Narla Dean Somatic and Relational Therapist, Melbourne (2026)

01/02/2026

There are only two choices, Love and Fear.

27/01/2026

WHERE MOST TRIP UP IN OPEN RELATING

The biggest shift in open relating is not logical, and it’s not logistical either.
It’s not agreements.
It’s not even communication.

It's the undercurrents.
It’s a change in our safety programming.
It’s the nervous system.

Within the dominant relating construct of monogamy, safety is organised around one core idea:
my partner choosing someone else equals threat, right?

The mind can understand a new relational framework fairly quickly.
The nervous system takes time.

This is where so many people get lost.

We read.
We learn.
We plan.
We make thoughtful agreements.

And then the body panics.

Fear floods the system.
We question everything.
We lose our centre.
Threat. Threat. Threat.

The mind might be entirely on board, clear, consenting, even excited.
But underneath, the nervous system is still running an older program.

This undercurrent needs tending to.
Again and again and again.
It becomes the practice.
And it will either be where you fall apart, or where you evolve and grow.

I remember a moment clearly, viscerally.
A lover told me they were about to be intimate with someone new.
I knew this would happen.
And my body went ice cold.
Completely ice cold, like a sharp peppermint rushing through my blood.

I noticed it.
And instead of reacting, I let my mind take the lead.

I talked myself through it.
'Okay Narla.
We’ve learned about this.
We knew this was coming.
We chose this path.
Your lover is still here.
You agreed to this.
You are safe.
Breathe.
We've got this.
All is well.
All is well.'

I had to walk my nervous system through it.
Not once, but many times.
Teaching the body what the mind already knew.
We were creating a new pathway, a whole new program.

This is the work of open relating.
And this is where I see so many people get tripped up.
‘Why is this happening?
Do I even want this?
Why am I finding this so hard?
What if I get replaced?
What if this changes us forever?
What if they prefer this person?
What if I lose my place?’

Sound familiar?
Breathe, honey.
Slow down.

continues on my website.

25/01/2026

I CONSENTED TO THIS ROLLERCOASTER?!

It wasn’t always this easy.

My relating field lately has honestly been so spacious, so loving, and so easeful that I almost have to pinch myself at times. I feel so met by the humans I’m relating with.

I catch myself having these small, almost funny moments lately where I think, huh… oh that actually went really well. My relating feels easeful and smooth, I'm sorry what?

I feel so met by the humans I’m dating, It's certainly not perfect, but it's honest and present so caring. I spent a long time fearing I wouldn’t be met in relationship, always felt like I was leading and guiding and now I’m standing inside something that feels deeply nourishing, like I’ve somehow landed where I used to only imagine.

Recently I went back and read some of my early writing from the beginning years of open relating (about a decade ago) and… wow. It was a rollercoaster of feels. At one point I’d written something like, “It’s hilarious that I am consenting to this emotional rollercoaster.” And honestly, that tracks.

Early open relating is often hard. Really hard.

There is so much de-conditioning in those early years and relationships, there's so much nervous system activation, so much new learning standing inside a field of endless possibility and unknowns. I met edges I didn’t even know existed until bam, i was suddenly right on top them.

Excitement, intensity, newness, insecurity, old wounds, all lighting up at once. What a ride babe!

Sometimes I was too confident and went too deep too quickly.
Sometimes things got real wobbly.
Sometimes people got hurt.
Sometimes there were so many feelings running I couldn't do life at all well.
Sometimes I set a million boundaries and asked a million questions.
Sometimes I went headfirst into every trigger.... until I realised that only led me to burn out.

Other times I simply didn’t yet know what questions to ask, or how to communicate what was moving inside me, or what was even shaping my beliefs, my feels, my fears, my reactions.

It really is a whole new experience of life, love and relating.

Continues in comments.

www.narladean.com

20/01/2026

SHOW ME, DON'T TELL ME

Calling yourself non monogamous does not make you ethical.
Your behaviour does.

This matters.
It needs to be said.

Ethics are not an identity.
They are lived.
They are not written on your profile.
They are not proven by using the right language.
They are embodied.

Show me, don't tell me.

They show up in how clearly you communicate.
How early you name impact and intention.
How your nervous system feels, and mine with yours.
How you respond when something lands poorly, not in how well you explain yourself.
Open relating is not a free pass.

It breaks my heart when clients come in having caused real harm, while remaining disconnected from the impact of their choices across every relationship they touch.

And it hurts every time I hear someone say,
“I tried open relating, it was terrible,”
when what they actually experienced was unresourced, unaccountable behaviour.

Stop giving it a bad reputation.
Do the work properly.

Yes, I’m fiery about this today.

Because open relating does not absolve you from care.
It does not excuse avoidance.
And it does not remove your responsibility to tend the nervous systems you are in relationship with.

