361 - More Than Words by John Howard
Connection first
John Howard, internationally recognized therapist, wellness expert, educator, and author of More Than Words: The Science of Deepening Love and Connection in Any Relationship, which was released February 1, 2022. John has joined us for this episode to discuss his book and approach to using the latest science to help people strengthen their relationships.
Throughout this episode, John touches on the following topics:
Connecting first and communicating second, particularly when one or both people are neurodivergent or where reading unspoken cues is inaccessible or not a strength.
The nervous system and relationships and how often the speed of a response is paramount to showing that a partner is understanding and accommodating of your needs, and how it relates to things like long distance relationships, secondary ones, comet relationships, etc. in polyamory.
Self-awareness, enhanced communication, and tracking as three essential things for polyamorous relationships to function securely.
Boundaries, rules, and agreements and his take on them.
What a “culture of practice” looks like to him when developing relationship skills.
Why it is so important to learn how to talk about emotions with your partners.
Find more about John on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. More Than Words can be purchased from any book retailer, but if you buy it from getmorethanwords.com, you also get access to some bonus material!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we are talking with Therapist John Howard about his new book, More Than Words. John Howard is an internationally recognized therapist, wellness expert, and educator who uses the latest science to help couples have stronger relationships. He is the host of The John Howard Show, a wellness podcast, and the creator of the Ready Set Love® series of online programs for couples. John is a Cuban American whose first language is Spanish and thus prioritizes diversity and inclusion, drawing on multicultural influences from years of traveling and studying indigenous traditions.
Emily: Welcome to the show, John. Thank you so much for being here.
John: It's a pleasure and an honor. Thank you so much for having me.
Emily: Excellent. Just to start off, can you talk a little bit about yourself and how you got into your line of work? I know there's a lot of things just even besides you being a therapist and an author, you have a lot of things going on in your world. Let's talk about that a bit.
John: Sure. I was just broken as a kid. I did not live with my parents. I was neglected a lot. People didn't play with me. I went to school early. I was smaller than everybody. I didn't speak English. I had a lot of trouble making friends. I was a very anxious kid. I carried a stuffed animal to school. I had a lot of issues, and I did not grow up around people or in a family that really understood emotional support or mental health support. I have this very distinct feeling that I remember as a kid of just feeling very, very alone.
I was raised by my Cuban grandmother who died when I was nine, and everybody around me thought it best to simply not talk about it. The person who raised me essentially disappeared, and I didn't know how to process that. I didn't have anybody to talk to. By the time I woke up to what had happened to me, I was 15, 16. I left home. I just went looking for a better life, and I didn't really meet people who were into personal growth until I was 18 or so.
That began a healing process and is why I became a therapist, why I'm so interested in relationships and connection. There's so many people out there that feel disconnected, alone, and isolated, and have no one to talk to about it. Part of my work is to really reach people and also reach decision-makers in society and see if we can shift priorities a little bit to say, "Hey, talking about relationships and connection and love and support really matters, and it's a really key part of mental health."
Emily: That's excellent. Very cool. We do also want to get into your book, which just came out February 1st. It's called More Than Words: The Science of Deepening Love and Connection in Any Relationship. Right off the bat, the very first thing that you say in this book is that connection is in and communication is out, so that's very different than what a lot of people out there say regarding just relationships in general and the way that people look at relationships and relationship self-help books, things like that. Can you talk about the reasoning behind that?
John: Yes. I'm stepping on a lot of toes by design. What's fun and interesting about the new neuroscience of both mental health and relationships is just it's breaking, how many myths it's busting, how many ideas it's revising that have even been held in the field of psychology for a long time. We thought communication was really the ticket to healthy relationships, but the reason why we believe that is because communication theory was all the rage in the 1970s in the field of psychology.
It populated a lot of relationship self-help books that are still popular today. It spread this information through academia, into textbooks, and into classes. It's taken a while to work our way out of that framework, but neuroscience is very clear. We've had this science for the last 15 years or so, that what the brain is mostly concerned with in relationships is the sense of safety and security. We want to feel relaxed, we want to know somebody has our back.
We want to know that we're going to be emotionally supported and that someone cares about us much more than we care about thoughts and ideas and concepts and the detail of the stuff we talk about day-to-day. This is why people get crossways in their relationships a lot, is they're trying to rely on communication to bridge differences, and communication is a pretty inefficient tool.
It's usually just more annoying when we're actually talking about our differences because then you introduce differences of perspective on those differences, and it's just layer after layer of stuff that doesn't quite fit. If you take the time to get connected first, nervous system to nervous system, primitive brain to primitive brain, then all kinds of goodwill opens up. We're willing to open our minds to understand stuff and to bridge across different ideas.
Dedeker: Would you say that it's almost looking at it of connection is necessary before we can even start thinking about communication?
