relearning relationships

Tag: healing

  • let desire show you what needs to be healed.

    the new moon is in libra, a time to set intentions about the kinds of relationships we really want and commit to the healing, repair, and everyday practices necessary to co-create these relationships. as a libra stellium who loves to love, this is my time.

    i had an experience recently that felt like falling in love. i wondered to myself: why does this feel so familiar? so intense? some moments felt like i’d gone back in time, to past moments in my life, picking up right where i left off. consciously, i knew a relationship with this person, under these circumstances, wasn’t aligned with what i wanted. somatically, i felt pulled toward them anyway.

    i told myself: it’s just a fantasy. sexual attraction. something to be contained. and my body replied: but goddamn i want it so bad.

    in dean spade’s “love in a fucked up world,” he writes about how to deescalate crushes that aren’t in alignment with our conscious principles. spade writes, “What we need is a way to return to a sober assessment of the situation, to remind ourselves of the buzz-kill realities that make this emotional/behavioral pattern something we are trying to break. Killing buzzes may sound like a bummer, but in this case, it’s about getting back to reality so we can find actual joy and pleasure rather than drama, shame, and conflict.” i followed the advice, reminding myself of why i wasn’t pursuing this crush. but something about this guidance felt off.

    instead of investigating why we feel the way we feel, spade seems to encourage readers to override our feelings, using our minds to control our bodies to try to make undesirable feelings go away. as a somatic coach and mental health worker, i know the feelings we don’t want to feel don’t just go away when buried.

    in my practice, i use internal family systems (IFS), more commonly known as ‘parts’ work, which pulls from many existing practices. the idea behind IFS is that we’re made up of many parts; past versions of ourselves get frozen in time replaying patterns that aren’t necessarily aligned with who we are, or want to be, now. some parts are protectors, and some are exiles. the feelings we don’t want to feel are exiles. often, exiles are our sadness, our pain, our deepest fears, our unwanted desires. we push them below the surface where they can’t easily reach us, because we fear they will debilitate us if freed. we deny and disconnect from these feelings, or exile them.

    our protectors are then divided into two types that work to keep the exiles at bay: managers and firefighters. the managers take control, keep us functioning, and keep us distracted from exiled parts with habits like overworking and caregiving. managers act proactively to prevent us from feeling our pain, usually with habits we appreciate. firefighters then react when we can no longer contain our exiled feelings.

    dean spade seems to be asking us to manage our feelings of desire. the problem with that is, when our feelings become too much to manage, our exiled parts get activated by being pushed away and our firefighters jump out to…put out the fire. firefighters rebel against being managed; they may take drastic actions that have real consequences, like excessive substance use, binge eating, or risky sex. our firefighters come up when we’ve been trying to suppress exiled feelings for so long, and we just can’t do it anymore, so we find other – often much more reckless – ways to disconnect and stop ourselves from feeling those feelings.

    instead of managing or disconnecting from our feelings of desire, i want to offer a secret third thing: we have to tend to what’s coming up. we can accept, embrace, and explore our desires without acting on them (though this is arguably way less fun). so i asked myself: “what if my desire isn’t wrong? what if it’s showing me something i need to know about myself?” and if so, what does my body want me to know?

    i let myself have the crush. i envisioned a way to bring my feelings into alignment with my principles, and i told the person how i felt and what i wanted. even if it wasn’t something that could happen, i had to allow myself to want it. this was my gift to myself.

    over time, it became clear what was so familiar about the dynamic i’d [re]created with this person. working with my somatic coach, i came to recognize i was replaying an old script, acting out an old wound. with her support to bring attention to the wisdom held in my body, i explored the question: why is this feeling so intense? meditation brought me back to a memory from when i was 15, when i learned my mother had regained custody of me a year earlier, but had only taken my siblings back. she left me in the foster system until one night she showed up to have me institutionalized. when the police officers asked her why she left me, she said, “because i never wanted her.”

    i was destroyed. and in that moment, in that meditation, i felt destroyed all over again; i cried like i hadn’t cried for decades, releasing pain that had been buried. and this exiled feeling only became accessible to me when i learned to embrace my desire.

    this is where i return to align with dean spade, who writes, “Sometimes we are attracted to people because of the ways that they remind us unconsciously of our childhood caregivers (parents, older siblings, grandparents, foster parents). Unconsciously, we hope to recreate a similar situation with a different outcome.”

