Gwynn Raimondi, MA

I want (a declaration)

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On February 1, 2019 I wrote the following :: “I am getting to discover what I actually want. Who I am. The kind of person I want to be with. Not forever and happily every after. Because that illusion is shattered. Rather for now and we’ll see where the days take us. I want to be with someone who feels as cozy as the idea of home and who pushes me outside my comfort zones in ways I never imagined. And I want to be the same for them. I want someone who has a whole life and identity outside of me and us. And I want the same for me. I’m learning not to compromise these things.“

Then, on February 14, 2019 I wrote: “Want :: feel like home; feel safe, at ease; be silly; honest; easy; sweet; gentle; tender; trust; amazing sex; physical; cuddly; funny.”

On February 15, 2019 I met a truly amazing person and could check all these things off.

I believe there is power in stating what we want in our lives. Not in a “manifesting” kind of way, more in a getting really clear on what we want in our lives so that we can learn to not settle or compromise when we don’t need to.

I created a revised list of wants in August and have been editing it over the last couple months. I have been holding this list relatively close. When I started I was going to limit my number of wants to 48 (as I’m turning 48 today) and then realized putting limits on our wants is kinda going against the point. So these wants flowed. Some are about the type of intimate partner/relationship I want. Some are about the friends I want; how I want to be with my kids; how I want to be in life in general. All of them are morphing and shifting and changing. And some of my wants are likely missing because I haven’t been able to fully articulate them yet.

And.

For the days leading up to my birthday, each day I posted a different image that lists some of these wants on my secret IG account. I did this for me, to help me get clear with myself. To explore the ideas of adult relationships and wanting and wounding and getting curious about how some of my wants may not necessarily be so great for me, and also some are.

To be clear I don’t want all these things from a single person. Rather, these are things I want in my life, somewhere, with someone. And sometimes that someone is me, myself and not someone outside of me.

Below is the list of wants, in its entirety. It is a love poem of sorts, to myself, to the world, and to you.

In rebellious solidarity and wanting, always. xoox grr

I want (a declaration)

I want passion. Red. Hot. Smoldering and bursts of flames.
I want deep belly laughs that won’t stop.
I want to write. About processing trauma. Poetry. A memoir. A love story.
I want touching. I want not being able to keep our hands off each other. I want personal space respected.
I want to paint. I want to freely express my Self. I want to move it out. I want to let it in.

I want snow magic and summer heat.
I want saltwater and salt air, rocks and sand.
I want narrow trails through dense, lush forests.
I want open, honest, consistent communication.

I want political compatibility with just enough difference to spark debates so deep we get turned on and can’t help but want to kiss each other ravenously.
I want out of body experiences. I want deep dives into our souls.
I want support. I want to be told to never doubt myself, to never sell myself short.

I want safeness and home and being pushed outside my comfort zone.
I want mystery and curiosity. I want well known and semi-predictable.
I want rainy days curled up in bed and sunny days stretching on the water.
I want the sweetness of protectiveness knowing they know I can take care of myself.

I want games of pool and smooth bourbon and pale ales. I want witty conversation and knowing looks.
I want to light up at the sight them as they light up at the sight of me.
I want good morning texts when I can’t have good morning kisses.
I want hand holding, our hands fitting each other’s perfectly.
I want to feel valued, understood, appreciated. I want to value, understand, and appreciate.

I want texting just because, without concern about bothering or boring each other.
I want forehead kisses and ass slaps.
I want rolling over in his sleep and wrapping his arms around me.
I want dinners in and dinners out. I want movies in bed and movies at the cinema. I want drinks at home and at the bar.

I want dog walks at twilight.
I want safeness and ease.
I want honesty and emotional intelligence.

I want sweet and tender, gentle and kind. I want softness as strength.
I want to trust and be trusted.
I want flowers for special occasions and just because.
I want to get lost in his eyes and while I’m there knowing how loved and wanted I am.

I want to feel accepted, in all my awkwardness and dorkiness.
I want to not always be in control or making all the decisions. I want equal effort.
I want to break cycles and patterns. I want to shift . I want to fill the black holes within myself so they can no longer devour me or anyone else.
I want snuggles and secret sharing and telling dumb jokes.
I want childish giggles and smirks and the thoughts that go with them.

