Hello dear ones,
For those who follow astrology, you’ll be happy to hear that Venus retrograde has ended — though we’ll be in the shadow period until March 3rd. So this is a great time to integrate what you learnt about relationships, love, pleasure, and all things Venusian over the past six weeks. On Friday I was in a class called “Venus in the Underworld,” taught by two of my fav astrologers Olivia Pepper and Charlie Cross, and I recognized that the biggest lesson or epiphany I had during this time could be best summed up by the word mutuality. So here are some thoughts on love, care, and mutuality.
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THOUGHTS
In December I wrote about the Venus retrograde and all of the juicy relational trauma it was gonna bring to the surface. The astrological weather was calling on me to consider how I feel valued in relationships and how I own my value in my connections with others. Over the course of this six week long retrograde, I took a class called Venus in the Underworld with Olivia Pepper and Charlie Cross (they’ll be sharing their astro projections for 2022 tonight and you can learn more here). Friday was the last of our three sessions together, just as Venus was stationing direct. When we all checked in about our Venus Rx experiences, I realized that I’d done some pretty major integration work.
Over the last year or so, I’ve been grappling with a story I hold: that it’s impossible for me to have emotional connection and sexual connection in a partnership. Growing up, it was always the latter. In my mid-twenties, I started to see someone that I’d be with for four years. It was my first non-abusive relationship. And while this human was able to show up emotionally, and we had amazing sex, I realized in hindsight that the emotional connection was still pretty surface level. But because it was more than I’d ever had before, it felt so much deeper. The relationships that followed had both/and, but there was an imbalance. Emotional connection was sometimes present, while sexual connection was a constant presence.
Things flipped with my last partnership: the deepest emotional connection I’ve ever had in a romantic relationship, but no sex. And the same was true for another partnership I had during that time. I’d sit in my therapy sessions and express the belief that I was somehow cursed: I’d only ever have one or the other. I remember my therapist asking me if maybe it was the case that a part or parts of me just didn’t believe that it was possible to have both and my stomach dropped. Yes! Given all of the experiences I’d had in the past, it made sense that my parts wanted to protect me from the disappointment of not getting to have both.
Since ending my last long-term partnership in October, this belief that I can only have one or the other, that I will have to make sacrifices if I want connection, as loosened its hold on me. When I discovered that someone I was really excited about wasn’t in a place where sex was on the table for them, I was able to hold that information without turning it into a story about me. I was able to tell them that I really want to be with someone who shares the same desires and can meet me where I’m at and I felt so good about doing that. I’m so used to compromising because of a fear that I’ll be alone — and I’m just not feeling that anymore.
When I told my therapist about this situation, she said “You know the word that’s really jumping out at me is mutuality. You want mutuality in your relationships.” Yes yes yes! Mutuality: the sharing of a feeling, action, or relationship with another. Mutual: reciprocally given and received.
Mutuality in relationships means that I’m with someone who can meet me where I’m at, whose done enough work on their attachment trauma, and just knows what they want out of relationships. Mutuality means that there isn’t an imbalance in whose calling who and whose planning the dates. Mutuality means that we’re both ready to be vulnerable with each other, that our care for one another is reciprocal, and that we’re moving towards a shared vision of the future.
In choosing to prioritize mutuality, I honour my value as a human being and as a partner. I’m no longer willing to accept the belief that love requires sacrifice or compromise. I want love built on collaboration. The most successful relationships are those that look to find a different route than the either/or placed in front of them. When I teach about conflict transformation, I explain the difference between compromise and collaboration as follows: let’s say that there’s one slice of pizza left. You want it and another person wants it. You could split the piece in half (a compromise) or you could start to ask questions and find out what’s underneath the desire for that pizza. You might learn that one person brought a salad for lunch but is craving that pizza and the other person doesn’t care about the pizza; they’re just hungry. And so one person takes the pizza and the other person eats their salad. Together, they find another option for getting their needs met without having to sacrifice.
