Radical Receptivity
Or, Can You Receive My Radical Honesty?
Hello dear ones,
I’ve been in a bit of a writing rut lately. Which, as you can imagine, is really hard when you’re a writer. So for today’s post, I wanted to share some writing from my first zine Radical Receptivity: Fostering Intimacy After Trauma. The TLDR is that I want us to have more nuanced conversations on the importance of radical honesty in our relationships.
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I have a problem that I didn’t expect I’d have: I’m not sure how I feel about radical honesty. So many of the thinkers that I love talk about how supportive relationships require radical honesty. And in theory, I agree. I love the idea that we can share anything and everything with the people we love. But in practice, I’m not sure if radical honesty is always an option. I may want to be radically honest with you, but you might not be in a place to hear what I have to say with compassion and care.
In her book Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown argues that radical honesty is an integral principle for liberated relationships: “Radical honesty. No omissions, no white lies, no projections. Ask the questions you really want answered, speak your truth, and let the relationship build inside all that reality.” Don’t get me wrong – I want all of this. But in order for me to share something that might make you feel uncomfortable at best, or really fucking upset at worst, here's what I need:
I need to trust that you are willing and able to hear what I’m saying without getting defensive or mean, without placing blame, without making judgments, without walking away.
I need to know that you can hear what I’m saying with openness, compassion, and care.
I need to know that you’ll be able to recognize and acknowledge just how terrifyingly vulnerable it is for me to be radically honest with you.
I need you to see my radical honesty as an affirmation of my love and care for you.
I need you to own your own capacity to receive.
If radical honesty is a commitment to not hiding, omitting, or lying about our actions, feelings, and thoughts, then radical receptivity is a commitment to taking accountability for your response to someone else’s truth. Radical receptivity requires us to get curious about why it hurts when someone is radically honest with us.
I want to be clear that when I talk about radical honesty, I'm not talking about just saying anything and everything I want to you because “it’s the truth and [insert other person] should be able to take it.” That’s harm cloaking itself as radical honesty. That form of radical honesty isn’t so radical. In fact, it’s toxic.
For me, being radically honest means that I’m going to push through all of the fear and insecurity and trauma to say the scary thing because if I don’t say it, I’m disavowing myself. As a trauma bb who was punished anytime they tried to articulate their needs, I quickly learnt that no one in my home would take accountability for their shitty and abusive behaviour. And so learning to speak my truth has taken a long, long time.
First, I had to come to accept that my needs and my truth were never the problem. The problem was that my brother and father were incapable of holding space for me. They couldn’t take accountability. They couldn’t be receptive. Then I had to trust that other people were capable of hearing my truth, that they wouldn’t explode upon hearing it, slam doors, gaslight me, and then blame me for the explosion.
And so I practiced with those that I loved and trusted. Humans in my life who’d done their own work were able to receive me with care. The one’s who hadn’t done that work exploded or shut down. But still I kept practicing because I knew deep down that my needs shouldn’t be kept silent. That, in fact, I couldn’t be silent anymore.
Being radically honest requires A LOT of work. Before I can speak my truth, I have to do the work of regulating myself; I have to compassionately unpack all of the negative stories I internalized about myself and my self-worth that are coming up each time I think about speaking my truth; and then I have to take that terrifying step and make myself utterly vulnerable in the face of the other.
I also have to accept that I have no control over how the other person responds. Sure, there are things that I can say and do that will help that person feel cared for. I don’t want to be a jerk. Being a super compassionate person + being a trauma bb makes it super challenging to a) not blame myself when someone else is upset; and b) not immediately step into a caretaker role to make all of their bad feelings go away. In the early days of my healing, I found it helpful to hear that I'm not responsible for other people's feelings. It freed me in ways that I didn’t imagine were possible.
I now see that it's more nuanced than that. I recently saw this post circulating on Instagram that read:
“A person’s emotional response to your need isn’t about you. You could be the best communicator in the world asking for a basic need, yet people will always perceive you through the lens of their own experiences, perceptions, and emotional capacity. How people receive your needs isn’t about you. Remember that.”
At one point in time, I would have read this post and exclaimed YES!! Because the truth is it can be really hard to receive another person’s boundaries, to hear their needs, especially when those needs conflict with your own. I know all too well how your needs can be turned against you by those who do not like your boundaries, who over-responsibilize you for having needs to begin with — and so it makes sense to me that we do not take other’s responses into account when stating our needs.
It may also be the case that another person’s need triggers something inside of you. I used to get so activated by people needing space to process their feelings while we were in conflict because it triggered my past trauma from my father and brother pulling away from me during conflict and never coming back to resolve and repair. My triggered response is my responsibility and should never be used to make someone feel bad about their need.
