by Melina | Jan 18, 2024 | Conflict Intimacy, Intimacy, Love, Non Monogamy, Polyamory, Relationship Anarchy, Trauma Informed
This article is an abbreviated version of a chapter from my upcoming book, shared with gratitude to all the individuals who offered feedback to the draft and asked to be able to share it with their friends and loved ones. We can work out logistics, share google...
by Melina | Aug 18, 2021 | Intimacy, Non Monogamy, Polyamory, Relationship Anarchy, Self Care
Just like any healthy ecology, a relationship landscape will naturally shift and transform through the passage of time: trees grow and blossom in spring, fruit through summer, some shed their leaves in autumn. Smaller plants come, and go. Perennial relationships are...
by Melina | Apr 5, 2019 | Intimacy, Monogamy, Non Monogamy
When we hold an expectation of our partner to be everything: best friend, surrogate parent, emotional processor, and the sole person responsible for supplying our life pleasure and happiness, things tend to go awry. We’ve been raised with these expectations, but that...
by Melina | Jan 20, 2019 | Intimacy
There’s more written in polyamorous literature about jealousy and compersion than possibly anything else. And still, the feeling of compersion seems elusive for many. Compersion— a word coined within polyamory but increasingly finding mainstream use— is defined as an...
by Melina | Oct 28, 2018 | Conflict, Conflict Intimacy, Intimacy, Self Care
The Drama Triangle: a model for understanding interpersonal conflict. Again and again I return to this model to understand my own accountability in contributing to conflict, and as a tool for supporting others in navigating conflict. The Drama Triangle is a relational...
by Melina | Aug 29, 2018 | Intimacy, Love
“Enough with the martyrdom, Mel, you need to step out of that.” My friend Chris and I were finishing up a session of peer coaching (because even coaches need coaching from time to time) and he added this as a little aside at the end. We’d been talking about a...