Author: Rose Sylvester

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A Quest for Healing Power Ravishing Rose Blog

The Power Imbalance of Giving & Receiving

I have to start with Martin & Dalzen’s (2021) Wheel of Consent when I talk about giving and receiving because it highlights the vulnerability and energetic structure of being in different roles of interpersonal exchange. This became apparent to me when I noticed a pattern of women positioning themselves in a relationship towards me as being the giver of care, advice, or mentorship without that being an agreed dynamic. I recognize these behaviours, as much as I have a reaction to judge them, and see them in myself (something I don’t want to look at) as part of a socialized way to feel in control of a situation.

I love being in control. And I, sometimes, recognize it’s illusion: Being ‘better than’ others, having something to offer, feeling of value in a dynamic. I just listened to a recent podcast by Tara Brach about the drive to feel inferior or superior. She has some interesting exercises to reprogram your brain around disconnection and isolation. The positioning of myself as a “giver of care” without fee for exchange (as in a work setting), allows me to feel superior because my health, the measurement at hand, is being communicated as if I were in better condition that the caregivee.

I recognize the urge as my ego and I negotiate who’s in charge. I’ve also learned in past year that, if I catch my ego, it can be a choice on my part as to whether or not to engage in this power struggle. Someone may try to position themselves and if my ego takes over I can physically feel this power struggle in my body, but when I am aware of myself and don’t allow the reactionary action/word/energy to dominate, then I can disengage and remain on an even playing field with the other being.

This is hard in our interpersonal interactions, there’s a lot going on. So I wonder about Brach’s take as she navigates negotiating this power dynamic with other energetic beings such as plants and animals. Our ‘natural setting’ as humans is to dominate these relationships, animals and nature are often domesticated to our habits. What would happen if we simply acknowledge and honour the ways in which our cat takes up space in ways we don’t prefer or a tree root destroys our sewer system? We don’t have to like it, but we can notice that this is how we live in harmony with one another.

It is my desire to grow into being on this earth in a way that honours my surrounding beings. We are all of the same atoms, the same stardust and, I believe, essentially seeking the same harmony of existence. What relationships come to mind for you when you think about this?

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

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A Quest for Healing Intersectional Identity Ravishing Rose Blog

Parts of Me: Elsa

I’ve been feeling stuck lately and having a hard time writing. When I reflect on my stuck feelings…I feel frozen, a sense of impending doom if I make some wrong decision, it’s hard to feel my body and when I do it’s mostly just uncomfortable, my mind wants to take over and SOLVE something but mostly doesn’t know where to begin.

I’ll call this experience of stuckness ‘Elsa’. I feel angry with her at the moment. Elsa is getting in the way of my writing, and I LOVE to write. She’s probably also impeding my ability to do other things that feel important and urgent. Why is Elsa dictating how I spend my time? I refuse to let her win.

But what if Elsa is trying to help in some way? What is Elsa’s core intentions? Most often the parts of me that inhibit action tend to be protective. I identify as both a freezer and a fawner when it comes to high stress situations. These responses are protective measures to keep me safe and stop me from escalating any danger that is happening in my vicinity.

Since the pandemic, my vicinity has felt like it expanded a lot further than the North American bubble that I generally, mentally lived in. Elsa came and went for company. When she went away, I furiously covered the walls of my apartment in paintings like my life depended on it despite not identifying as a mural artist, and I watched and waited as a global disease unfolded. There was a level of connectedness with the rest of the world that had begun through my privileged wanderlust and it was both challenged and solidified through the shutting down and reopening of borders. The mandate that had trapped me on the other side of an invisible wall from most of my family challenged the privilege of border crossing I had experienced the entirety of my life.

Elsa supported me through this experience. She turned my brain off when I became overwhelmed by the things I lost before I was mentally too far outside of my window of tolerance. She kept me company during the many, MANY hours of alone time I experienced during the lockdown since I was living alone at the time. She generally helped me pass the time and likely the tension of her departures helped generate the fire of action that comes forth through me in her absence.

