Ordinary Love. An invitation to true wellness culture

Postmodernity is too egocentric. This includes current “spiritual” trends.

Here’s what an alternative can look like: Yesterday Dara asked Jason to install a window A/C unit in Val’s room; he came over and did it. Last night a participant shared struggling with a contract at work, and a lawyer in the session volunteered to help her redline it. My sister watches the kids while I help my brother-in-law move their furniture to make room for the new baby. If this doesn’t sound special, that’s the point. You’re already doing this, that’s also the point.

I’m not writing to admonish us to “get rid” of the “ego”—a particular self-identity*. I think it’s too hard for modern Americans, steeped in a culture of individualism. I love life, people, experience, and I think a good life includes a sense of “me.” Instead, I want to expand the sense of self to go much beyond the concept of “my body, my history” to see the larger whole these are part of. One upshot of this is gratitude, even for what I usually think of as “Jordan’s”—like these thoughts thunk in English. I needed English to think ‘em, so how much are they ‘mine’? 

Automated & consensual narrative lock-in

We know that social media exacerbated this. Many studies show narcissism and loneliness increasing faster with mass adoption of social media, especially after 2012. Young kids don’t want to serve as a fireman or doctor anymore, they want to be adored as an influencer (We’re working on this social media problem by launching UpTrust). 

Now I worry that AI is exponentiating this self-reification trend to unprecedented levels.

Last week I met four people who were convinced that their personal ChatGPT interface, molding its “personality” to respond based on their unique interactions, was a sentient being. If you think our filter bubbles are bad now, imagine what it’s like when we have 8 billion of them? Each individual’s personal collection of bots reinforcing whatever identity feels special, safe, and comfortable, no matter how limited and delusional?

There’s nothing wrong with specialness, safety, and comfort, but neither is there anything wrong with ordinariness, risk, and discomfort. Transformation, life, intimacy, and play all demand both. Are we bleaching the color of life in pursuit of maintaining a self? What are we so afraid of that we hide from becoming? Life is transformation. Relating requires and changes our uniqueness. Other people providing friction and challenge—that’s a service, freely given to all at birth.

Perhaps the trap isn’t narcissism. It’s any reification of identity via any narrative frame, especially spiritual ones, designed to parade as if they’re narrative-free. And the cost is ordinary love.

Transcend and exclude often means we fall back into less maturity

I’m still trying to get my mind and language around this, so I’m going to highlight the contrast to see the phenomena more clearly. Does your coach / (AI) therapist / culture / practice help you:

• Express more gratitude? Become more forgiving? Be more accepting of others’ flaws? “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court”?
  Or say you should be treated a very particular way (reifying a victim identity?)

• Build infrastructure that’s super helpful but unsexy? Do things that are good for others without recognition? Feed those who are hungry? Do mundane things for the local whole like pick up trash that’s not yours?
  Or build a marketing funnel that will help you promote yourself and perpetuate the ‘me’ ‘me’ ‘me’ cycle? 

• Love your friends and family better? Accept being misunderstood? Show up to their events and support their successes? Take care of them when they’re sick? Be more generous? Patient, humble, respectful, loyal, temperate? Maintain commitments regardless of feelings?
  Or emphasize your in-the-moment desire above all else, calling impulsivity and self-centeredness ‘surrender’?

• Develop boundaries as expressions of love and connection? Face challenges with grace and acceptance? Take responsibility for your pain, flaws, mistakes, shadows, and limitations?
  Or use "boundaries" to control others and force them to change according to your preferences?

• Admit ignorance, learn from criticism, hold your beliefs lightly, speak simply about profound experiences, work steadily without needing dramatic breakthroughs, notice your defensive patterns without performatively announcing them, contribute to social understanding, love others as they are?
  Or position yourself as having rare insights to help others transcend their limitations through your techniques and advice?

This list can go on; I wish I could speak to the connection and community side more but I’m stuck in my own bias. 

I’m not saying it’s easy, we of course need guides, mentors, feedback–it’s so complicated! Nor am I saying its special—all of this has been said for thousands of years! I’m trying to highlight a healthy version of one pole and unhealthy versions of another on purpose to get more clarity on where we are deeply unbalanced today. This is especially true of ‘spiritual’ hotbeds like San Francisco, Boulder, Ubud, Amsterdam. Austin is somewhat counterbalanced by its Texas-ness—cowboy culture still emphasizes family, duty and sacrifice to a greater good beyond ‘you’. Plus our immigrants are a little more integrated.