John: Yes. In our culture, we are taught to communicate to connect. That's because we elevate logic and rationality in modern Western society, but the reality is the nervous system much prefers to connect in order to communicate.
A simple test of that is when you're hanging out with your best friend, it doesn't really matter if they screw up in the way they say things, you still buy the goodwill in that relationship, and you're going to forgive them easily and move on. When you're with someone you don't really trust, they give you the creeps.
You're like, "Eh, I don't know. I don't feel totally secure with this person." It doesn't really matter how good their communication skills are. You're still going to be suspicious of what's going on. That's because the nervous system is designed to track these very subtle signals that determine how safe we feel with someone.
Dedeker: Can you lay out what that might look like then for someone who's maybe in a traditional relationship with their partner, maybe thinking about tackling a difficult conversation, or wanting to share something with their partner, wanting to I guess "connect" in the way that we think about on that day-to-day basis in a relationship? What would that approach entail, what are the logistics of how we're actually connecting before communicating? What does that look like?
John: Part of it is being in the moment and paying attention because, when we get verbal and heady, we lose track of what's happening in the moment, and we lose track of nonverbal cues. It's a little bit like a meditation. If you're landing in the moment and you're paying attention to yourself and your partner's body language, eyes, face, tone of voice, nonverbal expressions, you're going to be able to take care of each other in the moment and not get so lost in the content.
When I say connect to communicate, what I mean is connect yourselves by taking care of the process, making sure you're relaxed, you feel good, you feel secure, you feel like you have each other's back. Then focus on the fancy content and ideas that you're trying to share. If you lose the connection, come back to it. Use physical proximity, use touch, use body language, use your tone of voice, and use eye contact to get it back.
Dedeker: I'm trying to piece together just the image of this. If you were, let's say coaching or working with a couple who's working through conflict or working through some kind of insecurity, what are the things that you're coaching people to do? It sounds like making eye contact, making physical touch. What other things are you encouraging people to do before they open their mouths?
John: Have a safety mindset. A lot of people aren't really tracking how secure the people in the interaction field. They're too focused on their ideas and what they're trying to share. If I have a couple in my office and they're getting crossways in their communication, very often what I have them do is stop talking for a bit, move in closer, and touch, maybe hold hands, or hug each other, soften their face, soften their eyes, and telegraph connecting signals through those nonverbal channels because what you're trying to do essentially is put their nervous system at ease before you go back to a dicey topic.
If you keep trying to negotiate it with words and language, people typically just get elevated in their threat response. They get more frustrated, more annoyed. Then you lose the interaction altogether and you start arguing. Learning how to connect in simpler ways, nervous system to nervous system, and then go back to what you're talking about.
Emily: We have gotten questions regarding this specifically
like what this would look like, what you're talking about it with a neurodivergent couple, for example, or where one or both partners are neurodivergent and where reading unspoken cues is perhaps not something that is inaccessible or it's not a strength. What are your thoughts on that specifically?
John: Individuals and couples like that need to know how to connect because they may not be able to read subtle cues or emotional information on the face or in the tone. Very important that they not just rely on language and concepts, which can easily get people in trouble but that they learn how to use physical proximity and touch, very simple nonverbal cues that say, "I love you, you're my person, I'm friendly, we're here together, we're here for each other."
For example, sitting close and holding hands doesn't take a lot of emotional EQ or reading ability but it sends a very important signal to the nervous system. If you're having trouble reading cues, and you sit at a distance of three feet and try to negotiate that interaction, you're going to miss so much because now you're relying on concepts that have to fly through the air and the interpretation of those. A lot of times the simple moves help not only neurodiverse individuals but really all of us communicate very obviously, "I'm here for you, you're safe with me."
The nervous system really needs those obvious cues. As you guys know, the brain tends to skew negative by default. In the absence of obvious information, that we're good, we're friendly, we're safe, the brain is going to keep assuming the negative and looking for signs that it should be cautious. I really love it when partners give each other these very clear, obvious signals. They slow down, they don't multitask, they hold hands, they look in each other's eyes, "I love you, I care about you, I'm here for you." Okay, now we can sink into that moment and go into fancier stuff.
Dedeker: Yes, so I have a question arising about what you find are the most common obstacles for people being able to do this. I think piggybacking off of Emily bringing up the neurodivergence thing, I also think about trauma, especially very physically encoded trauma. I know for some of my clients, encouraging them to touch each other and give those physical safety cues is very, very effective and really works to help bring down that charge and calm down the nervous system.
For other people, if they have a history of trauma, either with that particular partner or just with a previous partner, things like that, sometimes forcing the touch is very much more activating and much more destabilizing. That's just one scenario that I thought of but I'm curious, in addition to that, like, are there common things that you see that gets in the way of people being able to do this and connect in this particular way?
