(aka: Shit we don’t talk about in the Polarity world)
My former partner is a good man.
He is also a wounded man.
My former partner loved me deeply.
And he abused me tremendously.
All of these are true.
For so long, I resisted referring to my previous relationship as abusive.
I didn’t want to be judged as dramatic.
I didn’t want be just another woman who threw a man under the bus because I didn’t have my own boundaries in check.
I didn’t want to belittle our love.
I didn’t want to abdicate myself from responsibility.
I didn’t want to paint him in a bad light.
I didn’t want to be that person airing my dirty laundry publicly.
I didn’t want to negate all the ways that relationship also nourished me and helped me rise into my power.
This post took over 8 months for me to write. I kept coming back to it. Adding. Deleting. Pausing. Chewing. Grieving. Expressing. Deleting.
When I first sat down to begin writing it, I could hear my former partner’s angry voice criticizing me for what I was doing.
Getting in my head about all the ways I should rise above this behavior.
About how it’s disgraceful to share information like this gratuitously on social media.
About how I’m not operating from my “higher self.”
That’s how master manipulators work.
They burrow themselves into your psyche and gaslight you so often that you cannot find your center.
You don’t know where up and where down is.
You float through reality questioning every single move you make.
And that’s how they flip things around so that THEIR reality becomes YOUR center point.
I wanted so badly to be that person who could be friends with her ex for life.
(Where we would be at each other’s weddings and do business together and joke about the days when we were dating to our future partners.)
So I resisted. I hoped. That maybe it could be that way.
But I was haunted.
Even as the charge of the relationship dissolved…
Even as I moved into the next chapter of my life…
And even as I’ve been finding forgiveness in my heart for both of our struggles…
I’m haunted by something much bigger than the relationship.
I’m haunted by the reality of woman everywhere who are also in abusive dynamics.
In particular the woman in the Conscious Relating/Polarity Practice/Tantra World.
Because we are fed only ONE type of abusive relationship.
And there’s a trickier, more nuanced version out there under the guise of Conscious Relating.
So I’m talking to you, the woman who is trying so deeply to be more devoted and more surrendered and more “feminine”,
With a partner who is weaponizing these concepts to keep you confused, destabilized and disempowered.
I’ve been seeing this pattern more and more everywhere I look.
Even in teachers of this work.
(Trust me, I questioned how much of this was me looking through the world from trauma-induced glasses or just being a brat after a break-up.)
But I’m willing to take that risk.
If it helps just ONE woman.
Now let me be clear. This post is NOT meant to demonize the practice OR the partners that are perpetuating this abuse.
I believe we are all trying our best.
I’m here to share what I think is often missing in the work.
Polarity practice has given me so much.
And polarity practice also imprisoned me.
Or I should I say, I imprisoned myself in it.
I went really hard. I took all the tools and I got down on my knees and devoted myself to this work.
This helped me move through the muck that the world had plastered in my body.
It helped me hold deeply uncomfortable emotional poses in devotion to shifting neural pathways and relational dynamics.
It helped me see how my expression was a gift to the world.
It taught me the power in submission.
It showed me the bliss in my expression.
It connected me to God through ecstasy and pain.
All beautiful things…
If you’re with the right partner.
And we are often with the wrong partner.
The practice isn’t the problem.
It’s who you are practicing with.
There are so many layers and nuances to this conversation that I cannot possibly clarify it all in one post.
But if I had to sum it up, I believe the problem is that we are operating these tools without TRUST.
Trust in ourselves.
Trust in our bodies.
Trust in our partners.
And trust in our teachers.
Do you trust your body when she says no?
Do you trust your partner with your life?
Do you trust the teachers who taught you these concepts?
Do you trust your body when she’s sick around them all the time?
Or do you blame that on yourself?
Do you trust your body when she refuses to open fully over and over and over again?
Or do you think you’re broken?
Do you trust your body when she feels heavy and ugly around them?
Or you believe that you just need to “open your heart more”?
Our discernment is based on their attunement.
And their attunement is OFTEN off.
Because we are all living in a world that is constantly distracting us and disconnected us from our discernment and their attunement.
Our animal bodies don’t lie.
Do you trust your partner’s clarity?
Or do you put the weight of the relationship working on YOUR shoulders only?
Do you trust your partner’s heart?
Or do you believe “if I am just devotional enough”, they will claim me?
Do you trust your partner’s consciousness?
Or do you find yourself having to clear out their energy AND yours?
This is a two-way dance. A tango of trauma.
And I’m not alleviating you of your inner work.
There IS a lot of that.
There was for me.
I’m just suggesting you don’t take it in for the TWO of you.
You might be the one championing the “we”, the union, the unit.
But it is NOT your job to process both of your traumas.
So today, take a good look in the mirror.
And ask yourself…
Where is the trust?
And if you can’t find it.
Begin with your sweet, soft animal body. She purrs and she hisses.
Which one is she doing more of these days?
Begin by finding your center.
Recall your energy from THEIR reality and pull it back into yours.
Find your ground.
Find your desire.
Find your fire.
Practice Polarity on the foundation of TRUST.
Without TRUST it can become a cesspool of trauma with a side of 1950s patriarchy masked as CONSCIOUS.
Find the one you trust with your life.
And give them your heart.