I’m really pleased to invite you to an event about Expansive Kinship happening on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026, 7:00-8:30pm, at Northern Commons in St. Paul, Minnesota, as part of the Diverse Futures series. Please RSVP here.

What is this event?

I’ll be giving a presentation on my vision of Expansive Kinship and why I believe relational diversity is key to a resilient, beautiful, and sane future. I’ll also be inviting those gathered to participate in a facilitated discussion, imagining our way forward into relational webs/tapestries/environments that truly meet our individual and collective needs. I’m excited about this format in which I’ll be talking about my own lived experience and study on this topic, as well as co-creating a dynamic conversation that (hopefully!) will help inspire people to think, feel, and act in life-affirming ways. Attendees can expect me to touch upon concepts like chosen family, relationship anarchy, intentional community, radical parenting/alloparenting, examining the impact of structures such as the nuclear family and marriage, and the necessity of confronting systems of domination and oppression through everyday acts of solidarity.

What is Diverse Futures?

From the Diverse Futures page on the Northern Commons website: “Imagination opens us. It makes impossible things possible. It jostles us free from our chimeric yolks. What can our future be? Imagine with us. Imagine a future where diversity is embraced. Imagine a future of caring—caring for each other and our planet.

Northern Commons is hosting a series of lectures and discussions. Each session features a different presenter and that presenter’s view of what the future can be. Come, join us for these events.”

Is there a cost for attending?

When you RSVP here you will be invited to pay-what-you-want for a ticket. Funds raised go to Northern Commons, a non-profit organization. I strongly support the relational work and mission of Northern Commons here in my local community. If you are unable to contribute financially, please come anyway—you are kin.

Will this event be recorded for future viewing?

Yes! I will share a link when it’s available.

There's a river of birds
In migration
A nation of
Women
With wings

In my own little life, I’m in that river. I’m preparing to move to Saint Paul/Imniza Ska in a few weeks. It has been a tremendous effort to get to this point, and it has involved the proverbial blood, sweat, and tears, and it’s not even that I’m moving tremendously far this time. But here I am, swimming/flying in that current of blood and sweat and tears. Migrating. Again.

It’s a privilege to be able to move at all, this I know. I can’t stop thinking about all my kin around the world who can’t live where they choose, who are forcibly removed from homes they don’t want to leave, who desperately want to escape places that make thriving or surviving impossible. I can’t tell their stories; I can only tell my own, but I can also urge us all to listen closely.

There have been times during this process when I’ve felt very alone. This recurring feeling of aloneness has its roots, I think, in stories about The Way the Relational World Works that I absorbed throughout my childhood. It’s been taking me a long time to make the old stories visible, to deconstruct them, and to continue reminding myself that I have other stories now, better ones. The newer stories vehemently insist that the feeling of aloneness is an artifact of the older stories.

The older stories told me that the road to relational happiness, security, and fulfillment was to be found in marriage. It was to be found in status-seeking, professional achievement, and being admired, even envied. There were rules, some spoken but mostly unspoken, about what to do and who to be and what roles were appropriate for me and what to aspire to. According to those older stories, of course I should conclude that I’m “alone” and that it’s somehow tragic—I’m divorced, with my only child about to go to college and live there. I don’t plan to share living quarters with anyone, at least for now (any humans, anyway— my two house panthers, Jasper and Obsidian, will continue to cohabitate with me). I’m in my mid-50s, I don’t meet conventional standards for professional “success,” and I’m determined to fully embody my Crone-hood and my essential weirdness, which doesn’t endear me to normative culture.

The newer stories, however, are incandescent. They say that The Way the Relational World Works is inescapable: we are kin. There is no need for me to be married. I have people in my life to whom I’m committed and who are committed to me. The commitments change as needed, as they must. We remain flexible and loving. My child will live elsewhere but our bond is enormously strong; my fledgling knows I’m on her side for life. My beloved partner and friends show me the radiance and comfort of our choosing one another again and again. My parents and sister are far in geography but close in spirit, as are other blood relatives and ancestors. And now I move to Saint Paul/Imniza Ska, where undoubtedly I will meet more kin, deepen friendships, and participate in the life of the community. There will be more commitments, growth, and interdependence. This is the life I have chosen.

I don’t know if I will migrate again, physically, anyway. It would be nice to stay put for a while. Change is guaranteed to happen all around me and within me, in any case. The world is on fire in a thousand ways, as you’ve probably noticed.

May we soar as birds, loves, in whatever configuration we are called. Sometimes a migration, sometimes a murmuration. May our nests be beautifully woven. May we not forget how to build nests when the older ones are scattered.

You can learn more about me and my work at JenniferLuciani.com.

I was born in the springtime, on Earth Day. Earth, the element that most claims me. It wants me rooted, even though I’ve been a perpetual transplant. It wants me grounded, stable, embedded in the web of relations. This past month has seen a lot of movement towards more personal stability even though initially all the change feels like scrambling.

I’d be hard-pressed to give you a solid answer on what stability means in the current context, given the converging crises of our times, so I’ll keep it small for now, just the view from my little speck of a life.

A month ago a lovely acquaintance reached out to me, someone I first met through Flow Club, a virtual co-working platform. She has read my writings on Substack, and through that became aware of my need for access to income. As it turned out, she and her workplace (away over yonder on the east coast) had a need for a part-time virtual file clerk, and so she reached out to inquire if I might be interested. We quickly established that yes, this seems to be a good match of needs, and I’ve been working as a virtual file clerk since three weeks ago. To say I was surprised and grateful is an understatement. This relative whom I’ve never met in person (“relative” because we are all related) found me in the pixelated universe and offered me a job, a great blessing.

I’m still doing my relational coaching work which I dearly love, and of course I plan to continue writing and pursuing some speaking engagements and possibly offer additional workshops. I’m still facilitating a free monthly Relationship Anarchy discussion group in St. Paul.

I’ve also concluded that it’s time for me to put my current suburban home on the market and relocate into the Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul), and so I have contacted a realtor (someone I like very much, who assisted me in purchasing this home) and I’ve started preparing for sale in earnest. It’s a lot of work. I’m decluttering, moving items off-site, spiffing things up, and next up will be some DIY projects. You know, in my spare time.

And of course I’m still immersed in parenting my amazing progeny who is a senior soon to graduate from high school and is college-bound this fall. There is so much we’ve been focusing on and planning together. When I say she is amazing, I mean I’m continuously in awe—how is she real? She exists! She was also born in the spring, through my body, through a miracle of survival, and is always being born into a new and glorious version of herself.

I think I’m writing all of this as a way of saying please forgive me for not writing more frequently because I’ve been so thoroughly occupied. There is still much I plan to write about. I have thoughts about the concept of “abolishing the family” that I want to explore, as well as thoughts about language and what it evokes when we use words like family, community, expansive kinship, and relationship anarchy. There are visions that I have about expansive kinship as a sort of road-map into the thicket of polycrisis and whatever values we want to endure. I hope you will stick it out with me as I keep trying to plant my feet solidly on the Earth, keep striving to meet basic needs for myself and my kid and my closest ones, and keep trying to write.

For more about me and my work in the world, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

Recently I decided I would write on the topic of fidelity. I wrote a whole bunch of things. Then I set it aside and thought, ack, no, I can’t continue with this because a) I feel like I’m coming at this in an overly defensive way, and b) there are too many other things happening in the world that seem more urgent to examine. What am I doing, writing about this?! Who am I to be writing at all?

This has resulted in me getting so tangled up that I’ve been brought to too long of a standstill with writing here. It’s not what I want. I see the hurdles that get in my way: worries about how I’ll be perceived, whether my topics are okay, whether I’ll sound professional. Oof. I’m reminded that this culture has done a pretty bang-up job convincing me to police myself out of having a voice.

Welp. If there’s anything that will convince me to write no matter what, it’s the idea that my voicelessness will contribute to others not using their voices either. I can’t abide it. It motivates me tremendously to know that the more I put forth my thoughts, opinions, creations, all the things that make me this odd little assemblage of humanity, the more I strike gongs of resonance in others and the more I help embolden my kin to speak up and keep the sound waves traveling.

What was all that writing about fidelity about? If I could boil it down to the essence of what I want to say, it’s this: it bothers me that fidelity is conventionally defined as sexual and/or romantic exclusivity. That’s not what it means to me. It bothers me that exclusivity is considered a marker, sometimes THE marker, of integrity. It bothers me that people who haven’t seriously investigated the ethical landscapes of relationship anarchists and polyamorists tend to assume that we lack integrity, refuse to “commit,” and are only interested in sexual novelty. (News flash: these issues are separate from how many partners someone has.) It bothers me that fidelity is so often used only in the context of sexual and/or romantic relationships rather than every kind of relationship, to humans, to groups, to ideals, to life on Earth.

To me, fidelity feels like a sacred act of devotion. I don’t think this has anything to do with exclusivity. I’m capable of being devoted to many people and ideals and the Earth all at the same time. Fidelity feels like being true to my kin. For example, I feel it applies to my daughter very much—I’m there for her, I don’t lie to her, I’d take a bullet for her a thousand times over, I want to show her love and consistency and constancy and loyalty until my last breath. But why would I stop with her? I love all my people, my big, chosen family. I love the land and the water and the air. I love my cats and the community of life. I know I’m willing to fight for us. I know what I stand for. I’m not willing to have my fidelity and everything that constitutes my integrity whittled down to cultural norms that reinforce patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy, all the forces that tell us we shouldn’t actually love each other and have each other’s back. I reject scripts that say: You can only love one person. Relationship is ownership. Them’s the Rules.

I don’t care how many partners people have. Truly. I don’t care. I think there is no inherent moral value in having zero, one, or more than one partner, no matter how you define “partner.” What I really want to know is: what is the full range of relationships in your life? What values do you hold? Are you honest? If you are not, what are you hiding from? Do you love with your whole heart? What wounds do you carry? What medicine do you seek? Who convinced you that you have fewer options than you actually have? What people, what landscapes, what truths would you walk through fire for?

And ultimately this gets back to the question of the other very urgent things happening in the world. To which ideals will we remain faithful, loves? Lay them out on the table. If we can’t see them or don’t know where to turn, then what?

May we imagine our way forward, guided by that compass of devotion. What or whom has earned our fidelity? Can you speak it? I can and I will. I hope you will, too.

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For more about me and my work in the world, including relational coaching, workshops, and discussion groups, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

Wasn’t this always the case, though? murmurs a part of me, and yes, certainly, it’s clear that there is nothing new about suffering, nor about some humans perpetrating dominance and violence against other humans and living beings.

But here we are in this moment in this particular relational landscape, and it feels like we have reached some inflection points. The velocity of change is stirring up all the leaves in the yard. Institutions, processes, and norms that seemed solid are showing their brittleness. Habitual means of coping or seeking protection are looking rather threadbare.

It’s not hard for me to conclude that this dismantling of conventional support systems and “normalcy” is very much a design feature. It leads to a sense of helplessness, disorientation, and a search for equilibrium, any equilibrium, no matter the cost. Please, let there be a unitary guiding belief for me to follow. Please, let there be a leader I can trust. Please, let my basic needs for survival be met. In this pleading position, what agency do we have? Where is our power?

For me, calling attention to the distinction between power over and power with feels important (this idea is not original to me; many others have written about it). When someone has power over others, they are making decisions for those others, not in collaboration with them. This is a scenario ripe for exploitation. Power with others, however, harnesses the generative, collaborative energy of the collective. Democracy, for example, is supposed to offer a decision-making structure for power with. Authoritarianism emphasizes power over.

