Trauma Informed Polyamory Bundle
Bundles are thematically curated zines that cost less when you buy them together. The Trauma Informed Polyamory Bundle brings together Love Without Emergency #1, Love Without Emergency #2, and Trauma Informed polyamory. The zines are hard copy and sent in the mail. You also have the option of adding the prerecorded Trauma Informed Polyamory workshop to the bundle for more savings. The workshop is sent via email if you choose that option.
Love Without Emergency #1:
Love Without Emergency: I Want This But I Feel Like I’m Going to Die is a collection of writing on trauma, attachment, and polyamory. For the first time, I have collected all my writing on the subject in one place. The pieces in this zine were written between 2014 and 2019; including my early writing on polyamory as well as my more recent work. This zine moves away from simple (and often judgmental/shaming) frameworks around managing jealousy, and toward a recognition of the distress traumatized and attachment injured people can feel when trying to navigate polyamory. Understanding distress as an embodied, nervous system experience, rather than simply a cognitive one, this collection of writing is trauma and attachment informed. Normalizing and validating distress while exploring the experience of earning secure attachment and developing nervous system regulation, this zine draws on both my personal experience as an anxiously attached polyamorous person living with c-ptsd, and my experience as a facilitator teaching my Trauma Informed Polyamory workshop. It’s a thick zine with fourteen pieces of writing covering topics such as non-hierarchical polyamory, queer platonic love, shame, anxious preoccupied attachment, avoidant attachment, desiring polyamory, and nervous system regulation. With a bright pink risograph cover, this zine celebrates trauma survivors and the hard work and great courage we put into love.
Love Without Emergency #2:
The follow up to Love Without Emergency shares what I have learned about navigating trauma, attachment, and polyamory in the three years since I put out the first installment. In particular, it focuses on disorganized attachment, having anxious tendencies with some partners, and avoidant tendencies with others. It feels like the other piece of the puzzle, offering more insight into the avoidant aspect, whereas the first installment focused more on the anxious aspect.
What if you're polyamorous, anxious as fuck with one partner, and unable to totally let other partners in? What if you have complex ptsd and feel fucking insane but you are committed to being poly? What if, years in, you still get nervous system flooded sometimes? What if you are realizing that you are way more avoidant than you thought? What if you want more intimacy and simultaneously push it away? What if your anxiety is part of your avoidance? What if you have sexual trauma and feel sex repulsed sometimes, and polyamory increases a sense of pressure to have a lot of sex?
Love Without Emergency #2 explores these and many other questions. It's a reflection on navigating polyamory with attachment issues and trauma, and it goes deeper than the standard issues with jealousy. It's about surrendering control, facing ambivalence, and listening to the 'no'. It's about loving someone who loves others, and dating when dating is hard. It's a love letter to the process of learning to love without emergency, through the mess and confusion of complex trauma and disorganized attachment.
Trauma Informed Polyamory (the zine):
Lots of people who want polyamory also feel like they are going to die from the intensity of their emotional reaction to polyamory. This zine is a resource for those of us who don’t find sitting with our feelings and waiting for them to pass easy, for those of us filled with regret and stress about repeated conflict with our partners, and for those of us whose experience of jealousy feels like a confrontation with death itself. Starting with the basics for integrating knowledge and skills around trauma and attachment into our practice of polyamory, this zine goes further into the underworld journey of facing our deepest fears and learning to love with open hands. Not for the faint of heart, this work is for brave souls who want to find a way to love in their chosen relationship style despite finding it extremely fucking hard. There is no condescension, shaming, or finger wagging here. You are invited just as fucking crazy as you are.
Trauma Informed Polyamory (the optional workshop):
This prerecorded workshop explores the ways in which our trauma histories can impact our ability to feel safe and secure in our polyamorous relationships. Going beyond jealousy as a framework, this workshop focuses on the importance of building safety and security, both internally and interpersonally. Polyamory can be an amazing opportunity to work on relationship skills, develop secure attachments, and deepen both our knowledge of and our ability to communicate about our desires, boundaries, and needs. Approaching polyamory from a trauma informed perspective has the potential to enrich both our polyamorous relationships and our trauma recovery. The workshop is 2.5 hours long, arrives by email as a digital file which you can download and watch as much as you like, and comes with closed captions which can be turned on or off.
