Recently I wrote a post about worshipping our wounds. In it, I talked about how sometimes we cling to our wounds too long because they become part of our identity or healing them might feel threatening to those who don’t want us to change.
I’ve been thinking about that post since, and I think it might need a few additional words to give it balance.
As much as I think it can be unhealthy to worship our wounds, I also don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that we should rush to heal our wounds, that we should pretend we don’t have wounds, or that we should feel ashamed for having those wounds.
It takes time to heal trauma. And even before the healing begins, it takes time to admit to ourselves that we have trauma and that we need healing. When I think about my divorce, for example, I have to admit that it took me a surprisingly long time to admit to myself the extent of the trauma from my marriage, and then it took even longer to speak about it to others. I’ve always prided myself in being resilient, strong and reliable, and those things felt especially important to me when I needed to be emotionally stable for my daughters and my clients. I was afraid that revealing my woundedness would mean that I was weak and people couldn’t depend on me.
Six years after the marriage ended, I’m still in therapy working to heal not only the wounds from my marriage, but also the wounds that I took into the marriage as a result of my rape as a twenty-two year old.
You have permission to take the time you need to do your healing work. You have permission to take longer than anyone else around you. It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong if it takes longer than you expect. It just means you’re human.
One of the dangers of not acknowledging the time it takes to heal deep wounds is that we can be tempted to slip into spiritual bypassing, where we grasp onto any spiritual practice or healing methodology that offers us a quick fix but that only masks what’s really going on or tries to “transcend” it instead of going deep enough to heal the roots of the pain. And one of the risks of spiritual bypassing is that it often excuses the perpetrator of the harm that was done to us and doesn’t allow us to feel anger or to seek justice for the wrong as part of our efforts to heal.
Healing is a journey, with lots of detours and rest stops along the way. It’s like a labyrinth that takes you through all kinds of twists and turns that sometimes feel like they’re getting you closer to the centre and sometimes take you further toward the edge. It takes the time it takes. You’re not doing it wrong if you stay on the path, rest when you need to rest, and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
You’ll get to the centre eventually if you stay on the path.
As long as you don’t intentionally get stuck and start clinging to your wounds, worshipping them, or allowing them to define who you are, you’re on the right journey.
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p.s. If you’re on a healing journey and want to learn more about holding space for yourself and others, you might want to check out The Spiral Path, a self-study program that takes you through the three stages of a labyrinth journey. Or check out our Holding Space Foundation Program.
In the movie, Sound of Metal, Ruben, a drummer in a heavy metal band, begins to lose his hearing. Fearing that he might slip back into addiction because of it, his girlfriend helps him check in to a facility for deaf recovering addicts. Joe, the man who runs the facility, encourages Ruben to find his way to stillness and acceptance, but Ruben is resistant, and much of the movie is about his determination to find his way back to his old life. In one scene, when he’s meant to be sitting alone, writing his thoughts in a journal, he smashes a donut as a distraction. Near the end of the movie, there’s a powerful moment in which Ruben finally surrenders to stillness and acceptance.
I am neither a rockstar nor in recovery, but I do have some things in common with Ruben and can understand some of his resistance. Here, for example, is a recent conversation that went on in my brain on a recent morning when I was sitting on the dock with my journal:
Voice 1: Oooo… look at the waves in the water! The way they reflect the light and sparkle! And the way they break up into pieces when they hit the dock and then bounce back to meet the oncoming waves!
Voice 2: It’s lovely! And… I can think of a blog post I could write, using the waves as a metaphor…
Voice 1: Can’t we just stay with the waves right now? A blog post can wait. Just look! And enjoy!
Voice 2: But if I don’t write something down, I might miss a valuable insight and… (grabs journal)
Voice 1: Stay with the waves. Put your journal down and just be present.
Voice 2: I should probably take a picture of it for social media, to go along with the blog post… (grabs camera)
Voice 1: STAY WITH THE WAVES!
Voice 2: Look! There’s a duck. Maybe the metaphor could expand to include what it’s like to be floating on the waves.
Voice 1: Take a deep breath. Maybe we can stay with the breath AND the waves? Please? At least try?
Voice 3: Oooo… I should write a blog post about how my brain works when I’m trying to stay with the waves! (grabs journal again.)
Voice 1: Seriously? Like we needed ANOTHER distraction? Can’t we just stay with the waves?
