relational innovation

lately my home partner and i have been watching couples therapy like a spectator sport. we're watching the world cup of relational rupture, and dr. orna guralnik is locked in, delivering absolute bangers of truth. certain people are exhausting with how they get stuck. there's a certain amount of innovation necessary to feel alive and developing.

there's a couple in season 2 called michael and michal. michal has such a hard time relaxing that she rides in on a high temp from the first moment she's on screen. her insistent, desperate explosion of words — the hyperbole, the anger, the volume — makes her seem cartoonishly unpleasant, and there's a certain pleasure i take in disidentifying with her. i'm on the couch, and she's in the tank. that's the sport of it.

but as soon as the episode ends and my partner and i start to discuss, the attempts to find safety, dignity, and belonging start to reveal themselves, and there's a softening in me. in my somatics education staci haines named "move toward and push against" as one of the conditioned tendencies a body reaches for when it feels vulnerable and afraid — one of the survival strategies we map in generative somatics, each one a move to protect access to safety, dignity, belonging. michal isn't cartoonish. michal is terrified she won't be heard unless she screams, so threatened by being ignored that she's making herself unignorable. i start to imagine how unpleasant it must be to feel there's no way to be heard no matter how hard you scream for attention.

my own conditioned tendency, hard earned by a lifetime of surviving by running away, is flight. i may be a sagittarius but i function more like a pegasus. galloping ain't fast enough escape for me. part of why flight is what my system reaches for is that the volume of my own affect is so easily overwhelmed by the fighter type. if someone starts screaming, my impulse is to protect access to my own inner experience — their emotions start to choke out every source of light and oxygen. in that moment i see whoever is trying to get safety, dignity, belonging by flooding me as hexxus from ferngully: incompatible with my survival and more than a little monstrous. it knocks me right out of my window of tolerance and i will extricate myself until more favorable emotional weather prevails.

which is part of why the middle of season 2 is so hard to watch. the pandemic lockdowns hit new york and the show continues with the couples on zoom. it's been six years from that period of life and the footage is still activating and surreal. some of that is the obvious — the empty streets, everyone's nervous system visibly rerouting in real time. but some of it is specific to my strategy. lockdown was the season the world revoked flight from a flight type. nowhere to gallop. every exit closed. i watch michal on that laptop screen, sealed into an apartment with the person she can't stop screaming at, and my body remembers what it was to have my one reliable move taken off the board. when you can't leave, you find out what your system does next. what mine did, mostly, was learn how small a flight can get — leaving the sentence instead of the conversation, leaving my body for the length of a dinner, trying to exert control in my physical environment to manage the stress. i chose the roommate i did for that time specifically because i trusted they would give me space if needed, but part of the early pandemic i shared with my ex partner. with less room to escape, i think i reached for fight more with her. my main strategy miniaturized, and i saw that fight forced out of someone who was reaching for flight takes a lot out of me.  watching the zoom sessions, i can see everyone's strategies doing the same thing: compressing, concentrating, getting weirder and purer under pressure, like the show accidentally became a documentary about what survival moves do when they run out of room.

understanding doesn't make the overwhelm moment any less overwhelming. now that i know some people are oriented toward intensity as a bid for attention, i still walk away when someone floods me. flight is still the most effective strategy i have. but rather than avoid forever, i have practices for helping someone who is terrified of being unheard learn, over time, that they will actually be heard without the scream. it's devastatingly beautiful to watch someone reach for care instead of survival — to watch them become someone who can trust enough to reach.

when i was younger i was fascinated by strategies that could help me stay in connection with anyone. i had a pattern of finding myself in romantic and platonic entanglements with people who activated me in all the worst, most familiar ways. now i see it differently: people who trigger our conditioned tendencies help us stay bonded to our dearest, oldest protectors. the trigger convinces us we still need the strategy, lets us keep developing that relationship with the world. i'm an expert at flight, truly — why would i take up anything else when this one is so good at keeping me safe? i don't think i was drawn to activating people in my twenties because i wanted a hard time. i think i was learning to access choice moments — or at least that's the story that lets me keep the material, and i hold it the way i hold any retrospective: useful, unverifiable, mine, echoing something now true, more so than true at the time.

what i keep noticing is that i'm not really watching the stories the couples think they're telling on couples therapy. i'm watching for the moment before the old move — the breath before michal's temperature climbs, the flinch before someone pushes against, the collapse when there's nothing new and alive and vulnerable to contact. that's where the opportunity for innovation lives, if it lives anywhere: the moment where choice starts to become available. not some grand reinvention but the half-second where you feel the conditioned tendency loading up and you do something riskily new instead. yield where you'd usually brace. stay soft where you'd usually go big. it's such a small thing that it barely looks like anything, but it's the only learning the body respects — these tiny subprocesses, run enough times, in enough weather.

and each unfamiliar move, survived, makes just enough space for a new protector to emerge alongside the old ones. not replacing them — my dearest, oldest protectors earned their tenure, and flight will always have a seat on my council. but making new friends in the body. lama rod talks about spaciousness as something cultivated rather than found — not the absence of what overwhelms you but room around it, enough room to be in relationship with the experience instead of being run by it. that's the teaching that finally let me understand my own trajectory: spaciousness is the evolution of flight. it's the same move, matured. flight buys distance by leaving; spaciousness buys distance while staying. the pegasus doesn't stop being a pegasus, but it now has the choice to stay. i find i can make more space. and a system that trusts the exit exists is a system that can afford to stay.

i think that's why the zoom footage still activates me six years later. that was the season nobody got to spectate their own pattern from a distance — the season every strategy had to run in a sealed room, before i knew the room could be made bigger from the inside. i'm not on the couch as a spectator. i'm in the session too.