What if Elsa is the precursor to action? As I get older, I realize that often the most challenging part of challenging feelings is the judgement I heap upon myself for having the challenging feels in the first place. An unkind way to respond to someone who is already struggling I know. And then Elsa comes to the rescue to shut it all down. She is the emergency switch that takes brain offline until I can find a little thread of compassion for myself.

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A Quest for Healing Ravishing Rose Blog

When the Mind Wanders Off Leash: The Fantasizing Mind

A handful of recent experiences have led me to reflect upon my relationship to fantasy. You know when a theme keeps popping up in different areas of your life? Time to pay attention? The act of fantasizing is such an interesting exercise and generally considered to be a positive, exploratory or sexy activity, though also considered mysterious and sometimes even dangerous. When we fantasize we might be using our imagination to create future goals for ourselves but we also might be trying to escape whatever discomfort we are experiencing in the moment. Fantasy can be realistic or fantastical, it can be something we truly want or perhaps, and we might not recognize this, it remains pleasant only in confines of our mind. The mind is a truly creative place and a tool that we share across oceans, languages and cultures.

There are a few ways in which I have come to notice fantasy getting the better of me. The first one is believing that a situation or relationship would only be better if this or that were different. If only my friend/boss/partner were a slightly different person, if only we related in this other specific way. This is a trap. They will, very likely, never become that person and this habit of discontent is something that has deeper meaning within me rather than the individual in question.

A second way I’ve noticed fantasy popping up is a little more sadistic. I will fantasize a particular future outcome or vengence if I am in conflict with someone. It has more of a stonewalling or emotional torture type of flavor for me. I caught myself doing this last week with my one of my partners and realized that it was helping me cope with the discomfort of being in conflict. I also recognized that the chances of me following through on this fantasy that took place hours later was pretty slim. The chances of me still being angry about something small after a whole day apart was pretty unlikely.

Finally, the one you’ve been waiting for, using fantasy to explore sexuality. I can’t help but think about the ethics of consent when I think about others sexually cause that’s how I roll. How would this person feel about being a part of my fantasy world? Sometimes we know because we are already in relationship with the person and we can ask directly. There are other times when it’s someone we don’t have a connection with, we might fantasize about them regularly, and it could possibly disrupt a potential connection because, after a certain point, we can have trouble separating fact from fiction.

While fantasy can be fun, relieving and an essential part of creativity, there are ways in which it can wander beyond what aids us in living the life that we hope for ourselves. It is my desire that by identifying the ways in which it might go awry, I can catch myself and start to utilize my fantastical skills for fun, exploration and the deepening of connections.

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Intersectional Identity Power Ravishing Rose Blog

On Hierarchy in Intimate Poly Relationships

We’re talking romantic here, though another piece on friendships would be interesting too. My brain already considered a sub-series of power dynamics about hierarchy before I opened the laptop. It’s important to keep in mind that I don’t believe that relationships can be non-hierarchal. I believe we can strive for equality, but if we ignore the ways in which equality can’t (or intentionally does not) exist then power doesn’t cease to exist.

I go through periods where I immerse myself in short videos of other people’s worlds around the world and so this is what I gathered from my online poly community. Hierarchy is in the way we negotiate finances and how it can impact how much money you spend on a date with another partner. Hierarchy is living together and having down time to chat about other partners, the hierarchy of having more knowledge of others. The hierarchy of knowing a partner longer than another partner. The hierarchy of marriage, having kiddos, sharing property.

None of these are set in stone. We’re a collection of identities that both provide and take away privileges and shift. Consider being a passing trans white man, you have gone from a white woman to what most people will assume is a white man. In some ways, this is an enormous privilege leap while still having been socialized as a woman and retaining that history as well as mental health struggles that can result both from having experienced significant dysmorphia about your body as well as very real fears of being the target of violence politically and in your immediate neighbourhood. Consider being a white cis man that marries this individual, now you are in a queer relationship. How does that impact the way in which you hold power? What situations might result in the experience of more or less power and how might that impact your behaviour?

