Words to help you describe your open relationship

Every subculture has it’s own vernacular, but if you’re new to open relationships, or not in a community of people who are open or poly, you may not know these helpful words:

New Relationship Energy (NRE):

That feeling you get when you’ve just started a new relationship and everything else seems secondary. You’re so focused on that person in all their perfection. You want to spend all your time with them, you never fight, the sex is intense and passionate. This is important to recognize in an open relationship, because you may be experiencing this with someone new, while your primary partner is not, and this can cause jealousy and conflict. The key to this struggle is compersion (see below), validation of your partner’s feelings, and making sure your primary partner knows how important they are to you.

Compersion:

The joy you can feel from witnessing your partner’s happiness. This may be sexual, such as watching them with another sexual partner or hearing about the story later, or more of that “warm fuzzy feeling” you get when they come home from a date feeling giddy and excited. Compersion is said to be the opposite of jealousy, and cultivating compersion can certainly help with the feelings that come with jealousy like sadness, anger, and fear.

Metamor:

This is the partner of your partner who is not also your partner (say that three times fast!). In different relationship structures you may or may not know this person, you may or may not be friends with them, and you may or may not like them. No matter what, it’s good to know what to call them. You share a joint love (met-amour), and this person can be an invaluable resource to you!

Polycule

Your polycule is the family tree of your open relationship. This includes you and your partner and all your metamours. All of these people influence each other, and it is important to take each person’s experience and feelings into account when making decisions. This is why communication and negotiation are such an important part of open relationships!

Fluid Bonded

Being fluid bonded is a safe sex practice where everyone agrees to get STI tested and share results. After that, those people may eschew safer sex practices like using condoms and dental dams when having sex with each other. They will either not have sex with people outside their fluid bonded group, or all agree to use safer sex practices each and every time they have sex with someone else, to protect the safety of those in the group.

If you have any questions about any of these words, or there are some that I’ve missed, please feel free to message me, email me at counselingwithcolleen@gmail.com or comment!

Your therapist’s reading list

Definitely recommend:

Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence by Esther Perel; Can we desire what we already have in romantic relationships?

The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity by Esther Perel; More on modern love and expectations in our romantic life.

The Ethical Slut, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love by Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton; The ins and outs of ethical consensual non-monogamy.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed; An alternative to Dear Abby, profound and deeply touching.

Women, Food, and God by Geneen Roth; Mindfulness to heal disordered eating.

Awakening the Buddha Within by Llama Surya Das; Intro to Buddhism for a lay person.

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan; Current and historical research on psychedelics as medicine in psychology, transformative experiences in well people.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk; How trauma affects humans.

The Guide to Getting it On by Paul Joannides; Overview of everything sex.

The Seven Principals for Making Marriages Work by John Gottman; Basics skills and pitfalls in relationships.

Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris; Self explanatory title. Humorous and light, an easy read.

Currently reading and loving:

Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes; Deep exploration of emotional lives of women.

Why you should ALWAYS screen your therapist before meeting them.

I’m just gonna say it…there are some pretty bad therapists out there.

I love my profession, and I have a great group of therapists who are incredibly talented and whom I am proud to know, but just like everything, there are good ones and not-so-good ones. I’ve heard stories of people who’s therapists have asked them for advice, therapists who told them to withhold sex from their partners to punish them, therapists who are late, disorganized, or just plain clueless. If this sounds familiar to you, I’m here to tell you: therapy should not be like that!

You never want to find yourself paying for a session with someone you know is not a match for you! Or, if you’re like most of us, you end up paying for multiple sessions before you get up the guts to break up with that therapist, even though you knew within the first five minutes they were a dud.

Think about it: what are the reasons you’re coming to therapy?

Maybe you’ve got some people-pleasing tendencies?

You have difficulty setting boundaries or saying “no” when you need to?

You’re trying to get up the courage to break up with your partner or quit your job with your terrible boss?

