Hello dear ones,
We’re back to our regular scheduled programming! But before we dive in, I wanted to share that I’m offering a special paid subscription discount! Get 33% of monthly and yearly paid subscriptions by June 30th! It’s my hope that this discount can make a paid subscription more accessible than the $5/month I have it set at.
Your paid subscriptions truly enable me to survive in this capitalist hellscape with all of the social media woes I’m wading through atm. There are currently 6071 subscribers, and 175 of those are paid subscriptions, which is less than 3% of subscribers. Increasing my paid subscriptions to a lofty goal — but hey, we’re manifesting here — of 500 would be life-changing. As an additional incentive, I’m planning to send out a little snail mail thank you to the next 50 people who upgrade to paid, and to everyone who already has a paid sub.
With love,
Margeaux
Like so many humans, I was not taught how to navigate the muddy waters of conflict growing up. In my family, the pattern usually went like this: 1) my brother does something that upsets me; 2) I name that I don’t like what he did and try to set a boundary; 3) brother explodes; 4) I go to my dad crying and he tells me that I should’ve kept my mouth shut (his literal words); 5) none of us talk for a few hours; 6) we carry on as though nothing happened. In other words, there was no such thing as conflict resolution.
In the world of conflict resolution, there are five conflict styles that I’ve mapped onto the terrain of trauma responses: compete (fight response), avoid (flight or freeze), accommodate (fawn/submit), compromise (often another submit response, though we can also compromise from a regulated place), and collaborate. In order to avoid this cycle, I became an expert at remaining silent, or I’d backtrack and appease.
After years and years of having no clue how to navigate conflict, and through a combination of therapy, secure friendships, and conflict resolution training, I became confident in my ability to move myself, and my relationships, towards collaboration. In fact, I found myself even enjoying conflict! I saw it as an opportunity to learn about the things that the person I love cares about, and to practice repair after rupture — one of the tenets of secure attachment.
But lately, something new has been happening. When in conflict with my partner F, I move into compete/fight mode. I get snappy. I get angry. I get bratty. Well if you’re gonna be in a bad mood then I’ll be in a bad mood, I say to myself. I do not want to move us towards collaboration. Instead of wanting closeness — my usual MO as someone whose disorganized attachment leans towards the anxious end of the spectrum — I want distance.
Last week, I came into therapy and told Amy — my brilliant somatic therapist — what had been happening.
“It’s like I just don’t want to put in the emotional labor of getting us through the conflict,” I told her. “Instead, I just feel angry and annoyed. It feels like I’m being a bratty teenager.”
“What if you didn’t see this as a problem?” She asked, leading me towards a reframe that I can only describe as a mic drop moment.
“In the past, you’ve worked so hard to get you and F towards resolution. But they’re not ready to meet you there yet. They need more time. And I feel like this is giving you an opportunity to actually be with your anger. This is a good thing.”
As someone who has historically attached anger with trauma (see aforementioned conflict cycle in my family), who once proclaimed to my first ever therapist “Anger is a wasted emotion” after she gave me a copy of The Dance of Anger (reader: I kept the book and never saw her again), learning to see anger as an emotion that can exist outside of abuse and harm has taken A LOT of work.
I lean into what Amy has just shared with me: “It’s like I’m just so annoyed because I love F so much and I just don’t want us to be in conflict and I hate that I can’t get us out of it.”
“Exactly! Your anger is coming from a place of love. It’s cold anger or hot anger that can harm us. But warm anger is something different.”
Cold anger: my father, shutting down and giving me his silent face of rage as his cheeks turn red. Hot anger: my brother exploding and punching holes in walls when I try to name my hurt with him. Warm anger: the anger that arises when you love someone but hate the situation you’re in. The anger that comes up when you’re frankly just annoyed by the person that you love.
Here, I’m reminded of a quote from Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst whose work I read in grad school. In “Against Self-Criticism,” Adam Phillips states: “In Freud’s vision we are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate we love, wherever we love we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can frustrate us; and if someone can frustrate us we always believe they can satisfy us.” Phillips observes that, “ambivalence is the way we recognise that someone or something has become significant to us,” that “wherever there is an object of desire there must be ambivalence.” I’m all about normalizing ambivalence.
What I’m beginning to realize is that my new conflict response is the direct result of feeling safe and secure in my partnership. It’s safe to be angry here. I can be a brat because, well, my partner is also kinda being a brat. Here, I get to join them in speaking a kind of younger language. In fact, there’s a kind of loving intimacy in joining them where they’re at. In this place where we can both feel our feelings without worrying about moving towards resolution immediately.
And so Amy asks me: “What if there’s some maturity in just letting things be as they are — allowing yourself to be angry and frustrated?”
All of this time, I’ve been thinking that my teen brat response is making me immature, when, in fact, it’s the opposite. In these moments, I’m being given the opportunity to offer myself full permission to follow my impulse. Being able to just say “FUCK IT!” in the moment is a gift because I get to tap into the young anger that I never got to have.
I’m in a secure enough place now — both in terms of my relationship with myself and with my partner — that I don’t need to push for us to resolve the conflict. I can just let it be, honor where we’re both at, and trust that we’ll come back together.
So here I am, in my teen brat era, embracing the fiery rage inside of me.
When I say I devoured Patric Gagne’s Sociopath: A Memoir, I mean I DEVOURED IT. Fun fact about me: I started my undergrad as a criminology and psychology major because I wanted to be a criminal psychologist. I’ve always been super interested in how some humans cause harm without guilt or shame or accountability, and also believe that no one is disposal (a contentious claim that many disagree with). In this memoir, Gagne sheds light on the “why” behind sociopathic behavior, offering a reading that is as illuminating as it is paradigm-shifting.
F and I just got caught up on The Perfect Match. This season is just so fucking good — and this cut convo of Dom and Tolú is an example of how to take accountability and how to receive it. For folks who haven’t started or aren’t up to date, you should know that there are spoilers ahead.
I’m finally picking up 100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell. It’s been sitting in my to read stack for at least six months and is not disappointing me. This short story collection explore queer desire and the messiness of intimacy. I get why people are such big Purnell fans.
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Love these reflections 🙏🏻