Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [70]
There are many excellent weekend workshops focusing on communication for couples; many churches offer weekend marriage retreats, and some medical centers offer classes in couples’ communication and anger management. Workshops and classes are worth attending even if they don’t specifically address sluttery. We’ve never known a couple who went to a communication or intimacy workshop and didn’t gain some good new skills and insights from it. Some workshops exist specifically to work on issues arising from nonmonogamy. Don’t hesitate to take these workshops, and remember that the facilitator has expertise in creating safe environments to explore highly charged issues. Many couples repeat these workshops when a new issue has arisen in their lives. We encourage you to take a class or a workshop, or to join a support group suitable to your needs. Just knowing that others struggle with some of the same issues that you do can help.
Support, ideas, and information can also be found through online groups and tribes. See chapter 17, “Making Connection,” for ideas on how to find these.
A more expensive, but still excellent, option is to do some sessions with a couples’ counselor. In general, we recommend this as a second-level alternative, after you’ve already done some classes and workshops, unless you have privacy concerns that make classes and workshops difficult for you.
Screen any of these resources about whether they’ll be accepting of your open relationship. Some old-fashioned psychologists, and the leaders of some workshops and retreats, may believe that your lust for many people is a symptom of psychological disturbance; you may not feel adequately safe and supported in such a hostile environment. If you need help finding a sympathetic therapist or group, try asking your friends or checking the Resource Guide at the end of this book. Most therapists now have websites where they list their skills and experience and something about their philosophy: you can email them to ask what their experience is in working with polyamorous relationships.
We strongly recommend that you investigate these types of help sooner rather than later. Just about everyone can use an occasional communications skills tune-up, and if you wait until your relationship is in crisis, you’ll face much harder work than if you’d been practicing your skills all along.
Time Is Your Friend
In some Native American cultures it is customary to wait several minutes after a person speaks before responding: it is rude and disrespectful to fail to think about what the person has said, and to speak immediately would indicate that you have simply been waiting for the speaker to be quiet so that you can then attempt to change his or her mind. We recommend taking some time before responding to any serious communication, especially when it’s important to the speaker. Maybe if you pay attention you’ll hear something new.
People often approach a disagreement as if it were urgent that it be resolved right away. They strive for a resolution within minutes of discovering that they don’t agree about something—something that they have in fact never agreed on.
But you’ve probably been living with that disagreement for a long time, and a little while more is not going to make a lot of difference. Thus, consider this strategy: acknowledge the disagreement, give each of you a chance to state your feelings using the principles you’ve learned in this chapter, and then take two days to digest what you’ve learned.
When you return to discuss the disagreement, you will probably be in a much calmer mode. You may have a clearer understanding of what is important to you and an appreciation of what is important to your beloved and why. Thus you may find yourself in a much better state to negotiate a solution that might make everyone happy.
Dossie sees this phenomenon all the time in her therapy practice, when she sends clients home from a session in a state of disagreement that seems intolerable. She instructs them to hold this new knowledge for a couple