months earlier when we were quote-unquote just friends like I don't even know what friends means we were we are not people who saw each other as romantic partners we were not overly friendly were just people who were in community with each other, that it would have been fine for you to drop everything and take me to the hospital.
the entrance into a like a romantic and sexual relationship all of a sudden scrambled everything and now there was this desire to be picked first even over someone else's needs. So to have your wants given preference over someone else's needs and urgencies. So right away, I think most people, just if you take a deep breath and you feel into that, you can see that. There's a gap in our humanity there. Right.
So you were in this situation. Yes, I was. On the other side of this. Yeah. In this particular instance, what happened for you? What was going on? Um... Well, honestly, a significant dissociation at that moment. Because I can just barely remember the situation. I remember what happened. I remember certain aspects of it and not others. And I think that's because of the shock of... Like you said, the downgrade too. to to humanity like that that's not how we act and so i was
I just got so thrown that, yeah, I don't really remember a lot about that time. And I want to give you credit. You did not agree. You actually overrode the desire. So you were in a relationship where... There was some fuzziness around this primary, this premises. What does it mean? As there always will be, because what does it mean? I watched you.
grapple with this like you're on their own you knew you needed to bring we were far away you needed to bring me to a hospital and You were being told no go drop her off with someone else go leave her with someone else and come home and I What I remember you grappling with was wait, okay, but yeah okay because now she like what happened and Full disclosure, you broke your arm at two separate times. I did, yeah. I was actually remembering the first one where I...
I broke around two separate times, six weeks apart. Six weeks apart. The second time, I do remember being... I think enough had happened. I felt certain. There was no confusion in my mind about what should happen next. I didn't. I didn't understand the point of view that said no, don't care. for this person who is injured okay but here's the thing we had also already undergone a period of time where it became clear like verbally clear
that you had a primary partner and I was secondary. Yeah, right. And you did not fight back against that. Nope. You didn't ask for different language. That conversation happened and it just... And so we floated through it. And so that was there. So what I'm curious about is what the dissonance there between saying yes. I'm committing to you as a primary partner.
And then also being put in the position to have to then act on that and choose. And I know I'm using an extreme situation, but often extremes help us actually clarify like, oh, oh, this isn't always going to be just an obvious. or it's not always going to be on a level playing field. It's not going to be just, do I go hang out with this person or that person? It can be specifics that will make the decision hard. Right. Thank you for bringing that up because
Yeah, I agreed because I couldn't imagine that it would actually matter. I thought that my and my partner's values were similar enough. that like okay sure what difference does it make like i'm not going to make decisions you wouldn't make anyway like if something so you were in math You couldn't imagine the act. Because I think your values still aligned quite a bit. But how you acted, how you enacted those values was different. But you didn't know that.
But I didn't know that, right? Because the years of enmeshment leading up to that left me unable to distinguish me from them. And I just want to give you a like... You were enmeshed and non-monogamous. You were not in a monogamous marriage, but you were enmeshed to that point. It's not protection from enmesh. Right. I so appreciate this example. I don't like having broken my arm. I don't like you having to have grappled with all of that.
But this example does, it just highlights like how stark it can all feel. When I, I didn't agree to the secondary label, but I also didn't, I didn't feel that I got to negotiate. It was just a label handed to me. And I was like, well, I don't like that, but. I don't know what to do like it was that or leave and I was in a very precarious housing situation at the time where I was.
really i'm not able to actually i didn't have any place else to sleep at the time um and it was complicated with children involved and all sorts of stuff but so very complex situation but Day to day, all of us will be faced with times when we have a commitment to one person. And stuff happens with our other partners. And this is the stuff that it is we're never actually going to be able to imagine into all of the specific scenarios.
So instead, we're going to have to act. Well, now I'm thinking back to the first episode of this season. We're going to have to act in attunement and alignment with our own integrity, right? Like we're going to have to act in alignment with our own value. which may then look like to a person we promised primary partnership to, like we're not choosing them. so now again ask yourself yeah when has it ever happened that your partner chose something that you disagreed with
I can't think of anybody who's partnered who hasn't faced a time when, oh, my partner's choosing something I don't agree with. That's a thing that happens at times. What we do from there is going to have a huge impact on the relationship. I think the important point in choosing the language, you know, we could say this is all semantics. Yeah, it all is. I mean, everything we're doing, it's about language.
