Ryel Kestano explains why dumping everything on a date backfires, even when you're trying to be authentic. Start with headlines, not full stories. Check in with your partner's capacity to hear you, and let trust build before going deep.
Yeah, so I think one thing that occurs to me immediately is I think, Pia, you're already quite well into the world of authentic relating, but especially for people who come into it initially and are exposed to things like the Five Practices, and they get to the reveal your experience, they interpret that as like, oh, like I should not hold anything back. Anything that's in me, alive in me, present for me, especially anything that I would otherwise keep hidden, I should reveal. You know, it's really about transparency and being seen and known in all my parts and all my inner ways. And I think like, I think generally my experience is people are so filtered and compartmentalized that that directive is useful in starting to open things up. But we never want to actually override any inner boundaries or impulse towards privacy or delaying or taking our time with sharing certain aspects of ourselves. If that's what's authentically happening within ourselves, right? So, you know, I actually think my experience is that if people are oversharing too early, it can blow other people out actually. It's like, whoa, like I'm not ready to like go that deep that quickly. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I had that experience one time, yeah, with somebody I'd met. And I'm just, you know, I'm— and I was like fresh out of the community of authentic relators. Like, we, yeah, we just, you know, have a bias towards oversharing, overrevealing, whatever. And it's just normalized. And this woman that I was dating was like, I do it like, slow down. Like, I'm not ready to hear that. And I'm not ready to share, you know, like my deepest, darkest stuff. And that was actually really valuable to hear. So the actual practice, I think, which is a bit more nuanced, is, yeah, you know, like, I— there's, there's stuff in me, there's, you know, aspects of my experience within me that are very tender and sensitive and, um, personal. And I do want to be seen in them and known in them over time. I just don't know if I'm quite ready to share the full depth and breadth of these things at this point. And that's actually often how it's authentically living in you, right? It's like, yeah, I do want to actually be seen in these deeper parts of myself. I'm just not quite ready to go there just yet. I want to build trust. I want to build rapport. I want to build some connection, you know. But I am letting you know, right, that that's actually what's happening within myself and the value that I'm holding around. These tender parts within me, right? So, so the idea, as always, as I always say, is like the idea is to narrow and ultimately like make congruent the distance between the inner world and the outer world, how I experience myself on the inside and how other people experience me on the outside. We want to shrink that and narrow that. And, and so saying something like, yeah, there's something I would like to share with you at some point It still feels quite tender and private for now, you know, and you could even say it might be around like a past relationship or a loss that I've experienced or some grief I'm holding, you know, and I will share it, you know, when it feels right and there's an opening for it and a space for it. And so the other person can orient to that because if it's left unsaid, then the other person has the experience of like, I don't know, I just get this sense like they're not, you know, they're not revealing, they're holding something, they're hiding something. Right, and then that then leads to people taking things personally. Do they not like me, trust me? Are they not an open person? So it just is rife for assumptions. So simply saying something like, yeah, this is like my authentic experience, I'm holding something tender, I'm not quite ready to share it with you yet, you know, and maybe offering like a kind of headline as to what that is, is the thing that actually builds more trust. And has you feeling seen and orients the other person to what's actually true for you, right? So when you said at one point, you know, I'm trying not to shut off parts of myself, well, if your actual authentic impulse is to keep parts of you— shut off might be a strong term, but at least private— then I wouldn't want you to override that because you're kind of holding this value that like, well, I should, you know, this is the nature of the practice. Like, I should share these things, you know, and be seen in these things. And I just, especially for people who aren't exposed or may not have done a lot of deep inner work, which is basically almost everybody, you know, like they may not just have, they just may not have the capacity to be with that, handle that. Like, I have definitely been in situations, like I said, You know, where the other person's just like, like either they got blown out too soon, like that's too much personal information, or they themselves then overrode an internal boundary and shared too much of their own selves. I've heard that from clients actually, and early in my coaching I was sort of more encouraging people to share, and then I started getting reports back from the field of people saying, yeah, you know, like, we were in this super intimate, deep, like, really revealed, vulnerable conversation. I remember this one instance where this one of my clients, a guy, was out on a date, and he was in this place, and it was beautiful and all this kind of stuff. And then she went to the bathroom, and like, that was an opportunity for her to disengage from like the space. And by the time she came back, she was just closed, like Like, totally, like, no, you know? And what happened was that she had a recoil effect of like, holy shit, like, I just way overshared, you know? Like, I did not— I was not prepared to go there. I did not want to go there. I don't even know how I ended up there, you know? It's just like disoriented and overwhelmed, and then there's just this snapping, recoiling kind of impulse to protect, which makes total sense. Right? So we want to be gentle, you know, and incremental, and really be attuned to people's capacities. That's absolutely one of the key skills for people who are further advanced in this practice, is the attunement to the capacity of the other person that they're with. Right? Like checking, you can do that explicitly, like verbally, like, hey, how are we doing? You know, this, I'm tracking that we're kind of getting into some vulnerable territory here. How is this for you? How are you feeling about it? Is this maybe too much? Are you okay? Which is just basic care and attunement for other people. You know, you, you want to definitely practice that quality of attunement to where people are at and how they're able to navigate and stay oriented to the direction and depth of the conversation. Right? Because if you're just so self-absorbed, you're not even noticing. It's like they're just getting more and more beyond capacity, right? And they're not being noticed or tracked by you, you know? And then you'll come back around, oh wow, like, wow, I just went on a whole ride. You know, what's happening now? And they're like paralyzed. They're just like frozen. I don't know what to do with this, you know?