Voice 4: What a big waste of time THIS was!
Yup – that’s how hard it is for me to settle into stillness, even though I’ve been trying to be intentional about it for years and I try at least once a day to be in a place (like the dock) where stillness is hard to resist. If there is a spectrum for ADHD, then my busy distractible brain is definitely on it. I may not be an addict, but like an addict, my brain craves the dopamine hits it gets from creative ideas and shiny things and it’s hard to resist giving in to the cravings.
A few days later, I arrived back at the dock to find the water perfectly still. It was so still that you couldn’t tell the river was flowing at all except for those spots where there was something floating on the surface of the water. When I stepped onto the floating dock, the dock’s movement was the only thing that made ripples. After I’d settled down on the dock with my journal, the following conversation happened in my brain.
Voice 1: It’s so peaceful. Let’s just soak this in for a moment and be present.
Voice 2: But… I should take a picture of the water. And the clouds reflecting on the water. I could post it on Instagram. (grabs camera)
Voice 1: Look… every time you move on this floating dock, you’re causing ripples on the surface of the water. What if we try to sit so quietly that we cause no ripples?
Voice 2: But… I need a picture. And I should write in my journal about how peaceful it is. And…
Voice 1: Maybe you should first EXPERIENCE the stillness before you decide to write about it? Take long slow breaths and don’t move any muscles – let’s see if the ripples disappear.
Voice 2: Ooo… the metaphor! When there’s no movement on the water, you get a clearer reflection of the clouds! It’s like a mirror! You can see yourself more clearly when you’re still!
Voice 1: Not that you would know, since you apparently don’t know how to BE still!
Voice 2: Okay, have it your way. I won’t write or take pictures until we’ve stopped moving enough to let the water settle into stillness.
Voice 1: (closes her eyes and takes slow breaths)
Voice 2: (opens her eyes) Oooo…. Look! We did it! The water is like glass again!
Voice 1: Maybe don’t be TOO proud of yourself. That kinda ruins the point of the whole exercise.
Voice 3: Hmmmm… you’re both giving me great material for my blog post about how my brain works!
Voice 2: I just thought of another metaphor!! The water in a river is only calm like this when the pressure on the higher end of the river decreases. When there’s been too much rain or melting snow, the river needs to move faster to try to get to equilibrium. So if you want stillness, you need to decrease input and wait for the water to settle!
Voice 1: I give up.
Voice 4: I knew it all along. You suck at stillness.
Does this internal dialogue sound familiar to anyone else or is it just me? This is why I have to WORK at stillness – it doesn’t happen naturally! It’s also why I sometimes disappear from social media for a week and hide out in a cabin in the woods when I really need to focus on an important project. I love my distractible, creative brain, but I need to give it some guardrails and point it in the direction of the right things.
This year has been especially taxing for my overly active brain. While building a business, launching a book, and creating several new programs has been fun for the part of my brain that craves dopamine, it’s also been exhausting to do it all in the unfamiliar landscape of a pandemic. My brain needs a break! And so does my body. And my heart.
So I’m taking a couple of months off, and I’m going to do my best to listen to Voice 1 and STAY WITH THE WAVES! I’m going to see if my body and mind can stay still long enough to smooth the surface of the water. And I’m going to reduce input and output so that equilibrium feels more like a possibility and the waves can settle for awhile before the next big rainstorm comes.
Before I go, though, I wanted to let you know that I will not be leaving you without content for the next two months! (In fact, it seems something about the upcoming sabbatical prompted my creative brain to go into a frenzy and I’ve created more content than ever!) Here’s what you can expect in the next 8 weeks:
1. I’ve written a series of short posts that will go out to my list (and appear on my blog) every Monday for eight weeks.
2. I’m sharing a daily poem on my author page on Facebook. (I have an extensive collection of poems I like to read as openers when I host conversations and retreats – these are some of my favourites.)
4. Though I’ll be mostly away from social media, I might occasionally post a photo or video of my summer wanderings on my own Instagram, likely with the hashtag #pauseandbenourished.
5. My business partner, Krista, has been creating fun daily Tiktok videos that are worth checking out. One of the things she’s doing is pulling a daily card from our Holding Space Card Deck. (@centre_for_holding_space)
There’s a stack of books on the floor beside my nightstand. And there’s another stack next to it. And there’s a third stack on the nightstand above. It’s a bit ridiculous and it’s about time I did my twice-yearly movement of books to my overflowing bookshelves downstairs.
