Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you are entranced by their interest? Have you ever had a feeling upon meeting someone that they want to know all about you? Maybe you’ve had an experience where someone just can’t seem to get enough of you?
…Or perhaps you have just fantasized about this kind of magical connection…
There’s a reason why romance writers spiral into the interest and attention dynamic as they weave fantasies of a perfect couple. They are working off of a premise that we all crave being interesting. At our core, we all want attention. When we are given the full attention of someone else, everything around us and inside us becomes more alive. That embodied sensation of interest creates the capacity to feel erotic.
What if you could allow attention - not just receiving it but also giving - to be erotic? (Teaching point: Erotic does not equal sexual. Erotic means to feel vitally alive as a sensate being in your own body.)
There is a paradox with attention and interest that requires the fantasy. We can both crave attention and interest and be terrified of it. Our wounded self at some point got called out for something we were expressing that was too much. Some of us even got traumatized or abused for expressing self. Here lies the paradox. Wanting attention and interest. Being terrified of attention and interest.
At the core all of us as human beings need interest and attention. It is a need based not simply to feel nourished in communion with other people. The need for interest and attention go deeper. They are based in a need that exists to as a reason for being alive at this moment in time. The need being met creates permission to grow into who we are meant to be.
The fantasy aspect is that one person is not only going to find you worthy of all that attention and all of their interest, but also be able to maintain that energetic for the rest of your life. To bring it back to a realistic meetable need, we have to be able to recognize those moments of getting the need met may be fleeting and they also may have to come from more than just one perfect person.
The need to receive attention and interest beckons to the part of us that is wounded and doesn’t feel worthy of attention. We need to be able to discern fantasy from reality. No one can give 100% attention to anyone all of the time. Attention has to be cultivated and discussed to be attainable. In relationships its easy to demand attention rather than ask for it or talk about the blocks that are inhibiting it rather than try to acknowledge what is possible. Mutual attention and interest is based on relatability.
All this interest, attention, need and wound swirl internally to create three diverse questions.
How do you know that your capable of meeting the basic need of attention and interest?
When you do know that you are capable of giving that need back to another and feeling?
Is it possible to feel nourished by not simply the receiving of interest and attention but by the giving of it as well?
Today’s post gives you a way to measure your own capacity to give and receive attention and interest in relationship. Consider that your actual desire to engage in relational content with other people can be mutually nourishing.
First. The Baseline Assessment
Ask yourself the following question and try not to judge or curate the answer.
“Am I capable of perspective in this moment?”
It is important before I go too far into this litmus test to assess your relational capabilities to talk about the prerequisite that means you are either capable or incapable of being relational. The baseline assessment for relational capability is based in your ability to have perspective. Perspective, as I am using it here, is the ability to allow yourself to be a complex being with multiple parts of self.
Perspective means that you can recognize that you have parts of self or gradations of abilities. Acknowledgement of your parts of self is necessary to be relational. You have to know what part of you is in charge in any given moment and what other parts might be present in that same moment as well as what is being repressed in that moment. Perspective comes from being able to step back and say to yourself “oh, this part of me feels this way.” or “look, this part of me doesn’t WANT to be relational.” Without perspective, there is simply a weak ego running the show and letting it drive you into all of your worst nightmares.
Whenever you are in a 100% state of mind and being, you are not capable of being relational. Don’t judge it. Accept it. Notice it.
Once again. This baseline assessment process is NOT ABOUT FIXING THIS PART THAT IS INCAPABLE OF RELATING. When you assess your own perspective capabilities, just be honest with where you are at. It is not about making one part shut up or one part go away. Perspective has no idealization of self in it. Simply the ability to be present with the self as it is while staying interested and not making anything too concrete. Perspective does not exist when you believe yourself to be 100% of something. As long as there is the presence of a little voice inside that is not fully believing that 100%, you have perspective.
When I write about perspective, I am talking about the act of non judgmentally accepting that you have a part of you that is wanting, thinking, or feeling one way and another part of you that is wanting, thinking, or feeling something else and so on and so on. Letting these parts of you feel a certain way without latching too strongly onto any one part creates the ability to have perspective.
It’s okay to not always want to be relational or not always be able to relational. Just engage in that self honesty thing and admit that’s where you are at. You are going to be more relational in the long run if you can just be with your own truth. There it is. Self honest at it’s most truthful.
