Oh hey internet! A whole bunch more of you know about us now, and you have opinions! That’s cool, I read all your comments, replied to a few, ignored most. But there have been a few common themes as I look at comments on various web media coverage of our Our America appearance, and I wanted to answer some of them without flooding the boards over at Gawker and the like.

OMG, you are such a bunch of hippies! You’re probably all obsessed with reiki and shit.
If you take two seconds to look around this blog, you’ll quickly see how not true that is. We run more to the “asshole skeptic” side of things. I’ll grant that woo-loving hippies are somewhat overrepresented in the poly world, but it’s not everybody by a long shot. (Also, I have a soft spot in my heart for woo-loving hippies, although I’m not sure that’s true for the other polyskeptic contributors.)

OMG, you are such a bunch of geeks! Why do all poly people love steampunk?
This, on the other hand, I plead totally guilty to. Did you see our TARDIS door? We are huge, huge geeks. I dunno why there’s such overlap between polyamory and geekdom (also kink), except perhaps that if you’re used to being called a freak and a weirdo already, there’s less barrier to entry for doing something else that will get you called a freak and a weirdo. Also probably several of your weirdo freak friends are already doing it, so you’re more likely to give it a try. There may be more to it than that, but I don’t know.

Every poly person I’ve met is incredibly smug.
Yeah, I’ve met those people too. You have my full permission to be irritated by them. We’re also all atheists, so we’re two for two on memetic smugness. Me, I’ve met people who I find intolerably smug (even if I agree with them on whatever they’re being smug about) and I’ve also met people who are convinced they’re right about something without the smugness (also, sometimes, without the rightness). I think all of us at polyskeptic believe that it is better, all else being equal, to work past the jealousies and insecurities that make polyamory seem impossible to so many people. None of us give a shit whether, having done that, a person dates one person or four people or no people. If that’s smug to you, okay I guess.

You just want to have sex with a lot of different people.
And if we do, the problem is…? But actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that. I could definitely find a way to have sex with a lot of different people that didn’t involve also negotiating how to split the budget five ways, mass round-robin conversations about why X is mad at Y, and anxiety that one of us might get a kickass job in another state and what that would mean for everybody.

You’re such attention whores! Why should you get the spotlight and applause for your stupid “lifestyle”?
While being on the show sort of necessitates that all of us are positive or neutral to public attention — and all but one of us enjoys performing in various venues — it’s not like we petitioned documentarians until someone finally agreed to do a show on us. The Our America people reached out looking for poly families willing to be featured, and after talking it over we said we’d be up for it. We’d actually be thrilled if nobody thought our way of life was interesting or weird enough to pay attention to.

You’re so brave, I could never do that.
It came easily to some of us and with great difficulty to others. One thing all of us here believe in is personal growth, and doing shit that’s hard for you if you’ve decided it’s worth doing. That doesn’t mean that you, dear reader, need to aim your personal growth in the same direction we have, but I do hope you’re doing something in your life that challenges you, and that gets you to a place where you say, “Wow, five years ago I never would have thought I could do that!” For one reason or another, all of us were strongly motivated to work toward being comfortably, happily poly, so that’s where we’ve directed a lot of our effort.

You’re incredibly emotionally immature to need more than one lover.
I sometimes wonder about people who say stuff like this. Are relationships, to them, more take than give? Because every person who comes into my life to give me emotional support also needs as much emotional support from me. One reason I don’t mind having just one serious partner is that having a second one would be more work. I’ll do it happily if I fall in love with someone else, but it’s not all sunshine and candy.

You’re all ugly.
YOU ARE! No, seriously, I don’t give two shits whether a random internet commenter thinks I’m ugly or pretty, but if it makes you feel better to say it, knock yourself out.

Editorial Note: This post was written by Wes Fenza, long before the falling out of our previous quint household and the subsequent illumination of his abusive behavior, sexual assault of several women, and removal from the Polyamory Leadership Network and banning from at least one conference. I have left Wes’ posts  here because I don’t believe it’s meaningful to simply remove them. You cannot remove the truth by hiding it; Wes and I used to collaborate, and his thoughts will remain here, with this notice attached.