What’s up with me?

Anyway, I ask myself: Why do I care?

Sure, practices purported to transcend ego instead teach self-absorption. But it’s in the name— "personal growth" and “self-help.” What’s got me?

Because I’m guilty of all of this. 

Sometimes despite my best efforts, I’ve taught people to ignore their minds in order to stay with the sensations of their bodies (rather than integrating them); to ‘surrender’ to their feelings-in-the-moment and ignore larger consequences or agreements and the greater wholes that hold them. I’ve corrected a lot of these mistakes, made amends, even evolved the practice and training. Yet I still can’t quite escape the selfishness of ‘wellness’ culture. Prime example: a couple years ago we hosted a “Give Fest” at the Relateful Studio in Austin with a reverse silent auction, where people bid on what they wanted to give to a local nonprofit. Even my wife and I didn’t follow through on what we ‘won.’

Let us redefine wellness and self-development. Let us change the metrics to gratitude, forgiveness, acceptance of our and others' flaws, showing up for family, friendship, and our greater communities. Let us celebrate unglamorous, unwitnessed interdependence.

Three alternatives: what is it all for?

Burning Man is actually a great example of a positive alternative. The economy is about gifting—and after your first year, it’s well known that to get the most out of the experience, you need to give. People camp in communities, build massive art projects and cars together, and give them freely without credit, burning them at the end. It’s all about creating for the whole, being present with each other in non-transactional relating. All of this disrupts the self-reification loops in such a way that people are consistently shaken from long held encumbrances, and come out of the desert transformed. I say this as an admirer but not a fanatic—I went to Black Rock City in 2012 and 2014, and then didn’t go again.

Relatefulness

Relatefulness, especially in Level Up ⬆’s Leadership Program and the The Relateful Coaching Training, does not fall into these problem nearly as badly as almost every other community I’ve seen. We claim our directionality of truth + love. This means the personal can’t be number one—individual expression and growth is always in service of something greater. Of course we make mistakes. (For example, the Level Up structure highlighted individualism. We’ll be returning to a cohort-only model this Fall—more on that in a future email). But we’ve done a really good job focusing on being with what is, especially relationally and communally. 

We don’t abandon compassion and honesty in service of making sure people feel seen, heard, cultivating a ‘safe space,’ or maintaining instagram-defined-trauma-therapy-norms. This is hard, because I not only want people to feel seen, heard, safe, and heal, I think it’s crucial for a healthy community and for the true pursuit of truth and love. It just needs to be in service of love/truth, rather than an end unto itself. It needs to come authentically from the moment, not as a script or status signal or performance. We run into generative friction embracing the seeming paradox of this polarity all the time, and it is incredibly demanding of our facilitators to walk this tight rope. It demands that we are always changing, individually as leaders, as a community, and even the practice itself. Even our coaching teaches revealing identity commitments, inherently making the self an object in a larger self that can choose “yes” or “no” to, versus reinforcing a self and an existing worldview.

And even as we teach people how to meta-narrate as a way to witness and disembed themselves from unconscious habits that have been running them, we recognize that the compulsion to name and categorize experiences—spiritual or otherwise—often becomes a form of conceptual possession, serving self preservation rather than self-transformation.

Frozen
The Disney movie Frozen shows another fantastic example of a healthy alternative. (I just watched the Broadway version with my kids this weekend, so it's fresh on my mind). 

In my view, the critical part of Elsa moving from “Conceal don’t reveal” to “Let it Go” is not about self-expression, it's about surrendering the need to control, particularly others’ reactions to her true nature. As a result she loves what she previously saw as her shame (her ice power), an identity transformation that eliminates the victim-perpetrator dynamic entirely and unlocks her ability to use her power for everyone’s benefit.

But of course the most incredible part is reframing the trope of “true love”—not just from romantic to familial love, but about the act of loving others. The secret that ‘healed’ Anna’s frozen heart wasn’t receiving ‘true love’ from someone else, but her performing a selfless act of true love herself. Even better, she truly loved the one who accidentally caused the curse in the first place, in a show of what I like to call “true forgiveness”—there was never any threat to love’s presence in the first place. So in some real sense, nothing to forgive. Family love, particularly love that endures despite harm, represents the ordinary, unglamorous love that doesn't depend on worthiness or reciprocity (romantic love ideally is the same, but often feels like something we need to earn or could lose). 