When we are in a situation of feeling helpless, what helps us to step into our power? Not the power to oppress or demean or abuse others, but to be empowered to take aligned action in our own lives and communities?

I’m asking myself: what helps me to step into my power? This question keeps generating more questions. What is this power? What does it look like? How does it behave? What is my power and how is it different from others? Are all the ways that I perceive myself as withdrawing a refusal of stepping into my power, or can some of that withdrawal be perceived as an exercise of power in itself, a means of protection and gathering resources and capacity?

It feels important to open up a space for imagination, a space characterized by relative safety, where I can play with ideas and let the shape and size of my power become clear. I can’t do that without acknowledging, honoring, and working with my very real physiological, cognitive, and emotional responses to ongoing threats. It can feel overwhelming to name the threats themselves, as if naming them will give oxygen to the flames, but how can I understand the possibilities and limits of my own power without understanding the context in which I’m trying to exercise power?

Some elements of my context, both personal and collective:

• I live in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul) metro area of Minnesota. Unless you are particularly unaware of current events, you probably understand that everyone here is in an environment of heightened threat, with BIPOC under far more threat than others. The threats continue with no end in sight, despite whatever spin you may have heard, and there has been grievous damage to individuals, families, businesses, and communities.

• What’s been happening in Minnesota is part of a larger pattern both nationally and globally. We are in the midst of polycrisis, with multiple crises intertwining and compounding. I have been studying many angles of polycrisis and engaging in various forms of community activism for over 20 years. I was first aware of converging crises and their effects on my nervous system as a child in the 1970s and 80s.

• It’s a huge challenge to cope with ongoing, current trauma on top of historical trauma: acute, chronic, and epigenetic. I see this in myself and I see it in everyone around me.

• I’m deeply concerned about my ability to get needs met in terms of access to income. Strategizing about my next steps in this regard is a major source of stress.

I’m not going to continue this list, right now, anyway. I’m noticing the response in my body-mind and it’s signaling that just writing this much down feels very overwhelming. I was pretty sure that would happen, but it felt important to acknowledge that things are hard. I don’t want to remain overwhelmed, and I also don’t want to pretend that aggressive positivity or an affectation of nonchalance will save the day. (My progeny and I agreed recently that I am 100% chalant rather than nonchalant. She knows me well.)

Given that, what helps me to step into my power?

Inner Wise Woman says: You can’t think your way out of this, love. You are a good thinker and very smart, but if your body-mind is seriously out of whack and overwhelmed in your current context of threat, you need to cultivate feelings of relative safety. So start there. What relative safety do you have right now? How can you increase it? Who’s got your back? What resources do you have? What resources can you build, amplify, share? You notice how helpful it is to focus on self-compassion as a starting point. You notice the grounding effects of cats, trees, cups of tea, human touch, contact with those you love. You are frustrated that you have to RE-ground and RE-orient and RE-assure yourself over and over, because the overwhelm rises up over and over. But there’s really no other viable starting place, my dear. Do it as many times as necessary. Remind yourself of why you and all your kin matter. Remind yourself of why you follow that North Star. You don’t have to have a perfect plan or understanding—just allow all your love and longing and compassion to carry you and point the way. You will keep hatching plans. You will revise them again and again. What chapter are we in now in your life? Chapter 793? Count on more change, more revision. Count on the fact that you have a great deal of knowledge, skill, and strength, and clarity that it’s all inseparable from collective strength. Count on your process of discernment leading to action. What enables you to step into your power is the roar of billions. Just listen.

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For more about me and my work in the world, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

Click here to register

​“I don’t know what to do. How do I figure out my priorities in this moment?”

“My mind and heart feel scrambled.”

“I feel an urgent need to do something, but it’s hard to make a plan.”

“I’ve been shoving aside my feelings because there’s too much that needs to get done.”

“I’m angry.”

“I’m numb.”

“I want to run away.”

“I want to make the best decisions I can and find my resilience. Our resilience.”

Here in the Twin Cities of Minnesota as well as around the country and beyond, many people are giving voice to a great deal of disruption, disorientation, and overwhelming feelings. As federal agents surge into our cities, causing enormous harm, the consequences are unavoidable. We are experiencing a time of considerable fear, grief, anger, stress, uncertainty, and danger, and our bodies and minds are responding accordingly.

In this 4-session workshop series (4 Saturdays, 10am-12pm, Feb. 14, 21, 28, and Mar. 7, 2026), we’ll be aiming to find our footing. Through presentations and facilitated discussions, we’ll confront overwhelm together so we can get some breathing room, center on values, prioritize, make plans, gather tools, and remember the sources of our individual and collective resilience. We’ll gather in person in Saint Paul, Minnesota to

• set intentions and goals

• figure out where and how to direct our attention

• examine how stress and trauma affect perception and cognitive/emotional functioning

• explore our beliefs and values about how we show up in the world

• learn about and share tools that support cognitive/emotional resilience, grounding, and understanding ourselves and others

• envision the world/selves/lives we most need and cherish

Expectations: Limited to 12 participants. Participants are asked to commit to the whole series; these are not stand-alone, drop-in sessions, but rather build on each other from one week to the next. Participants are asked to be ready to engage in thinking, questioning, listening, and sharing, to practice kindness to themselves and each other, and to maintain confidentiality of everyone present.
There will be suggested assignments between sessions to complete at your own pace.

Agenda: Sessions will include a combination of presentation and facilitated group discussion.

Session 1 (Feb. 14): Introductions, guidelines, motivations, and goals
Session 2 (Feb. 21): Sense-making: relevance, attention, trauma, beliefs, and values
Session 3 (Feb. 28): Tools for cognitive/emotional resilience
Session 4 (Mar. 7): Envisioning the future and next steps

Pricing (includes all 4 sessions):

• Supporter rate: $130

• Regular rate: $100

• Hardship rate: $70

If this pricing is beyond your current means, you will not be turned away. You can contribute a lower amount that is within your capacity, as low as $0. If you need help determining where you might land on a sliding scale, this website can help you think through some options, and I’m also available as a sounding board. Payment plans can also be arranged.

Facilitator: I’m Jennifer Luciani, a trauma-informed certified coach; a certified peer support specialist; and a human with a long and varied history of studying and practicing resilience under challenging circumstances. I have years of experience in group facilitation and self-directed education. My focus is on relational healing through expansive kinship. For more about me, read here.

Please note: This is not group therapy and I am not a therapist. If you have concerns about your mental health and whether you might benefit from therapy of any type, I’m always happy to support you in finding the help that you need. I also strongly believe that mental health is inextricable from overall health and that it is supported in a multitude of ways, including having basic needs met for food, housing, health care, etc.; having meaningful, supportive relationships with others; and engaging in activities that help fulfill a sense of purpose and align with values. A workshop series such as this one can potentially help you to gain clarity on your beliefs, values, and goals; engage in nervous system co-regulation with others; practice self-compassion as well as community solidarity; and learn more about various tools, theories, and mental frameworks. This workshop cannot provide crisis support. If you are in crisis, I and/or other community members can try to help direct you to appropriate sources of crisis support.

To register, click here.

Interested but can’t attend? Click here to let me know and I’ll keep you updated about future workshops on this topic.

Kin, please feel free to share this workshop announcement with anyone you think might be interested. It’s a new offering from me, motivated by the conviction that collective, relational healing matters. We need spaces to be together, co-create some relative safety as much as we can, and find ways through this devastating mess of a time. I’m focusing on the Twin Cities right now, where I live, but also open to considering how to spread this kind of work more widely and collaborate with others.

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You are welcome to subscribe to my Substack to receive my writings directly into your inbox or through the Substack app. Current followers may have noticed that I haven’t posted since the killing of Renee Good. Overwhelm doesn’t begin to describe what I’ve been experiencing the past few weeks. My hope is that I will be writing more in the days and weeks to come, since this is one of my offerings to all you my kin, and also because I feel a huge imperative to make my voice heard. In making my voice heard, I want to embolden you all to speak/write/express, too, and remind you that our voices together are more powerful than any government, paramilitary force, or oppressive system.

As always, you are warmly invited to comment or to respond privately to me.

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To find out more about me and my work in the world, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

I write to you from Dakota land in Mni Sota Makoce, also known as the state of Minnesota. I live just north of Imniza Ska, a.k.a St. Paul, twin city to Bde Óta Othúŋwe, a.k.a Minneapolis.

Yesterday our relative pictured above, Renee Good, was murdered by ICE in Minneapolis. There is currently a furor of outrage locally and globally about this event for all kinds of reasons, and it’s not my intention to dissect the news here. Here is one news item if you want a starting place to understand what happened and contextualize it.

My intention in writing this is to emphasize that Renee and everyone targeted by ICE is our kin, to process some of my own rage, grief, and fear, and to offer some thoughts about what to do next.

“How can I relax? You just killed my neighbor!” —witness Emily Heller, in response to an ICE agent telling her to relax after Renee was shot in the face.

Kin, if you are not relaxed about this, there is nothing wrong with you. I am not relaxed, either. The suggestion that any of us should relax is a bizarre notion, divorced from reality. We weren’t relaxed before this particular murder, and we sure as hell aren’t relaxed now.

There seems to be a whole lot of reality-divorcing going on. This is not new in the annals of oppression. I think it is probably more shocking for people with more privilege, but please, kin with privilege (e.g. white skin, citizenship status, financial resources, straightness, maleness, people who have mostly escaped being “othered,” etc.), if you haven’t seriously engaged with the insanity of being gaslit by “authorities” and told that you can’t believe your own eyes and experience, you’re going to need to engage now. As a moral duty. If you are believing the narratives that Renee Good was a domestic terrorist who tried to ram innocent ICE agents with her car and that they acted in self-defense, please look at the plentiful video evidence and listen to the voices of witnesses who were physically present. Don’t buy into the blatant spin and propaganda.

I heard about Renee being killed very soon after it happened, through an online discussion group and then through a text message from my daughter who was about a mile away from where the killing happened. I was set up at a public library in St. Paul, preparing to write, having just dropped off my daughter in Minneapolis. My writing plans yesterday got derailed, to say the least, and I’m not the least bit inclined to berate myself for that. I felt an intense need to monitor the news, to communicate with other people I know, and to retrieve my child safely a bit later.

Writing about this makes everything seem more contained than I actually feel. Here is what happened, in this order. Here are my beliefs. Here are my statements. I’m pausing to recognize that this is largely a trauma/crisis response on my part. My brain and body are scrambling. The fear is thick and it makes it hard to see, hard to think. This is by design. Know that fear is being wielded as a weapon. So the first step in what to do next, for me and maybe for you, is to pause, recognize, notice the feelings, allow them.

Fear and outrage and mind-boggling grief. It’s easy for someone in my shoes to crystallize this on someone like Renee Good. The fear, anger, and grief have been building for years and really when we get down to it, decades, my entire life. It’s not just me, I know. It’s not just my story. It’s our collective story.

Renee Good was a white woman, a US citizen, a mother, a queer person, a poet, someone who loved to sing, a recent transplant to the Twin Cities. Her actions tell me that she was also someone who cared deeply about bearing witness to injustice and protecting her neighbors. It is not hard for me to identify with her, as I share these features. It immediately reminds me to think of the rest of my kin who have been targeted and suffering, kin of color, non-citizens, in other locations with other life experiences. If you are like me and find it easy to identify with Renee, please use it as a signal, as I have, to think and feel broadly and bring in all the rest of our kin. AND, it is also okay to be gutted and grieving at Renee’s death. She is not the first and won’t be the last.

I can’t just sit here. I can’t just watch this and do nothing.

