Want to work with me?

1. Join the July cohort of the Power in Pleasure course. Check out details and pre-enroll at dawnserra.com/pleasurecourse.
2. My coaching practice has a few new spots available. If you could use support around the places where you feel most stuck, I'd love to support you. Details about my coaching practice are here: dawnserra.com/work-with-me .

In a Sex Gets Real first, this episode is Part One of a THREE part series featuring Eve Rickert, Samantha Manewitz, and Aida Manduley.

This episode is my conversation with Eve Rickert. In it, Eve shares her experience of being in a relationship with Franklin Veaux for five and a half years. She talks about what it was like in the beginning and what happened over the course of time.

A part of she shares reveals what it's like to be on the receiving end of gaslighting and emotional abuse: the questioning of self, the isolation, thinking that you're actually crazy. Eve shares about how difficult it was to begin untangling herself from the confusion of it all and what happened when she started speaking with other women Franklin had been in relationship with.

We explore and question who gets to tell the stories, who gets to have the redemption arc, and how we (collectively) are so terrible at asking about the people who were a part of that person's redemption, how we ignore or invisibilize their voices and experiences.

We also talk about how being someone who caused harm doesn't make you a bad person or a disposable person, and being a survivor of harm doesn't mean you didn't also cause harm. We desperately need more nuanced and messy understandings of relationship dynamics and behaviors, to move away from the good vs evil, pure vs villain narratives that force us into black-and-white categories. This also contributes to victim blaming and the "good survivor" story that so many survivors feel boxed in by.

Eve also speaks about being witnessed at Southwest Poly Love Fest and how important that was for her, but how it also made her question why she got to be witnessed in that way and some of the other people impacted by abuse don't get that gift.

In the end, this conversation is really about examining problematic behaviors and the harm they can cause, engaging in accountability processes that are outside of our criminal "justice" system, and what we need to start asking ourselves about how we're doing relationship.

The survivor pod resources mentioned in this episode include:

1. Initial statement on February 11th
2. Update on March 25th
3. Tracking spreadsheet where you can find most of the documents, updates, and conversations happening
4. Survivor pod PayPal where you can donate some money (PLEASE DO THIS) to support the process

If you've been accused of consent violations or harm, this piece by Tamara Pincus is a good place to start.

Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook. It's true. Oh! And Dawn is on Instagram. About Eve Rickert:

Eve Rickert is the co-author of the books More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory and Black Iron, and the co-founder and publisher of Thorntree Press.

Support Eve's fundraiser for suicide prevention here.

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