    my desire showed me that an exiled wound, a part of me that just wanted to be loved by someone who couldn’t love me, was calling for my attention. and i wasn’t going to heal by replaying this script, reenacting this trauma in a way i have many times before. the way to heal is to grieve and nurture relationships where i can truly feel and be seen, and known, and wanted. not just because of an attraction, albeit one that felt deeply familiar to me, but because i let them in, through connection earned over time with consistent acts of “care, commitment, respect, knowledge, responsibility, and trust,” as bell hooks defines love in all about love.

    so, for my 36th birthday, i decided to honor that desire to be seen and known by people who have shown me love. i decided not to have a party, because, as much as i’ve loved the parties i’ve gotten to have, sometimes it can be difficult for me to truly connect in a large group of people. right now, i’m not interested in just adding people to my life; i’m interested in deepening my relationships. i invited friends to set up time to engage in trust building exercises with me, and it’s been such a beautiful adventure to see what people come up with and share with me.

    on these trust dates, my friends and i have been crafting, collaging, creating, writing, walking, and painting. we’ve been asking and answering each other’s questions about each other – our pasts, presents, and futures – and about our relationship. i’ve been able to see parts of my life through new frames, through the interpretations of the people i know and love now. and in these friendships, on these dates, i have felt so seen, known, and loved, in exactly the ways i’ve been craving.

    i feel so grateful to be creating love and nurturing intimacy in relationships where i feel connection, reciprocity, and alignment. i feel so grateful to be learning from desire and choosing to heal.

  • becoming a weapon of mass construction

    relationships are incredibly important to me. when there’s little else i can count on, i pour my faith into my relationships to carry me through difficult times. i recognize relationships as critical sites of transformation, healing, and liberation work. my intimate relationships have also been sites of violence, betrayal, and trauma. oppressive systems shape our everyday lives, down to the ways we relate to each other. it’s in the air we breathe. as i wrote five years ago, i’m still learning to breathe in this polluted air and exhale in a way that heals. i’m sure this learning will be lifelong.

    i think about healing as interconnected with collective liberation. i’m guided in part by the words of assata shakur who said, “we must be weapons of mass construction, weapons of mass love. it’s not enough just to change the system. we need to change ourselves.” it’s not enough to know what we want to destroy and dismantle; we also have to envision, and learn, and practice what we want to create. this blog, relearning relationships, is a space where i hope to document some of my process of learning and practice. i hope it will be a space where i can share and learn.

    after being doxxed and relentlessly harassed for speaking out against abuse in organizing spaces in 2020, i needed to reevaluate my relationship to the internet. over the past few years, i’ve kept most of my thoughts in a written journal that’s just for me. i use my journal to process my experiences, clarify my values, keep myself accountable to those values, and document my growth. i use it as a reference point when i can’t remember things. i live with complex trauma and bipolar disorder, and for me that means some memories are difficult to access, especially when i’m activated or in a heightened mood state. journaling has been a grounding practice for me, so i’m keeping this practice up at home. i also miss sharing through online journals, because i love how they open me up to more connection, feedback, and growth. so, after five years, i’m back to sharing online through this blog: relearning relationships, where i’ll share about what i’m reading, what i’m reflecting on, and my practices for (re)learning ways of relating that i hope will move me/us closer to liberation.

    for those of you who are meeting me through this blog, hello! i’m zara. i’m a 35 year old Caribbean mama of Black & Arab descent. i’m a transformative justice practitioner and a conflict mediator with a libra stellium. i’m a longtime organizer and a survivor of intimate partner abuse, child abuse, and state violence.

    my name is a chosen name; it’s an homage to a loved one and to the surname passed down to me at birth. i use it to mark where i am now in my journey. as a survivor of child abuse who was displaced by the family policing system, running away is a strategy that has helped me survive again and again. in leaving behind the options that were offered to me by birth and by the state, i was able to create relationships, and especially friendships, unlike what i’d ever experienced. relationships where there was a mutual commitment to care, connection, justice, and reciprocity. and in recent years, i have felt a pull to return: return to the place of my birth, return to the lands and cultural practices of my ancestors, return to parts of myself that once felt like they needed to be hidden or cast away to survive to this point. it feels like i’m retracing my steps and the steps of my ancestors to gather all the missing puzzle pieces, to feel whole. my name, my chosen name, seeks to honor both where i’ve come from and what i’ve created.