I saw a steady stream of this online yesterday from people in the Twin Cities. I understand this profoundly and also feel the wild agitation, the fear, the desire to repeat over and over, ICE, GET THE FUCK OUT!

I did not attend the vigil last night at the site of the killing, but I did listen to it live on Minnesota Public Radio, and felt the fear and rage alongside those who were physically present. So many echoes of the murder of George Floyd. It’s surely not an accident that Minneapolis has been targeted in this way, that the aching wounds are being ripped open again and again. They want us to blow up. They want a pretext for even more violence.

So another piece of what to do next is what NOT to do: blow up, take unthinking actions, make things worse, bring down hammer after hammer.

This doesn’t translate to sit down, shut up and obey. It does translate to some other things.

Like organizing.

Like deep discernment.

Like using our heads and our hearts at the same time. Not bypassing. Not disembodiment.

I’m not going to spell out in detail what anyone should do. But I’m going to encourage you to practice solidarity and for dog’s sake, treat yourself and everyone like precious kin because that is what we are. Allow space for the fear, rage, and grief. Allow space for thinking through next steps if that’s at all possible. Call on your best self. Call on the best selves of others. Reject the dominance hierarchies that are trying to get a whole lot of us killed.

For me, I’m taking up the mantle now and settling it around my shoulders. I’m going to let it guide me where I need to go. I’ll keep you posted. Solidarity, my kin. Forza e coraggio!

As always, you are warmly invited to comment or to respond privately to me.

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If you are moved to share this post, please do so. These ideas can help spread the “expansive” part of Expansive Kinship.

And lastly, to find out more about me and my work in the world, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

I’m keenly aware that I haven’t posted on Substack since early November. This was not my original plan for writing by a long shot. I was hoping to develop a regular pattern of writing at least weekly on various topics related to Expansive Kinship, a concept that has felt compelling and broad enough to contain most of my interests. Now seems as good a time as any to revisit my goals to assess what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change.

I think I have this vision in my head of a Truly Successful Blog/Newsletter/Whatever-this-is, and it’s tripping me up and getting in my way. In this vision, I am supremely focused and organized. I produce posts on a regular timetable, never faltering due to other life circumstances. My writing is always engaging, personal but not too personal, intellectually rigorous but not in a stuffy way, stimulating further thought and commentary in my readers. I gain more followers on a steady basis and I also see a corresponding interest in my professional endeavors, with people booking sessions for coaching or cuddling. I feel satisfied with my growth as a writer and thinker, also making time to read, digest, and interact with the writing/speaking of others.

It’s a lovely vision, isn’t it, except it’s not working. I want to change this vision into one I can fulfill.

The reality is, life has been hard these past few months. Hard to the point of any bandwidth for writing going out the window. Hard as in “please let me try to keep my head above water and attend to the most basic needs.” Almost all of my focus has been devoted to the most immediate needs for me and those in my closest relational sphere.

One way that things have been hard is in my working life. I know well that as a solopreneur trying to build a niche, offering services that are not well-recognized, in an economy in which many people are barely scraping by, is not a formula for regular or adequate income. I’m needing to carefully consider my options going forward for work that actually keeps me and those who depend on me alive. In this context, writing feels like a luxury. What am I doing even writing this post? I should be job planning and hunting.

Inner Wise Woman says: Okay, that’s it; I’m butting in here. Honey, you are making yourself miserable, thinking you are a failure at writing and just about everything else in your life. I won’t have it. I won’t! It’s fine to reassess your goals with writing and with this platform, but I will not abide watching you flounder and blame yourself for all the stupid shit in the world. I see you. I am you. Don’t think I’m unaware of how massively self-critical you are. I know exactly where that comes from, and I know how it has served you, but sometimes it’s just heaping abuse on yourself.

You would give anyone else a huge amount of compassion for going through the same exact shit and struggling in the same way. You would say, “This is not evidence of your failure. This is evidence of all the systems that have failed you.”

The vision you painted assumes a lot. It assumes a writer who has adequate support and resources, for starters. I don’t think a true and solid vision can make that assumption. You are just going to have to be a different kind of writer. A flawed, not-perfectly-organized, anti-capitalist writer, one who gets too personal, one who returns again and again to writing because it’s like a form of oxygen, not because it leads to followers or clients or anything like that. You write because you feel like you’ll die if you don’t. This is not writing to produce items for consumption; this is writing to solidify your existence. And sometimes it even helps others to solidify theirs.

Expansive kinship isn’t a branding gimmick to you. It’s reaching toward principles for living with integrity. Of course you were hoping you could incorporate it into a sort of operating manual for your working life. That makes sense. But you are not responsible for the current sociocultural economic reality. Look around: you did not fill this dumpster and set it on fire. And here you are, trying to yank yourself and everyone and everything you love out of the fire. This appalling, global conflagration.

You know me; I will give you the reassurance and practical guidance you need. So here it is. You are not going to conclude that you have failed at writing. You are going to write as often as you can manage. You are going to write about all the things that matter to you. If people read it and get something out of it, great. If they don’t, you’re going to write anyway. You’re also going to figure out more sustainable sources of income and you’re going to strengthen your relational landscape. You’re already doing it, love.

It occurs to me that embodying expansive kinship requires me to keep addressing my not-always-adaptive coping mechanisms, including believing that I have to fix everything, know everything, and do everything single-handedly; believing that I am solely responsible for my own “success” or not; finding myself racing around the drama triangle of victim-savior-perpetrator; and managing a tremendous amount of somatic distress (this is not an exhaustive list). These coping mechanisms are profoundly shaped by the trauma of dominance hierarchies that have infiltrated every square inch of my upbringing and cultural context.

Not only does this vision of expansive kinship require me to do this work, it asks all of my kin to do it, too. We are not separate. This work can’t be done while maintaining an atomized view of selfhood; it is fundamentally relational work.

I’ve been trying to dismantle entrenched beliefs and fears about “success” for my entire adult life. In the modern assemblage of dominance hierarchies, all kinds of markers of status are held up as the key to survival and well-being, and I was instructed to try to claw my way towards more status. But what happens when you literally can’t improve and achieve your way to status/survival/well-being? What then? And what if the cost of attaining or maintaining status is too high a price to pay?

Dominance hierarchies are not sustainable nor regenerative. Playing that game (hoarding wealth, wielding violence directly or implicitly, discriminating, contributing to massive inequality, etc.) does not ultimately benefit the survival and well-being of the spectrum of kin and therefore does not serve the interests of anyone. Some beings suffer a lot more and a lot earlier than others, and apparently this temporal difference and the illusion of separation between us allows for the florescent madness of greed and cruelty. But I would argue that the pursuit of dominance at all costs ends up destroying everything and is never worth it. We are witnessing it at every scale.

How do these thoughts translate into what I’m doing here, writing, thinking, trying to build workable plans for my survival and well-being and that of our collective, our circle of kinship?

Aim towards collective rather than individual approaches. In the case of writing, I can keep reading what others write, keep soliciting feedback and dialogue, keep it interactive. Not product or achievement oriented. In the case of struggles in general, I can keep asking for help, offering help, and looking towards collective solutions.

Remember the context. This helps reduce self-blame and tendencies towards over- or under-inflating my importance. My place in the relational web is legitimate. My worth is intrinsic and not dictated by the whims of dominance hierarchies.

Pay attention to the voices saying I am needed. They are my kin and they matter. What I can offer to them makes a difference. Presence, connection, and compassion can help keep people alive and motivated to co-create a thriving and just world.

And in that spirit, I invite you, dear kinsfolk, to comment, to reach out, to ask questions, to reflect, and to practice solidarity alongside me.

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For more about me and my work in the world, including relational coaching, therapeutic platonic touch, and workshops and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

I’d love to hear: what resonates for you? Any areas of discomfort, recognition, reflection? Feel free to comment or to contact me directly if you prefer.

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It was a lovely experience to speak at Lake Harriet Spiritual Community. I really enjoyed connecting with people who have been long-time members of that community as well as everyone who brought their curiosity and approached me after the talk.

Any other groups or venues that might appreciate a speaker on these topics? Let me know.

Two of the people who approached me after the talk said, “Have you written a book? You should write a book.” I did tell them that writing a book was always part of the plan, but that circumstances got in the way. They said they thought I would probably become a Big Deal and wanted a selfie with me, which I agreed to (and am still kind of laughing about). I want to tell them: YOU are the big deal. Us, together, connecting on a November morning, sharing enthusiasm, WE are the big deal, so yes, a photo is fine, but it’s because of this moment, not some future of Bigness for me.

Also, a heads up that at some point in the near future, I am leaning towards enabling paid subscriptions here at Expansive Kinship. If you enjoy my writings and want to help keep me afloat, a subscription of any amount would be greatly appreciated. It would also give me much incentive to be more disciplined about how regularly I post. You are still absolutely welcome to maintain a free subscription—I VERY much understand about how difficult it is for many of us to be able to afford basic necessities, let alone paid subscriptions. I’m committed to maintaining access to the ideas I present here and to our connection as kin (hello, I’m still a librarian and a communitarian to the core, never mind that I’m not in a library or intentional community at this moment in my life). But if you’re in a position to purchase a paid subscription, with joy and willingness, know that you would be supporting a low-income human with a dependent child who is trying hard to figure out a sustainable path forward.

I’m thankful to my friend Kevin who went ahead recently and pledged towards a future subscription with no prompting whatsoever from me; that gesture deeply moved me and helped reinforce that I do have valuable things to say. I wish I could say that I haven’t been brainwashed by capitalism/colonization/modernity and instead have a bedrock confidence and understanding of my own value, but the reality is that in this culture, it’s easy to believe that if I’m not getting paid, I must not have value. Not even that my work must not have value, but me as a person. It’s appalling when I spell it out like that, and believe me, it’s something I’m actively working on. And part of working on it is asking for support and solidarity.

May you experience ease, healing, and insight, my dear kin.

For more about me and my work in the world, including relational coaching, therapeutic platonic touch, and workshops and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

This coming Sunday, November 2nd, 2025, at 10:30AM Central time, I’ll be giving a talk at Lake Harriet Spiritual Community. You are welcome to come in person (at 4401 Upton Ave. S, Minneapolis, MN) or watch via livestream on LHSC’s YouTube channel or Facebook page. The talk will also be recorded. There is no cost to attend. (Remember that in the United States and some other locations the clocks are being turned back an hour on Nov. 2nd!)

LHSC’s theme for November is “Staying Curious,” so in keeping with my focus on Expansive Kinship, I’m focusing on staying curious about relational possibilities. This talk will include personal stories about what led me to orienting around the idea and practice of expansive kinship, including the relational pilgrimage that my daughter and I completed in 2014 as well as thoughts about heteronormativity, gender norms and expectations, polyamory, relationship anarchy, the relationship escalator, and the RA smörgåsbord. My hope is that in presenting these stories and ideas, it can provide a springboard for others to reflect on their own evolving relational journeys, beliefs, and ethics. Also it’s part of my not-so-secret agenda to normalize and make visible a variety of ways of relating so as to reduce stigma and discrimination against all of us who relate counter-culturally and resist oppressive default social scripts.

