This is a continuation of a series on thinking about relationships through an Animistic lens, starting with this piece.
Previously in this discussion I have spoken about quitting smoking through the honouring of my relationship to Tobacco and a burial ceremony of that relationship.
In a way, I have restored an emotional balance in many of my relationships by no longer leaning on Tobacco to compensate for emotions that I perceived as uncomfortable.
I call these kinds of toxic dependencies, surrogates, as distinct from helpful and healthy or alongsided dependencies, which I call reciprocates.
I've been talking to my partner about this, because we are continually deepening in our relationship, and broaching the dreaded subject of co-dependency. I take issue with the pathologising of a term that ought to mean a reduction in exclusionary boundaries between two or more consenting Humans. I want to use it to mean what the word itself means - a mutual dependency along the lines of co-housing, co-living, and cooperation.
Typically defined, however, co-dependency comes off as a dysfunctional relationship trope.
It seems a little dismissive of other lifeways to say that being co-dependent is something to avoid. For instance, in collectivist cultures (Latin or Asian, among others) there is much more emphasis on group cohesion and fewer boundaries between members. Is this inherently pathological? Does this way of being induce illness in Non-Latin/Asian/etc peoples? Does Psychology perhaps have to wear a disclaimer around its neck, ‘If I’m lost, please return me to my base culture of bias.’
There is a distinction drawn between co-dependent and inter-dependent, I believe for the purposes of saying what my partner and I have been circling around.
Forgive me, but as Bayo Akomolafe says, 'Psychology is political', and I must invite larger forces to this conversation on the ways that being together can be pathologised - namely the isolating of Humans into individuals.
It seems to be an ability of individualist cultures (and yet I read it as a curse) to be functional without a village. Individual speaks to one who cannot be divided further, everything else has already been cut away. (What is the benefit of being outside of a shared body, in this exposed organ nightmare? I get to eat in front of the screen? I get a digital screen? I choose?) I see the co or inter dependent Human as the beginning of the conversation about the boundaries of a Human.
I'm not a historian nor a scholar so I piecemeal this idea into the plant world and make sense of it there.
There are three types of plant lifestyles; A monoculture, a pot and the wild. I've annoyed many people, even myself, by putting it like that. But on we march.
Monoculture plants are people in the west pre-stranger-danger, pre-nerf-the-world, pre-collective-agoraphobia. Individuals still in the Earth (though with many additives, many interventions) where your fellow individual is close by. There's not that many of you and you're mostly surrounded still by your wild cousins, with enough time though you could potentially build root and microbial communities.
Pot plants are people in the west after all of those cultural shifts. Individuals who are still in dirt, sure, but it is a highly refined dirt and floats six inches to 200 metres off the ground in plastic containers of convenience, entirely reliant on additives and interventions. There are many of you very close by, such that it more closely resembles the wild ones (who we only know from books and TV) and yet there is always a thin plastic separation between us. We will never (minus miracles - which most of us don’t allow) be able to grow root and microbial communities of inter-connection between our isolated, individual bodies (The best we can hope for here is to start the deepening, somewhere where our children can carry it on). (It does also bring in the notion of recognising that the parameters of an individual Human being isn’t accordant with the many stringed reality of the body of bodies being reduced)
Wild plants are both individualistic and communal but they are communal first, you'll rarely find one on their own and more often will find them embracing various others of their kind and of another kind. This much greater cross-species interaction, would be spiritual and other-than-human wisdom. There is a resilience here that Pot plants and Monocultures can only dream of, (though they don't, telling themselves that they produce the best fruit and veg with the greatest yield) and a willingness to adapt across deep time that means next to nothing to their modernised counterparts. Wild plants (here, literally. This is a tedious euphemism because it's barely one) know their place and know their community in ways and depth that Monocultures and Pot plants simply cannot imagine. Try imagine being a voice and cognition not localised to your (supposed) individual body.
It's a shrug worthy vision, what does that even mean?