Power is nuanced, invisible and morphing. There are ways in which it is obvious by a role you are in, think boss/employee or further CEO and entry level employee, and situations in which power might shift depending on the setting you are in despite your relationship to another person. Power is not inherently bad, though many make this conclusion. We are not trying to rid the world of power but more so wield it wisely. It is my desire that we take the time to recognize the ways in which we hold power and use it in ways that align with our values to lift one another up, instead of fearfully taking them down. What are some nuanced ways in which power shows up in your relationship(s)?

Photo by Abed Ismail on Unsplash

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A Quest for Healing Bicycles Intersectional Identity Ravishing Rose Blog

Sorting Axle Nuts

Yesterday I sorted axel nuts. A task I initially felt was a waste of time and was I really getting paid to sort? But it reminded me of the beginnings of being a mechanic. Coop days where a volunteers task was to sort. There’s a TON to learn from sorting parts. There are lots of unique differences between axle nuts in fact. There’s also some humility needed since I associate it with the start of my learning and I was divided between nostalgia and ego.

But back to the nuts. There’s obviously size differences and then thread pitch is the next step to consider. But my axle nut chart, {picture to come as reference}, only has so much range with its 6 options (3 difference circumferences and 3 difference pitches). Some nuts were too big and some too small so I could use the discernment of my eye to weed them out in the beginning (e-bikes for the larger nuts and vintage bikes for the smaller). Recently I encountered an axle nut that didn’t fit a 13 or 12 mm wrench in the collection of standard bike tools. “An imperial size,” my spouse chipped in. The nut was so thin and fragile and stuck that an adjustable was mangling it 😥 .

If you’ve enjoyed the article this far, “Congratulations!”, you’re a huge nerd like me. Maybe you like to get dirty, take things apart or some other obscure thing I can’t think of. Feel free to email me about it and I will add you to my email list once I get that going. Where I want to go with all of this is into the human mind. What do axle bolts have to do with the mind?

This kind of focus on the details of small hardware allows me to relax. Paying attention to the feel of the nut screwing onto the chart, using my sight to assess whether it needs to go into another bin for cone parts, and smelling the old grease and grit that coats them all is an immersive experience. The feeling of not being enough being humbled through a simple task of sorting, unlocking a sort of flow or meditative state.

It is through the work of my hands that I can continue to do the work of the mind and I’m often wondering how they are more and more combined in my life. How do bikes fit with therapy? What can I use from my therapy training to assist me as a mechanic? Have they already combined into the opportunities I’ve had, the experiences I’ve made, the communities I’ve mingled with? I desire that you see yourself as whole, through the lens of many combined identities.

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Ravishing Rose Blog

Ethical Unicorn Hunting

Catchy title, am I right? This popped into my head as a concept as I was starting to explore multiple sides of unicorndom at the same time. In true nerd fashion, I brought this topic to my polyamory group and clumsily tried to weave it into the topic which was about building community.

So hear me out! Cause I’m pretty good at weaving ideas together. What I got most out of the conversation was that the language of unicorn ‘hunting’ is that it incites a certain type of loss of ethics in a way. An object to kill and potentially hang the head of its carcass on your wall. An ultimate objectification! So the term isn’t really instilling any confidence in the community that there are ethics involved.

If one were to use it within the context of a relationship, it could be a fun, kinky kind of objectification. But really, who even decided that this was the term? Everyone recognizes it and if you can think of a better one please post it in the comments! I asked AI and some of my favorite synonyms provided were: triad recruiting, seeking a guest star, and couple’s threesome quest.

My theory, and yes I told you we would get there, is that the moniker ‘unicorn hunting’ is a way to further divide an already divided minority. The anti-thesis to community. How do we deal with oppression? Oppress others! It’s the Great Equalizer. By recognizing this as a societal norm I can release the shame attached to and can identify the ways in which I might be discriminating against others to cope. Is propagating the term ‘unicorn hunting’ part of my own participation?