Oh and there’s the wonderful Olaf, as a projection of the best of Anna and Elsa’s innocence in childhood. And I love that it’s not spiritual :)
 

True spirituality isn’t spiritual (and is definitely not about ‘me’)

As usual, I’m writing this for myself as much as anyone. Can I experience states of fundamental wellbeing, help others, and act with virtue and integrity without any internal or external narration / validation? Without needing it to be spiritual development? Who would be accumulating spiritual experiences or qualities anyway, and what would they be good for if not to benefit the whole of existence?

Can all of my mastery lead me to being completely ordinary? Not needing actions to be recognized as anything, even by myself, I respond to what's in front of me without overlaying (spiritual) significance.

And can I not do that for the sake of development either? If I notice that self-referential trap, may I love myself in it and move on with the normal good stuff of living. The self-referential loop is infinite if I engage it.

Instead, let me show up lovingly for the sake of itself, because that’s what love does.

—

*Although that is a path that can work for some people like Byron Katie or Eckhart Tolle, it’s a hard one to “do” because the will that acts needs to eventually be transcended. In both of their histories, their dissolution was more done to them.

(this will be sent out to my #TTT email in a couple of days, but UpTrust gets the early exclusive ;) )

fashion is supposed to be a unique representation of your personality and image.....so why is it is homogenized? 

AMA with Liv Boeree on incentive traps, game theory, and win-wins. AMA with Liv Boeree -poker champion with a background in astrophysics here to slay Molog- & Jordan Myska Allen on incentive traps, game theory, and win-wins | UpTrust launch event | #heywait, can we do better?

Isn't It Ironic? . Don't you think? 

A little toooo ironic. 

I really do think. 

This site where we are upping trust lets users post under a pseudonym. 

Every time I see a post or comment from a pseudonym, screen name, handle, what have you, after first wondering if it's another godforsaken AI bot stealing my eyeballs away from human creations, I remember a line from the Tao Te Ching; 

To give no trust

is to get no trust. 

v.17, Lao Tzu x Ursula LeGuin 

A Future I Love is One Where I Can Be Autistic Safely. “You don’t look autistic,” I’m told as I open up about it for the first time with someone I barely know.

This conversation is familiar, considering I have it at least once a month. Thankfully, since I’m not in middle school anymore, this is no longer met with strange looks or shocked laughter; however, adults are just as messy as children – they’re just better at covering it up.

With social advocacy for everyone being newly-prevalent in our society, so many people call themselves “allies,” but never actually do the work that the term requires. Rather, the term they should use is “accomplice” – not actually calling autistic people the r-word or straight-up bullying us, but side-eyeing us when we walk by and treating us like puppies. 

Parents often believe that the minute you step foot in a university, you become more mature. However, especially for fresh-out-of-high-school students, they’re still their same high school-selves, just with an added sense of responsibility. Fortunately, I’ve been able to have accommodations in my classes that allow me frequent breaks and the ability to leave class as needed, yet some professors have seen this as a challenge:

“Elwyn, where are you going?”

“To the bathroom.” I lie. I’m about to have a panic attack and don’t want to make it everyone else’s problem.

My face is red with embarrassment as students stare at me, familiar stifled giggles ringing through my ears. It’s either to console the teacher’s feelings, making a spectacle out of myself as I apologize for interrupting his speech about American history and explain to the entire class that I’m special needs, or leave and not come back.

I take the latter.

Thus, to me, a future that I love is one where I can exist safely, where I can be seen as a person: nothing more and nothing less. Of course, as children, we are taught to “treat others how [we] want to be treated,” though we often leave out conversations surrounding those who are “different,” or, in modern terms, neurodivergent.

One way that I believe a safer future can be created for neurodivergent and Autistic individuals is through education that actually aims to teach people that we exist and are equals, rather than having materials that are a personification of “getting it over with.” Likewise, representation in children’s media is extremely important, especially for those who might not otherwise meet Autistic and other neurodivergent people in their lives. Modern television shows, such as Sesame Street and the character Julia, represent Autistic people in a way that is both educational and respectful, though significant work needs to be done.