Before I do that, though, I thought I’d give you a list of the books (in no particular order) from the past six months or so that I’d recommend for your reading pleasure and personal growth. (This is just the non-fiction list – I have a whole other stack of fiction books.)
(Full disclosure: The links below are affiliate links on Amazon. I hope you consider buying the books from local booksellers, but if you’re going to buy them from Amazon, you might as well use the links so that I get a few pennies to get some more books for free.)
1. The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay It sounds a little obvious to say so, but this is a delightful book. It’s a collection of short reflections of things that Ross Gay, a poet, finds delightful in the world. It’s not all kittens and roses, though… through his capacity for witnessing delight he also shares some hard things about what it’s like to be a Black man in the U.S.
2.Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, by Emily and Amelia Nagoski This book could NOT have come at a better time for me – just as I was slipping into my own burnout after an incredibly challenging year of building a new business, starting a partnership, and dealing with my daughter’s scary and rare health conditions in the middle of a global pandemic. What I especially appreciate about it is that Emily and Amelia (twin sisters) have a finely tuned lens for understanding and explaining how much women’s burnout is a factor of the culture we live in and how “the system is rigged against us”. They don’t just give the analysis though – they provide helpful tools and resources.
3.I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey, by Izzeldin Abuelaish If you want to learn more about the harsh reality of what it’s like to live in the Gaza Strip, then this book is worth the read. It’s a revealing and heartwrenching memoir written by a doctor who’s spent most of his life there. Shortly after his wife died, a bomb hit his home and killed three of his daughters and a niece. Despite his many hardships and the cruelties done to his family, he has a surprising capacity for grace and forgiveness.
4.Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson This is my most-referenced book of the last year. I have recommended it to dozens of people and will continue to do so because it’s a book that changed me. It’s definitely confronting at times (it makes you look more closely at your deeply held beliefs and biases and why you’re hanging onto them), but it also helps to explain the world and relationships and why we often end up in the conflicts that we do. I understand myself better and have more compassion for people who struggle with giving up ideas and beliefs that are important to them and that become part of their identity.
5.The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, by Sarah Lewis One of my favourite things about this book is the way it embraces and elevates the gift of failure. If you’ve been struggling with your inner perfectionist, and you often don’t get things done because of the way it blocks you, this might be the right book for you.
6.Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, by Soraya Chemaly I picked up this book because anger is one of my most uncomfortable emotions and I don’t always know how to process it or channel it. I wasn’t disappointed. Chemaly teaches how anger can be a vital instrument and catalyst for change when we approach it with conscious intention.
7.The Body is Not an Apology, by Sonya Renee Taylor I can hardly recommend this book strongly enough. I listened to it first as an audiobook, but when I finished, it felt so important to me that I needed to own a physical copy. If you want to examine your own relationship with your body and dig deeply into the cultural and systemic messages you’ve been picking up about your body all of your life, then you won’t find a better book than this one.
8.Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, by Adam Grant This is a valuable book for exploring the ways that we get stuck in our thinking and how we can become more expansive and open to new ideas. It’s about unlearning and relearning, with courage and humility, so that we can keep growing and stretching ourselves.
9.Broken Horses: A Memoir, by Brandi Carlile If you love Brandi Carlile’s music, as I do, then you’ll love this book. It’s the story of her life growing up in a musically gifted but impoverished and fractured family. It’s also the story of how she found her way into her musical career and how she developed the confidence and courage to live life on her terms and to become the star she is now. (My sister tells me that it’s even better in audio because not only does Brandi read it, but she also sings a song at the end of each chapter.)
10.Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, by Ijeoma Oluo I was looking forward to this book coming out because I really appreciated Oluo’s last book, So You Want to Talk About Race. This is a bold exposé of white male supremacy. It digs deeply into the history of the U.S. and reveals what happens when, generation after generation, white men are told they deserve power.
11.Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life, by Jill Bolte Taylor I was fascinated with Jill Bolte Taylor’s first book, My Stroke of Insight, and was pretty confident this would be a good follow-up. In it, Taylor explores how the brain has four “characters” and she lays out how we can learn to live more balanced, peaceful, holistic lives when we grow our capacity for tapping into each part of the brain and processing information, situations, and decisions with all four parts engaged. I’m curious enough about what I learned in this book that I’d love to someday take a workshop with Taylor to dig deeper into how this might inform my own work. I think there are some beautiful lines of connection between whole brain living and holding space.