I want to be alone together, each doing our own thing in the comfort of each other’s presence.
I want singing together in the car to my favorite bands.
I want road trips and adventures. I want quiet Sundays together at home.
I want to feel so overwhelmingly happy I have to sob.

I want dancing late at clubs with loud music and dancing slow in our living rooms in the middle of the day to no music at all.
I want sparks. I want electricity. I want fireworks.
I want quiet. I want peace. I want breath.

I want the Marvelverse and vampires and campy thrillers.
I want butterflies and giddy nervousness. I want ease and relaxation.
I want to tingle at the sound of his voice.
I want lots of amazing sex.

I want sunsets and moonrise and star gazing and warm fires under dark skies.
I want sunrise and burning fog and cool crisp air and seeing our breath.
I want freedom and space and closeness and intensity.
I want creativity and rawness.
I want growth. Mine. Theirs. Ours.

I want to be wholly seen and still be adored. I want to feel wanted, every part of me.
I want open, honest communication. I want shadows shared. I want to bask in each other’s sun.
I want to live life in the fullest ways I can. I want rest and naps and regeneration.
I want gentle and rough. I want smooth and scratchy.

I want unbreakable love and appropriate boundaries. I want clarity. I want emotional maturity.
I want to be held together when I feel I’m falling apart. I want to hold them together when they feel like they are falling apart.
I want separate lives. I want our lives to blend and grow together.

I want expansion and contraction. I want beyond the edge of the universe and cuddled close together on the couch.
I want playfulness and fun. I want seriousness and dedication.
I want to go out and stay in. I want to be social and have solitude.
I want connection beyond this realm, indescribable, outside of language and the deep knowing that goes with this.

I want to not take life so seriously, not take myself so seriously.
I want pleasure in every sense. I want financial stability and security.
I want the hard times that bring us together and help us grow.
I want open communication & expressing our needs and wants, without demands or expectations.
I want presence. I want being here now. I want self-awareness and doing our own work. I want repair when harm is unintentionally done. I want loving each other and our selves enough to encourage growth, change, and healing.

I want long term with no contracts or promises. Decades filled with single days waking up and choosing each other and ourselves over and over.
I want to feel more alive than I ever have before.
I want what I had. I want what I have. And I want more.

*I reserve the right to edit and revise as I want.*

…

High maintenance, low drama, and other code words

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She’s not high maintenance, you’re just low effort. ~Unknown

“High maintenance” is a great way to make a woman who puts tons of effort into her own life sound like a burden on a man. ~Unknown

Having standards doesn’t make you high maintenance. It makes you a bitch who knows what the fuck she wants. ~Unknown 

I’ve in and out of the online dating world since last fall.

Something I’ve noticed on many CIS/hetero male profiles are the phrases “No high maintenance” or “no/low drama“. These are code words for “I want a woman who I can walk all over and won’t state her needs or wants or, if she does, she won’t demand or fight for them.” These are code words for “I don’t want to have to deal the consequences of me being a jerk or selfish or inconsiderate of another human being I’m being intimate with“. These are code words for “I’m the only one who actually matters, who is actually fully human, in this relationship.“

I don’t think (most) men think these things consciously. They have been trained in this culture just like we all have. We have all been trained that women are meant to be accommodating, submissive, quiet. We have all been trained that when a woman is angry or frustrated then she is being hysterical and unreasonable. We have all been trained that when a woman states her needs or wants that she is being demanding and just too much.

And as a dear friend says “Priviledge. It’s a hell of a drug.“

This past week I read an article in the Paris Review titled The Crane Wife. It is a written by a woman telling the story of her breaking off her engagement and cancelling her wedding, the reasons why, and the ways she sold herself out in the name of not being a “burden” or a “bother” or too demanding.

I related to this article as if I could have written it myself. I look back on the twenty years I was with my ex and see all the ways I was “accommodating” and all the ways I “compromised” which translates to mean all the ways I didn’t ask for nor demand some of my own basic needs and wants. The ways I convinced myself those things weren’t important, that I didn’t need them, that I was expecting too much and being… unreasonable. I look back and see all the ways I gave my Self up, piece by piece, in the name of love, in the name of not being too much, in the name of not wanting to rock the boat and cause conflict.

I would love to be able to say that this behavior was all in the past. That I learned from the disintegration of my marriage how to not give up pieces of me, to stand up for myself, to honor my own wants and needs. 

I’d love to be able to say that.

