Polyamory And Being Honesty-Oriented | With Reid Mihalko and Cathy Vartuli
Cathy: Someone wrote in with a question said. I don’t know if you can answer this or not. But how do I find Poly people that know how to be transparent and honor and an honest. I’ve been wondering?
This is Reid Mihalko from http://www.ReidAboutSex.com/
Reid: Cathy Vartuli from http://www.TheIntimacyDojo.com/
Cathy: It’s a great question.
Reid: Yeah, It is a. it’s not just poly, it’s like how do you find people who are transparent and honest to begin with? And now we go down the rabbit hole level what do you mean by transparent? And honesty and if I got if you ask me a question you surprised me. and I got scared and I lied to you but then I cleaned it up. Is that is that like honesty still? Is that okay? What kind of lies constitute lies or dishonesty versus “oh yeah that’s a human thing and you cleaned it up so I can trust you more. So that means you’re more honest?” or is the honest person only the person who is never told a lie. Maybe you could actually start these conversations with people. As a means of getting to know them, to see, to assess. Are they the people you seek?
Cathy: I like role modeling too, just I try to be authentic as much as I can. And the other day we were at a conference and in at the moment I kind of panicked and I didn’t tell you what I really thought. And then
Reid: Are you?
Cathy: I did. so as soon as that session ended, I asked you if you had a minute and I cleaned it up.
Reid: There’s not transparent or honest.
Cathy: Yeah, but I didn’t feel like it was important enough to like no let’s leave the
Session. So like I like to role model it with my friends. and I know some of them are like a little taken aback. We’re like “no I really don’t want to go to that restaurant I want to be like or I don’t like it when you do this” or just start being more open with people and requesting different things. at first there was an awkwardness. But I think that the friends that I remain closed with started going “oh this is kind of cool” like I you can trust Cathy to say what she wants. and my closest friends or people that will tell me even if they know will be disappointed. And I know that if I ask them something, if I asked my friend Rick and say “Hey do you want to do this?” He’s going to tell me the truth. Like his not going to do it because, you don’t have to worry about him just suffering through. And I do have friends around like “I’m not really sure they’re here because they want to be here”. And that’s not really comfortable so role modeling in this big thing.
Reid: Yeah, um I don’t know the immediate answer to where you find them. You have to do the legwork to find them. it’s not like it’s not like there’s a transparent and honesty you know bubble somewhere in in the world, where that’s where all of the people end up being.
Cathy: No, but there’s certain programs radical honesty, landmark, there’s some things that kind of emphasize more, being more authentic about. So looking for authentic relating games places that teach boundaries and consent.
Reid: People who are drawn to deconstructing and working on real and healthy relationships that require transparent honesty. How you forgive people and rebuild trust once it’s broken? Like basically relationship nerds. And the people in the poly world who you know, there’s many people doing poly horribly wrong. As there are people who are doing monogamy horribly wrong.
Cathy: It just with poly gets more complicated fastest.
Reid: You have more people to be accountable to. So maybe we exposed the traitor faster. But at the same time like we have all been raised in cultures that encourage lying or not hurting people’s feelings. And so we fib or we have shame so we don’t own up to stuff. Or we weren’t really even taught to understand what it is we want. So, again like this is complex because you’re dealing with relationships and human beings. The answer seems to be like, one how can you how can you develop the skill so your role modeling. And then two how do you have these conversations with people so that you can start to assess who people are. And then do they show up for the most part being who they say they are.
Cathy: And one of the easiest ways I’ve actually like, it’s not simple but its easiest way I found is to create people like that. And I don’t mean build them in a workshop.
Reid: Babies? Have babies.
Cathy: No, I don’t advocate that much you really want to have one.
Reid: That’s not a brainer.
Cathy: No, I like to borrow them and teach them bad things and give them back.
Reid: Oh, you said that now on YouTube.
Cathy: For short periods of time but I teach some bad words and give them sugar, so you probably don’t want to give them to me.
Reid: She’s being transparent now.
Cathy: Yes Yes No, but like I don’t mean in an arrogant way. But like when I was in Dallas there wasn’t a big community of anything like there’s a big Poly community but, it was a mixture of things. I was having trouble meeting the kind of people I wanted to hang out with.
Reid: This is years ago too right? So Dallas has been changing
Cathy: Yeah, it change a lot.
Cathy: Yeah, now it changed a lot. But at that time I was having trouble finding those people. So I started a group where we actually taught those things like we went over exercises or brought people in and we taught those things to the community. And the people that were interested in that naturally gravitated to it and it started small so my first ones had two or three people at them. but over time it came like most of them sold out and I started building a community of people I want to take around with they were geeks about the very thing I was it would call me my stuff too, and that was beautiful.
Reid: Yeah so again like landmark education is a great place to find people who are trying to work on transparency and integrity. The book radical honesty maybe there’s meetups or you form a book club about transparent Poly.
Cathy: There’s authentic relating games some people …
Reid: We have project the authentic man project and the authentic world project. There’s I mean again you can you can do the research to find those groups that are neerding out on those things. And you can build and start your own group, or meet up, or online group to see who’s drawn to that. Go to Poly threads on Facebook Poly groups on Facebook and start a thread. And see who’s drawn to that and then use those connections to see who’s in your area locally. That you can start to meet up with and start building your community of friends. Use community as a way to meet people and get your human needs met. And then out of your community look for people that you want to date. Or use your community to help find you people to date.
Cathy: Bring them to me.
Reid: So, that it’s not this blind crapshoot. that you know happens where you’re on tinder. trying to just pick people that look right and you don’t know what their skill sets are. That’s what I would do I’m a big fan of using online to leverage in person stuff. You can also go to a conferences and seminars where people like that are gathering there’s a lot of poly conferences and sex educator geeky type things going on around the world.
Cathy: You can also read has difficult conversation formula. which is a great way to start being authentic. Pass it out to all your friends and see you get geeks out of it.
Reid: And that’s it http://www.ReidAboutSex.com/convo
Cathy: It’s a great tool.
Reid: Leave some comments.