But how we use that language, you know, so when somebody says to me, I need to know that I'm primary, I'm first, I will always be chosen first. I want to know what's underneath that. Oh, yeah. What is the need underneath it? Do you need to know, for instance, that you will have access to someone to support your emotions when you are distraught?
Do you need to have a sense of emotional attunement? Do you need to have a wider support network? So in fact you don't feel like if this one person isn't here, you are bereft and alone in the world. And that's where I start getting curious because for myself, I feel it. The desire to lean into you because you're my nesting partner. I call you my anchor partner because our lives are so interwoven. I can fall into a trap of thinking that I need you to fulfill all of those needs.
What I need is my community. I need a community that includes you. Absolutely. And I even, because I happen to just, I love you. I actually find it really easy to love pretty much all people, but I like you. I just really like you. I really, really do. And I don't like everybody. I don't even like a lot of people, I think. I'm kind of a... I'm honored. I'm a pain in the ass. I don't really like everybody.
I love people. I do. I love humans. I love humans. You do. Like you. And so I trick myself pretty regularly into feeling like this person I like I need them to fulfill all of these needs and that has numerous times, even though I know all of this, I know how it feels to be on this shit end of a hierarchy, it tricks me into wanting one. I trick myself into like, I need you to make me these promises. Even though I know that the promises For God's sakes, I hope you are human.
who will listen to your own values over promises that were made in absence of an imagination that even included the situation you find yourself in. There it is, yeah. That's why the concept... I want to amend my answer to hierarchy. They're simplistic. Extremely simplistic because of all the things that you've just been saying. They don't take, they're a global promise. without a global vision of what's possible. Through no fault of your own.
We cannot actually hold all of the everything. I mean, it's calling to mind the movie Everything All at Once. Everything Everywhere All at Once. No, infinite possibilities. We don't know what's going to happen. to ask for that is to set yourself up to be disappointed too and that's actually what right now keeps me out of that trap that i set for myself is i have said it i have set myself up to feel like it's okay I'm safe because
Early, early days. I mean, we've tried all the things. And early, early days, I remember thinking, well, yeah, so, I mean, this is just sort of obvious. We'll have, like, there will be these. will arrange things and there will be promises that will keep me feeling safe. My imagination is broad and I still know it's not broad enough. And I don't know what's going to happen. And then a whole lot of stuff went down in our life. Our shared life. The one we create. The day-to-day mundane one.
stuff that neither of us felt like dealing with. job losses and multiple deaths, so many deaths, like right up close in our house. That sounds bad. Our house isn't a death trap. No, it's not. But we have walked people to the end. And also the... All the stuff that happens when kids are growing up. Like they're going from being little, little kids to grown-ups. Our youngest was two when we got together romantically. He'll be 18 in a couple months. So much has happened.
And in that time, my ability to hold on to, oh, I don't know anything. I don't know. So instead of asking you to promise me that nothing will change. I've taught myself to rely on, yeah, you know what, we have a bunch of responsibilities that overlap. Can we make contingency plans? Can we understand what happens?
If, you know, if one of us isn't here or can we make some backups for these? Because I am a person who seeks safety through knowing. I try to know things. Yeah. Even though I can't know them all. increasing my capacity for like, yeah, I really don't know what's going to happen has also led me to want to make more plans.
And then practice releasing. I have to surrender. So hand in hand, more plans, contingencies, and understanding of how my world can be more... scaffolded I can have more sources of safety and surrender to the fact that I don't know. Yeah. Which I find very comforting. I actually love waking up next to you knowing that
I wake up next to you because you chose to go to bed next to me, not because that's the only bed for you to sleep in. I find that comforting, but it's taken years to get to that point where it felt. Genuinely better than if I had to wake up thinking, well, I mean, where else was he going to be? Yeah. Yeah. And so what would you say changed? from then to now.