12.Discovering the Inner Mother: A Guide to Healing the Mother Wound and Claiming Your Personal Power, by Bethany Webster Of all the books in this list, this is probably the one that had the most profound impact on me from a personal healing perspective. It cracked open some wounds I wasn’t aware I still carried from my own relationship with my mother, and it helped me find ways of healing those wounds and learning how to better mother myself. (I’ll be sharing a blog post in a few weeks about a new journal practice I’ve developed as a result.)
13.Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard If you loved Braiding Sweetgrass (as I did – it’s probably my favourite book of the last five years), you will likely love this book as well. I am very fond of trees, as I’ve shared in the past, and I loved learning about the ways in which they communicate with each other in the forest and how integral they are to each other’s survival and thriving. I also enjoyed the way that the story of trees is interwoven with Simard’s personal narrative as she grew her relationship with trees.
14.Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, by Emily Najoski This is the book I wish I’d owned in my twenties. It’s also a book I’ve encouraged all three of my daughters to read. I think it has the capacity to change nearly everyone’s sex life, and it also has the capacity to help us love ourselves more and stop shaming ourselves for not being “normal”. Even if you have a great sex life, this book will teach you something new about yourself and/or your partner.
Not long ago, I listened to an interview with someone who’d written a piece for the New York Times on the “empty religions of Instagram”. She was critiquing some self-help social media influencers, and she mentioned that some of them “worship their wounds”. On their Instagram feeds, she said, they make themselves accessible by being wounded people, but then they stay with the wound because it makes them feel special and loved and it gets them more followers.
Those words stuck with me. At the time, I was taking a social media break because I was going through a period that was somewhere between burnout and existential crisis. I was wrestling with some of the pressures I wrote about in this article, about trying to be an ethical leader and influencer while avoiding the trap of starting a cult, and I was having a bit of a vulnerability hangover after spending eight months talking about myself and my book. I was suddenly uncertain about how much I wanted to share and engage on social media, and I was feeling some pressure to be performative, which felt antithetical to my commitment to authenticity.
Because I’ve written a book that includes quite a few of my own vulnerable stories, and because much of my work has its roots in those stories (i.e. the original blog post that catapulted this work into the world was about my mom dying), the words of the writer felt somewhat confronting.
Was I, too, guilty of “worshipping my wounds”? Was I monetizing my woundedness and then staying with the woundedness because it’s become part of my brand and it draws people in?
Whew. That’s a really big question. It stopped me in my tracks and caused me to withdraw even further from the public-facing spaces. I spent hours wrestling with it in my journal and had several good conversations with friends. I dug deep, trying to be as honest with myself as I could.
Somewhat ironically, at the same time, I was teaching my course, Write for Love and Liberation, where I was telling people how liberating and healing it can be to write about your wounds and share your stories. I told them how much more liberated I felt when I was honest about past trauma and abuse and how much that honesty and vulnerability had helped me find community and deepen relationships.
My mind wrestled with the cognitive dissonance of those two things and I didn’t know if they could both be true at the same time.
On the one hand, oversharing and crafting your identity out of a narrative of woundedness and trauma can keep you stuck in your wounds. A relationship or community built out of shared woundedness can give everyone in that relationship or community an excuse to stay wounded. It can also hold people back from healing and growth because people need safety and belonging and are afraid of being abandoned by people who don’t want them to change. (Some of us come from families, for example, that don’t encourage growth because that causes a threat to the family system.)
Plus, a leader who uses her wounds to gather people around her can turn those wounds into performance and connecting points for relationships. She is much more likely to grow unhealthy attachments, to project those wounds onto other people, and to start a cult rather than a healthy growing community. A leader who stays wounded is likely to create trauma bonds with people to ensure that they don’t outgrow her and move on because they’ve healed and no longer need the attachment to her. (Consider the many recent stories of abuse in spiritual communities – those are leaders whose own woundedness tries to trap people and hold them back.)
