Searching for Safety
As long as I can remember I’ve been vigilant, tracking my environment for threats, expecting it to attack me.
What would a “safe” home look like? What would it require for this vigilance tendency to unwind, unravel, because it is no longer needed? What would the path of unwinding look like? What does it take for beliefs, embodied stories, to be updated?
For me, this is the highest level objective of the Relational Microscope experiments: what is a safe home? Can people be safe? And how can I get there? Ultimately the goal is get there, ideally before starting a family.
A Path Home
Going a level deeper, human relationships are both our greatest source of dependency and threat. Part of this material, but arguably more is emotionally conditioned and wired into our nervous system. At birth, humans are utterly vulnerable, and relationships with caregiver are a matter of life-and-death. This inciting circumstance internalizes a coupling between relationships and self preservation, one that most people retain for their entire life. Some assumptions are so large, so close to one’s field of vision, they remain invisible, and this coupling is one such belief.
As a consequence, once basic material needs are met, what constitutes a “safe home” is largely a social dynamic and one’s relationship to it.
In the American nuclear family norm, a shared cultural experience is the parentified child; when parents were overwhelmed they put their overwhelm on their child, and their child had to hold it, often in a way that compromised their own needs. One common consequence is a rational belief that overwhelming parents with their needs will only be reflected back and force the child back into a parentified role, and a common response is the child internalizing sole responsibility for their needs and experience.
This sense of sole responsibility is held in a variety of ways, but one aspect of a safe social dynamic is showing individuals that they can alter this belief, and turn to community for their needs and their experience. One byproduct of this communal reparenting is that it often permissions repressed emotions and needs to be expressed again, and come back online. A whole structure of repression and compartmentalization that emerged as a coping mechanism can begin to unravel and re-unify.
In my own personal experience, this has looked like a continual process of surrender. My stories and reflexes were motivated by fear and control, and surrender has gently softed and dissolved them. More often than not, these reflexes are so default that they are invisible; visibility often indicates a loosening. Much of my belief-updating process has been directly experiencing that the fear of the thing is a greater than the thing itself; I may fear my anger, but in fact the fear has become far larger and scarier than the anger. Moreover, the anger (or whatever emotion) can be held safely and cleanly, it’s not a question of “what” but “how”, and I can learn how to hold all my emotions and aspects of my experience safely. This also includes fundamental unsafety, ie the fact of arbitrary and impermanent nature of existence, and surrendering fear of loss to it. Loss is certain, and fear only prevents the pleasure of savoring.
The Relational Microscope is a coliving experiment to understand what social dynamics are required for this unraveling to occur, how to safely and responsibly hold the process, and how to safely hold aspects of our experience that may be coming back online.
Over the course of the month I want to refine my understanding of these things, build on top the methods and tools and discoveries from Living in a Relational Microscope (the first 1-month Relational Microscope coliving experiment) and experiment with new ones, and ultimately compress this understanding into templates that can be applied to coliving more broadly. Arguably a happy home may fulfill the greatest number of human needs, a path to a happy home has enormous personal value to me (perhaps more value than anything else), and social value more broadly.
Radical Transparency
One role of a mantra is to act a kind of seed, which represents a kind of efficient compression of a series of insights. The seed expands into a series of downstream realizations. I’ve been trying to iterate on one myself, a simple set of rules which compresses all the insights of these experiments into a seed. Ambitious, and still very much a work in progress. The intention of this seed is to enable radical transparency to be held in a group.
The Three Awarenesses:
- Feelings are facts.
- Stories are wrong but useful.
- Actions have consequences, feelings and stories do not.
The intention of this seed is to encapsulate the social norms needed to safely hold us in our experience. In the first Experiment we committed to radical transparency, similar to what we experienced at the Sleepawake Immersive. The first two of these awarenesses emerged there, and third emerged afterwards as I applied them to all my friendships.