There’s a concept in psychology called the haunted house. It’s a house with rooms but no doors and no windows. The rooms of the haunted house are full of their own stories, stuck in shadow until you get stuck inside them, and not connected to the other rooms in any way. When you find yourself in a particular room, you have no access to the outside of the house or any other rooms in the house. There is also no escape. You walk through the haunted house materializing in each room, entrenching yourself into a way of being simply because you cannot access anything in the moment but this known default nightmarish way of surviving. When you are stuck in your haunted house, you do not believe that anything else exists and have no tools to escape the truth of your own state of being.
Read here…NO TOOLS…Yet…Keep reading…but remember that truth.
If you cannot in any given moment choose to have perspective than you are, in the current state of your own being, not capable of being relational with yourself or others. In this case, your litmus test has no foundation. It does not have the baseline required to be relational with anything but your own negativity. This isn’t failure. This is information. If you are in a state of being incapable of having perspective, you are in either a young defended state of mind or a shadow emerging state of being. Your haunted house needs to be addressed.
When you get stuck in your haunted house. When you have no perspective.
You need to develop tools and you need support.You need time to create compassion and acceptance in your self for this part of yourself. Your haunted house needs some doors and windows, staircases and hallways. Here is where you need others to be relational with YOU. Consider engaging in inner child work, meditating to sustain an observant state of self and a witness state of self, getting some therapy or calling upon a non fixing friend. These are all tools to use when you’ve entered into the inability to have perspective. Instead of getting lost, try letting yourself be found.
Foundational Assessment Complete. What’s Next?
I’ve been writing a lot lately about the unloved self. This part of us that is both ordinary and extra ordinary in nature…but not necessarily in a way that we can accept and nourish. The ability to be relational is integral to working with another’s unloved self. It’s also necessary for assessing when our own unloved self might be running our psyche, affecting our choices, and creating a life we don’t actually want.
Sometimes what we believe to be intuition, guidance, or need is fake. It’s coming from the unloved self and is an act of protection rather than transformation.
You can get confused inside and hide from yourself. You can get scared inside and push others away. Being able to assess your own ability to actually move forward and gain ground instead of repeating the same mistakes needs to be learned. By actively engaging in a conscious scanning of your state of being, you will learn how to be present with the vast aspect of your psyche. This isn’t about feeling schizophrenic! It’s about knowing that you are capable of more than you realize and that simple tools can change everything.
Remember. Ability to have perspective is the first check in. Then you can move forward with the litmus test. The following is a list of questions to ask yourself in order to assess if in any given moment you are capable of relating.
THE LITMUS TEST
What is the nature of my breath in this moment? (No breath means a part of you does not want to be present)
Do I have an agenda already in place? (Agenda creates demand)
Am I idealizing myself or am I feeling like I can be fluidly authentic? (Idealization and expectation create disappointment and avoidance)
Am I able to see the real person in front of me? (Projection means you aren’t talking to a real person and are not interested in them for some reason)
Arm I stuck in the past or am I available to discuss what is currently happening on the present? (Transference, the presence of always and nevers, means you are defended with a trigger that is unprocessed)
Am I interested enough to actually listen or actively listen? (No desire to listen means you cannot be present for the person)
How curious am I really in what is going on? (No curiosity means your curiosity wants to engage somewhere else)
Am I willing to allow for an unknown to arise? (No opening for mystery creates no possibility to allow for change and that a door is closed in this conversation and will not open without exploration)
Can I face what is happening with compassion? (No compassion means you have relational capacity with defense present)
Can I step back and have more than one part of myself engaged in this inquiry? (Multiple parts of self give you relational capacity with tracking of self)
Am I capable of being present with an authentically imperfect response of the person I am talking to? (No tolerance for imperfect response leads to defended communication, the possibility of unstated demand, and losing a percentage of the other’s response.)
It’s probably a good idea at this point to consider the nature of a litmus test. A litmus test is done when you want to figure out if a substance is acidic, neutral, or basic in nature. It has gradations and polarizations. The polarization is acid or base, all or nothing, one or the other. We humans really like to polarize our psyche. In the case of utilizing a relational litmus test, it is not about going from a 0 to a 14 on the acid to base scale or non relational to perfectly relational reality. Relying on the fact that it’s impossible to be at a 14 or a 100% relational factor all the time is important. Don’t idealize. Simply assess. Let yourself be on the scale.