Additionally, not only is representation important, but it is needed for neurodivergent and Autistic children. Growing up, I often did not see characters explicitly stated as neurodivergent despite having those traits, and found myself relating to them, such as Mabel from Gravity Falls or Samantha Coleman from Wii Deleted You, leading to my own sense of representation despite the characters never having been confirmed as Autistic. Autistic individuals might see shared traits in fiction and “head canon” a character to have their diagnoses, more confirmed representation is necessary for a kinder future.

While many psychologists say things along the lines of “small steps lead to big change,” it is clear that this is absolutely true – you just have to come to those conclusions yourself. In this case, though, small and seemingly insignificant things that might mean nothing to us can mean the world to someone else. As adults we can think of something as a child that shaped us, and in my case, I believed that I couldn’t go into the bathroom late at night or else Slenderman would get me. Seeing Autistic and neurodivergent characters in media and also learning about how children can treat others who might not think similarly to them, can make a necessary change in our society that creates a future that not only I would love, but other Autistic people would, too. 

#FutureYouLove

"You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”. Dennis Hightower, who at the time was head of Disney International.

He asked me why I wasn’t doing something, and I responded by explaining the pros and cons of two different ways of doing it. Thoughtfully, he replied “You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”

The best Founders avoid over-analyzing. At a startup, you don’t have time — and the result will most likely be marginal. Pick a way and do it. Be consistently decisive.

“When discourse ends, violence begins,”. From the Small Stage to Center Stage

Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA when he was just 18 years old. What started as a small group of like-minded college students grew into one of the most influential youth movements in the United States. 

Kirk traveled from campus to campus, never shying away from hard questions or loud opposition. For him, the university wasn’t a battlefield — it was a classroom where young minds could (and, more importantly, should) wrestle with ideas, disagree passionately, and still walk out the door as neighbors.

“When discourse ends, violence begins,” Kirk was fond of saying.

Charlie Kirk’s Legacy

Kirk’s death is a painful reminder that when we equate one’s political opinions with their morality, we undermine our own. When we stop listening to each other and focus solely on our differences, we lose sight of all we have in common.

America was built by people of different cultures, faiths, and colors who believed that we could live in harmony and even prosper, not because we agree on everything, but because freedom allows us to be the best version of ourselves.

That is what Charlie Kirk fought for — and what he died for.

Today, Kirk’s voice was silenced — but his message endures. 

May he rest in peace.

- The Wellness Company

Everyone should be entranced by a beautiful woman (and it's definitely not a sin). I'm sitting here about to finalize my draft for "what are holding environments and why they are important" as a deep take. I'm on my second day of bleeding and my brain doesn't work very well. 

So I'm rather going to share my deep take on my experience. 

I'm faced with a common battle for women: society follows a 24-hour clock, we function in 28-day cycles. 

I'd be happy to share more about holding environments when I'm at the end of my follicular phase. And for now, I can go on and on about how much the female cycle matters to a woman - but that's not really a deep take. 

What I think belongs to the core of the rage around this for me is the historical repetition of the dismissal of the Goddess. 

Objectification of the female body is a sacred practice, and the current cultural waves of deeming female objectification as a sin is disconnecting us to spirit, aliveness and connection. 

When we're not allowed to objectify the woman, we rob ourselves from the experience of touching the divine in her. 

To put it simple: the woman body offers the masculine the potency to penetrate the divine, and the feminine to surrender to it. (This is the mystery of the dance between the feminine and the masculine.)

There's a currently such a huge split between spirituality and sexuality. And this is just one part of a greater trend of splitting God from matter.

I think we need to thread through a forest full of rage, grief, resentment and fear before we're even close to seeing the woman and men for they truly are. And in an age where we value the wisdom of the mind to the degree that we're even experimenting with leaving the body entirely to upload the mind- I do think we collectively are living as far away as almost possible to the understanding and the experience as spirit as matter and matter as spirit. 

I think this is the reason why we can rape the earth on a daily basis. And also why it's common practice to treat birth as a "medical event". 

And I'm not blaming men or the "patriarchy" for this - I actually think the problem lives in the source and women has their name on this to be reclaimed. 

Prostitution was seen as sacred in ancient times - women and men alike went to temple priestesses to awaken to the Goddess, to find personal development, to mature, to find aliveness, to balance the barrenness of daily life. 

In this split, it's like we're living in contemporary personas, never fully realizing the depth of aliveness available to us. 

The potential depth is so fully present in any presentation of the image of the sacred prostitute. Images that includes wide hips, circular breasts, a provocative form, a reassuring presence, so fertile she would bless the earth with her reproductions. 

