You probably already know you’re supposed to communicate your needs, set boundaries, stay curious, listen without becoming defensive, and repair when you fuck up. The problem is that knowing all of this intellectually doesn’t necessarily help when someone you love says something that makes your entire body prepare for abandonment, rejection, punishment, humiliation, or disconnection.
Because conflict security isn’t just about knowing what to say. It’s about building enough capacity in your body that, when conflict actually happens, you have more choices than freezing, people-pleasing, over-explaining, controlling, disappearing, becoming defensive, or waiting until you’re so resentful that everything comes out at once.
And I don’t think we learn that alone.
We become conflict secure through relationships. We need experiences of disagreement that don’t end in abandonment. We need to witness other people struggle with the same impulses we thought made us uniquely fucked up. We need spaces where we can practice staying curious, taking accountability, asking for what we need, surviving someone’s disappointment, repairing after harm, and discovering, over and over again, that conflict does not have to cost us belonging.
The thing is, and if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that
True intimacy begins after rupture.
Conflict is the doorway to intimacy.
It’s easy to love someone when they’re cute, kind, funny and in a good mood. It takes another set of capacity to move through conflict without losing safety, dignity, belonging when everything is hard. What we don’t like to admit is that we’re terrified of intimacy, maybe more than oppression, because our nervous system are used to the harm. Are you scared of the intimacy that conflict asks of you?
The other truth that I am sure you know is:
Abolition requires intimacy.
We won’t be able to do this work and abolish the police if we can’t even have a conversation about the piles of dishes in the sink.
That’s why Becoming Conflict Secure is a 28-day practice we’re doing together.
For €8 (instead of 57!), you can spend the next 28 days practicing becoming someone who no longer abandons themselves during conflict, alongside a community of people committed to building relationships capable of holding disagreement, complexity, accountability, repair, and care.
Every day, I’ll send you right to your inbox you a short video, a reflection, and/or a somatic practice so that we can take everything we intellectually understand about conflict and slowly, repetitively, imperfectly practice it into our bodies. Because we seriously need to FRENCH PRESS THE WHOLE THING BABY.
I don’t want you to leave these 28 days simply knowing more about conflict.
I want your body to have experienced something different.
I want you to know what it feels like to stay with yourself when someone is disappointed in you. To notice defensiveness without immediately obeying it. To say the difficult thing before resentment says it for you. To fuck up without disappearing into shame. To experience accountability without experiencing yourself as disposable. To discover that disagreement can coexist with love.
And I want hundreds of us practicing this at the same time, because if conflict is the smallest unit of abolition, then becoming people whose relationships can actually survive conflict is collective work.
Becoming Conflict Secure starts September 10.
28 days to practice somatic capacity for the smallest unit of abolition: conflict.
The entire course is included in your €8 paid subscription to Erotics of Liberation! No need to do anything else !
Come practice with us =)