Every day, I learn more about human interactions, attachment, and relationships. Recently, while scrolling through my podcast feed, I came across the term kleptothermy. I had never seen this word before, and it immediately caught my attention. I love language and thought, Could this mean what it looks like it means? …to steal heat?
Moments later – thanks to the miracle of technology at my fingertips – it was confirmed: a kleptotherm is an organism that replenishes its own warmth by “stealing” heat from other organisms. Naturally, I got very nerdy about this as a metaphor for human relationships. Once I get thinky, the questions multiply.
Conflict, Power, and Relationship in Cooperative Work
The most common questions Pulse receives as a worker-owned cooperative are about relational dynamics, conflict, and power:
How are decisions made?
How do we maintain trust?
How do we stay grounded during conflict, change, or uncertainty?
What I continue to learn is that the answer to these questions is less like a rulebook and more like a recipe – one that becomes richer and more complex the longer we exist. What follows is simply what I think right now, with the full acknowledgment that this recipe is only true for as long as it’s true. Measurements change depending on the moment.
A Living Recipe for Relational Health
Magic; and a dash of unyielding, stubborn hope
Genuine care and respect for one another
Knowing a good thing and protecting it by hiring competent people with wide-ranging skills, perspectives, and shared values of collaboration – while providing room for growth, learning, and exploration
Rejecting scarcity and reminding one another that we chose this work, even when fear and lack threaten to take hold
Valuing hard work and rest equally, sharing the load so that when someone needs rest, they know others will hold up the sky – and trusting they will do the same in return
Individual healing work, all the time – so we can understand our inner worlds well enough to stay present in discomfort, regulated in conflict, honest in communication, humble in assertion, and realistic in decision-making
Beyond Valentine’s Day: Expanding the Meaning of Love
It’s February, so writing about relationships felt like the obvious choice for our blog. But I’m bored with the basic bullshit that centers Valentine’s Day as if romantic relationships are singular in their importance – commodifying the human need for connection while minimizing the countless interpersonal relationships we navigate every. damn. day.
And those relationships matter. For our survival.
What would a day of love look like if it moved beyond individual desire wrapped in chocolate and ribbons, and instead honored the reciprocity, intention, and care required to safely share a world?
(And truly – celebrate Valentine’s Day if you want to. Tell your people you love them. Eat whatever you want. Have glorious sex. Or eat a sandwich in stretchy pants and watch a movie and don’t have sex at all. You get to decide what things mean. Squeezing joy from this life, however you can, is an act of resistance.)
Kleptothermy, Harm, and the Difference Between Uncomfortable and Unsafe
What a time to think about loving one another more fully – and about holding competing truths at once. We need one another. And we harm one another. We experience harm. We witness endless ways people soothe their own pain and powerlessness by hurting others.
Self-preservation is the most powerful human impulse. If an organism believes the only way it can survive is by siphoning warmth from another being, it will do so. Every time. Challenging that belief is where change begins.
As I try to walk a middle path – seeing the creep of fascism while remembering that theft and dehumanization are foundational to this nation – I keep returning to this question:
How often do we slow down enough to distinguish between discomfort and unsafety?
Does a kleptotherm know the difference between being cold and having hypothermia? Probably. How do humans learn this- especially those of us raised in cultures that center control, comfort, ease, “happiness,” and abundance as the only acceptable states of being?
Hell, Heaven, and the Absence of Shortcuts
Jean-Paul Sartre famously said, “Hell is other people.” That’s often true. But hell can only exist because there’s a promise of heaven – and we rarely imagine heaven without other people in it. So maybe we’re not entirely lost.
Who is responsible for how much warmth is taken or given – and for how long? The answer is never the same twice. No matter how much we want it to be otherwise, there is no shortcut to being human. No autopilot. Not even a manual.
There is only the ongoing practice of holding uncertainty and relinquishing control.
I hope that humans will eventually learn the right balance – the true recipe – for giving and receiving warmth, and finally let go of the myth that one person must lose for another to win.
“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Erin Mahone, LPC (she/her)
Licensed Professional Counselor, Clinical Supervisor, & Director of Marketing and Communications