It is my desire to be intentional with the language I use and recognize the ways in which I may be stepping on tiny, and not so tiny, delicate plants that are growing around me if I am not.

Image sourced from Paper Craft World

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A Quest for Healing Bicycles Intersectional Identity Ravishing Rose Blog

Healing and Bicycles

Bicycles have been a part of my life for a long time. Somewhere, my parent’s have a photo of me at 8 or 9 balancing a pool noodle on my helmet while riding. I also fondly recall riding my cat (Sneezy) around my cul-de-sac in my backpack, much to her protesting. But bicycles didn’t become as integral to my life until I started learning how to work on them mechanically. This process began during my undergrad degree where there was a bike cooperative (Right to Move) attached to the downtown campus of my school in Montreal. I still remember going inside the coop for the first time and feeling very out of place, but also curious and intrigued.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later when my path to becoming a professional mechanic was clear. Another city (Toronto) and coop (Bike Pirates) later, a friend of mine named Matt handed me a bike frame with only the cranks and brakes attached and told me to build. I looked at him deploringly and said I didn’t know how. A few days and several hours of laboring later, Esmerelda was born. I sold her off a several years later in Victoria, BC so she may still be rolling around!

I will never forget Esmerelda. After the build, I started bike couriering in Toronto which will also remain an unforgettable endeavour. I remember stopping at my friend Heather’s (former courier) place on my way home from work and lying on her kitchen floor shovelling in some bulk peanuts she just purchased before she politely took the bag away from me. I hadn’t yet learned with how much food fuel was needed to do the kind of riding I was doing.

Having been mugged at gunpoint in Montreal when I was 17, it took me over a decade to recover the sense of safety that I grew up feeling. Having a bicycle to rely on, that I could repair on the spot, was an enormous leap of recovery from this experience.

It wasn’t without many trials and tribulations. My first professional shop mentor was a gentleman that was of similar age to my parents and the intimacy of us working together one on one seemed to get some wrong ideas in his head about our connection. I almost quit, but decided to take the opportunity to put him in his place with my words and see what happened. Despite my remaining disappointment and empathy for my younger self, it was an empowering experience. I ended up remaining and learning what I could before I moved on with the relationship in good standing. But this was only one of many deeply sexist and power abusing experiences that I have endured in the world of bicycles in order to get where I am today.

I never set out to be a mechanic, I never thought I would be a mechanic and I certainly never thought that almost 2 decades after Esmerelda I would still be holding a wrench in my hand. These days I’m wrenching (term for doing bike mechanics) so much that if I don’t stretch before bed my body will wake me up in the night to make me. This may also be an element of aging 😛

I am passionate about teaching others how to do this work. This skill set has given me so much joy, community, connection and empowerment throughout my life. It has helped to build my self-esteem, shaped the way I travel and interact with the communities I’ve lived in, and allowed me a sense of safety and security when exploring new places.

I also see learning these, as well as other types of skills, as therapeutic. Sometimes it is helpful to take abstract work in our minds out into the physical world to labor over with our hands and our eyes until we can make sense of it all. It has long been a desire of mine to combine my work as a therapist with my work as a bicycle mechanic. It is also my desire that you feel capable to learn something that you otherwise thought might not have been possible. If you have a similar experience where a skillset chose you instead of the other way around, feel free to share in the comments below.

Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash

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Intersectional Identity Power Ravishing Rose Blog

Power and the 12 Steps

Recently, it became clear to me that I needed to write a post about how power is shared in the 12 step community because, at times, it is one of the more non-hierarchical spaces that I’ve experienced. It feels continues to feel difficult to write about power. My educated guess it that I have been socialized not to analyze it so as not to question those who hold it, myself included! There is also a discouragement within the program not to question why it works. Are these related? I do know that the sharing of power is tricky and there is no guaranteed method, only approximations.