lot of growing up work and I think of growing up work so a lot of I did a couple of Jungian analyses so for me that was a lot of dealing with All of the stuff that was popping through from unconscious to conscious awareness, it was just punching through and causing big... reactivity constellation we would call it in Jungian psychology. Also
A broadening of my imagination. I read widely about how relationships can go. I listen to stories. I listen to a lot of I listen to a lot of stories and podcasts and read widely on the variety of ways that people are living their lives. And that in itself broadened my imagination. Not just in our modern time. I also read mythology and I read literature. And that broadened my imagination. And studying depth psychology, it broadened my imagination.
enough to leave me feeling like oh i really just don't know like my primary thought all day every day is I know a lot of shit and I don't know what I don't know. Like just those two realities. And so I sit with that discomfort of not getting to know much more comfortably than I used to. And I've found that knowing myself better Again, analysis. I don't read as much as you do by any stretch of the imagination. I haven't studied like you have.
I've been with myself and I've questioned myself and I've listened to other people's stories a lot. And so the more I learn about myself and about all the different ways that there are to live this human life. the more clear I get on my relationship with the concept of hierarchy. which I don't really use the word very much anymore because I feel like it's still effective, it's a useful word, but it's been replaced by the concept of values and value management.
In any given situation, multiple values could be active and I have to decide and we could say priority like which one wins. except that it's a merging of them and finding the best like the actions that will best align with the most of them. It's not, it's just a simple, this is the value I'm using. It's a stew. No, no, it really is.
The biggest reason why I don't use the word hierarchy is the implication of power. Right. I find that it's antithetical to my values at core, like my most deeply held conviction. that I get to have power over others. And that was my experience. The biggest trouble, so going back to the story I told. It's not that my metamor, um, who at the time I thought was my partner, they didn't come to me and say, I need you not, I need you to have somebody else do this, or heck, I'll do it.
They told you what you could do. And it was the power structure that I felt where, oh, I was no longer relating. First off, this was not an equilateral triangle. It was very scary to find that out. But also... There was power that was flowing from a source I couldn't even access. I was not on the phone with this person. I didn't get to discuss. They didn't even get to hear my story.
It was they were controlling your actions or trying to control your actions and therefore my experience and I didn't even get to know about this. I had to piece it together from the bottom up and it was really scary. I don't want to be in a relationship where it feels like I'm exercising power over someone, which means I have to do a lot of work to make sure that my agreements make space for other people. ¡Chao!
needs and wants that are oppositional to mine, that are mutually exclusive to mine. What happens then? Which means also my life can't depend on just one person behaving exactly the way I expect all the time. That is hard for my child parts to deal with. Yeah, I was going to bring up the parts earlier when you were talking about it. It's like, so I know all these things, but I still have this desire to lean in.
And yeah, sure. We have quite simple childish parts inside us who don't even want to know about nuance or complexity. They just want to be safe. Very simple. Yeah. And that part of me, those parts of me are like, no, I know exactly what I want. You're going to sit here where I can see all the time and also never die. That's actually what they want. They are pre the acceptance of finitude. That's how simple they are. My work is to re-parent those parts.
And you have been a delightful partner in that you have committed to co-parenting my inner children with me. And I do that with you. Not all of my, not all of my partners have been open to that. I love it when people are open to that. I think there's like little ways that we do it all the time where we, where we notice and we help and we tend to those child parts. Not in a, like...
oh, I have to parent this person in a, hey, let me keep you company. This is hard work. Yes. Doing the growing up of our inner parents. Providing the emotional support. Yeah. I mean, you have done a great job for me in helping me be. less socially off-putting but When I was young, when I was a teenager and up into my 20s, I never wanted to be a parent. It was outside my imagination. It's like, that's never going to happen.
but everywhere I went i was i when i saw kids i i parented them not necessarily well but like i would see their needs And I would try to meet them, not just respond to what they were doing, but like what was behind it. And I would do that. And, you know, parents don't always want that when they're in the grocery store or whatever. So eventually, you know, I got a handle on that.