It's absolutely apart of it.

If people are confused, anxious, or carrying the emotional weight of your choices while you remain comfortable, something is off.
Not because non monogamy is wrong.
But because care is being spoken about more than it is being practiced.

Being ethical looks like naming power.
It looks like honesty before things get messy, not after.
It looks like slowing down when clarity is missing.
It looks like owning your part, without hiding behind good intentions.

Freedom without responsibility is not liberation.
It is avoidance.

If this stings, pause.
Ask yourself what part of this is touching something true.

This is not about doing it perfectly.
It is about doing it consciously.

And that starts with behaviour, not labels.

www.narladean.com

With love,
Narla.

18/01/2026

DOING THE GROUNDWORK

I keep noticing a pattern.

And if you know me at all, you know I love patterns.
Patterns.
Cycles.
Root causes.
Shadow.
Clarity.
Change.

So many of my clients are finding me because they are already in open relating, consciously non monogamous, or exploring something beyond the default script. Often they arrive here because the support they have elsewhere does not fully meet this terrain.

They are not finding me at the beginning.
They are finding me after hurt has landed.
After trust has been shaken.
After things have started to feel a little crumbly.

This is incredibly common.

Yes, open relating can be a beautiful, expansive journey.
And it also takes time.
Care.
Slowness.
A lot of communication.
A lot of clarity.
And a huge amount of deconditioning.

We are unlearning decades of relational conditioning while trying to build something new, often without enough support, structure, or grounding.

Most of the hurt I see does not come from open relating itself.
It comes from trying to live a new relational paradigm without having done the groundwork.
Without knowing your edges, your needs, your capacity.
Without knowing how to stay connected to yourself when things get hard.

That is where clunkiness creeps in.
That is where harm happens.
Not because people are doing it wrong, but because they are under resourced.

A few months ago, I realised I was taking almost all of my clients on a very similar journey. So I created a program called Relating, Me Before We.

Since then, I have been running individuals and couples through this work, and watching something very real take shape.

This work is not just for open relating.
It is about relating, full stop.
It is about building a clear, grounded, centred relationship with yourself before you bring yourself into relationship with another.

Open relating is like personal development on steroids.
It brings everything to the surface.
Attachment patterns.
Fear.
Desire.
Capacity.
Your relationship with truth, jealousy, autonomy, and responsibility.

This continues on my website -
www.narladean.com
and on my Substack -

18/01/2026

KNOWING YOUR CAPACITY

Knowing your capacity matters.
Knowing yourself matters.

Knowing where your energy begins to waver.
Knowing when you slip into reactive responses.
Knowing the moment your nervous system spikes.

How know this place in myself is...
Sometimes I want to run.
Sometimes I get spiky.
Sometimes I get defensive.
Sometimes i shut down and go silent.

This is not the ground of healthy relating.
This is reactive ground.

This is where we move into people pleasing, avoidance, neediness, armouring or fear based responses.
Where we stop responding to what is actually happening and start reacting from old protection strategies.

This is not the place we want to relate from.

So, do you know your edges?
What impacts them?
What stretches you?
Where can you be tugged into continuing beyond your capacity?

Can you feel it in your body?
Can you name it when it arrives?
Can you recognise the early signals before you tip over the edge?

And, most importantly can you set the boundary there?

Can you say,
'I need to pause'
'I am meeting my capacity for this conversation or experience right now'
'I need to slow down.'
'I need to take some space.'
'I need to park it and return when I am more resourced.'
'I need time to regulate before we continue.'

This is not avoidance.
This is responsibility.
This is knowing self.
This is boundaries.

That moment when you say 'I am meeting my capacity for this conversation/experience right now', is a deeply secure move.

It says 'I care about this bond enough to not let my fear drive us.
I care enough to pause rather than rupture.'

Healthy relating does not ask us to override ourselves.

It asks us to know where we begin and where we end, and to honour that truth before we fracture that connection through our reactivity.

Knowing your capacity is not a limitation.
It is one of the most loving skills you can bring into relationship.

Work with me 1:1, couples and polycules - www.narladean.com

With love,
Narla.