There’s another way that I want to think about mutuality, and that’s in our relationship with between our self and our parts (if you’re not familiar with parts work, I have a whole webinar about it here and will share more below). During the Venus workshop, Olivia had us do some character creation for our Venus placement and it was truly eye-opening for me. My Venus is in Gemini, which is represented by a pair of twins. Because my Venus is hanging out beside Chiron, the planet of the wounded healer, Olivia shared that this placement could represent a feeling of being split in two: one that really trusts Chiron and another who doesn’t.
This suggestion immediately brought to mind the metaphor of the day child and the night child from the book The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization. The book begins with an epigraph from Marilyn Van Derbur that reads: “Without realizing it, I fought to keep my two worlds separated. Without ever knowing why, I made sure, whenever possible, that nothing passed between the compartmentalization I had created between the day child and the night child.” The authors of The Haunted Self will use this metaphor of the day child and the night child to explain the state of primary splitting within the structural dissociation model: those of us who live in chronically traumatizing environments, where trauma remains unresolved, handle this stress through a splitting of the left and right hemispheres of our brains into the “going on with normal life” part and the “traumatized part of the personality.” This splitting helps explain how I managed to get nearly straight As in high school (day child), while being high each day (night child), and then going home to perform the role of mom for my younger brother (day child). This is what’s called primary splitting, and it’s facilitated by an underdeveloped corpus callosum, the nerve that runs between the left and right hemispheres of the brain and is responsible for facilitating conversation and collaboration between the two.
For some of us, primary splitting isn’t enough to keep us safe, and secondary splitting occurs. Here, the traumatized part of the personality splits into sub parts, each with their own personalities, behaviours, and beliefs. These parts are called fight, flight, freeze, attach-cry, and submit. Fight keeps us alive through hypervigilance, judgment, mistrust, control, and self-destructive behaviours. Flight keeps us safe by creating distance from others, often relying on addictive behaviours such as substance use, gambling, and disordered eating to help us escape our reality. Submit believes that shame, self-hatred, self-sacrifice, fawning, and caregiving support our survival, and is ready to activate chronic pain flares and other symptoms of illness to keep us in a state of collapse. Freeze protects us through dissociation and panic attacks. And attach-cry supports our survival by ensuring that we’ll never be abandoned, accepting the scraps of connection and intimacy that others throw its way. This is the landscape of my structural dissociation.
I’ve spent the last four years in therapy learning how to foster more collaboration between my day child and night child. You might say that this is a process of internal mutuality. And it’s made all the more complex by the fact that it’s not just day child and night child living within me. There are many other parts that want my attention. It’s my job to show them that I want to foster relationships with them that are built on mutuality and collaboration. Together, we can find new ways to keep me safe, and then let go of the old coping mechanisms that no longer support me.
I want to share a story of internal mutuality that has moved me deeply. During the second class of Venus in the Underworld, Olivia told us the story of Inanna, the Queen of Heaven and named for Venus, and her twin sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld (and so any quotes shared below can be attributed to Olivia). Ereshkigal was born first, and should have been favoured by her father. But Inanna was more beautiful than her sister and so she is the one who is chosen again and again to receive the teachings of her father. Traumatized by the lack of love she has received, Ereshkigal finds her own kingdom, the kingdom of the Underworld, and she separates herself from her family, retreating to the underworld and “into the company of ghosts.”
Years later, Ereshkigal’s husband dies, and overwhelmed by grief, she closes the doors to the Underworld and will not let anyone in. It just so happens that this death occurs at the same moment that Inanna has been married. One’s gain mirrors another’s loss. Inanna ventures into the Underworld to speak with her sister. At each of the seven gates, she must sacrifice a piece of clothing, until she arrives at her sister naked and unadorned, just as the dead must arrive to the Underworld. In all of her rage and grief, not just at her husband’s death, but at a life of childhood trauma, Ereshkigal kills her sister and throws her body onto a meat hook, and Inanna hangs there for days.
