Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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Regardless of gender or of attachment style, if you have a limbic brain, you have these needs. How individual human beings experience these needs, how conscious they are of them and how comfortable they are with them, varies. Healthy connection needs can be masked under known or even unknown intergenerational trauma, but the needs themselves – being able to be near someone you trust, being held in a comforting way – are universal.
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by being consistently attuned, accessible, and responsive from the day he met me, he had firmly and quickly established beyond a doubt that he was consistently emotionally available, whatever the details of our logistical situations. That is a hallmark of an emotionally adult man: a peaceful way of relating in the world in which he builds real lived autonomy because he creates safety for himself and those who rely on him. This is called the dependency paradox. It is a reality of human relating. It isn’t going anywhere. Because he openly greets attachment needs as the normal, healthy, eminently meetable things they are whether he is logistically available or not, being out of reach for a month was a manageable, even enjoyable, experience for us both.
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emotionally available the whole time, and thus infused these objects with his accessibility
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This only works as long as he fully wants me to rely on him. That wanting to be relied on, that subtle turning towards and full owning of his responsibility, is the condition that leads to autonomy emerging organically in the relationships with his closest intimates.
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It is a quality in him, that he learned is normal from his parents growing up, so he doesn’t withdraw accessibility when he gets bored or when you fight or after he’s used up your worth to him as a conquest. That is not trustworthiness, and only a culture folded backwards on itself could possibly normalize using women in such a disposable way.
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Responsiveness and accessibility mean you actively meet their needs while expressing your own. It can mean demonstrating in your actions (not just your words), “my needs matter and yours do too.”
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Healthy boundaries are neither utterly porous nor unilateral and rigid. Someone with healthy boundaries is confident enough in their own ability to say yes and no that they can act interdependent and responsive to others without losing themselves, either in the moment or in the long term. If it takes you a month to know that you did a thing you didn’t want to do, your boundaries may be overly porous and need healing. If you erect walls that are so rigid you cannot hear or see when someone you love needs you, your boundaries may be overly hard and you may need to develop responsiveness and receptivity. Ideally, someone with healthy boundaries can trust in live time their own capacity to listen to their body, needs, and feelings, and not need external permission to do so, while they also have the resilience and self-awareness that lets them empathize with and respond in the moment to those they care about. Healthy boundaries let you assess your own needs and the needs of others, in a moment-by-moment way. They let you act responsive to others and responsive to yourself.
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Children wrap themselves around his neck like scarves.
✏️ Children know when a person is safe? When they’re so emotionally secure that they’re a safe haven and provide a secure attachment?
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If you do not want to be relied on, if inside you, you turn angrily away from connection instead of lovingly towards it even as your body mimics the gestures of care, everyone close to you will get more and more hurt and more and more unsafe, no matter the effort you put in to do ‘acts of care.’ Without genuine attunement, accessibility, and responsiveness, acts of care don’t land as emotional safety. Your autonomy will spiral further and further out of reach as you fight harder and harder to get everyone you care about away from you.
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Emotionally immature men who believe that autonomy is something you take, rather than something you create, may live their lives in a continual nightmare of ‘needs they can’t meet’ that they never come to understand. They may blame everyone outside them, never perceiving their own inability to create safety is the cause, as needs and hurt spiral up around them. In the worst cases, where strong dismissive-avoidant attachment or some form of narcissism has not been recognized, understood and healed, the world of human relating may appear utterly confusing, as needs appear to expand behind you as you run.
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if you seek autonomy, you must genuinely enjoy and want to be relied on in an unlimited way. The truth is that comfortable, calm connectedness with intimates is the normal resting position for most people. If your resting position differs from connection, you will have extra healing to do. If you unilaterally ‘take’ autonomy, hurting your intimates when they need you, rather than building autonomy by being attuned, accessible, and responsive, needs around you will appear from your vantage point as if they grow and grow and expand behind you.
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If you deny this reality to make it somehow her fault that you are not acting in a safe way, this is unconscious gaslighting.
✏️ If she reaches out for connection and you abandon emotionally (flail, lash out, run away), and then you don’t repair it but rather act like nothing happened (or blame her for feeling hurt or afraid).. this is gaslighting and emotional abuse.
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we live in patriarchy, in which women’s normal emotional needs are routinely deemed crazy, people will believe you. Policing women’s normal emotional needs to protect male fragility is a long and well-established tradition. Just because a paradigm is dominant and naturalized and happens to work in your favour, that does not mean it is real, or healthy, or just.
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in a culture that loudly rewards men for even the smallest acts of reliable nurturance while attacking women who do not quietly, invisibly hold together the world around them, you have an extra responsibility to keep your integrity whole: to name these shearing moments between perception and reality.
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When we broke up we went on a camping trip together, and at the top of a mountain at sunrise did a divorce ceremony in which we told each other what we were no longer giving each other, and what we were continuing to give each other. What we are no longer giving each other is sex, romantic feeling, and partnership – we are no longer committing to live together or have children together or make our lives in the same geographical location. Because he is by his nature monogamous (ie not because we think this is the only good way to be, but because it is how he genuinely is), he will need his new girlfriend and eventual life partner to have priority decision-making power over how physically close he and I will be. We cried and grieved those decisions in a healthy way. What we are continuing to give one another is connection, trust and safety.
✏️ This is crazy amazing. A healthy divorce ceremony. We do not look at breakups as anything but unnatural and crappy and as something that went wrong. Here they look at how they’ll still be connected, their relationship is just shifting into a new dynamic, and they grieve what they lose from the change while respect what they keep/gain.
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Because many of us have lived through a lifetime of harm, your job if you advertise yourself as a feminist man is not only to not harm us again, it is to help us heal from the harm caused by others.
✏️ “Don’t be rapey” is below-lowest starting point basic requirement of things. As she says earlier, it’s basically pre-k level. Men can’t be lauded for finally reaching competence at a pre-k or even kindergarten level. And “attuned, accessible and responsive” is sixth grade.