This litmus test is incredibly helpful when you are about to go into a difficult conversation OR as a pause point to assess your own capabilities when you are in the middle of a fight with someone. Going into a difficult conversation or situation with an idea of what your baseline is will allow you to potentially recognize when you have gone OFF baseline and try to get back where you want to be. When you’re actively engaged in a fight with someone, it can be a huge relief for both people if you can simply assess your own relate-ability and admit, “you know what, I’m not able to be present anymore with this conversation in any way that is going to solve our problem right now.” This kind of statement inserts the flag of truth into a fight and creates choice - fight for the sake of fighting or regroup and revisit when less triggered.
Choice
Every answer the litmus test gives you creates the potential for choice. When your state of being is something you can admit to and let be, you create the ability to move in and out of states of being with more flexibility. Denial of state of being is more likely to create set ways of being that bring you into that haunted house self. Judging states of being creates that same inflexibility. Self honesty is not about ignoring or avoiding doing self work but creating the necessary bridges to be able to engage in self work with self acceptance.
When you have perspective, your embodied sense of choice is more accessible. When you lose expectation, your ability to choose grows.
In reference to the questions I listed above choices abound. The first choice that I want to suggest is one of not changing anything but simply stating what is present for you. Sometimes the most powerful conversations to transform something in ourselves happen when we realize we don’t have to be perfect to get what we need. Feeling interested and accepted in the midst of our own imperfection is more healing than performing to receive this basic need without truth.
If that is not available to you, there are choices within the answers to the questions that might also shift your own perspective and make you more available on behalf of someone else. For instance, if your state of breath is shallow or holding, can you deepen or shift into a breath that is more alive or flowing. If you have an agenda, can you state it out loud, let it go, or work with it as part of the situation. Can you shift the quality of your listening and listen into something or find interest in the nature of your listening? As I list the choices here there’s a fluidity that arises in self and relational potential.
Choice creates space. Choice allows you find space to be you and creates more space for other to be other. You can’t demand homogeneity in the medium of relational assessment. You can individualize permission to be present as your own unique and ever changing self. You don’t have to victimize your own attention span. Rather allow the voice of who you want to be to be a support to meetable change in the moment. Being imperfect but present to your imperfections creates healthy relating. Instead of tapping into an exhausted potential in self, meet the self that has grounded desire to embrace truth.
Remember that expectation and idealization kill authenticity. To be relatable, two accessible people need to be in front of each other being themselves. Notice I am not using words like grounded, centered, happy, open hearted, etc in reference to relatability. Because while these ways of being might improve what happens in any given relational conversation, they are actually not necessary to be relationally available. Self honesty is required to assess that there is perspective. The rest is all expectation unless you continue to be self honest. You can say a part of you is shut down and by letting it be a part of you that is present in the conversation you are actually more present!
The more consciousness you can bring into what is present and what is not and state it into the relational field, the more your presence is present. Presence is what is required for relatability.
Negative Reactions in the Midst of Conversation
Sometimes presence and honesty may make it so the other person loses relational capability (see question 11!). That’s on them though and their own container. Yours needs to simply be yours and track what happens when your honesty creates a loss of relational capacity in who you are talking to. If you feel like you suffer a loss from their ability to not be relational with something that is going on inside you, that’s on you to change. You have a choice. Either you can stay unmalleable and create a wall (where there might need to be a door or window) or you can choose again to assess and flow from a different state of being.
Now I’m having thoughts about ease versus trouble in relationships. Relationships are vital and erotic when two people can stay in relatable states of being at least some of the time. They hit the land of bleh and resentment when there are habitual feelings of being overlooked, ignored, and yes fixed. This post is an invitation for you to consider that YOU are in charge here of any relational potential. The other person’s reaction or lack thereof means that you can choose to relate differently or step out and reassess who you are relating with.
Ok. I went in a few directions there. From basic needs to acceptance of self to a short reminder that presence needs to stay in a state of tracking to actively be relational. The following is a short guided meditation through the litmus test questions so that you can assess more clearly where you are at before you engage in hard conversations.
Litmus Test Meditation
I suggest before doing this meditation that you imagine a person, a conversation, or a situation and breathe yourself into that space. From there, listen to the meditation and receive your answers to the questions.