Relationality feels like a deep thread of mine. This idea of deep threads is something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year.
I remember when my friend Jarred used this term in our conversation and I immediately felt the excitement that comes with finding the right word to express something that has only been living in the ephemeral before.
To me, threads point to something that Peter Limberg described as living questions, “the questions one lives with without prematurely forcing an answer”.
It seems true to me that we all go around being drawn to certain kinds of questions over others. These inquiry threads can span over years and often it’s not obvious to us that we’re on a thread in the present moment.
Looking back, it is easier to notice how there’s this thing that my attention keeps on coming back to, that the experiences of my life seem to all be probing into something, that there is a question that my whole being is trying to answer.
It was when Jarred was excitedly telling me about threads that I came to a sudden realization about the question that my interest in relationality is rooted in - Why can’t people just get along?
I’ve found it a very meaningful activity to pull my threads more into the explicit and to backtrack the origins and turning points for each of them.
I like to liken this process to following the mythical Ariadne’s thread, exploring the mazes of my memory and re-living important choice points in the emergent exploration of what feels important and meaningful.
There’s a kind of self-knowing and a sense of internal coherence that it brings that I have not managed to find in many other activities.
Here’s what I found along my relationality thread so far.
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I hear my parents fighting in the other room. She knows how to say exactly the thing that boils his blood. He tries to be unmoved, deflecting the attacks. She’s looking for a way in, an ignite button that she knows is there. I am too young to really see ways in which they both feel unseen. What seems like a fight is actually pain, a cry for attention. All that I know is the mounting tension in my little body, an oncoming freeze reaction and anticipation - when is he going to explode? He finally does, as always. She explodes too, with tears. I don’t hear the words they are saying anymore, because my heart is beating really loud. I hear my little sister starting to cry. I tell her it’s going to be ok, even though I am not sure it is true. Next day my mom is quiet, does not say a word in his direction. He’s cracking jokes and acts like nothing happened. Sometimes this lasts hours, sometimes days. As I witness those cycles, a yearning arises in me, a seeking for a way of communicating that would hurt less. 20 years later a friend asks me why I’ve become interested in relationality. I think about that memory and my long-held yearning is finally ready to be expressed: Why can’t people just get along?
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I am 26 and just moved to London, it’s the middle of the pandemic and Zoom is where I go for human connection. Apart from the occasional dinner with my housemates and a distanced greeting from the barista, the most meaningful parts of my life are now happening through the digital screen. This means that a power outage is a threat to my mental stability. But why am I struggling so much to just be by myself? Hanging out with someone else feels nice and hanging out with myself feels bad. Nights are the worst - that’s when all worries, fears, and overwhelming emotions surface. I am struggling and I am seeking answers. I join a nerdy mailing group for people interested in consciousness and personal growth. That’s where I meet A. She’s in London but we won’t meet in person for another 12 months for fear of getting infected. We become inner work buddies and start practicing Internal Family Systems together, which looks like holding space for each other to look at parts of us we don’t like, understand or accept. It feels like my relational awakening - there are relationships inside of me. Not just outside!
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It’s 2022 and I am traveling to Canada to attend a retreat where there is no agenda and the intention is to co-create it when we get there. These four days by the lake is where I start to experientially understand the words like container, collective inquiry, emergence, and collaborative culture. As I am there I can’t quite find the words to describe what I am feeling, but I know things won’t be the same anymore. Finally, I get it - it’s the first time that I am in a group of people who all see the relational dynamics that I see and who take it a step further - they talk about them, orient around them, have processes to improve them. I feel like I found the others. What has always felt like a thing only I could see, suddenly becomes a thing we can all see. It becomes more clear to me that I have been carrying a chronic sense of defensiveness and effort associated with feeling like the only person in the room who can see the problem. Feeling like unless I make others see what I see, things will go bad. This retreat is the first time that I experience how different things are when that feeling is not present. I feel safer. More open. I feel like we are looking at the same reality. As I enjoy the feeling, a worry cloud comes over me - is this how cults start? But I want to believe that there is something in between the “me against the world” stance and a pathologized community organism. I come back inspired and the feeling of being onto something.
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I am back in London and I just attended my first circling workshop. I am giddy with excitement. I have a strong need to understand what just happened there, because of how meaningful it felt. I just spent 2 hours in a room with strangers, talking about how we’re feeling and how we’re making each other feel and expressing parts of our experience that I never thought I could say out loud. Wild! It’s the first time I realize what a relational practice could look and feel like. That we can create spaces where we learn how to be more authentic and how to somehow glimpse into the relational dynamics together. I am starting to see a way in which relating could become almost like a discipline, something we can describe, get better at, understand more. This is how the idea of relational rigor is birthed in my mind, as a way to point to something that I want to see more in the world.
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I am sitting here and writing, noticing how much harder it is to distinguish what the thread-significant moments were, the closer it is to the present. I can think of many such moments in the past 2 years. Ever since I started having words for my interest in relationality, things started moving much faster. Having a tangible concept I was interested in - relational rigor - generated a lot of desire and energy in me to explore it. In early 2023, with the support of the Give Your Gift community, I hosted an Interintellect salon about it and realized that people resonate with it. I talked to my friends about it on a podcast and, finally, I quit my job last April to make more time and space for exploring it. I then realized that there was an implicit process inside of me for creating more relational consciousness and I decided to put it on paper and try it out with a few of my twitter friends last July. It seemed to work for them and I became excited about hosting more relational inquiries with people. This winter I also helped my friends Carol and James hold a learning container called Relational Agility to support people at work in staying connected to themselves. And now I am writing about relationality.
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I am struck by how much there seems to be a logical progression in this outline, even though at each individual step I did not see the bigger whole and often felt insecure. I keep on wondering who in me is doing the following of the thread - it definitely does not feel like the conscious self who does the thinking, planning, and analyzing. Intuition? Spirit? The Self?
I don’t feel the need to know, but I know that since I’ve started observing its workings by backtracking the thread, I feel more at ease with the unfolding of my life and I feel more trust towards random pulls of my attention. They may seem random, but they don’t seem to be when I see them in a larger context.
I am sure that there will be the next step along this path - I am just not sure yet when it will come and what shape it’s going to take.
"how did you become interested in relationality?"