I think the last time I spoke in front of an assembled spiritual community was circa 2001 or 2002 at First Parish in Cambridge, Mass. (Unitarian-Universalist) where I was a member as well as part of the church’s Welcoming Congregation committee. If memory serves me, I spoke for maybe 5 minutes as part of the committee and talked about how important it was to me personally, as a bisexual person, that First Parish was so engaged and committed in the Welcoming Congregation process (designed to be a path for UU congregations to become fully informed and invested in welcoming, supporting, and integrating LGBTQIA+ folks). It was, to put it mildly, a bit intimidating to stand in front of everyone and out myself, even knowing that I would have a generally receptive audience. It’s one thing to out oneself privately to individuals; it’s another to do it in writing in a public fashion; and it’s yet another thing to stand in front of a whole group of people who are looking at you and utter vulnerable words. But here I am, over 20 years later, preparing to out myself yet again in front of a bunch of eyeballs. And not just in person, but online. And not just for five minutes, but more like 40 minutes. I’ll gratefully accept all the support and solidarity available, thank you very much.

Here’s to everyone living their life out loud, making themselves heard, being visible, accepting the risks of doing so in a cultural landscape that feels more perilous by the day. I see you and I love you so much. May we co-create the culture we most need and desire.

For more about me and my work in the world, including relational coaching, therapeutic platonic touch, and workshops and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

Inner Wise Woman says:

Geez Louise, honey. You and everyone else are going through it. Don’t think I don’t notice. Just in your own little sphere, you are dealing with:

• health problems, daily pain, side effects from medications

• worrying about when exactly the axe will fall in terms of access to health care (yours and others)

• perimenopause

• solo parenting your (astonishing, kind, visionary) child

• helping said child with executive functioning tasks, navigating social life, college applications, homework, making sense of the world when there is often little sense to be found, etc.

• trying hard to figure out a path to financial stability while feeling the precarity all too keenly

• trying hard to cultivate friendships, community, and networks of mutual aid in a still-relatively-new place, a slow and difficult process with many barriers

• worrying about a far-away nephew in the hospital

• worrying about all your dear ones who are suffering in ways large and small

• worrying about the <gestures broadly at all the terrifying wetiko in the world>

Okay. I’m stopping there, not because that’s the whole list, because you and I know it isn’t, but because the point here isn’t simply to catalogue all the struggles. It’s to hold them in your lap. It’s to sit with the pain, fear, sadness, and anger and actually feel them without reverting to numbness and distraction. It’s to have your genuine, embodied experience so you can live in reality and not illusion. Reality is not just pain; it’s also love, beauty, and joy. Let’s hold it all together.

Sweet one, of course you feel overwhelmed. Why wouldn’t you feel that way? Why wouldn’t anyone? I hear that part of you that says you should be on top of it, you should be handling things, you should somehow be brilliant and perfect at all times. But that’s not possible, it was never possible, and it was never your fault that you were born into a soul-sick society.

Look around you, here and now. Center on your surroundings. You are in your living room. The red couch is holding you; you are anchored by gravity. The Earth herself keeps you close. There are two cats snoozing between your outstretched legs, warm and peaceful, entwined, secure in the cozy home you’ve created. Outside the sun is filtering through the yellow autumn leaves. There are familiar objects all around, artwork by your beautiful child on the walls, a crocheted mandala made by your love, so many gifts. Bookshelves from your parents that they bought half a century ago, full of books, every one holding associations and stories. Cozy rugs on the floor. Your own body, solid, functioning, alive. The clothing you chose for comfort. Listen—there’s the hum of the house, the dehumidifier you can hear running in the basement, the appliances. Your own breath. Your fingers tapping on keys, transcribing what I’m saying. Cars going by on the street, dogs outside barking occasionally, a plane flying overhead. Feel— the couch, the cats, the fibers of your clothing. Taste— the lingering taste of your decaf Assam tea. Smell— the slight dampness of leaves after some rain earlier.

This is one way back into a bit of peace. The overwhelming things you listed are all still true. And you can still find your way into a little haven, a sanctuary, where you can be reminded of some big love. You can smell the love in the damp leaves. You can feel the love from your dear ones in all these visible tokens around you, and directly from the warm bodies of the cats who choose to snuggle you. You can extend out your own deep love in the form of bearing witness, sharing the emotional load, staying open to opportunities for action, and sending out words on the pixelated waves. Your message in a bottle: You matter. You matter more than you can comprehend. You are loved beyond all reason. You are more than enough and not too much. You belong to this stunning web of kinship. Your star is right here, surrounded by all the other stars. Don’t accept the illusion of aloneness. Ask for help. Offer help. Never stop asking and offering. You exist in the flow of reciprocity. Let the waves take you where you need to go.

For more about me and my work in the world, including relational coaching, therapeutic platonic touch, and workshops and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

Grief has knocked on my door before. It’s knocked the whole door off its hinges before. That’s where I’m sitting, now, in my door-less space, my thoughts a necessary scramble of what-do-I-do-now and how-is-anybody-supposed-to-not-break?

Recently someone in my and my daughter’s circle of kinship ended his life. You can read about Riley here. He was a part of our Family Learning Center (FLC) homeschool group in Menomonie, Wisconsin. We miss him. We grieve him and we grieve the overwhelming anguish that his closest people are enduring. We’re trying hard to integrate the reality of his death into our lives. It helped to attend his memorial two days ago, to hear his family members eulogizing him, to cry, and to witness the gathered crowd, holding together the pain and trauma of his loss.

Losing Riley, for me, also reawakens the pain of every other person whose death by suicide affected me profoundly, going back 35 years. I include their names to honor their memory.

Tory Higgins, high school classmate.

Lisa Elwell, high school classmate.

Katie Sherman, who studied abroad through Living Routes where I worked.

Stacey Ahern, my friend Kate’s younger sister.

Mari Galereave, my cohousing neighbor.

I’m sure many people reading this have their own list of people. I hope you will pause and think of them now.

And this is not just about other people who have touched my life. It’s me. I’m that person, too, who happened to live instead of die by suicide. It easily could have been otherwise. I don’t want to write about the details today; you are going to have to take my word for it. For what it’s worth, I’m glad I didn’t die, and I have no plans of dying in that way. And I’m very sure that if I have a purpose in this life, at least part of it is to offer love and support to those who might want to end their lives, to offer solidarity and companionship in the face of trauma and extreme anguish.

Maybe that’s part of why I can’t stop thinking that expansive kinship as a way of life is so critically important, because I can’t bear the thought of so many of us feeling so utterly despondent and alone. I want us to feel held by a resilient web of relations, a constellation that enables our safety, thriving, and freedom, a world that honors our value and dignity.

I want no feeling to be unspeakable. If we can’t banish all trauma and suffering and atrocities in the world, at least can we name them? Can we find enough relative safety in each other to distribute the weight of the pain? Can we let our own pain deepen our compassion rather than channel it into violence towards others or ourselves?

The tragedies pile up, personally, ancestrally, globally. They bury some of us.

May those of us still breathing live in a way that honors those who didn’t survive. We are still related and bound to each other across time. May we carry the sacred spark forward on behalf of those who no longer can.

If you are suffering, grieving, fearful, or in pain, I urge you to lean on people, animals, trees, the sun, moon, and stars, the rivers, the oceans, the deities you may revere, all that is imbued with love. Lean on the voice inside you that is wise and loving. Lean on a stranger! Lean on some weirdo on the internet who writes about things like expansive kinship and relationship anarchy. I know for some of us it can feel like the hardest, most impossible thing to do, to be vulnerable in that way, but we aren’t meant to be isolated and atomized like this. If you are thinking of ending your life, please connect with people who know what it’s like and want you to not be alone with that pain. It could be me, or it could be someone else. You are not a burden, not a failure, not worthless, just a human having a very human experience of pain in a difficult world.

You are welcome to comment on this post or reach out to me directly.

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For more about me and my work in the world, including relational coaching, therapeutic platonic touch, and workshops and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

Here is a question that I feel is important:
What are the conditions that allow someone to NOT be caught in seductive, destructive hoops of false sense of belonging?

We have all known people who were somehow capable of smoking cigarettes on weekends & quitting on a whim, or kicked heroin, or left Wall St, or got out of an abusive relationship, or left a cult, or did not take academia too seriously, or were not obsessive sportsfans, or activists, or left hyper nationalistic groups, or did not need the approval of high school cool-kids, or their parents.

Attaching is absolutely necessary to being a mammal. But there are all sorts of shiny distractions one might be careful of attaching to. These things tend to give one a taste of belonging, but with limits that cut the interdependencies of living systems. It is possible for human beings to warp their realities and get caught up in just about anything at the expense of everything. For some its a health kick, or a spiritual kick, or a sex appetite, or seeking knowledge, or a substance addiction, or a political identity, or identifying w a particular vein of philosophy, science, saving the world, or getting lost in an AI chatbot companionship/guru/teacher.

While most people get snagged in one cove of social belonging or another, some people remain able to see both the attraction to participating in something, while they also manage to keep a more universal perception & curiosity. I know some would say it could be early childhood attachment & connection is the fiber will protect someone from becoming lost in a situation. I have also known many people who did not have that sort of attachment upbringing who managed to attain an ability to pass-through situations that would capture others.

Certainly the fragmentation of being alive in a world of reductionsim has forced strange sense making for survival. To synthesize the needs of being an interdependent organism in a social system of isolated independence is contorting vitality & necessary interrelationship: people need to need each other. Needs get twisted up.

In this moment, it is vital to address the nourishment of these unspecified conditions that allow people to remain able to find belonging more readily in the broader embrace of life. Defensiveness of promised belonging is driving us apart from that within which we all truly belong, life. People will fight for their in-group, addiction, isolation, abuser, & do so with a spectrum of justifications.

There are no promises that medication or meditation, or psychedelics will give this, nor will one god or another, (all religions, though they offer necessary havens, are fraught w issues)--academia & knowledge is not an antidote, nor is health, or self-help workshops, or running. All of these things could help, or they could become more of the same problem. Sometimes being in nature & exposure to other cultures can help, sometimes a harsh heartbreak, an illness.

It will take many approaches.

I am turning over certain words in my mind, in my mouth. Belonging. False belonging. Fragmentation. Interdependence. Defensiveness, justifications. No promises.

I don’t think I need to convince you that we live in perilous times. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you are also deeply concerned about where we stand in relationship to one another, on every level.

What are the conditions that allow someone to NOT be caught in seductive, destructive hoops of false sense of belonging?

How do we understand and experience belonging? What is it, really? Can we measure it? What is true belonging vs. false belonging? Who benefits when we falsely belong? What do we choose to belong to? Do we even see that we have choices? How are those choices constrained?

Much that comes up for me is about fish not necessarily being able to see the water they swim in (the water being the complex interplay of social/cultural/ecological/physical conditions that are true). Does a fish have to be special or anointed in order to see the water, if water is the only context that fish has ever known? Does a fish flopping around in the bottom of a boat suddenly “see” the water?

Can we think our way out of this? Academia & knowledge is not an antidote. Clearly. How I longed for academic and knowledge to be an antidote to every problem I could name. I did a lot of academizing, including becoming an academic reference librarian, among other things. But one thing I know for sure, especially on the topic of belonging: thinking harder, studying harder, researching harder will not get us there.

I find myself wanting to say, “See here, Nora, I have tried and tried and tried. I’ve tried to correctly perceive and understand the mind-bogglingly ridiculous social conditions of our time. I’ve tried academically, personally, and collectively. I’ve immersed myself in the social sciences. I’ve tried to truly belong. I’ve moved multiple times in pursuit of belonging for me and my child. I’ve helped create and lived in intentional community. I’ve built and maintained independent learning co-ops. I’ve been an activist of various stripes my whole life. I’ve tried to integrate into workplaces and other associations. I’ve been practicing and refining my beliefs around polyamory, relationship anarchy, and chosen family for many years. But all of this is ‘I, I, I’ and it’s not all about me, is it, because maybe if it was, I would be okay right now.