On the other hand, sharing the stories of our trauma and woundedness can be healing and transformational and those stories can offer beautiful connecting points on which to build community. Some of my biggest personal breakthroughs have come when I’ve read or listened to the stories of people who’ve dared to share their struggles and pain. Over the years, I have heard from many, many people who are grateful that I’ve been so honest in the sharing of my hard stories, because it helps them see themselves more clearly. Shared vulnerability connects us and makes us feel less alone. It can also give us hope that there is a way through the pain into a new story.
So… what is a person to do when they’ve built work that’s rooted in their personal stories, and many of those stories include wounds and trauma that help people find connecting points?
I think the key to that question is in the word that is deliberately part of both my book title and my writing course title… liberation. I think that the writing and sharing of our stories, the gathering of our communities, and the ways in which we show up online, should all be centered around the pursuit of liberation – for ourselves and for each other.
Liberation comes when we can see the wound; name the wound; speak honestly about the wound; erect healthy boundaries with anyone who caused, contributed to, or dismissed the wound; heal the wound; make meaning of the wound; and then free ourselves from the wound and move on.
Liberation comes when we share stories not only of the wounds themselves, but of what it takes to heal the wounds, triumph over the wounds, and stand up to the people or systems that cause the wounds.
Liberation comes when we tell the stories of how we developed healthy boundaries, stopped accepting abuse, and stopped giving ourselves away to people who don’t know how to honour and hold space for us.
Liberation comes when we don’t hold each other back, when we release unhealthy attachments, and when we refuse to participate in codependent relationships that rely on our woundedness.
Liberation comes when we make a conscious choice to detach ourselves from our wounds and we form new identities not built solely on those wounds.
After a considerable amount of reflection on this topic, I have come to a renewed commitment in my work and my life… I will continue to share honestly and vulnerably and will continue to let people see the wounds and trauma that have been part of my past (when I can do so out of a spirit of generosity) BUT… I will not stay in that place, nor will I stay in relationships that keep me in that place. I will do my best to continue healing whatever reveals itself in me and I will support other people in their healing. I will trust my own need for boundaries and give myself necessary time away from other people’s wounds and healing work. I will distance myself from situations or relationships that trigger my old woundedness. I will actively pursue peace, love, joy, and liberation. I will seek out relationships and communities that value growth (mine and other people’s) and that don’t need to keep anyone wounded to justify their own lack of growth. I will be gentle with those with trauma and wounds, but I won’t settle for wound-worshipping in the spaces I hold.
I am committed to my own liberation. AND I believe, as Lilla Watson says, that “my liberation is tied up with yours”. I am committed to liberated relationships, where we honour each other’s sovereignty AND we lean into community, where we hold space for each other’s trauma AND we seek healing and growth.
When I published my book, The Art of Holding Space: A Practice of Love, Liberation, and Leadership, my publisher wasn’t certain whether we should include “liberation” in the title. I insisted though, and I’m glad I did. Because I believe that when we hold space for each other, we choose to serve mutual liberation.
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p.s. We’ve recently re-launched Write for Love and Liberation as a self-study program, in case you need support as you work through your own stories of healing.
We’ve also opened registration for the Holding Space Foundation Program, where you can learn more about holding space for yourself and others.
A few years ago, I had a pretty big a-ha moment when I realized that the concept of holding space (which I’ve spent the last seven years exploring in a deep way as I developed programs and wrote a book about it) is, at its core, about freedom and sovereignty. Here’s a quote from one of the last chapters of my book…
“If I treat you as someone entitled to your own sovereignty, it means that I assume you have the same right to self-govern your life as I. You get to tell me how you want to be treated and I can choose to accept those boundaries or walk away.
“Sovereignty is what we’ve been talking about throughout this discussion on holding space – that we offer love to each other without attachment, manipulation, control, or boundary-crossing. It’s the starting point to developing healthy, strong social contracts between us.”
It’s taken me a lot of hard learning to get to the place where I can embrace a concept like sovereignty. As I’ve written about in the past, I had to let go of a lot of social conditioning, work through some trauma and abuse, and rewrite some old narratives to even begin to believe I have a right to self-govern my life and choose what’s best for me and my body. Similarly, I had to learn how to treat other people as sovereign individuals, and that’s especially tricky when you’re a parent trying to respect your daughters’ boundaries but haven’t often had your own boundaries respected. I still slip up sometimes, and the old scripts still play in my head, especially when I’m tired, confused, or feel beaten up, but I feel clearer and clearer about what it means to own my sovereignty and be in relationships with people who are equally sovereign.