John: Yes, I'm so glad you brought that up because there are people with a trauma history for whom eye contact and physical proximity and touch are going to be disconnecting rather than connecting. What you have to do in terms of applying this information is know your person. You can't just get super close and start staring at someone if they're sensitive in that way. That's going to cause a threat response within them. This is why even those of us that have some relationship skills are never fully prepared for the unique relationship that we're in.
You have to learn your people, you have to adapt everything to who you're with. If you know that someone is sensitive to touch, for example, a lot of people don't really like to be touched that much or they don't like to be touched unexpectedly. If you know that about your person, you have to adapt these techniques to create safety with that person. The bottom line is you're trying to increase a sense of safety and security in both people's nervous systems. You don't want to make a move just because the book says eye contact is good, or touch is good.
These are general pieces of advice that are going to work for a lot of people but any specific relationship, that might not be the right move. For example, eye contact is not appropriate in a lot of cultures, not because of trauma, but simply because it's not a normal social move even in a partner relationship. Just because we know eye contact can be connecting doesn't mean it's going to be in every culture or in every relationship. Now, I will say that for most people, what is disconnecting is the absence of these cues.
It's the absence of touch, it's the absence of eye contact, it's the absence of physical proximity, it's the absence of being aware of your tone of voice, right? It's important to study these markers because most of the time, we're missing opportunities for connection by not leveraging those primitive cues that the nervous system needs. Having said that, if you have a partner with a trauma history, if you're sensitive in some ways, you do need to adapt these cues to make sure they are creating safety in your relationship.
Dedeker: Yes, reminds me this still face experiment which is like videos I send to my clients all the time that really, really drives that home. I just wanted to highlight, I love that you said that about how even if you have relationship skills, you don't necessarily come in prepared for the relationship that you're in. That's a really, really interesting way of thinking about it, and so true.
John: Yes, I really think it's important for people to know that because so many people don't feel they're ready for a great relationship. They're working on themselves, they're like, "Okay, I'm going to be ready soon, there's just a few things I'm working on, I'm in therapy, I'm getting my career together." When I hear that, I always remind people, "You're never going to be ready for the relationship you get into."
Relationships are a key part of your personal growth process. Don't wait too long, just start creating healthier relationships with your friends and family members. Let yourself be available for the people that show up because individually, you're never going to be perfectly ready for anyone. There's always an adaptation process you have to go through in any relationship.
Jase: Something that we talk about a lot is meta-communication, is communicating about your communicating. It seems like that applies here, too, with some of what you're talking about of coming back around to communicating but communicating about that connecting, or what feels good to me, what feels safe, what state am I in right now especially if you and the other person are on the same page about, "We both want this connection. We're both aware this is important so that we can have better conversations." We also need to communicate with each other about how to best do that. It's almost like a cycle between communication and connection that could get started there.
John: Yes, personally, I love meta-communication but not everybody does, it's annoying to some people. The term I would use instead is meta-awareness. We want to be aware of how an interaction feels. Does it feel safe? Are we relaxed? Are we enjoying ourselves? If not, why not? Not just meta-communication because for some people, talking about how you're talking feels alienating from the topic that they're really wanting to get to.
Like if somebody wants to talk about how they're managing money, or parenting issues, or cleanliness, and you stop them and say, "Well, first, we need to talk about how we're talking before we can even get to that topic," a lot of people started to feel put off, they started to get annoyed, they get impatient. They're like, "Can we just talk about something."
Personally, I love that because it creates an opportunity to create more safety in the interaction. I also know that not everybody takes to it that way.
One way to get around that is to say, "Let's have an awareness of how we feel in this interaction. If any of us starts to feel stressed or overwhelmed, let's pause and do something different.
Let's rub each other's shoulders, let's massage each other's hands. Let's take a walk, let's make some tea. Let's do something that's connecting and then come back to it." If the verbal communication is already a little bit activating, going into a meta-communication about that can be additionally activating. Sometimes people need the opposite, which is like to not talk or de-stress in a more physical way.
Dedeker: Sure, that makes a lot of sense. Still speaking about the nervous system here, in the second chapter of your book, you talk about how often the speed of a response to a partner is paramount to showing that your partner is understanding, accommodating of your needs. Can you first talk about that a little bit more and then I have a follow-up question?
John: This is so interesting from the neuroscience of relationships because what couples generally argue about is things like, "I'm clean and you're not. I'm a strict parent and you're too forgiving. I'm a spender and you're a saver. I like sex twice a day, and you like it once a week." These are the things a lot of couples are arguing about. The reality is that connection does not hinge on those things. Connection really hinges on deeper level cues that the nervous system is measuring to determine safety and security.
Parenting differences is like a higher-order conceptual thing, right? We have to get into the realm of ideas to talk about that. The nervous system doesn't really care so much about that. In fact, when it feels safe and secure, people navigate these differences pretty easily. You take a spender and a saver, well, if they don't feel connected, they're going to argue constantly but when they do feel connected, they actually trust that these differences can be managed and they have much more skill. What's interesting about speed of response is it's one of those things that actually affects the nervous system, and therefore it affects connection.