Nora, I’m not okay. We are not okay. I think you are very aware of this and it spurs you to ask these important questions. I’m intensely grateful. Thank you for helping me to feel seen along with so many others who are drowning in false belonging and loneliness, twisted up in the agendas of systems they never asked for and often can’t describe their size and shape and characteristics.

That’s one of the conditions we need, right?— to feel deeply seen. To have our circumstances described in a way that resonates with truth. Often I think/feel about this in terms of being related—I know that you and I and every other living being on Earth is related, and that if I can remember to use that frame, it helps break down the harmful divisions I can feel in my own mind/body. Of course people/institutions/systems can use that need in manipulative ways, claiming to really see and understand and then rushing in to offer all manner of solutions, including violent, crushing ones. Feeling like we’re seen is a piece but insufficient by itself. What takes it further?

A word that comes up is respect, and I’m wary of it, because I’ve seen too many contradictory definitions of it. But respect is shimmying its way between the cracks of my wariness.

And love, a word that inspires even more wariness than respect. Because atrocities can be committed under banners marked Love.

Maybe it’s the slipperiness of language. I wish I could show you what I mean physically, which is kind of funny as someone who has experienced chronic problems with dissociation and embodiment. But it absolutely feels called for. I can feel belonging through my skin. I can feel it in the way someone relaxes in my presence, their body accepting and reveling in safety and calm, their breath and heart rate slowing.”

How do we practice respect, love, safety, witnessing? Can we throw the whole toolbox, every toolbox, at this, please? Because it feels like life and death. I don’t want to write prescriptions here—that feels like the wrong approach entirely. But I can wish for that giant toolbox in the sky to open up and rain down the exact right tools to land in each of our hands. I can describe my own tools, which may or may not inspire those listening.

I’m thankful for you reading these words right now, kinsperson. It helps to foster that true sense of belonging, I think, knowing that you are absorbing these thoughts, reflecting on them, and possibly feeling moved to respond in some way, whether to me or anyone else. That’s where my hope lies, in that verdant possibility.

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And I encourage you to reflect on the questions posed here and respond in the comments. I’m truly curious about what you’re observing and practicing.

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I’m observing a significant volume of swirling and fragmenting in the world, in my country (the United States), my area (Mni Sota Makoce, also known as Minnesota), the people I know, and within myself. Fear, rage, grief, and confusion are prominent in my awareness; I’m guessing if you’re reading this, it can’t have escaped your notice, either. It’s not my aim to lay out all the frequently painful news here; you have other sources for that. Rather, in writing this, I’m engaging in a practice that allows me to illuminate what is happening for myself, sitting with the thoughts and feelings that arise, following the lead of curiosity and compassion, and allowing space for insight and meaningful action. I start where I am, here and now, with myself, because this is my reality. This entity I call my Self is profoundly related to everything and everyone; we affect each other constantly; and we can gain deeper understanding by remembering that the universe as we know it is relational. By starting with myself, I’m not seeking to dissociate or engage in navel-gazing; I’m accepting that I’m a fractal piece of a larger whole, and the insights I pursue are more broadly applicable than only my speck of a self.

I’m a solopreneur (i.e., a solo entrepreneur, a one-person show, a person who owns and runs every single aspect of a business without any business partners or employees). I’m a relational coach, therapeutic Cuddlist, facilitator, educator, and writer (you can learn more about my business here). I’m also someone who emphasizes expansive kinship and criticizes the systemic forces pushing us towards hyper-individualism.

How do I reconcile these aspects of myself? How do I manage the tension of these seemingly contradictory choices? What strategies have I been using to design my life, if we can call it “design”? Does it work? What am I doing here, how am I spending my time, and am I living according to my core values? Which cultural scripts are tripping me up, and how can I continue the work of making them visible to myself and deconstructing them?

It was my own North Star (read: Inner Wise Woman) that led me to solopreneurship. An angsty part of me is facing that star, wanting to know: Why? Why have you brought me here? All these moves, all these life upheavals, and you plunk me down in the North Star State, seemingly starting over, AGAIN? What is this for? Do you not understand that the world is on fucking fire? How am I supposed to make this work? Why do so many parts of my life seem to be on hard mode? What are you doing to me?

Inner Wise Woman, arbiter of North Star navigation, says: Yep. I do, in fact, understand that the world is on fire, and I understand more than you can comprehend how scared and angry you are. Take a breath, love. Take many breaths. Slow it down. Let’s review the decisions you’ve made and why you’re here. This is not random, dear heart. You are not alone, you refuse to abandon yourself, and you refuse to abandon all you hold dear.

You’re here for love. Love guided you to relocate so your child could attend a school ideally suited to her needs, full of art and artists and mentors and friends. Love guided you to be physically closer to your beloved partner. Love said it was time to expand into a new community. I see how much effort you’ve put in to meet people and build a life here.

Building a life, or designing a life— that makes it sound like you can just whip out a pencil and sketch out all that you want and simply make it so. Reality is a bit more complicated, right? Relationships wax and wane, homes cease to be home, nation-states lose their minds, the climate gets ever weirder. You know this. You know that so much boils down to: what can I actually control? What can I choose? What can I do, individually, collectively? What opportunities can I perceive in the sturm und drang?

You decided to make a go at solopreneurship because of the work you’re called to do in this world. You didn’t just stumble into your work, however hard it is to define neatly. Part of your calling is doing the stuff that is hard to define. You’re called to hold space for healing in unconventional ways for unconventional people. You are always writing your own job description, love, and you know this path because you have walked and are walking it. You turned away from a lot of the well-worn paths because you realized that you needed to do things differently. And the world needs people who do things differently.

I know you’re keenly feeling the pressure to survive. You’re worried about instability in your finances, health, and everything and everyone around you. You’re not young anymore. Key institutions, relationships, and communities you thought you could count on have turned out to be unreliable. I’m urging you to keep grounding, as many times as necessary, in the values that keep you anchored, in all that you love, here in reality.

Eleven years ago, you traveled on a pilgrimage around Turtle Island, filled with questions, reaching out to chosen family and looking for home. In three months, you drove 10,000 miles, accompanied by your then-7-year-old child. You did a thing some people thought was crazy and dangerous. You did it because you thought you might die otherwise.

Can that be reason enough? To not let the most essential parts of you die, the parts that insist we are all related, we are not meant to live like this, we belong to ourselves and the land and each other, we do not belong to capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy no matter how much those systems try to hold us hostage.

You’ve had an eclectic career and relational life that might not make sense to anyone but you, love. That’s okay. Just let it make sense to you.

What is this for? This is for aligning your values with your calling. Your work is one of the ways you offer love and facilitate healing and learning. You made a choice to start your own business so you could begin the work you’re called to do on your own terms. You analyzed your situation and thought you could afford this as an experiment at the very least, knowing it would take much time and effort to build. It wasn’t a reckless decision. You weighed the risks and your resources, including the risk of not pursuing this path. Why endure regret for your unlived life? If it fails, maybe you can accept that and do something else? I know, this is a horrifying proposition for someone conditioned to avoid failure, but this is your task now: be courageous and do what you think is right even if you end up falling on your face. We all die in the end.

I realize the cultural messages you’ve internalized over a lifetime are screamingly loud and have flashing strobe lights and are pretty much a sensory nightmare. Let’s lay them out, shall we? Let’s make them visible so you can find a way out of no way.

“I am too old for this.” Yeah, we know exactly where this comes from. You received a million messages that by age 53 you should have had your whole life figured out, a stable home, a regular income, retirement funds, the works. It was tied up with messages about heteronormativity and marriage and nuclear family. You were led to believe that older women are undesirable, uninteresting, doddering, dried out husks of humanity. But here’s the thing: you don’t actually believe this. You don’t believe that anyone’s worth is contingent on how much money they have, if they have stable housing, if they are married or partnered, if they have any particular family structure, however old they are. You are not too old for this. You were born for this. You have more insight, compassion, skill, vision, depth, and sheer feistiness than you ever have. You are more powerful than you give yourself credit for, and you prove it to yourself over and over. You know when you’ll be too old to try to live your best life? When you’re dead.

“I’m not attractive enough to market my services effectively.” This stupid, annoying message is beyond tiresome. Does our culture reward a very narrow standard of what’s considered beautiful? Indeed it does. Should this prevent you or anyone else from pouring their energy into what’s meaningful? Absolutely not. Screw that. The people who are drawn to you can tell you exactly what they find attractive about you and for the most part that’s not going to be about your skin or hair or body. You are not here to compete on the beauty market. You’re not here to compete at all. You can’t stand that shit. Keep doing your usual things to look and feel lovely and comfortable. Tell the patriarchy to go fuck itself. End of story.

“I’m not good enough.” Love, I will hold the small child part of you that believes this until it sinks into your bones that your inherent goodness cannot be erased, not by you, not by anyone. You are not your achievements. You are not the sum total of the projections onto you from people and systems determined to misunderstand you. You are not your coping mechanisms, and you are definitely not your mistakes, nor your illnesses. The essence of you is love and energy, interlaced with all that is, inseparable from what is often called the divine. Your survival, your thriving, has nothing to do with whether you are good enough. That mission was accomplished when you began to exist.

“I won’t be able to keep myself and my child afloat financially.” Perhaps, perhaps not. What does afloat mean? Does it mean meeting basic needs? Do any of us get any guarantees about getting basic needs met? You know that we are bound to a profoundly broken economic system marked by extreme inequality. You know that you have done considerable study and preparation for personal and community resilience, and that you still don’t know precisely how everything will shake out. You know that it makes no sense to think only of yourself and your child in this overall context—you were led to believe that by capitalism, but that’s an ideology leading us to ruin. Expansive kinship and interdependence is where your energy needs to keep going. Money is a proxy for value in our current system, but our current system is messed up. One foot in front of the other, love. You’ve kept yourself and your child afloat this long.

There is much more to deconstruct and confront and replace with messages of love and resilience, of course, but enough for now.

I did not expect to be writing in quite this fashion today, but I trust that this is what I most needed to write.

Thanks for reading. I invite you to like, subscribe, and share this post; it helps increase the visibility of these ideas and (I hope) increases our collective resilience and bonds of kinship. You are also welcome to leave comments.

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For more about me and my offerings, including trauma-informed relational coaching, therapeutic cuddling, workshops, and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

My purpose in this post is to lay out some ideas and questions for non-monogamous folks to do their own vetting of helping professionals when they find themselves in need of help. This may be useful beyond non-monogamy and apply more broadly to marginalized/stigmatized groups, but for today’s purposes, I will try to limit my thoughts to the non-monogamy sphere.

First, some information about my background and what I bring to this topic.

• I’m a relational coach, Cuddlist (therapeutic, platonic touch practitioner), workshop facilitator/educator, and writer. I hold formal certifications in trauma-informed coaching, peer support for mental health issues, and the Cuddlist method. I’m also a queer, polyamorous relationship anarchist deeply invested in serving those who are also living in relationally transformative and non-conformist ways. It matters to me enormously that non-monogamous people receive quality support in an atmosphere of safety, trust, skill, and accountability. I want people to understand that they deserve the utmost in care and respect, whether that’s from me or anybody else. In addition to non-monogamous folks, I also serve people who don’t necessarily identify as non-mono but question or reject prevailing notions of “proper” relating, such as mononormativity, nuclear family models, amatonormativity, and pressures to be isolated, hyperindividualist, and patriarchal. We are too often stigmatized and misunderstood and we do not generally hold a lot of power as a group.

