Deprivatizing intimacy
Revealing withholds as a revolutionary act
I am part of the creation team for Regenera, a Living Systems Laboratory for Post-Capitalist Cultures. We will be sharing more about what this project is on our Substack and website, but I wanted to share a legend of how our research is already going. With “start before you’re ready” as one of my working mottos, our research and findings are already rich and alive in our weekly calls preparing for the project’s first “live-in” iteration.
Hannah shared her perspective on this legend on Regenera.life, which I highly recommend reading. She shares what happened on our most recent call, and our use of the “Naming the Elephant” technology to clear any withholds that come up in our space, and keep resentment from building up within our team.
I will give a summary of what happened (please read her post for more details and clarity on this front), and then share what it was like for me to witness to radical relating in real time.
What Happened
Participants in the call: Me, Hannah, Jonas
Relationship Matrix:
Nina/Hannah: Hannah and I went to college together a million years and lifetimes ago, and were brought back in contact by the universe to change our worlds together. We live in an intentional community called Youtopia, and we traveled together to spend two months this past summer at the peace research center Tamera. Hannah and I are radically on each other’s team for evolution and transparency. We love each other for no reason, and we are committed to creating together right now. Hannah is a force of nature that has changed my life forever in more ways than I can name, and I am overjoyed to be walking our paths together right now.
Hannah/Jonas: Hannah and Jonas met at Tamera, and have since engaged in a Radical Relating experiment together (translation: they have explored sexual and romantic relating, alongside and equal to other forms of intimacy). Jonas lives in Berlin, and Hannah lives in New York, and they have committed to relating together in connection with what they are creating together. At the time of the call, Hannah was visiting Jonas in Berlin for approximately two weeks.
Nina/Jonas: I met Jonas while he was visiting Tamera. Jonas and I are building a friendship, and we are committed to creating together in the context of Regenera, and potentially other collaborations around next culture living and community. My relationship with Jonas currently has some dependence on Hannah, as I have low frequency one-on-one communication with him at this moment. I have a desire to continue building my “spoke” of relating with Jonas, so that he and I can discover what our particular area of collaborative genius is in service of this project, and because he is an immensely sensitive, intelligent, and warm being.
Sequence of Events:
As we discussed how to begin some of our experimenting in community finance, Jonas suggested that we try out a resource pooling system in Youtopia. He said that he could initiate the experiment when he was visiting New York in December. In response, Hannah made a passive aggressive comment that she and I would have to implement the project, because Jonas wouldn’t be around.
At the end of our call, we had a space to share withholds - anything that came up for any of us during the call that we didn’t share. I told Hannah that I felt scared that she was harboring resentment against Jonas for changing the length of his stay in New York.
Hannah checked, and confirmed that she was holding resentment towards Jonas. They turned to face each other, with me as a witness, and Hannah revealed what she had been feeling. She was angry that he hadn’t communicated explicitly to her about his change in plans, and she was sad that he wouldn’t be in New York for more time. She discovered that she had withheld these feelings from him because she was scared of interfering with Jonas’ process in setting his boundaries, and that she wanted to be able to both support his decisions and boundaries, and share her feelings and emotions around them.
Jonas shared that he wanted to hold space for Hannah’s feelings, consider the valuable information that her feelings brought, but not feel any obligation to change his boundaries or decisions in response to her feelings.
Jonas and Hannah agreed that Hannah will share her feelings or emotions that surface when Jonas makes a decision or sets a boundary, and preface her feelings by acknowledging that he has set a boundary so that the two events (event 1. Jonas makes a decision or has a boundary, event 2. Hannah has feelings or emotions) can be separate.
Hannah energetically withdrew the resentment she had placed on Jonas.
What It Was Like
After embracing Hannah following the conclusion of the process, Jonas turned to me on camera, and shared that he felt “a low level of fear being observed… and joy also.” I also felt joy and fear while I held space for the process because I was at the edge of something very big and very important to me - deprivatizing intimacy.