We all have, I believe in the multiplicity of us all and of the... I can't think of the word, but the fact that we have versions of us from our past that are still there still at the place they were back there in the past. I have a 17-year-old who just lost his father. I have a 16-year-old
who doesn't know what the hell is going on because the world's about to change, but he doesn't know how. Those people, I carry them along with me as well as the five-year-old who knew just nothing and paid attention to nothing and was just... happy like all these things i carry around with me and i would love to have help caring for them. Which you do really well. And in a way that...
no one else has with both love and intolerance. I love it. That is not okay behavior. Right, love and standards, man. Love and standards. And so I'm thrilled to be able to do that. And relating to each other as adults who have inner child hearts, which is different than if I treated you like, oh my God, you're just a 17-year-old.
like that. You're not. You're a 58 year old man who still has these frozen versions of you in there operating from that zeitgeist that worldview and at times they need company and a reminder and at times they don't sometimes all they need is for me to talk to the 58 year old you and say, wow, sounds like you got some work to do. I'm going to go over there. It's still me.
They're my responsibility because they're me. But I bring all of this up because it helps me when I see people lean into the simplicity of hierarchy. to remember to Figure out, I mean, you talked about this. What's really underneath it? What is the thing you're looking for? And who in you is looking for. Who in you, exactly. Yeah. Finding out who it is.
can really help clarify what they actually want. And sometimes those things aren't available, but just being able to pinpoint exactly what it is can be very helpful. With all of that said, each of us seeks our safety in different ways. I rely on predictability.
That's a big one for me. I don't need actually consistency as much as I need. I need to be able. I need to feel like, yep, I know where this is going. Today is going to be different, but let me tell you how. Oh, okay. But you seek safety through playfulness. Like what the hell? Those two things do not really line up.
And so, like, it makes sense to me that you've never asked or even mentioned or even come anywhere near to ask, like, insinuating that you wanted any sort of primary partnership with me ever. It's never come up. And yet, and yet, parts of you, right? Like there are aspects of you that I see lean into the mono.
paradigm of well that would be simple when you're feeling soft or triggered or whatever right so so you know it's obvious like Because I seek safety through trust and predictability, it makes sense that I might want that hierarchical perspective. So I work on like, oh, so stay away. Careful, careful. I work on unpacking that thoughtfully. Not so that all of my relationships are the same. They're not.
but so that I know what I'm doing with my power, so that I am checking my power as much as possible. But I see you having to Instead, just tend carefully to. How are you unconsciously enacting hierarchy? How is it just popping out? Because it's not so much, oh, that's a strategy. That would work for me. But for you, it comes.
out like oh it's just you've just sort of made a world where it's happening not because you're primarily seeking it so there are a few ways that it can it can sneak in around the edges This is a really complicated conversation. I want to just leave off saying that if you are a person who uses the word hierarchy, I invite you to think about What's your relationship to power differentials and how you use power, right? Because that word may be a fit for you if you do want power over others.
Great. Use that word because it will help other people know whether you're a good person to partner with for them. And we're not a good fit for everyone. If that's not what you mean, then move away from that word and choose a word or a description that might be more apt. All we have are our words to help people understand who we are and then our actions to show what we're doing.
We need to be able to use descriptors, right? So I don't want to tell people which words to use, but I encourage you to really think deeply about how you're using these words. And also look at your actions because I've seen plenty of people who don't use the word hierarchy because they've heard that it's a bad word and they shouldn't use it. So they're not using it. I'm like, yeah, but they're acting it. They're doing it to the nth. It's everywhere.
It's not just about the word. This is also about really reckoning with how are you designing your relationships? Is there an accounting for how you use power? your relationships not just with your your most close people but also how you're using power with people who they relate to your metamores on how you're using power in community how you're using power in your friendship And if this is an interesting conversation for you and you'd like to continue it, or you have thoughts,
please join us at our Ask Me Anything. We have them about once a month. You can sign up for it at JolieHamilton.com slash AMA. Yeah, and that is a small group conversation. And lots of people, actually about 25%, according to a recent national survey, are interested in some type of open relationship. But how do you know if you are ready to open up happily? Not everyone is, and that's no problem.
I've got a 60 second quiz that will give you the answer. And even better, you'll walk away with your next step whether you're good to go or not so much when it comes to opening up. And this is no BuzzFeed nonsense. I personally designed this quiz from my years of academic research. Go to jolyquiz.com. That's J-O-L-I-Q-U-I-Z. you're ready to open