It’s truly a perfect storm for not being able to end a therapy relationship once you’ve started! That’s why I suggest calling at least three therapists and talking to them on the phone before you go into their office. I know, it’s hard enough to find one therapist. But trust me, therapy is a huge investment of your time and money, and it is worth it to do the work up front. I offer a free consultation call, and in fact, I require that everyone talks to me before scheduling an appointment. I want to make sure it’s a match, and if it’s not, I’ll hook you up with someone who is! Most therapists will do this, you just have to ask.

When you’re ready to take the leap, here’s a resource I’ve created to help you brainstorm what you want in a therapist, and take notes during your consultation calls with therapists!

Choosing a therapist: What do the letters mean?

It’s so difficult to find a good therapist! A friend of mine recently contacted me, asking “what are all these letters?! What do they mean? Is one better than the other? Is one more right for me?” The different tiers and disciplines of therapy can be hard for even some therapists to understand and explain, so it makes sense that you might be confused. Before you read this, here’s a spoiler alert: it doesn’t matter what letters the person has after their name, what matters is that they are a good fit for you. If you still want to nerd out on some therapist nitty-gritties, read on…

Here’s how I look at it: You have three tiers of providers when it comes to your mental health:

1. Psychiatrists: These are the people who prescribe medication.You will see the letters M.D. after their name. They are the highest tier, which means they are the most expensive. You’re not very often going to see a psychiatrist doing therapy, because their sessions are often about 15 minutes long (after the initial assessment). It’s someone you check in with maybe once a month to once every few months, depending on what medication you’re taking.

2. Psychologists: These are people with a doctoral level degree and license. You might see a PhD. or a Psy.D. after their name. A Ph.D. is someone who went the traditional route to get thier doctorate, and focused on research. Many people get this degree and become practitioners, so you will definitely see these letters when you’re looking for a therapist.  A PsyD. is a doctor of psychology, and this is someone who went to the doctoral level in order to become a practitioner. They focused less on research and more on the practice of therapy during their schooling than a Ph.D.

3. Master’s Level therapists: This is where it gets really confusing. At this level of education, the licenses are split into three disciplines. None is better or worse than the other, and to be honest, the person you pick is more important than which of the three disciplines they are licensed in. Each discipline gets some training in the areas of focus of the other disciplines, but the education and testing is more focused on their area of expertise. The three disciplines are:

   1. Licensed Professional Clinical Counselors, LPCC (that’s me!). Also called Licensed Mental Health Counselors (LMHCs)  in other states, the training for LPCCs is generally focused on individual mental health or illness. They are the experts in diagnosing/assessing and treating things like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc. In California, unlike other states, this license is exempted from providing couples therapy or family therapy. These therapists can get an extra level of certification called a Confirmation of Qualification from the Board of Behavioral Sciences (BBS). This involves doing 500 hours of supervised therapy and taking extra graduate level classes (I have this!).  

   2. Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists, LMFT. These therapists are the specialized in how a system (such as the family or romantic partner(s)) impacts an individual. They often want to have contact with as many people in the system as possible, to fully understand the problem. MFTs often prefer not to diagnose, because they see mental health as a function of the complex interplay of the relationships in the individual’s life.

   3. Licensed Clinical Social Workers, LCSW: This individuals training will have been focused on communities, groups, and organizations. They are zoomed out to look at the whole society and how it is functioning. Although this license can be used to provide therapy, the training can also be for folks who want to create change on a macro level, for example by affecting policy.

Now that you know all of that, I’ll say that none of it matters unless someone is a fit for you. I would actually say that, looking at those descriptions, and being many years removed from my grad school days, ideologically I fit more in with the MFTs, although I am an LPCC. I don’t love the idea of diagnosing (although I do respect that it can be helpful for many people), and I think it’s very important to take into account the systems in someone’s family or society that may be affecting them such as discrimination, stigma, and patriarchy.