Lately, though, I’ve had some concerns about the ways in which sovereignty gets talked about, especially in the wellness/self-help industry. It’s becoming an increasingly common term among those who talk about things like personal empowerment, self-love, etc.
Here’s what concerns me… Some of what’s being said ignores the way in which sovereignty is a relational concept.
When you talk about sovereignty without also talking about community and the kinds of social contracts that allow people to be in relationships while still maintaining their sovereignty, then you’re probably actually talking about selfishness and willful ignorance of the impact of your choices. And when you’re talking about those things, then your version of sovereignty is rooted in colonization rather than equity.
A sovereign nation becomes a colonizing nation when it takes its sovereignty too far, ignores the sovereignty of others, and lives by its own set of rules. It bulldozes over other nations’ rights (especially weaker and/or more community-oriented nations), exploits whatever resources it wants, enslaves and marginalizes people of other nations, and ignores any treaties that might have been written.
An individual can take their sovereignty too far in much the same way, centering their own right to do what they want over anyone else’s rights.
Sadly, most of us have been socially conditioned by the colonization that’s steeped into our cultures. As a result, when we claim a word like sovereignty (as the self-empowerment influencers have done), the concept can still hold the shadow of the culture within it. What you end up with is self-empowered people who believe in their own rights to self-govern their own bodies and choose what’s best for them, but who don’t recognize that those choices might actually be harming other people.
Let’s say, for example, that your self-care practice involves paying people to care for your children and clean your house while you get a massage. You have a sovereign right to do all of those things (and I’m all for it). But… let’s imagine that the people doing these things for you are exploited labourers who aren’t being fully compensated for their work because they’re undocumented immigrants or they’re marginalized in a way that makes other work hard to find. Is that truly a sovereign self-care practice if it doesn’t uphold the sovereignty and rights of others?
Or let’s say that you believe you have the sovereign right not to wear a mask in the middle of a pandemic and you pass the virus on to the person working at the grocery store who passes it on to their immuno-compromised child or elderly parent who dies as a result. Is that truly a sovereign choice if it ignores the sovereignty and rights of that family?
Sovereignty has a shadow side and that shadow looks like colonization. If your sovereignty does not acknowledge and uphold the sovereignty of others, then it’s individualism, and an excuse to be self-centred in your choices.
The only way for sovereignty to work in the world is for it to be interwoven with community (which comes with morality, responsibility, and justice).
Sovereignty needs guardrails. To avoid the shadow side, we need to hold it in a relationship with community. Social contracts serve as the guardrails, holding the two in balance.
We can think about sovereignty and community as a yin and yang relationship – they function together, balancing each other out and holding each other accountable. Within each is a bit of the other. And in the space in between is a social contract that weaves the relationship together and keeps one from swallowing the other whole.
Community that’s left unchecked swallows individual rights and erases sovereignty. Sovereignty that’s left unchecked destroys community and leaves everyone isolated and paranoid of each other.
Social contracts (like treaties between countries) guide us in naming and honouring what our individual rights are, what boundaries we need in order to uphold each person’s sovereignty, what we’re willing to give up in service to the community, how we’ll share and/or distribute assets and resources, how we’ll address conflict, and how we’ll celebrate and cherish the bond between us. Not only do they guide the relationship and protect each person’s freedom within that relationship, they also offer the freedom to leave if the relationship no longer serves or if there is irreparable harm done. Clear and supportive social contracts make a relationship stronger, more resilient, more adaptable, and more supportive of the people in it.
When Krista and I entered into a business partnership, we went through a process called Conscious Contracts (with a lawyer trained in the process) and we developed a Peace Covenant that gives us guardrails for our relationship. This helps us hold both sovereignty and community as values at the core of our business. What Krista has often said throughout this process is “I don’t want to be in a relationship with anyone who feels trapped in that relationship or who clings to it too desperately.” We value the relationship, and we are both free to leave if/when that feels necessary.
There is also a process called Blueprints of We that is a form of social contract that could be helpful for all kinds of relationships (not just business partnerships). I encourage you to check it out for your marriage, your family, your community organization, your church, etc.
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P.S.If you want to learn more about how to hold space for people’s sovereignty, while also leaning in to community, we welcome you to join us for the Holding Space Foundation Program. Registration just opened for the session that starts in October 2021.
