Autonomy and Relational Responsibility Can Coexist

A little invitation before we begin: This Wednesday, 11/11, I’m hosting a Resourced Relating Practice Lab where we’ll explore how to stay connected to ourselves when someone else’s autonomy, desires, or choices activate our protective parts.

We’ll practice somatic resourcing, parts work, and relational differentiation together in a supportive space with others who get it. Tickets are sliding scale ($22–$33 USD), and the session will be recorded if you can’t join us live!

I’d love to practice and be in community with you. Join us online 🧡

Nicole Frobusch, Seeding

One of the forever tensions I see come up again and again in non-monogamous relationships is how to honor our partners’ autonomy while still feeling cared for and considered.

Because here’s the thing: a part of us might genuinely want our partners to follow their desires and have all kinds of fulfilling experiences with other people.

But that doesn’t mean every part of us is going to feel great about their choices, especially when the way they express their freedom looks very different than ours.

Maybe one person is ace or demisexual while the other identifies as proudly slutty, experiencing sexual freedom as a radical reclamation of pleasure in our puritanical culture. What feels liberating and empowering to one might be difficult for their partner to relate to.

Maybe one person prefers to date independently while the other wants to date as a couple. What feels spacious and liberating to one might bring up fears of being excluded or left behind for the other.

Freedom sounds good on paper, but watching someone we’re attached to make choices that are different from the ones we’d make can stir up some pretty big responses in our protective parts.

Jealousy. Anger. Judgment. Insecurity. Maybe a deep fear that we’re about to be abandoned.

This can happen even when we’ve been doing a lot of work to understand our protective parts, resource our nervous systems, and get better at communicating our needs.

Maybe we’ve been asking for more intentional time together, clearer agreements, or some reassurance that our relationship still matters, even as things change.

But our partner might be having a very different experience.

Maybe they’ve already spent what feels like a lot of time accommodating our fears or trying to help us feel more secure. And now, another request for support feels like another obligation, another conversation, another concession they’re going to be asked to make. One more thing standing between them and the freedom they’re trying, with increasing frustration, to experience.

And that’s where things can get super confusing and swirly, especially in the absence of clear agreements about how decisions get made.

The person asking for care might start worrying that their needs are too much. And before long, that can become a much more painful story: that THEY are too much. Maybe they begin hiding their discomfort, convinced they need to figure out how to work through it all on their own. (Ouch; been there.)

At the same time, the person wanting more freedom might be wondering if what they’re doing will ever be enough. Whether they’re being selfish for wanting something different, or whether they’re allowed to make choices that disappoint someone they love. And when that guilt starts turning into shame, they might begin to wonder if there’s something fundamentally wrong with them for wanting what they want.

(I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between shame and our protective parts, and I want to explore it more deeply in a future essay. I recently spent a gorgeous and tearful week at Esalen with Jessica Fern, author of Polysecure, and David Cooley, her co-author of Polywise, doing some profound group parts work practices from their newest book, Transforming the Shame Triangle. I’m still integrating so much of what I learned, both for myself and in my IFS work with coaching clients. Wowwwwie.)

Both people can end up questioning whether their needs are reasonable, what they’re responsible for giving, and how to make room for each other’s differences. One person feels like there isn’t enough freedom, while the other feels like there isn’t enough care.

It’s a painful place to find ourselves, especially when both people genuinely want the relationship to work.

And when both people are feeling this way, their protective parts can start getting louder. One person begins hearing requests for consideration as attempts to control them. The other starts interpreting their partner’s desire for independence as evidence that their needs don’t really matter.

Before long, both people feel misunderstood and resentful of what they’re being asked to give.

And the stories they’re telling themselves about each other can make it harder to recognize the very real needs underneath those protective responses.

What began as two people trying to honor their needs can become a struggle over whose needs get to matter.

So what does it actually take to honor our differences while staying in right relationship with the people we love?

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