• I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology as well as master’s degrees in gender/cultural studies and library science. At various points I considered becoming a psychiatric nurse, an academic in the field of social psychology, or a clinical psychologist. I hope to write more in a separate essay about what pulled me in those directions, and why I ultimately decided not to pursue those paths (and what I did instead). I point it out now so you can understand more where I’m coming from, and that I’m intimately aware that there are pros and cons to considering different types of helping professionals, both as a client and as a professional myself.

• I want to be part of a network of professionals that practices mutual accountability, learning, and growth. I want us to listen deeply and not shy away from discussions about ethics and standards of practice. I want us to question normative, institutionalized practices and not assume by default that licensure, governing boards, mental health systems, or states will provide us with all the tools and safety that we need. I want us to own our mistakes and make amends, not begrudgingly, but because we wholeheartedly want to practice integrity. I want us to be humble, introspective, devoted to fostering genuine healing, engaged in respectful dialogue, and aware that we are all lifelong learners, no matter our credentials, number of followers, social or academic accolades, or any other marker of conventional “success.”

• I have experienced harm from professionals who were supposed to help me, including from licensed therapists. Any type of professional can cause harm. (As a client I have also experienced help, value, and integrity from particular therapists, coaches, and peer supporters.) I’m concerned to witness people blaming entire industries such as coaching or peer support for the bulk of harmful behavior in the non-monogamy space and beyond, solely on the basis of their being unlicensed professions, while allowing therapists to be let off the hook for closer scrutiny, purely because they require licensure. I propose that the criteria for evaluating all of these professionals should be more detailed and specific than only focusing on whether someone is licensed by the state or not. There are many therapists, coaches, peer supporters, somatic practitioners, etc. whom I admire and respect and with whom I seek collaboration, using criteria that I lay out in this post.

But first, a visual break and a breather.

Evaluation Criteria

Type of Help Needed

What specific issue or issues are bringing you to seek professional help? Gaining clarity on this question ahead of time will help you to discern which kinds of helpers to seek out.

Do you want or need to engage with the formal mental health system? If you need specialized treatment for a mental health condition and/or a diagnosis, the mental health system is the way to go (licensed therapists of which there are many types, beyond the scope of this article to describe, but it’s worth diving into the differences between the types if you go this route). Remember that you can seek help from more than one type of practitioner; for example, you might seek mental health treatment for trauma, anxiety, depression, etc. from a licensed therapist in addition to seeking specialized help with non-monogamy from a coach or peer supporter. It’s important to be aware that a large majority of professionals in the mental health system have not received specific training in caring for non-monogamous clients.

Are you specifically avoiding the mental health system? There are a variety of reasons why people avoid this system: harm experienced or anticipated, concerns about confidentiality of notes and insurance records, wanting to avoid being diagnosed as disordered when it’s not necessary, wanting to avoid applying a medical lens or other frameworks to understanding their relational issues, etc. Coaches and peer supporters are not beholden to that system, although vetting them further is still important. Note, however, that there are increasingly more therapists who are also taking on coaching roles, with or without specific coach training, often as a result of frustration and struggle with the health care industry and insurance companies. It’s useful to know the full background and training of practitioners you’re considering and how that shapes how they approach your relationship (it’s good to ask directly).

Is it individualized help that you need, and/or would you benefit from leaning on a larger non-monogamous community? There are many organized and informal non-monogamous groups that offer social events, learning opportunities, conferences, discussions, and informal support. Personally, I’ve observed that it can make a big difference for many to be involved in a non-monogamous community, regardless of whether one seeks professional assistance with non-monogamy—these pursuits are not mutually exclusive. I facilitate such a group myself, Relationship Anarchy Twin Cities, which meets monthly, in person, in St. Paul, Minnesota and also has a Discord server. Be aware, however, that if you would benefit from individualized, professional help in a fully confidential setting, such groups will not be able to provide that.

Accessibility (financial and otherwise)

How will you be paying for this help? In the US, if you plan to use health insurance, you are limited to licensed therapists or other licensed health care professionals who accept insurance (some do not). There is no licensing body for coaches or peer supporters and therefore no option to use insurance.

What are you able to afford? Any practitioner, regardless of type, should be transparent with their pricing. More expensive does not necessarily translate to “better”—for example, if you lack compatibility with a practitioner or don’t feel safe with them, no amount of higher price will compensate for that. It can be useful to compare prices and balance this against the value you hope to gain.

If your financial means are limited, does the practitioner offer tiered rates, package deals, or a sliding scale? If not, are they open to discussing this? Some practitioners are not in a position to be offering significant discounts, but it can be worthwhile to ask.

What accommodations are offered for disabilities or other challenges?

Where does the practitioner meet with clients? Online, in person, or both? Are there any geographical limitations?

How full is their schedule?

Experience and Training

Do you need assistance from someone who is non-monogamous themselves? I’ll admit up front, I have a bias towards non-monogamous professionals providing help to clients specifically seeking assistance with non-monogamous issues. I believe lived experience does matter, although not necessarily an indicator of safety or value. Of course, lived experiences vary tremendously, and there is still a need to understand what biases a practitioner holds, whether they are have any explicit or hidden agendas, how long they have been engaging with these issues, what the range of issues includes, etc. Whatever the lived experience of a practitioner, they should not be imposing a worldview or set of values on clients, but rather skillfully assisting clients to navigate, examine, and grow their own worldviews and values. Particular conflicting values may indicate that practitioners and clients are not compatible.

What formal education and training does the practitioner have? For licensed therapists, this will generally mean they have a minimum of a master’s degree, have passed an exam, and are supervised for a specific amount of time by a more experienced clinician. It can be useful to ask therapists how they felt about their education, how it influences their practice today, if they felt anything was lacking or worthy of critique, and what theories and modalities have most influenced their approach.

For coaches, it’s important to be aware that there is no regulation of the title “coach.” There is formal training available for coaching, and some programs are accredited by bodies such as the International Coaching Federation (ICF). If a practitioner mentions that they received training, it can be helpful to ask through which program(s) they studied, if they are certified and by whom, and what areas of specialization they sought out. What mentoring have they received? If a coach does not have formal training, you may want to ask what coaching means to them—what do they believe it includes or excludes? Are they clear on the boundaries of their role?

For peer supporters, there is also no regulation of the title “peer supporter.” In general, it means someone who has personal experience in a particular area (in this case, non-monogamy) who is willing to be in a supportive role with other peers. Something to be aware of, at least in the US, is that being a peer support specialist in the areas of mental health and/or substance use issues is also a thing; most states offer certification as a peer specialist, but this is not the same as specializing in non-monogamy. I happen to be certified in the state of Minnesota as a peer support specialist, but this is in my wheelhouse of peer support for mental health issues. For those offering peer support in non-monogamy, some questions to ask a practitioner might include: How do you define the boundaries of your peer support role? What does “peer support” mean to you? Do you adhere to a code of conduct and/or ethics, and if not, could you say more about your personal ethics in this role? How do you structure sessions? What do you bring to this role that adds value for your clients? Have you received training or mentoring in peer support? What distinguishes your offerings from talking to a friend or asking for support from a non-monogamy group?

For all types of practitioners, questions to ask can include: How has their training and experience influenced how they view clients? Did their training include any mention of non-monogamy, and if so, how was it approached? Do they take a strengths-based approach? How do they see clients in their relational and cultural context? What kinds of continuing education do they engage in, if any? Has any of their continuing education included a specific focus on supporting non-monogamous people? Do they receive any type of supervision or engage in mutual support and accountability with professionals in the same field? What would they do if something came up that was outside of their experience or scope?

What informal learning experiences have shaped the practitioner’s approach? If they do not have formal training, what can they tell you about how they structure sessions, the theories and values that underlie their work, how they handle conflict, and how they maintain safety for clients? For all practitioners with or without formal training, how does their life experience inform their work?

Safety

Safety in the relationship between client and helping professional is a large and crucial topic, one that I can’t hope to do complete justice to in the scope of this article. I will state this unequivocally: you deserve safety. Practitioners of any type have an obligation to provide a safe space for you to be honest, vulnerable, and open to insight, learning, and growth. They should pay close attention to maintaining appropriate boundaries and practicing ongoing consent. At the very least, they should commit to avoiding causing harm to their clients, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and have accountability mechanisms in place. As a non-monogamous person, a status that is often stigmatized and marginalized, you deserve particular mindfulness and consideration, as well as for the full range of experiences, practices, and identities you hold. Helping professionals are supposed to be helping, not harming. You are paying for a service and it should ultimately enhance your life, not hurt you.

By “safety” I don’t mean to imply that clients should never be challenged or held accountable. Many times the healing and growth process in therapy, coaching, or peer support involves facing into difficult truths, woundedness, and being encouraged to examine one’s beliefs and any alignment or disalignment between one’s values and behavior. Additionally, practitioners need to take steps to insure their own physical and emotional safety in the professional relationship, and clients also are responsible for their own behavior. Safety is not passive or static; it is co-created relationally, and any helping professional worth their salt invests time and effort into building trust and safety. Without trust and safety, there is little to no basis for true learning and healing.

Different professional fields have differing expectations for practitioners in terms of safety and ethical practice. For example, as a trauma-informed coach trained and certified through an ICF-accredited program, I adhere to the ICF Code of Ethics. As a therapeutic platonic touch professional trained and certified by Cuddlist, I follow the Cuddlist Code of Conduct. All therapists, formally-trained coaches, and other formally-trained helping professionals generally follow a standard for conduct and ethics. (You may want to check out these guidelines for psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and professional counselors for examples of what’s included.) The fact that these standards exist does not mean that everyone follows them to the letter, however—it is still important to be alert to questionable or hurtful behavior. It can be easy for formally trained, certified, and/or licensed professionals to hide behind their qualifications, but this is not a free pass for sketchy behavior. You may also have additional ethical standards for professionals that are not included in their professional codes of ethics and conduct.

For those practitioners who do not adhere to a formal code of ethics or conduct, it’s worth inquiring about how they approach safety and ethics, beyond vague statements such as “safety and ethics matter to me.” What do they consider to be the relevant issues around safety and ethics in the professional relationship? What practices do they use to attend to safety? How would they respond if clients say they are being harmed? Is there any history of past clients coming forward to say they were harmed by a given practitioner? When there is no private mechanism for lodging complaints about safety and ethics, sometimes this will come forward in the arena of public opinion, but in such cases also consider who is speaking, whether they may have another agenda, and the social dynamics of public criticism.

Effectiveness and Value

How do we gauge the effectiveness and value of any given practitioner? If clients are paying someone for a service, it helps for practitioners to be clear and detailed about what they’re offering, and for clients to be clear about their hopes and expectations. Pricing should be transparent and fair; there may be different definitions of “fair” but in a capitalist society where almost all of us are held hostage to economic factors beyond our control, “fair” usually involves an honest assessment of comparative market conditions for the type of practitioner. Skill and experience matter, both in terms of pricing as well as results. What do you hope to have at the end of a session or series of sessions? What degree of time, energy, and money are you prepared to invest? Does a given practitioner have a track record of providing value to clients? Have their clients’ lives shifted or changed in the ways that you hope to shift or change? What do client testimonials say?

Compatibility

It’s hard to get much traction in a therapeutic or learning environment without compatability. You don’t have to have the exact same life experiences, beliefs, or practices as a given professional, but it does matter if you genuinely like and respect them, respond to your interactions with enthusiasm, and feel like you are also appreciated and respected. It also matters that the professional is able to respond to your presented issues with empathy and skill, in a manner appropriate to their role. When we talk about “a good fit” between client and practitioner, we are talking about compatability.

