Juicy Friction
Tapping into the supercharged relational shadow
Accountability and taking responsibility for one’s own shit in conflict comes up a lot. Personal responsibility is important but has a shadow of individualism. The verbiage of “owning” or delineating what’s “mine” and “not mine” in interpersonal conflict is tangled with a colonial individualistic mindset of proprietary separatism that can limit us from exploring the richness that exists in the complexity of relationality.
Conflict is something that exists in relational space, it takes both parties to create it. Maybe it’s you and another person. Maybe it’s you and yourself. Things in relational space “belong” to all of us.
I’m mostly interested in self-healing when it happens in service to something greater to the self. I love to play in the tension between oneness and all the things-ness all at once. I’m not sure there’s much about life that isn’t relational. I’m a gardener cultivating more complex interconnected generative webs of humanity and life. I think healing happens when we engage these webs because when we try to hold the big energies of life, they are just too big to be held or to move in an individual. They require a larger more complex network.
This network is a rich web of relationality woven with the threads of our personal, ancestral and collective processes. This beautiful and complex web holds awesome wisdom and potential. I’m curious about the tensions and frictions that move in these threads. I’m curious about engaging the web as a mirror. The paradox of using the collective in service of the individual and the individual in service of the collective. I believe interpersonal space is where magic lives and I yearn to explore our relationality as much as we can while we still have this container.
I see conflict as a type of tension or friction. In order to feel these things there must be two parts. The self and other. Internal conflict is also a dynamic of internal schism. We need opposing force in order to create friction. Friction is the movement of creation. Sex is friction. Our conflict is a kink rich with generative potential. When we come together and find really spicy friction or conflict it is the sacred union and perfect fit of two complimentary wounds finding one another.
Engaging with the generative potential of interpersonal conflict is a tender and emergent process. To willingly allow our wounds to touch requires trust and safety. It is a mutual opening to the mystery in all of it’s terrifying precision.
Creating safety in community is something I’m exploring and a future post.
A wound is an opening in our “personal” edges that makes a window where “others” can see our insides. This type of engagement is acknowledging that we exist in a web bigger than our bodies and that in the hall of mirrors that is human community we see and offer beautiful and horrific reflections to one another in kaleidoscopic perfection. The complexity of these reflections goes beyond transference. It’s a wild network of transference, projection, perspective, enmeshment, bullshit and wisdom. Relational space is truly magical.
Wounds are incredibly sensitive. They expose delicate and extrasensory powers. By bravely pressing one’s wounds to those of another we are able feel with acute sensitivity and learn the shape, texture, and resonance of our process in a deeply informative way. To truly feel a wound we need the “other." Often we guard our wounds with the “other” and it can be more difficult to really explore them. By engaging safe wound to wound exploration we can receive information that is a catalyst to cultivating a more embodied awareness of our relational processes.
I tried an exercise with a friend recently. It was a little like that bad idea slumber party game where we all share what we hate about each other but unlike middle school slumber parties, I feel a lot of safety and trust with this friend. We each shared what the things was that we saw and felt about the other’s process that made us want to shake/slap/eye-roll/ugh them. Then we shared how it felt to receive that information. I received a very precise description of a dynamic I feel very alone in and a bit baffled by in my relational life. It felt so good to have it noticed and to be able to use the eyes of another to look at it.
I’m curious and committed to learning ways to create the trust, safety, and processes to delve more into this type of engagement with conflict. It feels terrifying. The risks are high. It needs a container and the broader the engaged network, the more perspectives, feelers and collaborative healing, the bigger the energies moved. Conflict is a portal into the gooey super charged bits of relationship, let’s tap into this, activate the portal and see what we can create with all this juicy friction!