Speed of response is essentially the nervous system measuring how long it takes someone to pay attention to us. If I try to get your attention and it takes four to five seconds for you to look up from your email, well, my nervous system has been measuring that entire time in milliseconds how long that took because, in a safety and security situation, that's too long.
I need to know that my people are there for me immediately if I need something not four or five seconds later. The whole time that you're spending, finishing up what you're doing, writing that text, finishing your social media post, or whatever, and then you turn your attention to your partner. That's a faux pa in relationship that a lot of people don't realize, is the nervous system wants to know that people are immediately responsive.
That's a security feature that's important to partnership. The right move there is when your partner seeks your attention, stop what you're doing immediately and turn your attention to your partner. Do this even if you're on the phone talking to someone. Say, Hold on a second, my partner needs something. Hold on a second, my partner's asking me a question.
What that does in your relationship is it elevates your partnership to the highest priority and it makes everybody feel good. Now I know I can get your attention anytime I need it. I'm not wondering if I'm more important than Facebook or not. There's a lot of people right now wondering about all the things that seem more important than them to the relationship. That really shouldn't be a question the nervous system has to ask.
Dedeker: Yes, that's really interesting. I think, ages ago on the show, we talked about phubbing a little bit, the phone snubbing, I guess, which is the term for it. I think it's just that it seems like it's not even going so far as I'm going to completely ignore my partner for the sake of scrolling on my phone but it seems like there is something almost like that middle ground there where it is that I'm going to take just long enough to break away from my phone in order to pay attention to my partner. That still carries this negative impact.
John: It does. Unfortunately, we get neither side. We end up in this dysfunctional gray zone. We're not really feeding the relationship, we're making a statement about how important our partner is and we're not really giving full attention to what we're trying to finish either. It's really important to send that message of you come first person in my life that I'm sharing my life with, and everything else comes second because when the nervous system believes that and feels that it relaxes.
You make the relationship much more secure. You can always turn to your partner and say, "Yes, what is it? If it can wait, I'd like to finish this email first," but your partner typically has a trump card to say, "It can't wait, I need you now." That's okay.
Dedeker: My follow up question then is thinking about all the I guess I'll call them more "modern-day complications" that get in the way of this, not just all of us being glued to our phones, but things like long-distance relationships or how in much more increasingly we're having to rely on text to stay in touch with our partners throughout the day.
Then of course, also, roping in things like non-monogamous relationships where there's maybe multiple partners where it's not always clear who needs to be priority number one in this particular moment, that we're juggling a sense of I need both of my partners or all my partners to know that they are a priority and I can't always necessarily default. What are your thoughts about that?
John: People who are poly open, or bringing in a third might elicit some threat responses from the attachment system. That's okay. That's not a reason to not pursue those relationship orientations. You just have to be aware that there might be a sense of threat posed by the presence of another person in those arrangements. If we take devices, for example, media is designed to draw us in and grab our attention. We get addicted to social, we get addicted to our phones, we get addicted to TV commercials.
Everything is designed to really pull in our attention. We have to be very disciplined to guard against that, otherwise, we're susceptible to it, we just get sucked in. How do we be disciplined? We have to keep reminding ourselves, "My partner comes first, my relationships come first, my family comes first. My kids come first, my friends come first before all this other stuff that is trying to draw me in."
That same discipline matters when you're in a poly relationship, open, or any type of non-monogamous relationship, you have to know what your relationship needs in order to feel secure. Now, this is different for every relationship. Generally speaking, there's three things I think are really necessary for poly and open relationships to succeed but they're not true for every relationship.
In some relation friendships, people don't really care about having a primary. They're just happy and willing to share life with a number of people that are all of equal importance. They don't really feel a need to have a primary attachment figure, but if you're in a relationship where there is a primary and you're trying to develop secure attachment with that person, well, then you have to negotiate thirds, and your poly orientation and your open lifestyle with a few features to make sure it doesn't compete.
Emily: What are those three things that you talk about and you discuss this in your book that there are three factors that allow non-monogamous relationships to function securely?
John: Yes. Now what's really interesting about this, and you guys probably know since you work in this area is there's not a whole ton of research on open and poly relationships compared to committed monogamous relationships. When I started working in this area, it was actually hard to find well-done research that's been done on populations that are engaged in those lifestyles. One of the things I did was I started calling my colleagues around the country, established and experienced couples therapists whose opinions I trust.
I started asking them, "Hey, are you seeing poly and open couples and what are you seeing? What are you noticing?" Now, what's interesting is there were two responses that I got back from almost everyone. One was, "Yes, I'm seeing them and they seem to have better communication and more self-awareness, and more maturity than the monogamous couples I see."