It can be hard to know from the get-go if a practitioner will be compatible with you. It’s worth finding out to the best of your ability, whether through their website, writings, social media presence, or perhaps through a short consultation or discovery call. Even so, you may not be able to thoroughly assess compatability until you work directly with them. At that point, if you discover points of incompatability, pay attention. You are not required to continue working with someone if you decide there’s just not enough compatability—it’s a necessary ingredient in determining the value of the work. Particularly with therapy, I have heard too many stories of people who assumed that they should continue working with a therapist because they felt they were “supposed” to, that suffering through their misgivings was for their own good, that the therapist was the authority and not them, that they didn’t want to disappoint the therapist by ending things, etc. Remember that YOU are the authority on your life, including when you are struggling, confused, and seeking help. YOU are paying this professional for their services. You should be receiving value from your interactions. Helping professionals of all types understand that not all client-practitioner relationships will be compatible and that clients should be empowered to seek the help that is most useful to them. Practitioners should be prepared to refer clients to other professionals as needed; if you are working with someone who is unable or unwilling to do so, ask why.

Accountability

What systems does a practitioner have in place to take accountability for their actions? For some, this will include a board or other body that receives and handles complaints about professionals with a particular license or certification, but it does not have to be limited to formal complaint processes. How do they respond directly to complaints? Have they ever had someone complain about their services, and if so, how did they handle it? Do they have a customized accountability process?

Values and Beliefs about Non-Monogamy

Like any diverse group, professionals who work with non-monogamous clients bring differing values and beliefs about non-monogamy to that work. Understanding those values and beliefs can help you evaluate if a given practitioner is a good fit for you. Are there certain behaviors that they view as clearly “right” or “wrong” in non-monogamy? Who do they consider an authority on non-monogamy? Will they allow room for you to have opinions and practices that are different from theirs? How do they react to disagreement with their values and beliefs?

And…… another breather.

This might be a lot to take in, and my intention here is not to overwhelm you. You certainly don’t have to ask every single one of these questions I’ve put forth to every helping professional with whom you might consider working. Instead, my aim here is to bolster your critical thinking and highlight some areas where your attention and inquiry may be especially well placed. This applies to those brand new to non-monogamy as well as those who have been non-monogamous for many years. We all carry ideas and assumptions about the nature of therapy, coaching, and peer support; who occupies those roles; what is effective; and who we are and what we need.

To all those reading this, non-monogamous or not, in a client role, a professional role, both, neither—I invite your feedback on what I’ve written here. What have I missed? What especially resonates? What topics could benefit from further exploration? The more I think about this, the more I see additional facets to it. I don’t claim to have been thoroughly comprehensive here. Feel free to comment here or contact me privately.

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Thanks for reading. I invite you to like, subscribe, and share this post; it helps increase the visibility of these ideas and (I hope) increases our collective resilience and bonds of kinship.

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For more about me and my offerings, including trauma-informed relational coaching, therapeutic cuddling, workshops, and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

First up is a Summer Social on Wednesday, August 20th, 2025, 6-9pm, for therapists, coaches, and healers who identify as non-monogamous. This will be happening in the event room at Davanni’s Pizza in Richfield, Minnesota. I’m so much looking forward to connecting with my fellow non-monogamous helping professionals! There’s no agenda or cost for this social event. We’ll do introductions, share resources, and make some new friends who get just how complicated it can be. Please reach out with any questions and feel free to spread the word to anyone who might be interested.

We will also be offering a professional workshop (CEUs available) on Sept. 29th on the topic of platonic touch in clinical settings and collaboration with cuddle professionals such as myself. I’m looking forward to talking about the Cuddlist model, what to look for in a cuddle pro, and why touch is often foundational to relational repair and healing. I’m eager to collaborate with colleagues in Minnesota to help support clients with the following (and more):

• Symptoms of depression and anxiety

• Communicating boundaries, needs, and wants

• Developing a sense of empowerment (especially after loss of agency)

• Recovering from abuse & resulting trauma: sexual, physical, psychological

• Improving low self esteem or body image

• Attachment wounds

• Processing grief or loss

• Social isolation & disability

Click here for more details and to register.

There are additional workshops that Maureen and I are getting ready to roll out, including an in-person, 4-session series for non-monogamous folks in general (not just therapists, coaches, etc.); I’ll make sure to write about that once we have all the details firmed up.

SO EXCITING. Talking with groups and setting groundwork for collective relational support makes my heart sing!

Thanks for reading. I invite you to like, subscribe, and share this post; it helps increase the visibility of these ideas and (I hope) increases our collective resilience and bonds of kinship. Feel free to comment as well.

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For more about me and my offerings, including trauma-informed relational coaching, therapeutic cuddling, workshops, and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

In three days, I will start walking again (in an orthopedic boot) and I’m hopeful but nervous. My foot feels strange, with areas of numbness and tingling. I don’t know what walking will feel like and if it will hurt. I desperately want to reclaim some independence and functioning, however.

I’ve been fortunate to receive help and care from various loved ones. It highlights to me just how much I’ve done to build and nurture my chosen family here in Minnesota and beyond: all the people who go above and beyond the cultural expectations of roles like “friend” or “non-cohabiting partner” to mutually create a circle of care. There are still logistical, geographic, cultural, and internal hurdles that we are all confronting, and I don’t want to give the impression that everything is perfect and great and every single need is met. I do want to emphasize my gratitude.

It’s been hard to get things done beyond basic self and home maintenance and parenting (of one human teenager and two house panthers), and I’m still finding my way forward in terms of things I want to write about as well as developing my business, marketing plans, and upcoming in-person workshops and events. It’s a lot. And this is all in a national and global context that is horrifying and overwhelming, every single day.

In assessing my current slate of feelings, struggles, and needs, I’m realizing that putting my focus into even small acts of self-love and self-compassion is giving me some badly needed uplift. Things like: making myself a cup of tea and drinking it slowly and mindfully. Petting my cats. Encouraging myself to avoid doomscrolling. Some self-massage, especially of my sad-but-valiant foot and leg. Mending and wearing my rainbow socks, now that I’m out of the splint and bandages and switching to the orthopedic boot.

One of the acts of self-love I want to immerse in is focusing on all that I want to write. I have ideas. Too many ideas. Too many directions. Too many thoughts clamoring for attention and exploration. One idea that I started writing about was about what to look for in a helping professional (therapist, coach, peer supporter, etc.) but my first draft started getting bogged down as I realized there are dozens of sub-topics associated with that. I think I have some useful questions, experiences, and frameworks to offer people in this regard; I just need to structure my approach further and accept that this probably needs to be a series of essays rather than one monster essay. I also want to continue some autobiographical writing as it relates to my journey with expansive kinship and how it informs everything I do. And it seems like every other minute, I’m reading or hearing someone else’s thoughts on topics like relationship anarchy, polyamory, family, motherhood, divorce, needing a village, coping with overwhelm in the face of threats and violence to our kin throughout the world, coming up with individual and collective action plans for all of these things, etc. and I so much want to respond, engage, riff on ideas, contribute to the larger project of relational understanding, action, and love.

I also very much want to write about why I became a relational coach, why I became a Cuddlist, and why offering these services feels so vitally important. I want to write about work and vocation and callings and bread labor and unpaid labor. I want to write about how capitalism has affected all of this for me and probably for you. I want to write about what it takes to do essential work when the systems around us are breaking or actively falling apart.

I want to write about upcoming workshops and events! For example, this workshop on platonic touch in clinical work on Sept. 29th! My friend and colleague Maureen Campion is great and I’m very excited about the slate of workshops and events we’re rolling out. We’re also hosting a summer social for non-monogamous therapists, coaches, and healers on Aug. 20th, 6-9pm, at the Richfield (MN) Davanni’s, so if that’s you and you’re in or near Minnesota, feel free to reach out for more details.

If any of the topics I mentioned above jump out at you as especially relevant to you, or you have requests for associated topics, you can absolutely say so and I’ll do my best to prioritize accordingly.

Thanks for reading. I invite you to like, subscribe, and share this post; it helps increase the visibility of these ideas and (I hope) increases our collective resilience and bonds of kinship. Feel free to comment as well.

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For more about me and my offerings, including trauma-informed relational coaching, therapeutic cuddling, workshops, and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

Hello, dear reader. I have not had much of a chance to write a post on Substack in a few weeks, and the brain weasels kicked in, snarling and critical. Perhaps you have your own brain weasels that yell at you and tell you how incompetent you are. If so, I offer you solidarity, friend. What my Inner Wise Woman is saying to the brain weasels is this:

Hey. I know you are upset and trying to exert control through familiar means. There are absolutely solid reasons for you to be upset. There is much in the world that is stupid and awful. However, my dear little freaking-out brain weasels, you are flailing and directing your ferocity in the wrong direction. Let’s put our focus squarely in a frame of our values, which starts with self-care, the kind that is a discipline of gentle truth. Then the self-care ripples out as it inevitably does into other-care, interdependence, resilience, resolve, groundedness, and integrity. You don’t have to tear yourself down to move ahead. It doesn’t work that way. You are enormously important and valuable and you must treat yourself accordingly, with kindness and respect. Your rage, fear, and urgency are well-earned; let’s work with them and direct them where they can fuel necessary fires and not self-destructive ones. Think prescribed prairie burns for the overall health of the landscape instead of burning down your house.

I was going to write “And now that that’s out of the way….” but actually it’s integral to my thoughts on showing up, relationship anarchy, mutual aid, and setting priorities, because showing up begins with self relationship.

Last Friday, I attended a potluck and discussion about relationship anarchy in Minneapolis with a group of people I hadn’t met before. This wasn’t “my” relationship anarchy group that has been meeting monthly in St. Paul for a little over a year (“my” is in quotes because although I initiated it and generally facilitate it, I don’t wish to signal ownership over it). I heard about the Minneapolis event through a chat thread to which an acquaintance had added me.

I had to overcome some hurdles in resolving to attend. First, I’m continually struggling to set priorities on how to spend my time currently, and second, social anxiety is very much an issue for me. My initial reaction was “Oh! More relationship anarchists in the Twin Cities! I want to connect with them!” and then the dread of jumping into an entirely new social situation set in. But I confronted this successfully by reminding myself that if I showed up and was miserable, I could leave, and that it was still a good thing to give myself and these unknown other people a chance to connect and benefit from each other’s experience, wisdom, and sparkliness.

The struggle with prioritizing how to spend my time often centers around the demands of capitalism, and by capitalism I mean not just the economic system/philosophy/religion to which we are all held hostage, but the overarching system of capitalism/white supremacy/patriarchy/colonialism/oppression in general. That all sounds big and vague, so I’ll try to condense it into my personal examples of lived experience: I’m a small business owner, a solopreneur, a single mom. My business is very much in its beginning stages, still, and it will take time to build it into anything even resembling financial stability. I’ve made a whole series of Big Life Choices as well as had circumstances thrust upon me, and it’s no wonder that the panic rises when I think about whether there is truly ground under my and my child’s feet. I’m deeply aware that the choices and circumstances have been shaped by the aforementioned oppressive System, which insinuates itself into every intimate corner of my existence. If a system can “want” things, this System does want me to be panicked; it wants me to abandon self-employment, especially the kind that is oriented around radical, relational healing; it wants me to abandon my volunteer and mutual aid efforts; it wants me atomized and focusing on hyperindividualism rather than expansive kinship; it wants me gasping for air and believing that the only answer is “normal” employment, the kind that comes with medical benefits and a 401K (never mind what the work even is). So even in deciding to attend a potluck and discussion, the doubt arises: shouldn’t I be spending every waking moment in a mad hustle to build my business? How the hell am I supposed to survive otherwise, given the choices I’ve made? Isn’t it a dilution of my energy to focus on things like relationship anarchy and mutual aid?