Feelings are facts: our experience is simply true and requires no explanation or external validation to be true. The intention of this awareness is to affirm the inherent validity of our experience, and in doing so, affirm the inherent validity of others’ experience as well.
Stories are wrong but useful: stories and narratives are tools to make sense of our experience, but they always less than reality itself. The intention of this awareness is to hold stories spaciously, playfully, and in parallel, and to the lower the stakes of discourse. Stories are tools not Truths. And stories are distinct from feelings, and certainly not a substitute.
Actions have consequences, feelings and stories do not. Often what makes feelings and stories appear to be dangerous is that they’re implicitly coupled to some action. If I share my feelings to my parents, they will lash out at me. This may make it seem like emotions are inherently risky, but in practice they can be completely safe. If actions can be decoupled from speech, speech itself in inherently safe. This is why it’s vitally important to construct social containers that can hold emotions and stories, decoupled from action. Of course there are grey areas: is a threat violent? Is fear of violence a form of violence itself? These grey areas can be recognized immediately and de-escalated to remain within the container (which is just a social agreement). And if one remains in the container, all feelings and stories can be held.
This is enormous value, because it provides a point of social safety to reground into. This kind of regrounding is essential to stop forms of spiraling, mutual triggering, collapse of trust. I hope to learn how to skillfully hold many conflicting emotions and stories in parallel, which is an essential skill for holding spiraling dynamics; parallelism allows multiple legitimate experiences to be held at once, or strategically decoupled to prevent mutual triggering, injecting space into the spiraling dynamic enough to untie its knot.
Anxiety and hypervigilance were a consequence of being dropped, betrayed, attacked when most vulnerable. A practice of radical transparency is a continual process of re-meeting those hurt and betrayed parts, and demonstrating that they are now safe. Safety isn’t virtual, it entails leaps of faith, unwindings and re-openings, and meeting those parts with ground on the other side: compassion, celebration, and love.
I go into this further depth in The Three Awarenesses.
Living in a Relational Microscope
An environment of radical transparency felt like a relational microscope.
In the context of Living in a Relational Microscope we had a 6.5-person group living in a fairly secluded house in the Mount Shasta area. Similar to a Vipassana retreat, it felt like seclusion made the window of awareness significantly smaller, micro behaviors became quite stark. This, combined with radical transparency meant there were N distinct perspectives on any behavior.
There is no such thing as Objectivity, all observation is situated in a reference point. Moreover each reference point produces its own emergent dynamics, its own relationship, with the object of observation. By having N distinct relationships with each object of observation we were in a uniquely powerful position to triangulate on the nature of the object. Along with the Second Awareness, we were able to reason incredibly quickly, and come up with a variety of plausible stories, which we could then iterate on over the course of the month.
Sensemaking was one piece of it. The second piece of it was that coliving nature of the experiment meant that behaviors could be updated in an embodied way in real time.
In the first three days I expressed frustration at Emily. In the first week we collectively figured out it was because I didn’t think direct anger was acceptable to express, so instead I would repress a sense of transgression. If the pattern of transgression continued inevitably it would be expressed sideways as frustration. We ran the experiment: what would it feel like to directly, cleanly, and most importantly, kindly, express my anger to Emily? The first time was terrifying in my body, but it was met so well. Panic, and then immense relief. This, this was an embodied update. This was the sign the body had received disconfirming evidence that in fact anger was acceptable. From around week 2 on, I practiced this new path, until it became my new default reflex. In one month a deep pattern I’ve had for decades updated. Woah.
In talk therapy, sensemaking is happening outside an embodied context where updates can take place. In a communal context, collective sensemaking can create group awareness, and the same collective can be the site of embodied updates. This embodied loop represents a kind of continual unwinding and easing, where new behaviors are “lower energy” than old ones, allowing the behaviors to “stick” and freeing up energy to go elsewhere, while also living with greater baseline ease. I have an intuition that the full feedback loop could perhaps occur in this context, allowing updates to occur significantly faster. I have a feeling that coliving could become a vehicle for communal therapy, with the right social agreements and awarenesses.
