August 4, 2024

Aria Diana

Demystifying Compersion: Insights from Marie ...

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Marie Thouin, a leading scholar on compersion and the author of the groundbreaking book, What is Compersion? Understanding Positive Empathy in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships. Our Instagram Live conversation focused on demystifying compersion and exploring how individuals practicing consensual non-monogamy (CNM) can cultivate this often misunderstood emotion.

March 27, 2024

Jessica Fern

Jessica Fern's Foreword to What Is Compersion?

This is the foreword to Marie Thouin’s forthcoming book, What Is Compersion? Understanding Positive Empathy in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships. Jessica Fern is a Psychotherapist, Coach, and Certified Clinical Trauma Professional. Jessica is the author of Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and NonMonogamy, The Polysecure Workbook, and Polywise: A Deeper Dive Into Navigating Open Relationships.

January 18, 2024

Dedeker Winston

Following Hatred Into Compersion: Non-Monogamy ...

Many of us who have been around the block with consensual non-monogamy can recognize that jealousy and compersion often coexist, sometimes maddeningly so. Your partner is excited to be heading into a second date, when it’s been crickets for you on the dating apps. You turn green with envy, but you’re also giving them a genuine high five and helping them fix their hair on the way out the door. It’s dizzying and confusing, but ultimately it leaves an open pathway to compassion, connection, and support.

Harboring vyapada, on the other hand, closes the gate. There is no way to squeeze sympathetic joy out of a heart that is wrapped around the handle of a dagger, desperately guarding the painful spots. And so I’ve learned that to follow the ill will, to follow the extreme lack of compersion, to follow the hatred is to find what needs to be healed. Is there pain that is going unacknowledged? Do I need my hurt to be heard and validated? Or am I prodding at old emotional wounds like compulsively picking at a scab, refusing to let it heal?

November 21, 2023

Evita “LaVitaLoca” Sawyers

Compersion as resistance

For some marginalized folks, rejecting normative concepts such as monogamy is a form of resistance. Monogamy has roots in capitalism and colonialism. So for many non-monogamous folks, their participation in non-monogamy is a form of resisting ideas about love and relationships that were imposed upon us by these systems. And not only do they reject the notions of how we “should” be in relationships as dictated by standard societal ideals, but they reject the notions of how we should FEEL about relationships as dictated by standard societal ideals, to include the experience of compersion. It is a form of resistance for them to assert that even though everything around them says that they are supposed to feel jealous, threatened, or negative about their partners seeking fulfillment in romantic and sexual relationships with others, that they are instead going to choose to feel joy, peace, and encouragement about their partners other relationships because to feel the reverse is to be in agreement with the dominant culture’s ideas about relationships. More than just reject the more problematic notions of monogamy in behavior and practice, they reject them in thought and feeling and their compersion is part of that rejection.

October 2, 2023

Marie Thouin

COMPERSTRUGGLE

A comperstruggle is when you’re caught between jealousy and compersion. This is what we call the experience of sincerely wanting our loved ones to have a great time with others–aka having a compersive ATTITUDE–but at the same exact time, struggling with painful jealous feelings.

polyamory

Dave Berman

January 13, 2023

How a Pronoiac Attitude can Lead to Compersion

Dave Berman

January 13, 2023

How a Pronoiac Attitude can Lead to Compersion

Can the worldview that the Universe is conspiring in our favor (rather than against us) enhance compersion?

Pronoia, as described in Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia Is The Antidote For Paranoia: How The Whole World Is Conspiring To Shower You With Blessings, is the idea that the Universe is conspiring on our behalf; that everything happens for us, not to us. Because it is such a powerful antidote to the pervasive negativity that permeates our conditioned minds, pronoia can be an essential tool for anyone looking to invite more compersion into their lives–whether in consensually non-monogamous relationships or in other contexts.