Communicate Vulnerability
Power-based relationships may survive game playing but true love thrives on equality and vulnerability
Prompt #5: How can you handle conflict in such a way that it yields intimacy and helps relationships grow?
Simple answer: Shut up, listen, and meet your partner’s emotional needs without losing sight of your own, while maintaining your boundaries and allowing their autonomy
American Cinquain
Listen Hold soul’s windows Relate to emotions Address fear and anger with love Share me
Dodoitsu
Why the fuck did you do that? Triggered trauma memory I thought I had dealt with it We will together
Prompt #4 was: How can you learn to better communicate your needs instead of expecting others to interpret & respond to your mood?
I like how the two prompts challenged me to come up with responses to the same situation but as a different actor in the play. I feel prompt 4 spoke to me as the talker in a conversation between lovers while #5 places me in the shoes of the listener. After all, one should play both roles in a relationship at the same or different times.
Dodoitsu
Can others hear you not speak? Don’t come off as entitled Stay on your side of the street Wise know difference
American Cinquain
Skin burns Anxious searing Release secrets’ pressure Communicate intimately Love warms
The decoder rings found here in my submission yesterday to MDSHall’s poetry centric publication The Bazaar of the Bizzare (a play on words name worthy of our high priestess’ provocative prompted pilgrimages of personal probing):
“The purpose of a relationship is not to have another who might complete you; but to have another with whom you might share your completeness.” (From Conversations with God — Book 1)
In Del Ray, I was assigned “home work” that at the time seemed inapt. For that time, it was, but ontologically, it is useful. The most interesting was this assignment: “describe a healthy romantic relationship.” I wrote that each partner should maintain their sense of self; no one should lose who they are to the relationship; it should be a partnership wherein each person maintains their autonomy; kind of like a treaty between, for example, the United States and Canada — contributions and rules are agreed to but each country maintains its sovereignty. This described an interdependent relationship. It is the opposite of codependent.
I wrote this next passage nearly eight years ago:
Sighhhhhh. My parents. What a fucking enigma. I think I got my driftwood trait from my mother. She is the one that everybody likes — she is kind and very social — she took care of us but I wonder now if she was there but not present. My father is emotionally detached from the world. He imperiously lives in his own construct of the world and everyone else, including his children, are but chess pieces in his game of life. What love he thinks he shows has strings attached. In Delray, after a few group therapy sessions with my parents, B., who practically destroyed his children, came up to me and said, “Man Greg, I thought my kids had it rough.”
B’s daughter was a cutter. I did not grasp the enormity of his statement at the time. After my awakening last year when I began to see behind my father’s veil, I texted B and asked him what he saw then that took me 50 years to see. Alas, he could not recall.
I just realized that what B said was probably an unwitting channeled message from a Guide, maybe even Rama. It would be some time till I could hear them climbing up my walls.
The enigma is how the hell they have stayed together. They constructed a world for themselves that works for them I guess, but they don’t realize that while it’s kept them together it’s not what they should want for their children. They would tell me that I seek infatuation and that real love is what they have. Bull shit. They have co-dependency.
They don’t even talk WITH each other. So many times I tell one of them something important and find out days or weeks later the other doesn’t know.
In Rama I create with Lindsey winding my sails,
