Journaling prompts and CBT for relationships

Since sensitive and sometimes privileged information could be referenced in these entries, make use of the privacy functions on your journal. Even if you have to keep a post privacy locked for your eyes only, it still counts as journaling. If you feel the need to state such delicate situations vaguely for privacy reasons, any friend will understand, and any non-friend can be encouraged to mind their business.

-- Prompts For Your Relationship --

1. Name ALL of the feelings you have for each other. The good and the bad: you can't start dealing with your feelings until you admit that you have them, and naming them will start that process. If you have to use a list of feelings to get the ball rolling, then so be it. Do you only feel certain feelings in certain situations? Write it out or make a note to write more about it later.

2. Set some short term and long term goals for your relationship. List achievable steps to those goals.

3. List problems that your relationship has had. How did you solve those problems? What concessions were made by each side? Is this an equitable balance? How would you like to solve problems in the future?

4. What do you trust about your partner? What are their reliable traits? List their strengths and dependable qualities.

5. Think about your parents relationship. Compare and contrast your relationship with theirs. Are there positive traits that you are trying to replicate? Are there negative traits that you are reproducing without intending to?

6. Write two love letters. The first is to yourself.

7. How does your relationship make you a better person? What aspects of yourself has your relationship inspired you to change? How has your relationship grown with you and your partner as people?

8. Anger shows us what is important to us. What do your arguments reveal about what you and your partner prioritize? Evaluate your priorities to make sure that you are not still working with an outdated understanding of yourself. What has changed in your priorities, that you need to talk over with your partner?


-- General Skill Building Prompts --

A. What is a conversation that you have been putting off having? Plan the conversation using respect, honesty, and gentleness.

B. Listen to your self-talk. What do you tell yourself when you experience negative emotions? Name your coping skills, both positive and negative, and list your methods of self-avoidance.

C. Recall times you have achieved a flow state. Are there some commonalities in the circumstances? How can flow be encouraged in your life?

D. Name your fears. Name the things you believe about yourself and the world that make you feel vulnerable.

E. What are things that make you feel trapped? What relieves that feeling? When do you feel free?

F. How does your body respond to your emotions? Describe the physical sensations of at least one of your emotional reactions. Follow up with this prompt after you have felt something intensely.

G. How are you betrayed by your expectations? When you do not get what you expect out of an interaction, what about that difference is upsetting to you? How do you want to handle it?

H. List your methods of self-care. What soothes you in times of difficulty?

I. Refer to the list of your fears. Pick one. List the efforts you have undertaken to guard against that fear. List the hopes you have given up on in order to avoid this fear coming to pass. Evaluate the usefulness of this fear based on this cost-benefit analysis.

J. List 10 traits you like about yourself.

"No Drama" and its many issues

I am polyamorous, and some of the poly community spaces that haven't shaken out all the bugs yet have this terrible habit of declaring "NO DRAMA" ... like that's a thing that works. But it doesn't work because humans don't work like that. We're a species that thrives on emotions and complexity - and the poly community is supposed to be a place that encourages the expression of such.

What "No Drama" does:

it encourages emotional dishonesty in an environment where fostering honest communication is supposed to be the norm. It causes as much turbulence as it stops due to making people feel as though bringing their problems before the group will cause them to be shunned socially. That vulnerability takes a great deal of bravery, and instead of rewarding it "no drama" seeks to criminalize it;

it fosters a policing outlook based not on member safety but on a subjective metric which if it has to be appealed will cause the thing it's trying to prevent. How is drama defined? How do we argue about what it is without creating it? How will it be discouraged without creating more drama than we are stopping?;

it is unevenly enforced across genders. Because expressing emotion is constructed as a feminine behavior, masculine people are less likely to be accused of starting drama due to their practice at emotional regulation. It becomes a way to discriminate against people who express problems or feelings others find uncomfortable, or who are still learning emotional regulation. In a space that encourages the open expression of feelings, it becomes a way to tell femme and genderqueer people to be silent about emotions others don't want to deal with.

it is enforced unevenly across power divides, like any silencing tactic. If a secondary partner has a problem and seeks advice from the community, they can be accused of starting drama by a primary partner who does not have to be held accountable, since their share of causing the trouble happened in private. If someone in the community has previous abuse triggered during a community meeting, it puts the onus of the emotional work on the victim to calm themselves lest they be "starting drama". It adds an element of injustice to our community, and to all communities that use it as a cultural standard.

"No Drama" as a framing issue:
Ask yourself these questions: for whose benefit do we avoid engaging in complex emotional reasoning, i.e. "drama"? Is the group meeting for some other purpose than to discuss problems and provide support to its members? If the person who has brought their problem to a group because their partners were not sufficiently able to achieve understanding without help, are their emotional needs being left without redress if the group declares their problems too problematic? Is the job of fixing these problems being left on the weakest and most isolated members?

Our communities are fragile, and our members have no recourse for advice beyond our borders much of the time. Telling someone not to have drama is basically telling them to stop having problems which ... we can't do. Often our intentions for saying so are even more suspect: we feel that the groups time and concern are better taken up with discussing our problems, which are not drama because we can conveniently define drama any way we like. In this way "no drama" is a silencing tactic that warns people to play happy families for public consumption on pain of nebulous punishment. It has no place in the polyamory community, and the world would be better off it it were replaced with a more nuanced understanding of complexity and concern for vulnerability.


With special thanks to my friends Terri Hudson and Cassie Withey Rila, to whom some of these points belong.