And, the reality is that our needs can and do impact those we’re in relationships with. To place the onus entirely on the human who is having their response is to negate our responsibility to one another. I’m grateful for the humans in my life who have articulated their needs and have been willing to collaborate with me, so that we both feel supported. Through them articulating their need, and me being able to share my own response, we have deepened our intimacy and have healed some old relational wounds. I can be compassionate AND also speak my truth.
To say that “people will always perceive you through the lens of their own experiences, perceptions, and emotional capacity” is lacking in nuance. To act as if our responses happen in a vacuum of past trauma or lack of emotional capacity is not only pathologizing, but it ignores our interdependence. This way of thinking contributes to the ways in which folks on the radical left have weaponized the language of needs and boundaries to justify being unaccountable. They will say “This is just my boundary. You don’t have to like it. I’m not responsible for how my boundary makes you feel” end of story. In this way, boundaries can be used to minimize your responsibility to those you’ve chosen to be in connection with.
I worry about how a sentiment like “another person’s response isn’t your responsibility” works to erase the ways in which sometimes our reaction to another person’s need isn’t just about us. There is something very neoliberal to me about this approach to boundaries and needs. As my bestie said to me as we chatted about this IG post: “That’s some neoliberal, every man is an island, bullshit. It’s anti-connection and anti-responsibility.” Where is the space for you to have a need (and for that need to be valid) and for that need to maybe have an impact on me? As much as folks on the radical left would like to believe, boundaries do not negate our responsibility to each other. This isn’t an either/or situation.
In thinking about radical receptivity, I returned to the Collective Tarot. Many years ago, I pulled the card named Reception, which is the Collective Tarot’s reimagining of the Empress card in the major arcana. The image on their card is an open palm holding a small human figure. The Collective Tarot explains the trouble we have with welcoming reception:
“many of us have come to associate letting go, giving, and admittance with danger. Ironically, this misconception can actually make us more vulnerable to outside influences. The walls and rules we create to protect ourselves may also be blocking out nourishing energies that we need, not only to survive, but to thrive and grow.”
As I re-read this card’s meaning, I thought about boundaries. In the boundary workshops I run, I talk about how our boundaries can take many shapes: soft, rigid, and flexible. You’ll know if your boundaries are soft if you consistently find yourself compromising your needs for the needs of others.
Another marker of soft boundaries is taking responsibility for the feelings of others. This is not to say that you shouldn’t be accountable if you cause harm. But causing harm and setting and affirming a boundary are two different things. You’re always entitled to assert your boundary. The person hearing your boundary is entitled to their response. The hard work is discerning when their response is or isn't your responsibility.
If our boundaries are always rigid, then we’re never meeting others where they’re at. Of course there are certain boundaries that will always be rigid because they protect me. I’m not going to allow others to touch me without my consent. No space for flexibility there. Sometimes, in order to practice equity, I soften rigid boundaries in order to meet the needs of another. The trick to having supportive boundaries begins with recognizing whether all of your boundaries are soft or rigid.
Our attachment styles play an integral role in whether we tend towards soft or rigid boundaries. For folks who have an anxious attachment style (which often manifests as a fear of being alone or abandoned), boundaries tend to be soft. The palm is always open. A closed palm is seen as a threat to connection. For folks who have an avoidant attachment style (which often takes the form of “I don’t need you, I don’t need anyone”), it’s the opposite. Boundaries are rigid and the palm is usually closed.
One of the many things I learnt from my trauma therapist is that our trains brains don’t have a whole lot of capacity for nuance and complexity. Everything exists in extremes and there’s no space for anything in between. When I’m within my window of tolerance, I’m able to comfortably exist in that middle ground space. My boundaries can be soft, rigid, and flexible.
Boundary work and radical receptivity require us to do some pretty major reparenting work. If our gut reaction is to close our palm the moment someone gets radically honest with us, we’re closing the door to intimacy and connection because we believe that’s what will keep us safe. And it probably did keep us safe for a really long time. We come by our trauma responses honestly.
But as we become adults, as we come into doing our healing work, we have the capacity to make different choices. In generative somatics, this ability to change our patterns of response is called somatic opening. Staci Haines, one of the founders of generative somatics, explains this process in The Politics of Trauma:
“Somatic opening works through the body to access and transform survival reactions, experiences that have shaped us, and emotions or numbing that has become automatic. Somatic opening allows us to listen to, somatically process, and transforms these stories ... allows more aliveness, purpose, love, and power.”
What does this look like in practice then?