I’m thankful to myself for overcoming the hurdles and attending anyway. It was absolutely worth it. I met some delightful, friendly, open-hearted people, we shared food, and we talked. Could anything be more elemental in human experience? We gather, we eat, we share stories, we search for meaning, we find our loneliness easing, our blood pressure lowering, our breathing and heart beats syncing. In many ways it was the same vibe I’ve been trying to cultivate through “my” Relationship Anarchy group. I don’t know when I’ll see these people again, but it’s okay; we have been introduced, we have connected, and with luck and intention, we may speak and share food again.

Why is it worth it, and why is it emphatically not a dilution of my energy? Showing up takes effort; there’s no getting around that. It is an investment of time and energy. There are times when showing up can take enormous time and energy (although if this is always the case, then it’s probably a signal that something is unsustainable). Showing up, to me, is what makes expansive kinship work; we demonstrate through our behavior that we are mutually interested, supportive, caring, and ultimately connected in a profound way. We are related. We need each other. Simultaneously, we are autonomous beings and interdependent beings; it doesn’t work to pretend that we are either islands or hopelessly and unhealthily enmeshed. We are called to show up for ourselves and for each other. And in doing so, we also inspire and invigorate ourselves.

There are many ways to move through the world as a relationship anarchist. There are no “rules,” although Andie Nordgren’s short manifesto has some excellent guidelines. My own take is inextricable from my thoughts about expansive kinship: that community building is vital to our surviving and thriving; that amatonormativity works against our common interests and tends to keep us largely separate and therefore weakened; that while honoring one’s own wants and needs is very important, doing so with a blatant disrespect for anyone else’s is more a sign of being a dick than being a relationship anarchist.

I have so many more thoughts, dear kin, and I promise that I will keep writing on a timetable that honors my real limits. I’m so glad you’re here, connecting through these words and ideas. You are very welcome to post your thoughts in the comments and/or contact me directly.

Reflection

How do you show up for yourself?

How do you show up for others?

What hurdles have you overcome or are working on overcoming regarding showing up in the ways most meaningful to you?

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Thanks for reading. I invite you to like, subscribe, and share this post; it helps increase the visibility of these ideas and (I hope) increases our collective resilience and bonds of kinship.

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For more about me and my offerings, including trauma-informed relational coaching, therapeutic cuddling, workshops, and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

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In this What do we do now? series, I’ve suggested slowing it all down, returning to your body, asking your Inner Wise Person for help, and reaching out to your kinship network. In this fifth and final post in the series, I’m going to encourage you to find and/or remember your mission. Yes, your mission, your purpose, even if that looks nothing like what we’ve been told “mission” and “purpose” are supposed to look like.

In keeping with my tendency to link thoughts with snippets of music, there is, again, some music: the theme song from Mission: Impossible.

Except I must emphasize to you, dear reader, that our missions are far from impossible. Not only are they possible, they are essential. They will always involve navigating risks, but that came as a package deal with the We Get to Be Alive bundle.

Mission can be a loaded word, and I don’t want to limit any of us to particular language in this regard. If purpose suits you better, or other verbiage, go for it. Mission can take on religious tones, and at least for me, I would rather aim for an expansive sense of the sacred rather than any particular religious references. However, your mission is profoundly yours, and the language you apply to understand it would ideally reflect what’s most meaningful to you.

For me, the word mission resonates in part because of a song by Patty Griffin, Mad Mission:

It’s a mad mission under difficult conditions
Not everybody makes it to the loving cup
It’s a mad mission but I’ve got the ambition
Mad, mad mission
Sign me up

This song has buoyed me up for decades now. Most of my missions have been mad by the standards of my society (20th-21st century America). And now they are madder than ever, yes, supposedly “crazy” and also angry as hell.

Why does it matter? Does one have to have a mission? There’s no life exam you have to take that asks “WHAT IS YOUR MISSION, HUMAN” and “DID YOU FULFILL IT?” It’s a bit like asking, why does life exist? Is there a reason? It seems that life from our little mammalian perspective wants to perpetuate itself both individually and collectively. Is that a purpose? Is part of our purpose as human animals to ask questions like these, because of our big honkin’ brains that can’t stop asking?

But here I am, boldly declaring “find and/or remember your mission” because I’m trying to address the urgent question, What do we do now? or more to the point, What the fuck do we do now?

These times summon our creativity and resilience in the face of profound danger. The world has never been an especially safe place, although some have experienced more safety relative to others. I’m wary of throwing around words like “unprecedented” when we know that empires have risen and collapsed, species have come and gone, and the community of life has endured abuses and horrors for a long, long time. But there are some aspects of what’s happening that are new.

I suggest that we can respond in ways that are both novel to our current circumstances and incomprehensibly old. The tools I’ve been describing in this series include things that are older than humanity itself. Becoming grounded in our physical beings, relying on our kin, etc.—these are not just important for humans. They are deeply encoded within us, biologically and socially. The part about finding one’s mission might require a bit more thinking, but it speaks to an internal compass that is felt more than held at arm’s reach in some ethereal way. It might be uniquely human, but who knows?

I have been thinking about and trying to verbalize my mission for my entire life. I don’t know if this is a character trait or flaw. Nobody told me I absolutely had to, although I think I’ve picked up cues from my culture that told me it would be a good idea. My culture also told me my mission would be better if it fit certain narratives and scripts, like “make money” and “be conventionally attractive and admirable” and “get married” and “be a successful professional like a professor or a doctor or something'“ and blah blah blah… you know what I’m talking about. But those specific messages weren’t my mission, even though aspects of them still resonate (like surviving, maintaining my sense of integrity, committing to important people in my life, and doing meaningful work).

What I know about my own mission is that I feel called to be a catalyst for healing and connection. I’m called to use my own wounds and challenges to expand my empathy and compassion. I’m called to connect with a posse of misfits, people who feel like they don’t belong, people who are marginalized and othered because of their quirky brains, sexualities, genders, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, ways of relating and loving, and other qualities that are intrinsic to who they are. I’m called to defend the community of life. I’m called to center myself in expansive kinship, loving up my kin the best I know how. I have amassed a collection of tools for these inextricably intertwined callings.

I’m committed to applying these tools in the service of love. My North Star, my Inner Wise Woman, my internal wisdom and integrity that speaks truth, that’s what I choose to listen to.

Reflection

What is your mission? Is it clear and right at the surface? buried? murky?

What would help you to find and/or remember your mission? Journaling? Talking with someone? Reading or listening to other people’s missions to hear what resonates or doesn’t?

What is your mission for? What actions are the natural next steps to live your mission?

What support do you need to fulfill your mission?

I invite you to respond in the comments.

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Thanks for reading. I invite you to like, subscribe, and share this post; it helps increase the visibility of these ideas and (I hope) increases our collective resilience and bonds of kinship.

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For more about me and my offerings, including trauma-informed relational coaching, professional cuddling, workshops, and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.

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Thus far in the What do we do now series, I have focused a lot on beginning with the self. I’ve recommended slowing it all down, returning to your body, and asking your Inner Wise Person for help.

And because my brain is the way it is, just now it latched onto “starting at the beginning” and queued up a song from The Sound of Music, “Do Re Mi”:

Let’s start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
When you read, you begin with A-B-C
When you sing, you begin with Do-Re-Mi

And apparently, when you ask the question “what do we do now?”, you begin with the self.

But we’re not going to stop there. It wasn’t simply “What do I do now,” was it? There was a we in there. We. Us. You and me and all y’all, tutti noi, todo el mundo.

If there’s nothing else you glean from this Substack, I hope you take away this: I urge you to reach out to your kinship network.

What do I mean? What does reaching out consist of? Who is included? Who is excluded?

Your network of expansive kinship

What are some ways to figure out who is in your network? Are there words that are more resonant for you than “network”? Your mycelial threads, your connections, your branching trees, your polycules and anarcules, your layers of relationships in Dunbar’s number, your nodes in Indra’s Net?

From a theoretical standpoint, it can be uplifting to cast that net wide and be more inclusive than exclusive. Feeling into your sense of kinship with the whole community of life and all of energy and matter can be a source of empowerment, comfort, inspiration, and hope.

From a practical standpoint, it can be useful to narrow your scope a bit. We are all literally related to every single living being on Earth, but that doesn’t mean we can reach out to them all, nor should we.

Using myself as an example, I’m related to every cat on earth (and yes, I wish I could pet every single one) but I am closest to the two cats that live with me, Jasper and Obsidian.

I include the blood relations who are a part of my life, my daughter, parents, sister, niece and nephews, and my relatives in Italy.

I include chosen family both near and far, my dear ones with whom I have varying frequencies of contact but shared understandings of love, alignment, and I have your back.

I also include so-called “weak social ties” although I’m not a fan of this verbiage. Supposedly these are all the people who don’t fall into the “close friends and family” bucket but with whom we have varying degrees of contact, familiarity, warmth, and mutual interests. These ties are far more important than current cultural understandings might have us believe. They can range from a clerk you see regularly at a local store, to a casual business acquaintance, to a fellow student, to a member of a social group you attend, without any strict definition limiting who might be included.

For me, people in my further-out rings of expansive kinship include many readers of my writings (here on Substack, my past blog, Scintillating Speck, and on Facebook and a smattering of other online places); members of social and discussion groups (such as the Relationship Anarchy Twin Cities discussion I facilitate monthly in St. Paul, Minnesota), past co-workers, neighbors, community organizers, activists, homeschool families, and members of affinity groups I’ve been a part of in the past.

Included, too, are the silver maples outside my window; the deer wandering the neighborhood; the crows and jays calling out their presence; the rain in its circular path from sky to ground to stream to river to ocean to sky. The food I take into my body. The secure knowledge that I am not separate from the web of life, matter, and energy.

The ways that I reach out to these beings and communities may differ depending on what I’m seeking at a given moment. That’s okay. There’s no mandate that I reach out to everyone in exactly the same way, at the same frequency, or on the same topics. The main point is to reach out at all.

We need each other. Contrary to the messaging of hyperindividualist, self-sufficient programming, we are a social, interdependent species. This is certainly balanced with a need for personal autonomy, but these things are not mutually exclusive.

In this current moment, with so many of us experiencing a great deal of stress, dysfunction, and upheaval, it makes sense for us to reach out. Reaching out in whatever ways we’re able can lead to real help, both given and received, and to further building community and mutual aid. Reaching out builds bonds for collective resistance against oppressive and tyrannical systems and entities. Reaching out is absolutely within our power.

And in the process of reaching out, we may find or remember our mission.

Reflection

Who is included in your kinship network? What criteria are you using to include or exclude?

What are three ways you could reach out over the next several days? If this feels daunting, begin by identifying those who feel easiest to reach out to.

What comes up for you as you contemplate or commit to reaching out?

I invite you to respond in the comments.

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This is part 4 in the series What do we do now? Other parts in the series:

• Slowing it all down

• Returning to your body

• Asking your Inner Wise Person for help

• Reaching out to your kinship network (what you’re reading now)

• Finding/remembering your mission (coming soon)

Thanks for reading. I invite you to like, subscribe, and share this post; it helps increase the visibility of these ideas and (I hope) increases our collective resilience and bonds of kinship.

Share

Subscribe now

For more about me and my work in the world, including trauma-informed relational coaching, cuddling, workshops, and events, visit JenniferLuciani.com.