That's pretty cool and that goes against what a lot of people think which is that open and poly couples are a mess and they're chaotic and not so according to most couples therapists, not most but at least the people I spoke to who are good at their craft. What they notice is a higher level of maturity, self-awareness and communication skills in these relationships.
The other thing they said was also really interesting which is I don't see a whole lot of them work out. In some cases, I asked, "Can you put a percentage on that?" Usually, the percentage was somewhere around 5% or so of poly and open couples they see end up at some point not working out.
Emily: Are these people that tend to be monogamous first and then opening up the relationships or that started off as polyamorous and then are continuing that journey together, or is it something else? What is the configuration setup that you found?
John: That I don't know because it's not like this was an organized research study or anything but it made me curious about, well, what are the factors that help poly and open couples be successful over time because I kept hearing these really low success rates. One of the things we do know is that if there is a low success rate, it's in part because there's low social support for these types of relationships.
When people don't feel like they can talk about their poly and open relationship, when they feel stigmatized by their friends and neighbors, when they're not seeking support from family members, or they're not going into therapy, because they're not sure the therapist is going to be friendly to their arrangement. That lack of structural support is one of the reasons why it's harder to pull off those types of relationships.
We used to see that a lot and still do with same-sex couples where they don't necessarily access the same level of support that a hetero couple might, and it's an issue. It contributes to poor outcomes in some cases. The three things that I think really matter to help poly and open couples be successful when they're trying to have a secure relationship, whatever it is that means to them is number 1, usually, these couples need to have above-average self-awareness.
Ideally, all the people in the relationship would have above-average self-awareness. Why? Because you have to know where your boundaries are, you have to know what's okay and what's not okay. You have to know what you're feeling about something and you have to be able to express those emotions. How do you possibly do that if you're not tuned into yourself if you don't know what really affects you, if you don't know what's okay and what's not okay.
In order to set the boundaries appropriately, you have to know yourself pretty well. You have to have a high level of individual maturity to say, "Well, these things really matter to me, these things don't. These things affect me, these things make me sad, these things make me feel scared. These things threaten me and these other things don't." A lot of people don't have that level of self-awareness and maturity. I think that's one reason why sometimes poly and open relationships don't make it long term is because you're really asking for people to be more mature to navigate that type of arrangement. Second I think people need above-average communication skills. In other words, they have to be talking actively
about their lifestyle, about what feels good, what doesn't. They can't put this on autopilot. They have to be able to communicate how they're going to approach this arrangement and they have to be able to do that with a level of skill and maturity that's uncommon honestly.
I think you see it more in same-sex couples. As a therapist, gay and lesbian couples and queer couples tend to have better open communication. For example, when they're attracted to someone it's not such a taboo topic to say, "Oh, I'm attracted to that person. I wonder what we should do about that." That's often a taboo topic in hetero couples. It's like that if you're going to bring in a third or be poly or open, you have to be willing to openly communicate your desires, your attractions, your preferences, your kinks, your turnons.
That's not that common of a skillset. That's something that people really have to work toward and practice. The third thing is people have to monitor because what happens is even if you think this lifestyle is for you, based on your preferences. When you implement it is when you're really going to find out how it feels. It's very hard to predict the emotional reality of operating as a poly or an open couple until you're living that life and feeling the emotions that come from that.
What I mean by monitoring is you can't just decide to be open and then that's it. Then everybody goes off and, and does what they want. You have to actually monitor how it's feeling. Do we need to shift these boundaries? Do we need to tweak them? Do we need to change them? Like, "Oh, you went on a date last night and I thought that was going to feel okay but when you were out, I realized how hard that was for me and how threatened I feel and how scared I felt.
We need to slow down. We need to talk. We need to prepare more. We need to talk about what kinds of dates you're going on with who. I'm going to need more emotional preparation for those types of events." Monitoring allows you to tweak as you go, which is really a key part of making sure these lifestyles are not threatening to the security you're trying to establish.
Dedeker: I think that echos something we talk about a lot on the show, which is about being experimental, but the fact that sunset clauses on agreements are your friend and of course always an encouraging that, that checking back in and checking back in regularly even for people who have been nonmonogamous for 20 years, it's still good to have that check-in process to see how things are shifting and changing for sure.
Jase: We're going to go on to talk about some other things, some about nonmonogamy, as well as talking about boundaries, rules, agreements, and getting more into some of this research. First, we're going to take a quick break to talk about some of the ways you can support this show and keep this content coming to all of you out there for free.
Emily: All right. We're back and we're continuing our conversation with John Howard. We'll talk a lot on the show about boundaries and rules and agreements, as you mentioned, all of those things are definitely in any relationship, really important to establish, but definitely in non-monogamous relationships as well. Can you discuss your specific take on those things and what you talk about in the book?