But I’ve realized over this past few weeks, that I can’t. The pattern is still there, it’s just a different layer now.

I noticed over the last couple months how I was falling into this same pattern again with the person I’m currently dating. It looks different this time, of course. With my ex I wouldn’t state my needs or wants until I was completely overwhelmed and triggered, which always lead to a huge fight. I would bottle and suppress and try to convince myself things didn’t matter when they did, and there always came a point when I couldn’t hold it in anymore and would basically explode.

That hasn’t happened with the person I’m currently dating. And to that I say thank the gods and goddesses for therapy and growth. What has happened however, is that my own insecure anxious attachment has been triggered, more than once. Each time I have taken a step back, analyzed the situation, and then decided if it made sense for me to say something or not.

Good so far, right?

The problem became apparent when I constantly and consistently decided that it was all on me. That is was just my anxious attachment, my childhood trauma, the wounding from the betrayal of my ex. For a long time I didn’t say anything to the person I’m dating. I didn’t mention how much certain behaviors were hurting me.

And that wasn’t fair to him, just as it wasn’t fair to me.

Over the last couple months I have begun to speak up. I have begun to say how certain behaviors were hurting me, I’ve asked that he tell me before he’s going to do certain things. I’ve stated my needs and wants. 

I haven’t demanded he change. I haven’t told him he’s a horrible person or blamed him for my wounding. 

I have told him clearly what my needs and wants are.

There, with all relationships, of course, needs to be some compromise. There needs to be understanding of circumstances. There needs to acceptance that sometimes we just don’t have enough spoons to be the person our partners or friends or family may want or need us to be and sometimes they don’t have enough spoons either. This is life. 

And.

It is also true that we cannot be the only one being “understanding” or making concessions. Just as we know those close to us have their own struggles, they too need to understand we have ours. This doesn’t mean anyone accepts abuse. It does mean we all recognize that we all can’t be our Very Best Selves 24/7. And if we can look at the whole and see how the hurtful or stressful behaviors are the exception and not the rule, then that is when it makes sense for us to compromise. But again, only when we can look at the whole and see those behaviors as the exception.

We also need to look at our own patterns and determine if we have expressed our needs in a way and at a time that they can be heard and acknowledged. I found myself in a variation of my old pattern of not speaking up, and this wasn’t fair to the person I’m dating. It also wouldn’t have been fair to yell at them or tell them they were a bad person for doing the things that were triggering (because they are not a bad person, they are actually a pretty great person!). What was fair and appropriate was realizing my pattern, and then stating my needs and why I need them. Not demanding. No threatening. Asking if he could do what I needed.

This is all a bit of a challenge. We get to own our own wants and needs. We get to express them. That doesn’t make us “high maintenance” or “high drama”. It makes us humans who have a right to having our needs and wants honored, by ourselves and others. 

It means that we are human and do not have to sell ourselves short or shrink ourselves or give away pieces of our Self so that we aren’t a bother or a burden. 

It means that we have as much right and deserving to be respected, heard, and regarded as any other person. 

It also means we need to do the same for those in our lives. To hear their asks and decide if it’s something we can do. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. That’s true both ways. And when those we care about can’t meet our needs and wants, we need to then decide what our own next courses of action are; be that getting some of those needs met by friends or family or ourselves or if we need to examine the relationship as a whole and decide how we want to go from there.

Another person not meeting a specific need or want at a specific time doesn’t need to be a deal breaker. A consistent pattern of a person not meeting our needs or wants perhaps should be. When looking at the pattern, consider the circumstances, the context. If there are legitimate reasons for a behavior, not that it makes the behavior okay, but to understand it more. When we are able to learn to do this for others we can also learn to do this for ourselves.

We are all human. We all make mistakes. 

And.

For each of us, it is important to be able to state our needs and wants, to not shrink ourselves or give away pieces of who we are. To not try mold ourselves into someone we aren’t. Rather, we need to be our whole selves, the messy, the not messy, and the complex, both with ourselves and with those we are in relationship with.

/../

This essay was originally published in my newsletter on July 29, 2019 and has been edited for publication here. If you’d like to read my most recent essays and learn about my current offerings, you can subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter here.