In Round 1, this kind of update was clumsy and inexperienced. In Round 2, I want to explicitly focus on refining approaches to sensemaking and embodied updates, ultimately so the process of updating beliefs can occur gracefully at home.
One tool that I made at the very end of the first Experiment was a very simply way of narrativizing our beliefs, such that we could begin mapping out a personal belief-reflex map.
In this framework many beliefs follow a self-confirming feedback loop:
flowchart TD subgraph B ["Belief"] I[Initial Circumstances] S((Story)) T{Trigger} R{{Reflex}} R1(Reinforcement) I --> S --> T --> R --> R1 --> S end subgraph N ["New Belief"] H((Hypothesis)) RM((Regulation Mantra)) E{Experiment} R2(Reinforcement) H --> RM --> E --> R2 --> H end T -->|Self-Awareness| H
The beauty of this framework is its simplicity. In Round 2 I hope that this framework could be used to make our patterns more legible, and through legibility we all could quickly, iteratively, and collaboratively run behavioral experiments, ultimately to make embodied updates.
In Round 1 the only consistent structure was Daily Pods. This was a great start, which we then emergently added more structures to. I would like to start from the same point, but this time quickly add a daily time to discuss our belief maps, set intentions, and run daily experiments.
Intentions
These are some spacious intentions for Round 2, based on last time.
7 people proved relationally rich in Round 1, it was small enough to go deep, large enough for interesting subgroup dynamics. This time around I would aim for 6-10 people. As an aside, I also suspect that prime number group sizes produce slightly more varied social dynamics, because they are “stably unstable”; they cannot fall into equality deadlocks / cliches in the same way that even-sized groups can.
In Round 1, by far the biggest problem was a gender ratio skew, which lead to massive over-demand for feminine attention. This time around I am explicitly aiming for a slight female skew, something like 3:2 female-to-male ratio.
I would like to aim for a month again. It felt like repression worked as a social coping mechanism for about 2 weeks, and after that a lot of good relational material was forced to come to the surface.
I would like to have a more explicit commitment to radical transparency this time around, including active support and encouragement for everyone involved in tough relational dynamics — in Round 1 it felt like several relationships froze into avoidance and repression, rather than working through issues. For me, it turned out I got the most from the relationship that felt hardest for me. I would like to emphasize this possibility so that hard dynamics can be subverted in a potential source of greatest personal gains.
Relatedly, it was very important that relational experiments be made aware in the group field, especially when well-intentioned gestures / experiments weren’t landing as expected. Repeated failure was draining, and at a certain points the reserve of goodwill between certain individuals almost zeroed out.
Setting Expectations
One of the most important preparatory steps before this experiment is setting the right expectations in participants.
The TLDR: we experienced a kind of collective holding at the Sleepawake Immersive. We want to bring this back home with us, and this experiment represents an attempt to do that, to learn what it takes to hold our experience in its fullness.
Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Gradually unwind. One failure of Living in a Relational Microscope was that some individuals jumped into the deep end too quickly, and the container couldn’t hold them. In this group, I believe it would be advisable to move gradually, so that people can hold each other.
Further Explorations
There are few explorations I would also like to go into:
- The relationship between belief reflexes and somatic safety — I want to run experiments around this. I intend to bring a massage table and would like to try emotional and somatic experiments while folks receive massage.
- Balancing the conditional and the unconditional — how to make sure all members of the experiment get enough resource? How to ensure enough resource goes around?
- Be aware of different kinds of subgroup dynamics.
- What is the proper use of psychedelics in the experiment?
- I want to investigate the nature of connection, how relational dynamics are absolutely singular and unique and understand how to lean into this fact, as a kind of counterpoint to transactionality, interchangeability, and social alienation.