John: Sure. In any non-monogamous arrangement, it's really important to know yourself and to know what feels okay, what doesn't, when it comes to rules and boundaries, and so on. I think the point that I would stress is how important it is to do that collaboratively not just at the individual level, because in any relationship, regardless of the type of relationship it is, what's really hard for people is merging life and perspective with another person. This is why security often gets threatened in relationships.
It's not necessarily because of the relationship orientation meaning are we monogamous or are we open, are we poly? That's not necessarily what's going to threaten the relationship. What tends to threaten relationships more than that is just the awkwardness we all have in functioning collectively and understanding that there needs to be a team conversation above the eye conversation. Even if I know what feels good to me and what doesn't, we have to prioritize the collaborative process of what's good for the relationship and what's good for the team.
That's a little bit of a different conversation from what do I want? What's fun for me. Obviously, we need to know that stuff too and prioritize it if it matters, but I see a lot of people doing that to the detriment of what does the relationship need in order to feel stable, secure, and to succeed. That's a little bit more of a selfless question. That's asking what does this team need to succeed? Even if I need to sacrifice a little bit to contribute to that, I'm going to get more back from this secure relationship than if I keep cycling through people.
Dedeker: That makes sense. I think that that is good practice for sure. I would wonder about-- something we talk about on the show a lot is also there's not necessarily one way that people practice polyamory in particular in the community right now, there's been for several years, a big emphasis on people practicing non-hierarchical polyamory where I have two partners, but I'm not necessarily picking out one relationship. It's like, that's the relationship, that's the team.
Maybe people don't necessarily want to practice in that way and so I guess I'm wondering that when it comes to that, to be honest, I think we've done six billion episodes trying to address this because this shows if in all kinds of different manifest for people, but your thoughts on that where it's not always clear, "Okay, I know that my guiding light is I want to preserve this relationship and so I make choices just for this relationship." What's your advice for people where it's maybe I want to preserve both of these relationships?
John: That's fine. As therapists our rule of thumb is always, is it working for people or is it not working for people. If it's working for someone, then why change it? It's great. All we need to do is celebrate it. If someone wants to keep cycling through partners and that's their jam, cool. Who cares? That's great. The issue occurs when people are not happy with what's happening in their relationship life.
They don't feel like they have the support or the security or the safety they want, but they do want to pursue a poly or an open lifestyle. If you're in a non-hierarchical arrangement, that's great. If it's working for you, great. If it has issues because people feel insecure or they feel threatened, or there's a lack of communication and so on, then what I would define as the team in that context is everybody in that relationship.
You don't have to identify a dyad and say, "Okay, this dyad is the team and this other person is the third on the outside." By the way, there's a lot of talk about this in the attachment space, because when people started talking about attachment theory, it was all dyad, dyad, dyad and that's because the research started with caregiver, infant pairs, and really studying that dyadic relationship. When attachment theory was extended to adults, it was only natural to examine dyadic relationships and say, "Okay, what is the attachment system in this dyad?"
I think that's a misunderstanding of the attachment literature and it creates a misinterpretation problem, which is people who are truly open and poly suddenly feel stigmatized because they're not in a secure dyad. I don't think the dyadic nature of the team really matters. I think being part of a team matters. Who has your back? If that's a tribe of people, then cool, but you should feel secure within that tribe. You should have go-to people that support you, that love you that will give you the goodies when you need help.
Let's say you're in a non-hierarchical poly relationship and it's three people in the relationship and there's really no dyadic primary. The team conversation is going to be, "What do we need to feel secure with each other? Let's not just be individualistic about it. Let's really think as a team. What's good for this non-hierarchical arrangement?" What that does is it forces collective thinking.
This is really important in relationships because if you get too self-centered, you can't broker a shared space what a therapist might call a two-person psychological system. What we really mean is, do you have a collectivist psychological system? Are you able to prioritize other people besides yourself at the same time that you're trying to prioritize yourself? I think you can do that in a relationship of three or four or five as well as you can in a dyad.
Dedeker: I think it's hard for Americans to get on board with collectivist care and thinking, but that's a topic for another time.
Emily: Yes. Quite.
Jase: That's for multi-social history around the podcast. Now, I do think that's interesting, but I would want to take that, and I think the same things that you said, I would just want to apply it more toward not specifically multi-person relationships. That's not really what we're seeing a ton of. That absolutely happens, but more multiple interlocking dyads.
Emily: Interlocking diads.
Jase: I do think there is this interesting thing that I've noticed between ones that can be very stressful and contentious where there's more of that sense of maybe I have my team with this one other person, but then everyone outside of this is a threat. That's the feeling that I'm going to have about that and that's how I'm going to react to it versus the sense of, "I'm not in a relationship with that other person, but
I do think of them as kind of being part of my team because we're both on team loving this other person. We're both on that team, even if we're not doing it together, per see." I think that distinction right there, at least in my experience, has really made that difference between people who are having a better time with polyamory than people who are having a less good time.