13/01/2026

HOLDING CENTRE
The hardest part of my breakup was not what people usually assume.
It was the witnessing of myself when I returned to relationship and saw, with painful clarity, all the ways I had contorted, softened, lost, and edited myself to be acceptable to another.
The part of me that stayed while abandoning myself.
The part of me that changed in order to receive attention.
The parts I made smaller because they just were allowed.
The parts of me that began to question my own instincts because I was led to believe I was too much, not enough, wrong, or simply unlovable in all my fullness.
The hardest part was realising how deeply I had been wearing rose tinted glasses, attached to a fantasy of what could be.
A dream of who we might become, a life we might create.
A future I kept feeding, while quietly dismissing all the evidence of how this relationship was hurting me and could not truly hold me.
I was loyal to the potential and disloyal to myself.
And I betrayed myself, sadly.
And perhaps the deepest grief was recognising how far I had drifted from my own centre.
How much of myself I had lost, or packed up in the corner.
Now, my focus is different.
Knowing who I am.
Knowing what I want.
Knowing my centre.
Noticing the moments where I waver, where I no longer feel myself, where alignment begins to slip.
Continuing to come back, to me.
And then to we.
To be whole within myself before coming to another.
To be so grounded in that wholeness.
To relate from that place.
This is the centre of the work I am offering.
Relating, Me Before We.
An eight week journey exploring how to connect to self, how to recognise the subtle ways we waver in relationship, and how to communicate and navigate intimacy with clarity, honesty, and ease.
Because a We that works does not ask you to disappear.
It includes a whole you.
www.narldean.com
With love,
Narla

12/01/2026

FINDING THE EDGES OF CAPACITY IN OPEN RELATING

I am learning my capacity right now.
My heart is full, alive with different frequencies of love, and my ability to offer quality relating has reached its current stretch.
I can feel it.

I see relating as something that moves in phases and chapters.
It is alive, responsive, changing with time and with me.

In some seasons we have more space for connection, and in others, less. And depending on what those connections are, we need to know how much time and space they require to be nourished and held to the standard of love and relating we decide is ours.

In my intimate field right now, there are two deep connections, one new love and one playful. Each nourishes me in very different ways, and together they complement one another beautifully.

What I notice in myself is that I am fully and happily me.
I feel secure, connected, and rooted in myself.
I am not questioning whether there is enough.
I have time and space for myself, and I have the right distance and closeness within my relationships.
Nothing feels rushed or strained.
All feels well.

The other day, while driving home, I could really feel my heart, beaming with all these frequencies of love. Open, wide, cracking, stretching, breathing, truly wild. It felt like a muscle being worked, strong and alive. Not overwhelmed, but exercised, alive to its own capacity. And it truly felt like enough, like I had tested the parameters and found the edge.

It is not so often you feel so many varieties of love moving through one heart.

Over the past few months, I have noticed a deep sense of fullness, in awe of my connections and the love growing. In December, I really felt the call of my capacity. Some smaller connections gently closed, and I chose to no longer actively seek. I had not been for a while, but now I knew, clearly.

I had a conversation with a lover recently about openness, about the smorgasbord of connection that can appear, especially in the beginning when opportunity feels endless. It can be intoxicating, even addictive, to reach and be reached for by so much possibility. But over time, what remains is alignment.

07/01/2026

LIVING IN TRANSITION
The contemplation of transition has been living close to me these past weeks.
Not as a concept, but as something alive.
Layered.
Overlapping.
Everywhere I look.
The turning of the year, Snake to Horse.
One cycle loosening, another to begin its gallop.
Transitions between lovers.
Between places and spaces, moving up and down the east coast.
Between phases of life, versions of self.
Between grief and love, of open and closure.
Between who I have been, where I am now, and who I am becoming.
What keeps drawing my attention is the space in between.
The place where nothing has fully arrived, and nothing has fully left.
The stretch.
The pause.
The quiet reorganisation that happens when I don’t rush myself forward.
We are taught to orient toward beginnings and endings.
To A and B.
To believe that once we arrive, something will finally settle.
But life doesn’t really work that way, no sir.
Because as soon as we arrive, the ground shifts.
What was B slowly becomes A.
And we are already beginning again.
So much of life lives here, in this middle space.
And when we rush through it, we potentially arrive without the wisdom that would have supported us there.
Transition is not a problem to solve, or a time to rush, or something to not love through, its all apart of the process.
It is a process and time to be felt.
Slowing down isn’t about stopping.
It’s about listening, learning, growing, meeting.
Learning the body’s healthy stretch, moment to moment.
Noticing when to soften, noticing with we tense, noticing the stretch, and letting it be, softening, opening, and pacing, open.
Like easing into cold water.
Breathing through the chill until the body agrees.
Like pulling over on a long drive.
Feet on the earth.
Letting the system land before continuing.
Like the movement from liking to loving.
The tenderness that can’t be rushed.
The small, almost invisible moments that quietly open the heart.
Like grief.
Meeting each wave.
Allowing ache to transform rather than harden.
Letting what was be felt fully, so something else can form.

Conts in comments.

06/01/2026

YOU’RE NOT FAILING AT LOVE, YOU’RE STARTING FROM SURVIVAL

Relating rarely fails because of our actions.
It struggles because we are starting from conditioned, survival based ground.