Allowing space & managing anxiety

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The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. ~Carl Gustav Jung

I no longer believed in the idea of soul mates, or love at first sight. But I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together. ~Lisa Kleypas, Blue-Eyed Devil

We all deal with stress and our emotions differently. Some of us need to hide away and process in solitude, others of us need to talk things out (and then talk them out some more), some of us need to write things out to get clear, and many, but not all of us, need some combination of these.

When we are in relationship, be that friendships or sexually intimate relationships, we tend to want the other person to process things in the same ways we do. It can be confusing in the least, and jarring and anxiety provoking towards the other end of the spectrum, when they don’t. 

So what do we do, when in relationship, our own anxiety (and therefore attachment needs, sense of worth, etc) is activated because a person we care about is managing their own stress and emotions in a way that is not our way, or not in a way we are familiar with?

Well, if you are like me, we initially freak the fuck out. 🙂

This especially can show up when one person in the relationship has a more anxious attachment style and the other person in the relationship has a more avoidant attachment style. But it doesn’t have to be about attachment styles. It can also be about personality types.

Introverts tend to need solitude to process. Extroverts tend to need their village to process. 

Of course these are all general statements. Each of us are unique individuals, with unique histories and ways of doing things. Yes, there is overlap, yes many of us experience similar things; and we are also all still unique.

This includes our ways of dealing with stress and highly emotional situations.

When we see our loved ones are in pain of some sort, be that stress or emotional distress, our initial instinct tends to be to fix it, to make them feel better, to do whatever we can to make the hurting stop.

On the surface this is about our love of the other person and not wanting them to be in distress.

However, if we go a little deeper, this manic need to stop the other person from feeling bad is more about our own inability to tolerate difficult or painful emotions. So, when another is in distress, it raises our own uncomfortable feelings of anxiety and so in order for us to feel better, we need to make the other person stop feeling bad. Now. If not sooner.

But others get to feel their feelings and process them in the ways that work for them just as we also get to feel our feelings and process them in the ways that work for us.

So what do we do with that anxiety, with those uncomfortable feelings of seeing someone we care about in pain? How do we manage our own discomfort without trying to force the other person to change?

Well if I had an easy five step program for this I bet I could make my millions and retire in the next few years.

A truth is, there is no easy way to learn how to manage our own feelings of anxiety and discomfort. It takes time, it takes actually sitting in our own discomfort and learning how to tolerate it, first in tiny bits, and with practice more and more.

Coming into our bodies is part of this process. Learning to feel all the sensations that our bodies express when anxious can give us the clues we need to signal that we need to regulate our own systems in that moment, to take a moment, to slow down and breathe. To bring our frontal lobe online and not allow our limbic system hijack things and put us in instinctual reactionary mode. To allow ourselves to consciously and intentionally think through what is happening in our bodies and why it is happening.

I know for me, my immediate response to situations where another person is processing in their own ways that are anxiety provoking for me is to flee. To walk away. To shut down. And then I jump into fight mode. And then I go on a pendulum ride back and forth between wanting to bolt and run far, far, away and wanting to pick a huge fight just to get the other person present with me, regardless how that “presence” shows up. I want to take action. I want to either fix it or completely break it.

At least that is my immediate, primal, wounded response.

Thankfully, over the last few years I have been learning to slow down. To breathe. To check-in with myself and my own defense mechanisms and how to self-regulate and self-correct so that I don’t turn an already stressful time for the other person into an even more stressful time by freaking the fuck out all over them.

Am I perfect at this? Hell no. It is a practice and it is ever evolving. And I can see the progress from where I was five years ago, one year ago, six months ago.

Remembering that those we love have their own ways of doing things, and that as long as they aren’t causing physical harm to anyone or lashing out and causing emotional or psychological harm to anyone, then they get to just do things in the ways that work for them, regardless of what it may or may not trigger within us.

Our work is in managing our own anxiety in these situations. Of course we can let the other person know we are there if they need/want our support (assuming we can actually hold the space for their own pain and not have that activating us to the point of trying to fix things). Of course we can check in every few hours or days or whatever is appropriate and simply say “thinking of you” or “I know things are rough right now, just want you to know you are on my mind/I’m here/etc”. 

And in those in-between spaces of our reaching out and them responding in some way (and remember silence is actually a response), we need to find the ways that work for us to manage our own stress and anxiety around our loved one’s discomfort and what it has brought up for us.

/../

This essay was originally published in my newsletter on June 16, 2019 and edited for publication here. If you’d like to receive my weekly(ish) newsletter with my most current essays and offerings, you can do so here.