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As most of you know by now, the Polyskeptics were featured on Our America With Lisa Ling tonight! In case any of you are new to the blog, you can check out our bio page and our driving philosophy. In addition, here’s some of our favorite posts you might want to check out:

My main philosophy on polyamory can be seen in my post Polyamory Isn’t All About You. It’s about why I became polyamorous, and how my love for my wife meant that I didn’t want to deny her the things that she wanted. You can also see one of my more controversial posts where I assert that Polyamory is Not a Sexual Orientation, and give my reasons why I think so. You can also see my view on The Transactional Model of Relationships, and why I’m not a fan. Also, don’t miss my more fun posts about Dick Stumps and Highlander Penis!

Gina tends to write about her personal experiences. One of her most-read is about how happy she is with her big house, and the followup, My Bigger House. She also talks about the history of our relationship and her struggles and coming out to her coworkers.

Shaun has a philosophy background, and his posts tend to reflect that. One of his most read post is Atheism over Humanism: Why We Must Philosophize With a Hammer. You can also check out his thoughts on jealousy as it relates to relationships and what it means to love authentically. You may also want to check out his post on Accidental Monogamy, which talks about why monogamous people might benefit from a journey through “the fires of polyamory.”

Ginny also blogs occasionally. Check out her experience at the Reason Rally and what it showed her about religion. Also, don’t miss her thoughts on individualism and atheism.

Hope you enjoy it! And we hope you’ll be back!

Read Part One here.

Read Part Two here.

Part Three: You Are Not a Special Snowflake, or You Are Special Just Like Everybody Else

We’d all like to think that our particular set of circumstances, challenges, disorders, strengths, whatever, make us a special case. And I won’t disagree with that.  I’ll take it a step further.  We are all bags of chemicals brought together by the forces of an entropic reality.  Literally.  The Big Bang happened and after millions of years some star stuff came together randomly and created carbon and voila, here we are as a species.  And each individual is unique in our molecular structure and our chemical requirements for health.  This is why I don’t say “Zoloft worked for me, so it will work for you.” That’s idiotic.  Sure, it might.  My brain is configured differently than your brain. It might be similar enough that the same dose of the same chemical might right the imbalance causing our ever present anxiety…but it might not.  The variety of deficiencies that there might be is vast and once we decide that our mood disorders have a chemical component (which I suppose they all do because that is all we are, including our emotions…chemical reactions and electrical storms)…a chemical component that we can’t control ourselves simply with water and a positive attitude…we have to approach it like we’re chemists.  What reactants result in what products?  I will admit that the fact that I am a chemist helped me immensely in weathering the first weeks of Zoloft.  I trusted in the scientific method, including the theory, hypothesis, and experiment.  For me, the results fit the hypothesis.  Lucky me.

But really, what I mean here is that we are all human and have to deal with our shit.  Just because our specific shit is different from other people’s doesn’t mean that we are exempt from dealing with it.  Just as we shouldn’t assume that we can solve other people’s problems by applying our own experience and personalities to them, we shouldn’t assume that our suffering or challenges are unique and beyond opinion.  Those outside of us can often have a lot to offer in terms of perspective and clutching to your belief that one can only have helpful insight if they too have suffered in the exact same way as you will leave you alone and dealing with things only through your own filter.  No, of course people who have not gone through the same things as you can fully understand the depth of your feelings.  This doesn’t mean they can’t understand them at all and it doesn’t mean that they mean to devalue your experience or insult you when they want to help.

Again, I will mention that trauma is a bit of a different story and while I think the same general idea stands, I understand that being open to outside opinion about feelings on a traumatic event is difficult and sometimes unwise.  I haven’t had a lot of severe trauma in my life, so I will be the first to say that I don’t know what it’s like to deal with that.

Another facet of this is that it is dangerous when we start to define ourselves by our faults.  It is important to accept our faults, but it should be an acceptance with the caveat that you don’t accept these faults as immoveable things.

