jump up jump up and get down

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 Be still and know that I am God 
~God


Do you ever feel like you are in the air on a seesaw, waiting for the heavier person to get off first so you can come down? 

That is a nervous-system metaphor for how it feels when another person controls a relationship through gravity and inertia. It can feel extremely disempowering when you are the one waiting, maybe worrying, for the other person to do something so you can, literally, come down.

It can be a kind of frustrating battle of wills. It is tempting to do something to get things rolling but then you just set yourself to play the same over-functioning role on the seesaw while the idler is just too content to do nothing.

When you stop pushing, managing, anticipating and absorbing the consequences of this unilaterally controlled motion, you wait without hope as TS Eliot would say. Without expectation, without directing an outcome or suggesting a direction, you allow the other person to feel their own weight.

And weight is what produces agency.

Stepping back doesn’t abandon anyone— it returns gravity to where it belongs. 

You’re simply not interfering with another's autonomy which, ironically, reclaims your own.

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