At Tamera, Hannah and I discovered our deep longing to deprivatize intimacy. We wanted to put on the table everything about ourselves - every detail, impulse, desire, strategy, error, withhold - AND we wanted to share all of the same about our relating spaces. We participated in as many spaces and technologies at Tamera that we could find dedicated to transparency. I felt the trembling potential of bringing everything into the open, and all of my sensitivities and fears of what could happen if we did.
If I’m attracted to someone who is relating to someone else, will I hurt them?
What if I feel jealous about someone else’s relating?
What happens if I share something that someone else didn’t want shared?
So much of romantic and sexual relating is done behind closed doors. Romantic and sexual relating spaces are airtight - we are taught to conceal both conflict and connection when we cross the threshold from private to public space.
Privacy is a central guardrail for relating in a culture wired by survival. By keeping things private, I create stories about ownership and power. Labels like “private property” and “data privacy” denote that I own something, and that I can punish anyone who tries to take it away from me. In relating, I use privacy to create stories about hierarchy. If there are certain things that I only share with one or a few people (my partner, my best friend, my family members), then I can label these relationships as more important. Relational privacy creates another flavor of ownership. If I know something vulnerable about someone, then I have ownership over some part of them - if they abandon me, they incur the risk that I will share that vulnerable thing I hold with others.
Privacy is a very powerful tool for reducing my exposure to the dangers of the world. I can weave a net out of privacy that protects me from the possibility that I could have, and really “be,” nothing. If I own things (tangible objects or intangible concepts), I can meet my needs for physical survival. If I own people, I try to make sure that I won’t be alone.
And believe me - as someone with a lot of experience in deliberately navigating the boundaries between private and public (thanks, private investigation career), I am not saying that privacy is bad or good. As someone with a core abandonment wound, having security and commitment in relationship has been crucial for me to regulate my nervous system. As someone living within a capitalist structure where our government provides steadily less and less human support, I have needed to own things and currency so that I can feed and shelter myself.
I am not saying that we should immediately flip from privacy to transparency, and share everything of ourselves without trust, discernment, and containment.
What I am saying is that I have no idea what not-privacy really looks like.
And that I want to know - what different results does not-privacy, or transparency, create?
What I Want
Inside of the core experiments at Regenera, we are researching whether moving from privacy to transparency can take us from survival to creation.
We are exploring how deprivatizing can be a spiral path towards more intimacy and more creation.
We reveal ourselves
We feel things about what we and others have revealed
We heal what needs to be healed, and negotiate what needs to be negotiated
We do it again and again and again
We will also be with all of our impulses to not be all in on this experiment, our impulses and patterns to:
Create and hold onto resentments
Share things with some people and not others
Withhold and hide
Close the doors, lower the voices, exchange looks
I specifically want to research my own conditioning to privatize in sexual and romantic relating:
What stories do I use to justify keeping my conflicts private? Am I scared that, if other people know that I am experiencing conflict with a partner, that they will want to take this person away from me, so that they can own them instead? Am I scared that, if other people know that we are fighting, that they will believe that I am failing at relating? Am I scared that they will “side” with my partner against me?
What stories do I use to justify keeping my joy private? If I share my feelings about a beautiful sexual encounter, am I scared that it will become less “sacred” if other people know about it? Am I scared that people will be jealous of the beauty of my relating space? The mirror image of the conflicts fear comes up: if I share how beautiful my connection is with someone, am I scared that they will want to take this person away from me, and own them instead?
I’m having a hard time wrapping up this piece because this research is so near to my heart. I am hungry for this continued experiment in transparency, to see that every moment in which I am relating (to myself, and to others) is an opportunity to learn more about the benefits and consequences of both privacy and transparency. I want to build my muscle for transparency, such that I can hold more and more of the exquisite discomfort and revelation that comes every time I unveil myself.
💞💞