If you’re not super familiar with the world of recovery, I encourage you to read the full version 12 traditions in tandem with my breakdown. The link is to AA’s website, but these traditions carry over to all 12 step programs. This document is basically a guide to help individual meetings make decisions around how to operate. Within this guide, there are several references to how they have achieved what approximates a non-hierarchical system.

Here’s a list of these elements as I understand them:

  1. Common welfare comes first. The health of the group is a Priority.
  2. God (or the faith moniker of your choosing) is the only authority. The important piece here is that part of being in recovery is discovering your personal experience of faith and that is a personal journey so the word ‘God’ is a placeholder. (The constrictions/power dynamics of the Christianity of the program are for another conversations ; )
  3. The only requirement to be here is a shared purpose. What is more uniting, leveling, than a shared goal?
  4. Each group is autonomous. There is a recognition that only so many guidelines can be applicable to everyone and there is space created for folks to be collectively creative in individual group settings.
  5. Similar to #3, reiterated the shared purpose.
  6. Addresses money and the power that it carries. Through guiding members of the program not to invest financially in anything outside of recovery in connection to it, this guideline protects members from having power struggles over how funds are spent. Please refer to my Money as Power post for more discussion.
  7. Similar to #6 containing the complications of power that money brings.
  8. AA should remain non-professional. Addressing the power that comes with being considered an expert of some kind.
  9. We may create service boards that are directly responsible to those we serve. The accountability to all members of the group is clearly outlined. Whether or not this is upheld may vary.
  10. AA has no opinion on outside issues. This prevents members from having to align with particular political or social issues that could create an imbalance of power and potentially result in segregation of the group which may take away from tradition #1.
  11. Attraction rather than promotion. It is against guidelines to advertise outside of the fellowship. The idea is that those in relationship with members of recovery will witness the benefits and organically make a decision if it might be a fit for them. We are, hopefully, not trying to dominate others with our recovery. The exception here being that there are mandates within our legal system that sometimes require individuals to attend.
  12. Principles before personalities. This is one of my favorite traditions. To me this has meant being welcoming and tolerant of everyone so that the experience of cliques and hierarchical social systems is as limited as possible.

It is my desire that these guidelines allow for another peek and perspective into the way power is navigated in what has grown into a fairly large and prevalent community over the last 95 years. While not perfect, progress not perfection, there is a lot to be learned about wielding power from how this community operates. Within each individual meeting, you may even find some nuanced lil nuggets, including those addressing the hierarchy of christianity.

Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash

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A Quest for Healing Ravishing Rose Blog

Trauma Play

The concept of trauma play was central to my final project during my counseling masters. To some extent, I don’t even know how I arrived on the subject considering I wasn’t aware of this topic until I began to write about it. When it comes up most folx ask me, ‘What is it?’.

For this, I will refer to one of the academic articles I referenced in my capstone by Jeremy Thomas’ entitled BDSM as Trauma Play: An Authoethnographic Investigation. Unfortunately it’s not open source but I have linked the abstract. Thomas opens the article discussing the research around the resilience and strengths of BDSM practitioners, and shares the research that has debunked the myth that kinky folx are any more traumatized than the average demographic.

Thomas goes on to educate us that the origins of trauma play come from play therapy, used with children to process events where language would fall short. Furthermore, he delineates that his definition is specific to personal trauma rather than collective or cultural trauma (that’s a topic for another post). The official definition landing at: “…BDSM activities that adults consensually engage in that are related to past trauma or abuse and fo which the individual is actively aware of this connection.”

What I like about this definition is that it requires not only consent of all the participants involved in this type of play, but consent of the individual with themselves about the choice to take an active role in their healing. Active in that they are an agent of healing, but also active in that they are physically taking action. I am certain that, even for adults, some things cannot be processed by verbal conversation alone and need some creativity and additional approaches. The most common example being purposefully recreating a scene in which the individual was formerly traumatized and experiencing it anew which the proper safeguards to ensure that it does not cause re-traumatization. Here’s a link to my academic blog if you have yet to hear the term ‘aftercare‘ and you’re feeling curious.