Emily: Definitely.
John: That's beautiful. I love the complexity of that because you see that in other cultures where those types of relationship arrangements are more easily brokered, and people don't have the same threat reactions to them. A lot of this is cultural conditioning, what are you taught to perceive as threatening? That's how your nervous system will react based on how you evaluate it.
If you grew up in a culture where it's normal to share people and parent with other people and share families and things like that, then it becomes normalized, and you don't have the same threat response. I still think the key question is, do people feel secure? If they do, then they're doing the right things. If they don't, then they really need to ask themselves, "What's going on here?" If we just try to broker those things through communication, often, it's just not quite enough to get all the way into the nervous system and speak that language of security.
Emily: In your book, you also talk about something called a culture of practice around developing relationship skills. I really liked that term. Can you talk about what that practice looks like to you?
John: This is really fun. I have a lot of friends that are improv actors. When couples come into my office, and I say, "I want you to be aware of your nonverbals. I want you to be aware of the signal you're sending in that 90% of communication that's subconscious." A lot of people will tell me, "I don't have any control over that. My tone of voice is what it is. My face does what it does. This is just me. Take it or leave it."
It's a cop-out. It's people who either don't believe they can take charge of themselves, or they just don't want to do the work that it takes to retrain those automatic habits. I will often point to people I know who have a lot of acting training, and they do this for a living, to say, "Look. You can definitely be more aware of your nonverbals. You can definitely take control of the signal you're sending somebody else, whether they perceive you as friendly, or non-friendly."
An acting class would teach you that. How do you take control over your face? How do you take control over your tone of voice and your eyes and your body expression? It's too easy to say, "It's automatic. I can't do anything about it. I'm sorry." Then we walk around sending threat signals to people and creating insecure relationships. A culture of practice really means that we're going to take ownership of our ability to control the sense of security. We're not going to leave it up to chance.
We're certainly not going to leave it up to our childhood conditioning because I'm example A, of that not being a good idea. The point is that we can take ownership of it, and say, "Maybe we have some bad habits." Maybe I have some bad habits but we can actually practice together and learn how to send secure signals to each other. We may not be very good at it right now but if we practice, just like anything else, we'll get better at it. Shockingly, this is really missing from relationship culture.
Even though relationships are like many other domains, music, sports, language, where a lot of what happens is based on really fast procedural memory. Most interactions between people happen really fast, and all the stuff we do is pre-thought. That doesn't mean we can't retrain ourselves. That would be like an athlete saying, "My motor memory happens really fast. Sorry. I don't really have any control over shaping it." It's true, it happens really fast but you can retrain it.
This is what I mean by a culture of practices. It's like, "Let's take this stuff we suck at and let's practice it proactively until it looks better and sounds better." When we've done that, now it's built into our motor memory. We can't use that same excuse for years and years and years of, "Oh, we know. We're just bad at this." Or, "It's a core issue or whatever." You can do something about it.
Emily: We're rewriting those neural pathways, essentially?
John: Exactly. That only happens through practice. You can't talk your way into developing new neural pathways or dusting them off and optimizing them because talk just doesn't do it. Talk as an idea. You have to get your body involved. You have to get your motor memory involved. All these default habits that are wired into the brain, the only way you can retrain those is by doing things experientially.
Dedeker: I was going to say I really appreciate, at least to me, I get a real impression of gentleness around just that phrase culture of practice, as opposed to culture of perfection, or something like that. Because I think what we've seen in the relationship and communication in psychology sphere, at least on maybe, the pop psychology consumer side that, for instance, something like attachment theory becomes popular and people start to learn about it and start to figure out what their attachment style is, and that's great.
What we've seen is then leads people to be like, "I'm anxiously attached, and that's just the way I am. That's how I'm going to react to everything. I've anxious attachment style, that's how it's going to be. If I react in this particular way, that causes stress in the relationship that's not my problem." It is trying to find this middle ground of where you don't want to tell someone, "Hey." Your personality, your hangups, your trauma, the way your brain works.
You don't want to tell somebody, "I'll just throw that in the garbage and just be different." We also I think, like you said, don't want to just use that excuse of, "Oh, that's just the way I am. I can't control any of these things." If that's aversive to my partner or really getting the way of my relationships, then they need to just go jump in a lake or something like that. That's how am I interpreting the message.
John: I agree. I think what we forget sometimes is relationship is how we get better. How are we possibly going to get better at these relationship skills, unless we're practicing them in a relationship? I have a lot of people that tell me, "I'm working on myself. I'm getting ready for a relationship. We're working on it."
If you work on that stuff by yourself, or in a vacuum, or with a therapist, good luck to you when you're back in a real relationship, again, because that stuff is going to come back out. The better approach is to simply be improving our existing relationships, whether they're friendships, or their co-worker relationships, or family bonds, or you do have a partner or kids or whatever.