Inanna messenger realizes that something must be wrong and so he goes to the God of the Sun and the God of the Moon to ask for their help and they both deny him. It is Enke, who is the god of water, and wisdom, and possibility, who will help save Inanna by creating two little mourners out of the dirt under his finger nails. These tiny mourners sneak into the Underworld unnoticed, eventually reaching a weeping Ereshikgal. They sit beside Ereshikgal and they join her in mourning. Ereshikgal will hear their cries and pick them up in her hand and be so moved by their fellow feeling that she revives her sister. Before Inanna can return to earth, it is decided that her husband will spend half of the year with Ereshikgal in the Underworld, and the other half of the year with Inanna on earth.
What I see in this story is a sense of mutuality between Inanna and Ereshikgal, who could each be a metaphor for our day child and night child, bright self and shadow self. This story, Olivia explained, represents “the deep grief that our shadow selves are experiencing” for “when our bright self gets something, the corresponding experience is that shadow self often loses something.” If I think about this in terms of my parts, what I recognize is that every time I move towards the love that I want, every time I choose to value myself, every time I say I’m not willing to sacrifice this my parts lose something: their control over my actions, which was once what kept me safe, their sense of being needed. It’s my job to show them that they’re still very much needed. We need our Ereshikgals as much as our Inannas.
In her newsletter, Chani Nicholas recounted the story of these twin sisters, and invoking parts work, she writes:
The parts of self that have been given the worst jobs need help if they are to have their own rebirth. When we dignify them with an acknowledgment, we return them to their valuable state. What I’ve come to understand through this latest Venus retrograde is that all aspects of myself are restorable if I take a trip to visit them and acknowledge all they’ve tried to do to keep me from harm. All parts of myself want to be known. All my monsters really want is to be heroines.
This is what internal mutuality looks like for me: we’re not getting rid of our parts; we’re learning to collaborate with them so that they can be reborn. We’re not sacrificing the needs of one part in order to meet the needs of another; we’re finding a third path so that everyone’s needs are met. No one part is left alone to grieve these changes. Just like the tiny mourners, we cry together. Our healing is a process of grieving. And so in this way, grief and trauma are the mirror to love and healing.
FEELINGS
Welcome to my Venus bedroom! I’ve been so inspired by this exercise that I’m going to make a whole series of rooms based on the houses in my chart, so stay tuned!
PRACTICES
Make yourself the damn cake!
Today while grocery shopping I impulse purchased my favourite cake from my youth and I didn’t realize how much I needed to offer myself, my inner child, and my inner teen something sweet (both literally and metaphorically). Can you check in with your inner little ones and ask them what they want to eat? Such a beautiful way to create a relationship of care with ourselves.
ACTIONS
Dean Spade just shared videos for his workshop series Building Capacity for Mutual Aid Groups on his website for free!
You can access them here!
SURJ Toronto is holding a Solidarity Fundraiser for Gidimt’en Land Defenders.
From their website: Land defenders on the west coast have been reclaiming their ancestral territory, blocking the Coastal GasLink pipeline from drilling beneath Wedzin Kwa, Wet’suwet’en sacred headwaters. They have faced heavy-handed, militarized repression, contrary to Indigenous law, international law, and the principles of reconciliation Canadians often proclaim to hold dear. All settlers have been called upon to support this ongoing resistance: state violence in the name of corporate profits must end now!
SURJ Toronto responds to the call to action from Gidimt’en Checkpoint without hesitation. We believe that moving money is one powerful way to take collective action, shift unequally distributed resources, and strategically support the frontlines of life-giving decolonial struggles.
We also believe that settlers have a responsibility to learn from Indigenous land defenders, including responding to calls to take action now! To learn more about Gidimt'en land defenders calls for action check out Yintahaccess.com. Along with your poster, we will also send you an action info sheet. Note that posters can only be sent to addresses within so-called Canada.
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