This relationship is my first long(er) term poly relationship. We have been together over a year. I'm solo, he is married and lives with and has kids with his wife. Meta and I wanted to meet early on and did. Meta does not identify as poly unless they are dating couples (had only dated couples in the past). Because I'm newer to poly, I knew that I was going to be doing a lot of changing in this relationship. Not who I am as a person, but just the breaking down of my assumed monogamous ideas that I'd grown up with. My partner and I discussed this a decent amount at first. Looking back now, the one thing I didn't have was the knowledge of what to ask my partner to understand what he AND my meta were able to offer. I find out later that even they differed on that. I am having a hard time figuring out if the issues are simply my mono conditioned brain and still breaking all of that down, and being newer to poly, or if there are some red flags and some things that simply aren't cool, that are being blamed on me for being newer to poly. I have asked them both to read some of the poly books. Originally because I would talk about attachment theory and neither knew what I was referring to. So I asked if they would read polysecure. They don't believe in those books because they think it's telling people how to be poly and poly journeys should be personal and function to fit and work for the people involved-and a book can't tell you how to do that. I'm starting to wonder if they have a subconscious reason for not reading any books or poly education/information is because they don't really want to hear of any of the ways they might be doing harmful things, because those things work for them.

I don't know if i should go into specifics, but how do you figure out what is worth pushing through discomfort and growing versus pushing through and avoiding unhealthy behaviors disguised as "this is poly"?