Now Thomas has an interesting approach in that, in the article, he revisits his trauma through the experience, and spectacle, of being flogged rather than recreating a unique roleplay scene. The experience of being flogged publicly allows him to safely revisit a former trauma. This demonstrates that there are many ways to go about trauma play. It is PLAY after all. Thomas highlights the ‘somatic reclamation’ he experiences through his play.

The second question I get is, ‘What does a therapist have to do with this type of work?’ Through therapy we can assist with the creation and processing of these experiences to ensure they are as safe as possible. Ethically we do not participate directly in a scene, but we can help flesh out important elements of the creation through discussion and maybe even brief role play if it would be helpful. Additionally, the experience of a scene goes beyond the actual event and there is lots of space to process the work an individual has done to engage in this kind of play.

Trauma play is not for everyone and it’s also not for every kinky person. Kinksters have a variety of reasons and lack of reasons for engaging in their particular pleasures. Like everything, you will know if it’s something that you are drawn to, curious about, want to research further. It is my desire that you have your own journey when healing trauma and that the concept of ‘trauma play’ might open your mind to the possibilities.

Image provided by www.freepik.com

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Intersectional Identity Power Ravishing Rose Blog

Money as Power

One of the most complex issues that unites humans globally is the concept of money, which makes it even more interesting that it can feel like an off limits topic and often causes quite a bit of conflict in relationships. A lawyer friend said to me recently that people will talk about anything before they want to discuss their finances. In contrast, this beautiful man as well as my business coach spoke transparently about their finances to help educate others on how to navigate starting their own businesses. The first link is about starting a private practice. They both gave us the gift of their vulnerability to help destigmatize monetary conversations and I feel inspired as a result.

This concept of giving feels not only central to my understanding of social justice, but to my experience of the world. I love to give to others, it brings me joy to be able to help someone else out when I am able to. But, there are times where we might not have the resources to give. If we are depressed and have little energy it might even feel that we have nothing to give even to ourselves. This is how I have been feeling of late. Depressed as a result of not having the financial resources to meet my family’s basic needs. As a result, I’ve been having something of a spiritual awakening.

Being in the receiving position can feel excruciating: needing help, asking for help, and even getting what I ask for can be the hardest of all. It comes back to power though doesn’t it? We are in a position of power when we are giving. When we are the one’s receiving, it is a form of submission.

I used to consider myself a submissive person, I was quiet, shy and I enjoyed listening rather than speaking, especially in my formative years. Identifying as a female during this time also furthered my understanding of myself as submissive, the best females were demure and anticipated the needs of others right? It’s only recently that I’ve started to understand and embrace the ways in which I actually have a tendency towards dominance. In fact, perhaps my desire to listen to others rather than share put me in a dominant position. Central to my practice as a therapist is understanding how to balance the power dynamic of holding a client’s information with respect from a position of power due to them not knowing nearly as much about myself.

Part of what balances this power dynamic between therapist and client is money. The client is the provider of financial resource in exchange for the vault and other skills that a therapist provides. One of the most obvious forms of social justice that has occurred to much of the therapy community is providing financially accessible counselling through offering a sliding scale or engaging in some pro-bono work. In my research I have found that the majority of therapists dedicate about 25% of their case load to sliding scale clients.

Recently, my business coach (clearly I’m still fan-girling) broke down the psychology and practicalness of offering a sliding scale in her own business. She experimented by both under and over charging for her services and used this data and her personal budget to calculate the range in which she could afford to charge for her services. The result is that, when people need financial assistance, she negotiates her fees by asking, “What would feel generous, but not cause harm?” Her own harm being caused by charging less than what she has identified as her lower limit.

It is my desire, through this article and generally, to continue to demystify the conversation of money through my own vulnerability, honesty and the practice of actively taking on a submissive role to not only ask for help, but receive the help that is offered to me. May we lean into our own pleasure by accepting the generosity around us and sharing the extra.

Photo by John McArthur on Unsplash