andre (my precious precious partner woman) and i went to therapy today. it was our second visit to dossie easton. she co-wrote the ethical slut, that polyamory bible of bibles. it is interesting to meet the woman who, by example, taught us all how to be sluts. she’s middle-aged or older, with a very sweet face and kind eyes, dressed in a long brown skirt and a sweater. she really could be any kind of therapist at all or somebody’s mother or a little baby’s grandmother. not necessarily the wild fantastical deviant that we know she is.

she welcomed us into a room full of comfy seating arrangements, curled into a big brown cube of a chair, tucks a foot under her rear, and encouraged us to take our shoes off and make ourselves at home.

andre and i did our best at nestling into a corner of the couch and looked at dossie as if praying she would have all the answers. we are still uncertain here of how to be or what to say or where to go. thankfully, dossie asked us a question. she asked us to talk about how conflict was dealt with in the places where we grew up.

in the little room we spoke of our families, and abuse, and violence. i spoke of cutting my wrists. did you know i used to do that? to reach for the bare blade of an exacto-knife for comfort, to make manifest in my flesh the wounds my psyche received daily, to dissociate, to control the pain. i traveled home to tell this story, the home of the thirteen year old me, the fifteen, the six, the eight. i hid in my room, back against the door, my knees drawn tight to my chest, the daily onslaught of harsh and cruel words clawing through the door, my hands over my ears, my body rocking, my teeth tight together, ‘i don’t believe her, i don’t believe her, i don’t believe i am that evil.’

dossie asked me if my mother ever hit me. i told her that she didn’t much, occasionally when i was young. she did choke me, once. lifted me up off the ground with it. i must have been about fourteen. i can still feel her fingers around my neck.

i forgot about the ever-present threat of physical violence:

“stop crying or i’ll give you something to cry about.”

“i brought you into this world and i can take you out of it.”

i spoke of the “don’t raise your voice to me” policy. i was never allowed to raise my voice to my mother, though she did yell and scream at me, call me names, and blame my actions for her never-ending anger. upset at the way adults do this, dossie said: you can always find something a child is doing to get upset about, to empty your bucket of bile upon.

i forgot the second half of my mother’s phrase, though i can hear it in my ear as if she were standing over me nose pointing down, anger radiating from her body: “don’t raise your voice to me. i’m not your kid.” as if it was alright to abuse your offspring. as if that’s what they’re there for. she used the word kid like one might say slave. i forgot to tell dossie about that. she would say that week after week, month after month, year upon year. it infuriated me, turned me into one long scream of “how dare you!” that i could not utter, because i was not allowed to talk back.

i swallowed my anger, never addressed it directly with the direct source of it, because that would only draw me back into a situation of bludgeoning.

this is how we dealt with conflict.

i’m thinking about it now--the repression of my voice, the notion that i’m supposed to just sit there, quiet, and take it as i am bruised and beaten bloody black and blue with someone’s violent words. how that training of silence affects me even now, when i’m allowed to speak, but don’t have any true grasp of how to articulate my anger (or disagreement or whatever). i learned to grow upset rather than angry. they seem to me two different ways of dealing with the same situation, either take it internally as hurt or send it outward as anger. i sent everything into myself. i hurt. i wept.

i traveled home. speaking of these things took me to that place. my memory of how it all felt is so vivid, i step into that young ariana in pain, my body tense and heart sore. i felt disoriented, and afterwards, it was difficult to return from that place.

my lover, in her turn, spoke of her parents’ violent interactions, the ways she was abused in her nursery school, and of her internment in an adolescent mental institution which was run by a set of individuals that the current head of that hospital’s psych ward refers to as “evil, evil men,” who apparently were running an incredibly lucrative money-making scam at the hospital, making tons and tons of money off the adolescent psych ward, keeping as many kids in there as long as they possibly could and keeping them doped up on as many drugs as possible. “there were so many kids down there,” she said, “that some were sleeping in the day room.” according to the current head of the place, that “was the darkest period of time in the hospital’s history,” and they no longer have an adolescent psych ward because of it.

dossie tells us that we’re going to be working on sort of an exorcism of ghosts—discover the things from our past which are still affecting us and meddling with our happiness today (those’ll be the places where our buttons are, she says), work on them, and then release them.

i was pleased. it sounded like an excellent plan to me.

later that night, my partner speaks to me of the intensity of listening to the two of us talk in detail about the conflict and abuse in our pasts. though things have been impossibly hard and difficult between us, given our painful pasts full of trauma and nowhere anywhere a good example of how to be loving or peaceful or how to resolve conflicts, my lover woman (with an air of ‘we should be proud), she says to me, it’s truly a wonder, isn’t it, that we can even function at all.