Most of us enter relationship carrying a starting point we did not consciously choose.
Patterns learned early.
Nervous systems shaped around adaptation, protection, pleasing, control, withdrawal.

We do not just relate to the person in front of us.
We relate from the place we learned how to stay connected.

And then we say we want something different.
More honesty.
More intimacy.
More safety.
More freedom.

But we try to create that from the same internal ground.

This is where force quietly enters.

We push for clarity, reassurance, movement, resolution.

Not because we are wrong or demanding, but because uncertainty is unbearable to parts of us that learned connection could disappear.

Deconditioning in relating means slowing down enough to notice where you are moving from, not just where you want to go.
It is learning to feel the moment before reaction.

To stay with sensation long enough for choice to appear.

It is creating space between trigger and action.
Between old reflex and present response.
Between the urge to manage and the capacity to feel.

When force softens, something else becomes possible.

You can feel your way through change rather than dragging yourself through it.
You can stay in contact with another without abandoning your body.
You can allow clarity to emerge instead of demanding it arrive on your timeline.

This is not passivity.
It is precision.

It is letting the nervous system settle enough to actually perceive what is happening between you.
What is true.
What is alive.
What is asking to be tended rather than fixed.

Relating becomes less about getting somewhere, and more about learning how to stay present in the in between.
That unfamiliar, honest terrain where new patterns are born.

I often wonder how often we confuse intensity with depth.
Or urgency with truth.

Work with me - www.narladean.com

With love,
Narla

30/12/2025

I AM OF SERVICE TO THE RELATIONSHIP - WORKING WITH COUPLES

There is a reason I prefer to work with couples, when people are in relationship.

Because relationship does not live in insight alone.
It lives in bodies.
In breath, tone, pacing, distance, eye contact, in the connection.
In what happens to the nervous system when the person you love most is close, and when they are not.

In the relating.

When two people come into a session with me, something immediate becomes present.
Not a story about the relationship, but the relationship itself.
Two nervous systems orienting, bracing, softening, scanning for safety, closeness, distance.
Old protective patterns rise before a word is even spoken.

This is the terrain we work with.

Witnessing and working with the bond itself.

Distress in relationship is not about poor communication or incompatible personalities.
It is about threatened connection, the bond.
About moments where reaching did not land.
Where closeness felt unsafe.
Where protection became more reliable than vulnerability.

I do not believe you can truly explore this terrain one on one.

When both partners are present, the attachment system is alive.
The body responds honestly.
The heart speeds up.
The impulse to defend, withdraw, pursue, or placate emerges in real time.
And instead of judging or dissecting those moments,
we slow right down and get curious.
We listen. We learn.

What are you protecting right now?
What is underneath that?
What are you feeling right now?
What are you afraid would happen if you softened?
What do you need your partner to see or know right now?

As the work unfolds, something subtle begins to happen.

Nervous systems start to settle, not because the discomfort disappears, but because it is held together.

In the room.
In the relationship.

The room becomes a place where scared parts can be named without fear.
Where longing can be spoken without being dismissed.
Where hurt can be touched without escalating into attack or shutdown.

This is how bonds are repaired.
Slowly and together, step by step, side by side.

Conts in comments.

29/12/2025

HOW TO LOVE - IT'S DIFFERENT EVERY DAY
Something my partner has been beautifully integrating into our relationship is a simple yet so powerful question.
How would you like to receive love today?
That question holds so much.
Because it recognises that humans are not static.
We move through seasons, states, emotions, capacities.
What feels nourishing one day may feel overwhelming the next.
Learning to speak your needs is stage one.
Learning the many ways you receive love is stage two.
Sometimes love looks like words of affirmation.
Sometimes it is physical touch.
Sometimes it is a walk together.
Sometimes it is a cooked meal.
Sometimes it is bring me home a sweet treat.
Sometimes it is help with the practical load.
And yes, sometimes it looks like space.
All of these are expressions of love.
None of them are wrong.
None of them should be ever be assumed.
The invitation is to stay in conversation and genuine connection.
To keep your partner informed about where you are and what you need.
To allow love to be responsive rather than scripted, an adventure that constantly evolves and changes.
When you communicate clearly, you give your partner a real chance to meet you.
And when you ask rather than assume, you protect the relationship from that unnecessary harm.
Love is not one language, it's many.
It is a living dialogue.
A thousand small choices to stay curious with them.
A willingness to learn each other again and again.
Meeting them anew, every day.
That's love language.
For more - www.narladean.com
With love,
Narla.

Narla Dean Somatic and Relational Therapist

01/02/2026

27/01/2026

25/01/2026

20/01/2026

18/01/2026

18/01/2026

13/01/2026

12/01/2026

07/01/2026

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30/12/2025

29/12/2025

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