    not all my relationships have been marked by this commitment to care and connection and justice and reciprocity. in my sexual and romantic relationships, i have repeatedly recreated/re-experienced the abusive/oppressive dynamics that were most familiar to me as a child. these repeat experiences, most recently in 2019, have led me to distrust my own desire, to interrogate romance, to pursue sexual relationships that feel more like friendships, and to have firm boundaries around sex with people i rely on for care. i haven’t made decisions about how much of this i want to change. for now, i just acknowledge that this is where i’m at right now.

    as a teen sex worker, my relationship to sex was intertwined with my access to housing and basic resources. i learned through my experiences that i needed to be desirable to get my needs met. i didn’t have a consistent or reliable parent figure, and what i learned from sleeping outside was that the only people willing to take me in were men who wanted to have sex with me. these were the people i relied on to buy me groceries and winter coats. at 18, when i first sought out therapeutic support to tend to my experiences of sexual trauma, it didn’t tend to this specificity: the problem wasn’t really sex; it was the vulnerability that came with being isolated, abandoned, and homeless. sex was my survival strategy, and surviving this way made me vulnerable to violation.

    i’ve often felt unguided and unsupported in my healing work; there are few spaces and practitioners that have made me feel seen and understood in my experiences of trauma caused by state and interpersonal violence. when i do find practitioners, i often don’t have the resources to continue to access them. i know this to be true for many others, and this is what led me into my own practice, and study, and creation of resources & wellness spaces. in 2024, i co-created a zine on criminalized survivors’ healing from the traumatic impact of state and interpersonal violence and for the past five years, i have collaborated with Sequoya Hayes on a healing justice project called the Safer Movements Collective.

    a lot of my own healing work happens through reading, study, and connecting with different practitioners that i’ve found supportive, especially Kesha Fikes at Somatic Extimacy, Siedeh St. Foxie at Parama Collective, & Leslie Priscilla at Latinx Parenting.

    there are two main books i’m reading right now about healing & relationships: healing sex: a mind-body approach to healing sexual trauma by staci haines and what it takes to heal: how transforming ourselves can change the world by prentis hemphill. both focus on embodiment, or coming into our bodies and feeling our sensations, as a pathway to healing and transformation. although it’s often white folks who are credited for somatics, or the study of bodies and the sensations we use to know how we feel or what we need, African and Indigenous communities have historically understood healing in this holistic way, as something that happens in the bodymind to use the language of disability justice collective Sins Invalid. i appreciate prentis hemphill’s writing that, “Somatics, in a way, is born from the original fracture that separates us all into feeling and non-feeling, wild and civilized.”

    all of that said, mindfulness, meditation, and embodiment haven’t always been possible for me. for many of us living with complex trauma, it isn’t safe to be embodied. we’re using every strategy we’ve got to escape feeling what we can’t bear or what we simply don’t have the resources – both internal & external – to tend to. prentis hemphill writes about this too; they write, “We numb with all the coping strategies we know: work, alcohol, drugs, sex, food, social media, and any other activity humans do that can be made into distraction or an eject button to leave our bodies.”

    in recent years, i’ve learned many ways we can build our internal resources to meet ourselves in the places where we hold pain: honoring the needs & experiences of our inner child(ren), play, rest, tapping into past experiences of joy. i really appreciated this 3-minute resourcing practice offered by camille sapara barton. and i know that these practices are limited: nothing resources us as well as having our material needs met, having housing stability, having food and light and community. so many of us are living so precariously that building our internal resources can sometimes feel so out of reach. we need a foundation to build on.

    i am grateful to have known people in my life who have found ways to resource themselves, to tap into joy and play and light, and keep themselves going in spite of barriers created by poverty/capitalism and intersecting oppressive systems. i’ll end this post by sharing about my dear friend nona conner, who passed away in 2021. she’d been through hell and still loved to light incense because it smelled nice, and read poetry because it lifted her heart, and dream about love and romance as though she’d never been hurt before. nona would often say, “be blessed and a blessing,” so i’ll leave you all here with those words. be blessed, and a blessing.