I guess what I’m talking about here is that we all have to grow up.  To me, being an adult has never been defined by my career, my degree, giving up watching cartoons or playing with toys, not having fun, or my stock options.  For me, my sense of being an adult is connected deeply to my personal growth, my ability to take care of myself and others, being responsible about practical things and emotional things, being honest, having integrity, setting goals and coming up with feasible plans to attain those goals, and ultimately being an adult with this good life I have is about being happy and taking the steps I need to in order to maintain a general sense of fine.  Happiness is not a constant state of being.  It is a goal that colors my actions and my outlook.

When I hear people say “I don’t handle that approach well” or “I don’t respond well to that”, I don’t often hear “and this is why” as a follow-up.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to at least know yourself well enough to know the things that trigger negative responses from you, but I think that it’s important to then take the next step towards growing.  It’s not that I never say things like this, but I have trained myself to ask why I feel certain ways when certain approaches are used.  And usually, I find that my reasons for reacting poorly are based in an insecurity and I make the decision to work on reacting more positively in the future.  This is usually in response to someone trying to reach out to me when I am having an issue with something.  If I lash out because of the approach, it’s important that I stand back and acknowledge that I just lashed out at someone trying to help me.  Why did I lash out?  What did I read into what they said?  For me it has often been that I read in a gross error.

And yes, sometimes people are assholes and you should tell them so.  Most of what I’m saying here is how to deal with people who are being reasonable and earnest.  But yeah, a lot of time people are full of shit and you should call them out on it.  You have to question your own specialness, but you have to question everyone else’s claims of specialness too.  This has been a huge challenge for me.

I had to challenge myself to accept that I am special and not special all at the same time.  I am an individual but my individuality does not give me a pass on growing as a person.  It means that I have to apply the things I see and learn to my own circumstances and see how everything fits together.  It doesn’t mean that I can declare that I am not part of the world and everybody leave me alone and I get to be mad if I want to.  Sure, I have every right to be that way, but it wouldn’t make me happy.  Are the obstacles we put in our own way things that define us?  Some things are constants.  Most things are variables.  But are the things we call constants actually constants?  And if they are, how can we work with the variable to make the constants have less of an impact?  This is how I look at myself and my world.

Again, maybe being a scientist helps.

So there you have it.  This is how I do it.  This is my approach to the world.  I took on this world view and approach before I ever thought about taking anti-depressants.  The Zoloft just let me carry these philosophies out without so much fear and anxiety.  It took away the edge.  I am brazen in the face of my own bullshit and I am the best possible version of myself at this time.  Halle-fucking-juah!

Read Part One here.

Part Two: Be Honest With Yourself and Others

Really, this needs to be part of Step One.  You must be honest if you’re going to get anywhere.  But what I’m talking about here is being willing to admit things about yourself and say them out loud.  This is something that you have to do forever until you die, in every situation.  You must have humility when it comes to your own short comings.  And you must admit them if your outlook is ever to change.

You see, belief in something doesn’t make it true.  As we have heard these days, depression lies and, as Jessie said recently, it is an expert liar that tells you exactly the lies you are primed to believe.  If you refuse to say your fears and insecurities out loud, no one will be able to be the voice of reason that you so often need.

If you are depressed and miserable and insecure, you simply can’t trust yourself to be in touch with reality.  We look for evidence to back up our biggest fears and it’s everywhere because the filter you have colors it that way.  It creates a haze on the truth and makes it easy to fill in the gaps with what you know must be the case. “Nobody loves me.” “If they knew who I really was, they would leave.” “I am not worth anyone’s trouble.”

So you need to trust the people you have allowed to be close to you, because there will be times when you can’t trust yourself.  If you can’t trust them, they should not be close to you.  I am very lucky as I trust those close to me to tell me what’s what.  I have trusted untrustworthy people in the past to do the same and it was very harmful…of course, I learned a lot, but harmful it was.

Once you trust them, you must be willing to say the ridiculous things in your head out loud.  Sometimes hearing them articulated in the air is enough to make you aware of their ridiculousness.  Sometimes you need someone to tell you.  Eventually you will learn to hear this yourself most of the time.

And sometimes, your fears will not be ridiculous and people will be able to confirm that to help you.  But you must also be willing to fight back and delve deeper when you are not satisfied that your fears are unfounded.