This is why co-dependency is not something to distrust. It simply takes more of us than we are told to give to relationships. More than we know we can give. Probably, in a lot of cases, more than we actually can give. Co-dependency is operating in the field of two bodies at once through a summoned third body which contains the two as one (Which is definitely for another post.)
Fleshy Humans, those in your immediate field, are reciprocates. (Unless they're not and then you need to act accordingly.) Dogs are reciprocates. So are forests and gardens. An Art practice can be a reciprocate, the deciding factors not style or medium but relationship in who each Artist and Art are to the other, also how community forms around the Art and Artist - which is essential to the cultural function of the organ that is Art. Speaking of, currently the relationship that exists between most Musicians, visual Artists and the city of Melbourne is an abusive surrogacy, whereby the city takes all of the life force from these hard working and under appreciated individuals and turns it into billboard slogans and sales pitches for tourism, leaving little for the Arts. I’ll have more to say on this in upcoming writing.
Para-relationships aren't quite a reciprocate, these are the kinds of relationships one might have with a youtube host or Joe Rogan or an online lecturer or a celebrity. They linger on the edge because we can find substance and beauty and a call to community within the expressions of these people but the direct relationship to the person saying the things is where it falls short. It's having a teacher you can't ask questions of, so can in some cases become an abusive one way channel - more like a loudspeaker than speaking from a stage.
Video Games, typically speaking, are a surrogate - though I know quite a few people who have a solid group of friends they play with, much like a sports team.
An insatiable thirst for booze is obviously a surrogate but having drinks with friends, within reason, could be a reciprocate. I think the difference here is intentional ceremony - Ceremony will be getting a post soon.
It's pretty straight forward, right? It's essentially a reframe but it carries the consequences one would associate with relationships, not with bio-chemical pathways and pathological patterns and pharmacological medicinal interventions - which all sound like terms that come out of the mouths of advertisers and generals. More to do with how we are made and how we make, how we speak and are spoken of that makes one relationship a depleting and eventually destructive interaction or a remedial and generative, or at least mundane, interaction.
Continuing this thread of relationship in an Animistic context the next piece discusses the relationship of our words and language, how we frame the Earth in our minds to how the world can possibly be perceived.
Ref: https://overshadows.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/cultural-and-gender-biases-of-codependence/
Thank you for reading this piece - IF ANYTHING stuck out to you or moved you, please leave a comment. Your interactions with my writing makes all the difference.
I want to just leave you with some prompts for conversations outside of this or for thoughts that might lead you to comment:
In what ways do your relationships challenge or undermine the standards that live in your thoughts or that you see or hear repeated around you?
Can you think of other relationships that may fall into Surrogate or Reciprocate, or even threshold dancing relationships which have rare or nuanced contexts that move them one way or the other?
This definitely speaks to my heart. I personally feel that so much of our relational, human ways of being with one another have been pathologised in our intensely individualistic culture. "Co-dependence" is a term that's become so laden with negative associations (even shame). I'm suspicious how much that serves an ever expanding capitalist agenda too. Our overweening cult of individualism has left a lot of people exhausted and isolated. And so many don't have the capacity to follow the hero's journey (such an emblematically individualist trope hey? A mostly linear, boot-strapping, ableist trajectory). Interdependence, and co-dependence are possibly the truth of the root systems that have long nourished us - with all the nuanced discomfort of these as well as their safety and support.
Because even the potted plants (especially them) depend upon the often invisible hands that water and feed them. So perhaps we're not at all functional without a village, we've just deluded ourselves that we are. The village is at more of a distance, faceless, but it's still there providing us with what we need to survive even in isolation if we pay for it (water, power, food, housing). Our ability to outsource is perhaps part of the hubris & delusion. Because in this recoiling from "co-dependence", this alienation from inter-dependence that we have makes me think of that Buddhist quote "everything good—every form of happiness, all positive qualities and so forth—comes through the kindness of others".
Sorry - long comment. Thankyou for such a great post.