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You Don’t Have to Own Your Feelings
There’s a fine line between a partner requesting personal responsibility and manipulation.
‘Own your feelings’ is a heavily triggering sentence for me. I had it thrown in my face when I was in deep pain. It was a sort of motto in my poly family and something I would go back to when everything else failed. This sentence always felt so wrong to me. As a kid, I was really sensitive to things I felt were unjust. The feeling of injustice is something so close to my skin, it grew with me. Nothing triggers me worse than the feeling of something that is unbalanced, unequal, unfair.
I had that same feeling of unfairness with this sentence and tried to explain it, but was never able to get to the core of it — mainly because I was frequently talked out of questioning it. Whenever I picked this angle, I was presented with a ton of evidence to the contrary — mainly poly-mainstream books and articles who defended this approach — and I was left feeling there was no other way out. At the time, I only had my feelings to support my dislike for the approach. So, ironically, I had to own my feelings on that too. I didn’t have as many words as I have now.
The problem with owning your feelings is that it places an apparent focus on personal responsibility. And I say apparent, because owning…