It's like, take the relationships that exist in your life, and work to improve them intentionally through practice. Because what you'll find is that it builds your secure skills so that naturally you're sending more connecting signals. That's really what we need in any relationship, is the ability to automatically non verbally put people at ease without having to slow down and think about it constantly.
Dedeker: As a last note here, your book is called More than Words. You put this heavy emphasis on connection, on these nonverbal cues, on calming nervous systems, but you do also talk about some words in a relationship. You do talk about how it is still important to build that skill versus expressing your emotions as words. You also make references to particular words that threaten connection. I just want to hear from you about that once we have connected and we are getting to the actual verbal communication piece of it, what you found and what your recommendations are.
John: We have language for a reason. I just really wanted to make the point and make sure it didn't get lost, that most of what the nervous system is paying attention to is nonverbal cues and signals. When you get those right, you can layer verbal communication on that connection, and it's going to go much more smoothly than if you don't connect first. Assuming that message gets through, and people go, "Maybe I should talk less, and be aware of my eye contact.
Maybe I should talk less, and make sure my face is expressing friendliness, and my tone of voice is communicating worth" That's really the message I want people to get. Once people get there, then obviously language does matter. We can say things that enhance connection, or we can say things that detract from connection. I list some mistakes that people make in their communication in the book because we're all very different. For example, some people say too little, and finding out how they feel is like pulling teeth.
That can impact connection because you're always guessing. Some people talk too much. They talk your ear off with stuff you don't need to know and after a while, you feel overwhelmed and annoyed, and it's like, "That's not very attuned either." There's not really a standard for everyone and every relationship is unique. One thing that I think we do know about words, is that if you're intentional with your words, and you don't clutter them, you can connect more deeply with words.
If I approach you and you're my partner, and I look you in the eye, and I say, "I love you so much. You are so wonderful. I'm so lucky to have you in my life. I just want to tell you what you mean to me." I let that stand and I don't clutter it with stuff, that's a pretty connecting message. It's obvious. It's simple. It's concise, and it goes in. A lot of times what happens is we're embarrassed and ashamed and awkward about communicating so directly, and so will say, I love you and I care about you, but we'll mix it in with a bunch of other stuff.
Then it's not as impactful. You know what I mean? Because people will focus on all this other stuff we threw in there. The point is a lot of people think we need more time to connect, but the truth is when people have time, they still don't connect because connection is awkward, it's embarrassing, it's vulnerable.
The real question is, are we emotionally courageous enough to connect? Then if we are, it only takes a very small amount of time. How much time does it take for me to completely slow down, put my phone down, hold your hands and tell you how much you mean to me and how much I love you and care about you. That might take me 30 seconds, so the time excuse is bullshit.
The real question is our courage and that's where I think a lot of us miss the boat myself included. It's like, you have to get over that embarrassment, and awkwardness, to really say what you feel in your heart and not clutter it with, "Oh, by the way, would you pick that up from the grocery store on your way home, thank you so much. Love you." It's like, yes, that's nice, but there's got to be times when connection is the main event.
Dedeker: Yes. That makes a lot of sense.
Jase: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today, John, and talking about all of this. Can you tell our listeners, where can they find more about you, the various things you do, and of course, where they can order your book?
John: First of all, I just want to really appreciate all of you and thank you so much for having me on. Non-monogamy is not my area of expertise, but I've always wanted to support poor poly, open and non-monogamous relationships because they get a lot of shit from the culture, and it's completely unfair.
There's probably more acceptance of same sex couples now than there is of non-monogamous couples, and so this type of discrimination that everybody experiences when they're just trying to live their life, and share love, and have healthy relationships is ridiculous. It's really important that those of us that are relationship experts and are in a position to say something about it say, "Look all of these relationship types can be healthy, secure, productive, and you can raise kids in them, and you can have of healthy families."
The stigma and the judgment and all of that is really high for a lot of people. It makes me sad to think about that. I just appreciate you guys for having the show and making this a featured topic. People can get the book really anywhere, but if they go to getmorethanwords.com, they'll get some extra free bonus goodies from me. I wrote a whole chapter on attachment, which I think is really useful because when I was trying to heal attachment theory was a big part of my recovery.
The chapter didn't make it into the book because we had so much other cool stuff to put in the book, but if people go to getmorethanwords.com, you can still get the book on Amazon or whatever you want, but you end up on my email list and I can send you that bonus chapter on attachment. I have some other goodies there, like a myth-busting guide, and a connection guide, so you can start learning right away, so that'd be one place people can go.
Emily: Excellent. We are going to continue our conversation with John in our bonus episode. This is going to talk about questions to ask, to evaluate the markers of secure functioning in your relationships. Really excited to talk to you about that. Our question of the week is "what is more important to you in a relationship, communication, or connection?" I'm very interested to hear that because, I think John had a lot of good points about connection this week, but communication is also important.