COMING OUT POLYAMORY

Awareness leads to consciousness

Let me quote Deborah Anapol from her book, The Seven Natural Laws of Love. This is from the chapter on “Law of Truth”:

The conditioning which most of us have gotten is the exact opposite of the law of truth. The man-made version could be stated like this: If you want to be loved you must project an image of perfection and never say anything, which might hurt someone’s feelings. Never show weakness and never be impolite. Never reveal family secrets. Lie if you need to in order to make a good impression, and keep quiet about anything controversial. If you have been trained to lie about your real feelings and needs from an early age, being truly intimate maybe a challenge for you.

The aversion to truth-telling is partly habit, but it persists for two reasons: First, in order to speak the truth, you have to know the truth. Second, you have to give up trying to control the outcome of speaking the truth.

And Anapol adds so poignantly:

The best way to lie to others is to lie to oneself. After many years of lying to yourself, you may no longer know your true feelings and thoughts...You want to be authentic but you’ve forgotten how.

This really makes so much sense in my own experience and in the experiences of so many of my abused clients.

I have been accused of talking too much about sex and of being addicted to sex. What I do want is for readers to learn that there are other ways of having relationships that our Western culture keeps a lid on. In my opinion, much of our Western consciousness through years of religious indoctrination and “Victorian morality” has forced us to keep secrets and not be truthful.

How does our culture see polyamory?

Counselors and therapists often know very little about polyamory (I certainly did not until I started to read books like Dr. Anapols’s book Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy with Multiple Partners. I also attended a polyamory workshop in Greece.)

Many people may fall back on considering polyamory to be an aberration, a pathology to be avoided or “cured” (as people used to consider homosexuality). I quote from The Polyamory Handbook by Peter Benson:

A common myth in our predominantly Judeo-Christian culture in the Western hemisphere … has been there is only one traditional or “standard” way, one valid and healthy and right way, for people to conduct their loving relationships and that is a pairing of one man and one woman.

Questions I ask you and myself

I ask myself: Could I be covering up my pain by labeling myself a polyamorist? What payoff do I get from keeping secret this need that masks old wounds of loneliness, isolation, and deep rejection in childhood?”

Diving deeper: Am I rationalizing my irrational hurtful behavior?

Am I being so subtle that the ego (the parasite) of feeling unlovable, and it’s a “dog eat dog world” where everyone is out to get me, means I must hide behind a label? Am I just seeking approval? Do I feel empty inside so I need others’ approval?

I ask: Why are there so many painful, jealous divorces in our Western culture? Does this hide people’s need for a new way to understand marriage, one of which could be polyamory? Could we change and share new relationships without divorces? Could we learn through loving ourselves to have more “open relationships” and still love our primary partners? Could an honest open relationship actually enhance the primary relationship? Please hear me; I am not saying all people need to be polyamorous, yet we need to advance our consciousness on this subject, or more and more people will hide and lie in unfulfilling marriages. So often people tell me they have had “affairs” and not told their partners. It’s a scientific fact that we are, on average, living longer and we change in so many ways. These changes may include our sexual orientations and needs. What if our capacity to love ourselves makes us more attractive to others?  I have no clear answers to any of these questions; my journey is work in process. I have seen and experienced firsthand how hard life is for children who have divorced parents. I ask the question: Could humanity make a huge shift in consciousness and realize we are more naturally polyamorous than monogamous?

Imagine us being more honest and giving real respect to our main partner and our main partner to us, if we have emotional and possible sexual relationships, and all parties share together. I am not advocating sex with just anyone. I feel we would see less abuse, and we could actually create communities that are far more real and deeply therapeutic around emotions and sexuality. Children would have much more trust in parents that were listening and empathizing with all feelings. Children deserve to see and hear love rather than jealous fights and arguments between their parents. Imagine, instead of an increasing number of divorces, we could take responsibility for open relationships in which we have a primary partner, and our society and culture says “yes” to this type of behavior—if you communicate with deep integrity and you go at a rate that respects feelings and emotions of all involved! Being honest and truly caring when you have secondary relationships is being responsible.

I am asking this of us men especially: Can we learn to be open to being honest and truly caring if we feel genuine love for another women or man? Could we men allow that same freedom to our primary partner? I don’t believe men come from Mars and women come from Venus. Can we learn a whole new way of being together that dissolves heart-wrenching jealousy and allows love and self-compassion to thrive?

Can we learn a new emotional language that really loves love? That is expansive rather than restrictive of our wholehearted way of being? I realize these are tough questions. I know we could make a safer world in which we could love ourselves and each other if we got the negative nonsense of our past conditioning out of the way. Could we learn how our ego so often defeats us in how expansive and deep love can be? Could we learn and truly experience Deborah Anapol’s Seven Laws of Love? These are:

1.     Love Is Its Own Law

2.     The Law of Source

3.     The Law of Attraction

4.     The Law of Truth

5.     The Law of Unity

6.     The Law of Consciousness

7.     The Law of Forgiveness

This book is so refreshing and could save so many loving relationships from ending poorly—or could we choose to keep love alive in all types of relationships.

Here is a quote from The Prophet by Kahil Gibran:

Speak to us of pleasure.

Pleasure is a freedom-song.

But it is not freedom.

It is the blossoming of your desires …

It is the caged taking wing … Ay in very truth, pleasure is a freedom song.

 … And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs committed in drunkenness …

They should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as they would the harvest of a summer.

It finishes, “People of Orphalese, be in your pleasure like the flowers and the bees.”