On being an adult in relationship

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Our work, then, is not to abolish our connection to the past but to take it into account without being at its mercy.  The question is how much the past interferes with our chances at healthy relating and living in accord with our deepest needs, values, and wishes. ~David Richo, How To Be An Adult In Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

David Richo states in How To Be An Adult In Relationships, that in order to be an adult, we need to be self-aware and mindful in our actions. 

 In other words, self-awareness is vital on it’s own, but until it is coupled with mindful and intentional action (or inaction), we still aren’t fully acting in our frontal lobe, or “adult” brain.

Those of us who experienced chronic trauma in childhood have a lot to be angry about.  We have a lot to be sad about.  We have a lot to rage and scream and wail about.  I don’t believe anyone would deny that.  The atrocities that were done to too many of us as children are horrifying and all of it is held in our body and mind memory. 

The trauma doesn’t want to stay trapped within us however, it wants to get out.  This is great news if we are in therapy and doing a combination of talk and somatic therapies to help move that trauma on out of our systems and being.  It’s not so great news if we aren’t and so we try to stuff it down and eventually it bubbles up and out and we spew it all over an unsuspecting passer-by.

That passer-by could be our children, our intimate partner(s), our friends, other family members.  It could even be ourselves.

It is understandable that we have so much hurt and torment living within us.  I makes sense that it all needs to get out.  It is not okay for us to lash out at others.

Even when they cause us harm.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Even when  a person causes us harm, it is not acceptable for us to lash out and cause them harm.

The whole “two wrongs doesn’t make a right” thing.

Here’s a thing, though.  For most of us, I don’t think our “eruptions” or “lashing out” are intentional.  I know for me it mostly certainly isn’t mindful.  It comes from a primal place within that only cares about our survival. And so when we are already wounded, like any animal, if we get poked or prodded we go into fight/flight/freeze because we see any hurt as an attack and we need to protect and defend ourselves.

Rollo May wrote: “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.“

The work of self-awareness is to be able to grow that capacity to pause and allow space for us to mindfully choose the response we want to to actually have.

This is not to say there isn’t a part of us that wants our response to be screaming at the top of our lungs and stomping our feet.

It is to say however, that we need to take the moment to consider the longer term impacts of us screaming and stomping our feet.  And if the longer term impacts actually cause us and other (more) harm, then perhaps we could consider a different response.

Shifting from a space of automatic, mindless, response to one where there has been space created between being activated and actually responding, is no simple task.  We cannot undo the habit of a lifetime of automatic, mindless responding simply because we decide we want to do so.

It takes time.

AND.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, learning to regulate our systems: calm our sympathetic nervous system, activate our parasympathetic nervous system, move the stored up cortisol out of our system.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, connecting to our boundaries and coming into our bodies.  Learning to truly understand, on a very visceral level, where we end and another begins, physically, psychically, emotionally.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, finding our ways to ground and our own center, being able to find our way to not only be in but stay in, the present moment, despite any and all the discomfort we may be feeling.

And after all of that, it takes practice, a LOT of practice, to break the patterns and cycles that we have become so accustomed to.  To actually not engage in an argument even though we may be being provoked, to walk away, to calm ourselves in the moment, to bite our tongues, to actually feel empathy for the person causing harm.

None of this comes easy.  Or at least, none of it has come easy to me.

Changing life long, if not generations old, patterns and cycles takes effort.  It requires compassion.  And we will all screw it up along the way, slipping back into old ways of being because that is what is known.  

And.

It can be done.  With practice.  

What is interesting about changing these patterns and cycles is that as we begin to do so on our end, the person(s) on the other side may try to up their game. When this happens it can be so tempting to engage.  Believe me, I know!  And, it is all the more important for us to continue practicing our own work, to continue growing that “pause”, to continue our own work of breaking harmful patterns and cycles.

Eventually those who try to engage us will change too.  Either they will simply go out of our lives because they aren’t getting the emotional charge from us anymore, or they too will begin to create space, to cultivate and grown that pause, to break their own patterns and cycles.

We can’t do any of that for them though.  We can only do our own work.  Even in those moments when, right then, we really just want to scream and stomp, and perhaps, especially in those moments.

In rebellious solidarity, always.

/../

This essay was originally written in May 2018 for my weekly newsletter and has been updated and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

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