Their sexual orientation. Full stop.
Straight. Gay. Bi. Unidentified. Any and all of them.
Socially, we use orientation to make navigating compatibility feel less like guesswork. But nervous-system honesty usually doesn’t live there. Survival performances do. Many people organize their lives around an orientation that keeps certain truths unexamined. From the outside, it can look like necessary protection. Or it can look manipulative, malicious, and exploitative. But from a nervous-system lens, it’s often just misaligned, unmanaged survival mind integration. That doesn’t mean you tolerate it. It just means you understand it without dramatizing it.
When you refuse to let people avoid themselves through you, it creates conflict with those who are drawn to you in ways that don’t match the story they tell you about themselves. They’ll either fall away or hover at the edge, conflicted, unable to meet you where you are, and inverted.
Inversion is slippery.
If you’re gay, inversion looks like straight people drawn to you in non-straight ways and gay people drawn to you in non-relational ways. And vice versa, if you’re straight, gay people are drawn to you in non-gay ways, and straight people are drawn to you in explicitly sexual ways. With others, you receive projection without a mutual pull.
Everything keeps arriving disassembled and disproportionate, and you feel forced to make do.
For me, sexual orientation has always been secondary. When the pieces never arrive integrated, a person’s label never solves the fragmentation. Even before having the language to name this, my concern has never been if someone is straight, gay, bi, pan, or unidentified. I’m always observing body-level nervous-system truth behavior (coherence).
I’ve never been one to “grow into” an attraction to someone. Whether it be platonic or erotic, I was always clear about it within moments. Where it got complicated is when the erotic signal got entangled in someone else’s avoidance pattern. That’s when the question became: Is this attraction clean? Or is this a survival performance leaking in sideways?
This is the question radical and immediate honesty brings up in connection with others. When more of us can accept that sexuality is fluid for everyone, then this kind of honesty can proportionately contextualize our personal preferences. Yes, including those who claim they are “100%” on one side or the other.
In survival performances, the inversion pattern is often interpreted as fate, chemistry, destiny, tragedy, or confusion. In other words, it’s almost always something external: attraction showing up indirectly, intimacy showing up displaced, desire showing up compartmentalized, and behavior looking sideways, delayed, or contradictory. Like, what are you trying to prove? What fantasy are you trying live up to?
Here’s the most powerful question to ask yourself about anyone connecting with you: Is this person connecting with themselves through me? Or am I becoming a channel they avoid themselves through?
To get an honest answer, you’ve got to turn the question around on yourself: Are you connecting with yourself through them? Or are you using them as a channel to avoid yourself?
Honesty in our current society isn’t evenly distributed in survival connections. It must work mutually. Otherwise, avoidance will continue to scramble attraction. Survival performances will continue to muddy clean resonance. People will continue to feel something real, but won’t take the time and effort to practice how to metabolize it. Why? Because it’ll feel like they’re betraying the survival identity they’re clinging to. Reconciling that depends on how easily people can soften their grip. Individual results always vary.
However, refusing the mismatch has a timing cost: Touch deprivation. Relational deprivation. The very human ache for contact without distortion. So your job is to remain deeply honest and deeply available internally, yet externally restrained, without forcing connection. Stay present and functional, and let your body-level truth guide the movement. Moment by moment. It’s a sobering process, but it holds a peace that a survival performance will never know.
If it’s any consolation, it’s getting harder and harder to avoid ourselves through survival performances. The deeper and more consciously we can meet ourselves in immediate honesty, the less what gets exposed can be used against us.
In the meantime and in between time, please be kind and gentle with yourself, as I do the same.
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