And I honestly think the very reason we're disinclined to associate that which is sexual to that which is divine, is also the cause of the separation we all feel between nature and humans, mind and body, individual and collective. 

It all starts with women honoring their body - not just following their cycles, but fully revering themselves as sacred: engaging in rituals, temple spaces, red tents, celebration of eros,  celebrating other women in their goddess form, experiencing the joyous experience of the female body and it's multi-orgasmic nature, and preparing us to be worshipped as the Goddess we naturally embody. 

Women need to embrace the ancient Sacred Prostitute to bridge the gap between spirit and matter in today's world.

I will end with a poem I found in the book "Sacred Prostitute"

For I am the first and the last 
I am the honored one and the scorned one. 
I am the whore and the holy one. 
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter. 
I am the members of my mother . . . . 
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
 and the idea whose rememberance is frequent
 I am the voice whose sound is manifold
 and the word whose appearnce is multiple
 I am the utterance of my name
 - "The thunder, Perfect mind" 

Our Experience of Gender is Caught in a Drama Triangle. My contribution to the #DeepTakes event is an experience I find really alienating and lonely on a personal level and I see it playing out culturally in a way that seems to impact everyone I know (and obviously huge swaths of people I don't).To express what I am seeing in this context I first have to explain a little bit about what I mean when I invoke the concept of a Drama Triangle.

The Drama Triangle is a social model of human interaction proposed by psychiatrist Stephen Karpman. It suggests that in circumstances where conflict arises and individuals are reactive to rather than present with that conflict there is a tendency to assign three roles: victim, hero, and villain.The victim role is characterized by fear and helplessness, the hero role is characterized by righteousness and some attempt to act as a saviour for the victim, and the villain role is characterized by blame (of self or others).

What is most important to me about this model is not how it points out that this dynamic often emerges in the context of conflict, but how it reveals that the dynamic is unconscious, volatile, and misleading. When the dynamic arises, it is typically through some invisible collusion that the roles are assigned and they remain implicit rather than being consciously claimed by the individuals involved. As a result of the unconscious nature of the dynamic, the roles are unstable - individuals often end up switching between these three roles as implicitly and unconsciously as the same roles initially emerged. Regardless of how the roles are assigned at any given moment, they obscure something true about each individual involved - victims are actually agentic and accountable for their own experiences, heroes are not moral authorities nor are they responsible for victims' experiences, and villains are not sole causes of the conflicts arising between them and their hero/victim counterparts.

I've explained this concept in the context of a conflict arising between individuals but, when it comes to gender, I am seeing the same dynamic play out in broader cultural conflicts between and within gendered groups. Probably the clearest example I can provide is how conflict between capital W-Women and capital M-Men has given rise to a drama triangle. For longer than I've been around there has been a broad, complex cultural claim that society is structured in such a way that Women are inherently victims and Men are inherently Villains. The specter of a Hero arises from this dynamic in many forms; activist groups are perhaps the clearest examples but it is also interesting to see how women/men may belong to the group role of victim/villain yet act in the role of the hero on an individual level if they can be seen as acting out any sort of protection, vengeance, etc. in reaction to to the Story of Women's Victimhood.

In my own experience relating to men, the cultural phenomenon of this Drama Triangle has been profoundly unhelpful! The dynamic sets a cultural precedent that looms over any conflict that arises between me and a man in my life - as tension emerges in our connection our difference in gender pulls this cultural lens into place such that there is a shared apprehension that I will be assigned the victim role and he will be assigned the villain role. What a mess! As if staying present with tension and orienting toward love and truth isn't enough of a task already! From here there are plenty of ways we squirm together - maybe we both preemptively try to promise we are not the victim/the villain, maybe I'll try to put him in the victim role or he'll try to put me in the villain role, maybe one of us will scramble to be the hero. All unconscious, unhelpful strategies to navigate an unconscious, unhelpful cultural script. I am getting a headache just writing about it.

Trust me, I wish this dynamic only loomed over my connections with men in my life. On the contrary, the way this Drama Triangle twists up my relationships with other women may actually be even more damaging - it's a tough race to call. In my connections with women the cultural precedent of the Drama Triangle still creates a shared apprehension but in this context the apprehension is that we are both victims and that we agree that men are villainous. Now I could gesture at the various ways in which this has been awkward and disconnecting in my relationships with other women but frankly, there is one stand out context which I see as the likely root of my deep resentment motivating this deep take.

