Book Day 14: How to have your cake and not even eat it and let it spoil
This is a 10-min blogpost, because that’s how much time I have today.
Look. If you have two things, and they are a dynamic, you will need a third thing as a “check” on that dynamic. that can be a village. it can be a therapist (though that sometimes gets in trouble).
If you are poly, the third thing generally _cannot_ be a third person, or “other people” in that general way.
You need an actual third thing that’s a check on your dynamic, that is either neutral outside of the dynamic, or is more like a system. A journaling practice. A workout practice. Girls’ nights. Alcohol. Weed.
Yes, alcohol and weed, or any drugs, can be a “third thing” in the sense of being something that solves problems by shaking up the “internal dynamics” of a thing that is happening inside of a dyad.
On a similar topic, though I have to lead into it more, generally you can have one of two things.
You can have somebody following your instructions, but then their attachment is “to the following of the instructions” and not their emotions or your emotions. They are somehow going “beyond their own emotions and your emotions to follow your instructions.”
You can have somebody being synced up with your emotions. But then they lose a sense of time, lose a sense of what is happening. Follow your instructions if you are giving them on an emotional level, following yours and theirs, but they might forget whatever other priority was important before.
If you want both — if you want someone to follow your instructions, and also be tied into your emotions really closely, and also inside their emotions deeply, such that they are following both the words of your instructions and all the emotional feelings of it —
this happens sometimes. but more likely than not you end up eating a shit sandwich. a shit cake. whatever cake you wanted to have and eat, you end up having the cake and not even eating it and let it to rot and spoil
125 words needed to make this a full 500 word blog post as per the parameters. what else can I say.
Often you don’t realize you’re building a shit sandwich like this, by wanting these two things. Often what happens is you switch between them in a funny time that the other person cannot follow.
You give someone the instruction, they follow it. You don’t mark how hard the instructions you were. You assume your instructions were easy. You assume that the cost of following them was zero. You assume that your person who was following the instructions didn’t have to do any emotional alchemy, or denial of their own emotions, or trusting you.
Because you had the phase before saying the instruction around the hope behind the instruction, the purpose behind the instruction, you already have emotions that are “aligned” and “in tune” and “synergistic with” and “vibrating with” and “on the same wavelength on” and “Enneagramming 4” on and “congruent with” the instruction. You have emotional congruence with your own instruction.
The failure mode here is assuming the other person also has any amount of emotional congruence with your instruction. Then they get to the other side of the instruction, you check on their emotional congruence, realize they don’t have any, and freak out, or you start giving them more instructions, not realize how much the first set of instructions “cost.”
If all this sounds like a lot of overthinking bullshit, yeah it kind of is. If you think it’s overthinking bullshit probably you already have a simplification process, or a system of buffers, such that this isn't the kind of problem you are likely to encounter. That is a good thing.
Maybe this will help you see what other people are doing, or if your system ever runs across problems when you are thinking “whoa why is my buffer system not working” something along this category would be what’s going on, if not this exact thing.
This is not an example of, but is in a similar chapter, as the “three-body problem.” Often you don’t know what is actually going on. You will need buffers to “account for the not knowing.”