Something that has felt compelling over the last couple of years wading into relational theory has been the value placed on conversational candor.
I’ll attempt to describe what I mean by conversational candor in connection to relating to another:
- A willingness to ask “What is the most honest experience you, I and we are having of each other” and to risk stepping into that conversation.
- A capacity to be open to the various self-states that emerge as one person is conversing with another person(s), especially non-preferred self-states (e.g., fear, disgust, rage, erotic, envy, anxiety, boredom, etc.).
- A tension with one’s subjectivity in which one attempts to be radically open to their own experience (“Essential I”) and open to the experience (or “I”) of the other, without collapsing into the pressures of sameness or certainty.
That’s a lot of words, but I think I’m trying to say how asleep I’ve been to myself. How many relational encounters I have had in which I don’t really check in to my experience at the moment, and find myself saying things that in retrospect I realize were total bullshit.
Neck up living, being disconnected to my body and felt experience as I engage another, trying to attune to THEM and understand THEM but having little to no clue what is going on inside of me. The influences keeping me living from the neck up are too numerous to count.
But what’s the aim?
And maybe that’s the deeper aim. Why on earth do we even attempt to have conversational candor? Why do we try to adopt radical openness towards ourselves? Perhaps because it is where genuine encounter occurs.
But what the hell does genuine encounter even mean? Words are cheap for this sacred experience but this comes to mind:
- The feeling that “I am really seeing you” and “you are really seeing me”.
- A moment of “Damn, that sucks to recognize but my God it is true”.
- A deep appreciation for someone not holding back and trusting you enough to tell you how they really feel and think with you.
- A playfulness that comes from “whatever feelings I have with or about you I believe we can bear and play with together”.
- An unbridledness in relating in which persons bring themselves to each other honestly and can “go anywhere” and not only survive but remain connected.
Experiencing genuine encounter is like walking across a threshold. Once you see it. Once you get a taste of it. There is no going back.
Similarly, in the words of my colleague Rachael Kerns-Wetherington, once you realize the “violence done to the self and other” by abandoning one’s own experience, there is no other alternative.
Genuine encounter now begins to feel like Love in which as soon as we begin to describe it, you move farther away from the fullness of it. But at the same time, I feel so strongly that there is something here. This sacred process of a human being finding their ‘Essential I’ and showing up in the world with that ‘I’ to create genuine encounters for another’s ‘I’ to be discovered and gifted as a vitalizing presence to the world.
This brings the question I have yet to explore, “What the hell is an ‘Essential I’ anyways?
Maybe that will be next months post, but in the meantime, I’ll leave you with a poem from a high-schooler I encountered at my favorite local coffeeshop. His name is Julian Gochenour.
“It’s merely permitting contradicting thoughts…formed from the formality of quiet desperation… in which you lie.”