I have had difficult situations with bad outcomes (ranging from deep emotional wounds to physical/sexual assaults) arise in my connections with men in my life. From the very earliest of these challenging experiences, it has been very important to me to integrate these experiences in ways that protect and strengthen my capacity to have healthy, loving relationships with men. I faced profound difficulty finding women who were able to support me in integrating my experiences this way rather than imposing the Drama Triangle on my situation, villainizing the men involved, and seeking to either play out the Hero role by saving me or pressuring me to join them in the victim role as a fellow woman. I have severed friendships, fired therapists, and generally opted out of "women's spaces" to protect myself from this because to the extent that I have ever seen myself as the victim of difficult situations with men it has been intolerable! My experience of the victim role was catastrophic for my self esteem, ruinous for my romantic relationships, and completely spiritually backward. I really really hate it.

Obviously I can't say as much about how this dynamic impacts men's relationships with one another but I do see men face pressure from women to take on the hero role by confronting other men as villains in their community. I've also had multiple men open up to me about the way that they've internalized the cultural role of Men as Villains and alienated them from their own sexualities, ambitions, boundaries etc. through a narrative that they are inherently creepy, greedy, controlling, etc. Although I don't seem to attract men who respond by trying to claim the victim role for themselves in my personal life, I am certainly aware of the "Manosphere" where the subcultural norm is to invert the cultural script and see men as the victim of women who perpetuate the myth of their own victimhood as a power grab and manipulation at mens' expense.

Now more than ever before it seems especially clear that gender non-conforming individuals are also deeply impacted by the way the binary gendered experience is captured by the Drama Triangle. While this impact is complex and multi-faceted, I'll offer an over-simplification here which I see as gesturing to a very prominent thread of impact for these communities. Non-binary and Trans people often seem to me to be implicitly collapsed into the same group role as Women or Men so that the existing cultural script can fit them into the Drama Triangle without much modification.

My social circles and information channels tend toward treating gender non-conforming groups as analogous to Women and implicitly assumes that they too are inherently victims of Men and assenting to this categorization puts "Us" (whoever we may be) in the hero role. Given my own impact of internalizing the message that I am a victim of Men, I have a strong projection that gender nonconforming people are actually greatly disadvantaged by the imposition of this lens and in my own relationships with gender non-conforming people in my life, the apprehension that they are victims and I ought to be heroic about it makes me act kinda weird. I feel an inflated sense of responsibility for their feelings and end up walking on egg shells around them in a way that doesn't feel true to me at all. This is something I really wanna work on in these relationships but, just like in my relationships with men and women, I deeply resent the added weight of the Drama Triangle as it shows up for me here.

Similar to the Manosphere example, I don't have much first hand experience of the corresponding culture which collapses gender non-conforming people in with Men but it is on my radar that there are people who see Women as victims of Non-binary and Trans People. This dynamic tends to rigidly impose the existing gender binary against the autonomy of gender non-conforming people and conclude that AMAB gender non-conforming people are trying to cheat their way into Women's Sacred Victimhood and AAFB gender non-conforming people are abandoning their sisters to escape Women's Sacred Victimhood and that whole narrative is unspeakably yucky to me in so so many ways.

There exist at least a couple of "answers" to the Drama Triangle that offer possible healthy responses to this unhealthy dynamic. Choy's "Winner's Triangle" suggests softening the helplessness, righteousness, and blame of the victim, hero, and villain into vulnerability, care, and assertiveness, respectively. Emerald's "Empowerment Dynamic" suggests swapping the victim role for the creator, characterized by a reclaiming of personal power, swapping the hero for the coach, characterized by the facilitation of the creator's self-empowerment, and swapping the villain for the challenger, characterized by the capacity to call others to action.

Imagine me shouting to the sky and shaking my fists when I write how strongly I would prefer a cultural norm that experimented with these approaches (or invented new ones) in context where conflict arises and gendered experiences are implicated. I've been taking my own baby steps in my relationships with men, women, and gender non-conforming folks, but I come to you all hoping for help to foster awareness and openness to new norms in our community. I deeply believe if we could make our great escape from the Drama Triangle and reclaim our experience of life in a world with genders it would be miraculously transformative for our relationships with ourselves, our intimate partners, our friends and family, and the world at large.