The point here is to always be communicating and processing.  But communication and process are useless if they are based on false premises.  You might honestly believe something that is wrong.  Admit it, then think about and understand why it is wrong and figure out how to incorporate that into your world view.

I have had to do this SO MUCH.  I have had to challenge everything EVERYTHING I think is true about me and the rest of world in order to get anywhere.  I started with having to admit all the negative things that I thought.  But then I even had to question and analyze all the positive things about myself.  I labeled things as “good” that of course have downsides that take away from happiness if done to excess.

For instance, I am not particularly self absorbed.  I think of everyone else first before taking care of myself.  I am selfless.  This is generally considered a good thing because the word selfish has an inherent negative connotation. And yes, I also generally consider it a good thing.  I treat people well.  I am considerate of their needs and do what I can to accommodate people.  I am reliable.  All these things make me quite likeable.  However, I am “selfless” because it makes me happy to take care of people and because I worry that I think of myself first that people will love me less and ultimately leave me.  So, my motivations for selfless acts have a selfish side to them.  And I take this to a level that is sometimes harmful to me.  I ignore what is good for me in order to do what someone else wants, even if what they want is unreasonable.  So we need to be honest about these things.  Everyone is selfish all the time because the choices we make affect how we feel.  Sometimes we make choices that make us feel bad.  We do this because we have a warped view of ourselves and think we deserve to feel bad.  It’s an indulgence.  That might seem counter intuitive, but we, like molecules, yearn to be in our lowest energy state.  It is hard work to be happy and positive and to make healthy choices.  We make unhealthy choices because, even in a perverse way, they make us feel good or “right”.  You might freak out about something even though you could have made the choice to process it more calmly.  I used to do this because I wanted attention and took the negative attention route to get it.

We have to admit when we are making a choice.  Sometimes you have to just say, “I just want to be angry right now”.  For me, this is key, because being angry or upset is not often particularly helpful in finding a solution to the root cause.  My goal is to find solutions for the things that plague me, not to simply indulge in feeling bad.  That doesn’t mean that when I feel that my anger is justified I don’t desire the chance to indulge in feeling righteous.  I am human, after all, but I acknowledge that this is an indulgence…and that it ultimately does more harm than good.

It is true that we feel the way that we feel.  It’s just that it doesn’t end there and us feeling the way we feel does not require others to be responsible for these feelings.  Feelings are irrational in that people react differently to different stimuli based on their own set of circumstances and brain chemistry.  When you have a negative emotional reaction to a certain type of situation over and over again, you must be willing to ask yourself why.  Why do I always feel this way when this happens?  What am I afraid of?  What do I believe is going on here and why do I view it as something bad happening to me?

For those of you playing along, this is how I deal with jealousy.  That’s it, plain and simple.  When you are feeling jealous about your partner and another person, you’ve got to accept that you feel jealous (it’s likely nothing higher minded than that…I had to learn that too.  I have a reptilian brain like everyone else), and then ask these questions…and then say the answers out loud to your partner.  Do I manage to not ever feel jealous or have it manifest in a less than fortunate way? No.  It still happens.  It will be with me forever, but it is not who I am.  I deal with it when it comes up as productively as I can.  These days I am more often successful than not and that’s great.

I may have neglected one thing here: Sometimes your fears will be based on reality and you have to be prepared to hear that and process it.  The name of the game here is seeking the truth and making choices based on that truth.  It doesn’t mean that the truth is always pretty.

I dated someone for a while who always confirmed my fears and insecurities.  I would ask the questions about what I was worried about and would often find out that I was right about what was going on.  It sucked, but I was glad to at least know the score and not feel delusional.  This is a gift in its own rite.

I say this unequivocally: Honesty is the best policy.  Just because it hurts doesn’t mean that it isn’t the way you should live.  Life is suffering.  It is also joy.  Both should be experienced with knowledge of the truth.  Joy based on lies is ultimately suffering.  Suffering based on lies is suffering that didn’t need to be.

Life 101: Open up your god damn mouth and speak the truth you think you know.  It will be challenged.  Listen.  Accept or reject. Incorporate or fight until the truth is found.

You are not living fully if you refuse to do this. I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t want to waste my time anymore.