261 Can You Love More Than One Person and Still Feel Secure? Love, Grief, and Growth with Lunarosa Peralta

When your partner falls in love with someone else, becomes a parent, or moves through profound grief during a breakup, you witness a transformation that has nothing to do with you. Except, as a witness, it also has the potential to affect you, and your relationships, profoundly.

This week, we're joined by Lunarosa Peralta, a Xhicana therapist and poet specializing in consensual non-monogamy, kink, and sex worker affirming care. She brings both professional expertise and deeply personal experience to this conversation, having recently navigated some of the most destabilizing changes imaginable: watching one partner move through engagement, marriage, relocation, and becoming a father, while simultaneously supporting another partner through a painful breakup.

What Lunarosa shares is raw, tender, and incredibly valuable. She talks about the grief that lives at the heart of all meaningful change, the work of re-creating your belonging when everything shifts, and why trying to understand your way out of pain might actually be protecting you from what you really need to feel. If you've ever struggled with being the witness to your partner's transformation—or if you're trying to figure out how to hold yourself when no one else can catch you—this conversation will meet you exactly where you are.

In this episode, we talk about:

— Why opening a relationship might mean you want to "break something" (and what that really means about growth and transformation)

— The reality that change will happen in your relationships – and that you can't ask to change your relationship without expecting it to actually change

— Why grief is an essential part of navigating non-monogamy, not a sign that something's wrong

— The profound experience of watching your partner become deeply alive through someone else

— What it means to be a witness versus being witnessed, and why you need more than one person to see you

— The existential questions that arise when your partner changes

— How to re-create your belonging in a relationship after major shifts, rather than trying to preserve what was

— The difference between trying to understand your way through pain versus actually allowing yourself to grieve

— Why self-witnessing and learning to hold yourself alone is essential muscle-building work

— How childhood wounds and past experiences with change can make present transitions feel impossible

— The realization that non-monogamy isn't just about sex and fun—it's about becoming more of who you are

— Practical tools like grief dinners and community witnessing for processing change

— Why "doing non-monogamy well" doesn't mean it won't hurt or be hard

Resources mentioned in this episode:

— Find Luna Rosa Peralta on Instagram @therapywithlunarosa

— Visit Luna's website withlunarosa.com for information about workshops and community events

JOIN The Year Of Opening® community for a full year of learning & support

Learn the 5 secrets to open your relationship the smart way

Are you ready to open your relationship happily? Find out at www.JoliQuiz.com

Get the answers you want to create the open relationship of your dreams! Sign up for a Playing With Fire Community Call here

Music: Dance of Felt by Blue Dot Sessions