I am riding a wave these last few days, being tossed between anxiety and contentment. At this very moment I’m sitting in a dirty little vegetarian restaurant waiting for a friend, and up until about two minutes ago I was fretting, still about the group I’m facilitating. Then, all of a sudden, right next to where my heart is in my chest, I felt a quick swelling up of joy. Nothing’s different than it was a few minutes ago — the issues I’m trying to untangle are still there — I still have a nagging little burden of worry hovering over me — but there’s also pleasure. The sun is warm. Commercial Drive, my favorite part of town, is teeming with people. I biked all the way here from work, and FAST — with a pit stop at the public library to pick up a book on cycling the Pacific Coast, to help us plan our weeklong trip through Washington State in July. Even though I have lots of work to do this weekend to prepare for Monday, and I feel overburdened and a little shackled by how much work I’ve taken on at my job, and I have three plans for this weekend that I don’t really want, despite despite despite all that, I’m free.
The stuff that is troubling me took a new little turn today. Every twist of this story is walloping me in a new way, and I suddenly realized why: it is too similar to a situation that I’ve been in before. In that situation I was one of the two participants embroiled in the conflict, and it was traumatizing to both of us, and to a few innocent bystanders who got caught up in it along the way. I have given it a lot of thought over the year, have come to understand my culpability on multiple levels in that situation, and I assumed I had finished coming to terms with it. But now I see almost the exact same dynamic — totally different situation — playing out in front of me, and this time I can make facilitation choices that could potentially diffuse, remedy — or exacerbate the situation, and I feel powerless, like I’m standing just an inch off the path of a great rolling inevitability.
I was told, the other day, by one of the participants, that at a particular moment she would have liked to see stronger facilitation, that she thought I should have intervened. She would have liked a ‘healing bomb.’ And at the time she made that comment, I wasn’t sure how I could have really intervened in a way that could have helped. I mean, I tried to intervene by entering the conversation and supporting her by agreeing with her comments. That didn’t work; it just sucked me into the discussion, and at that point I lost my potential to change the dynamic because I tacitly agreed to enter it. Now I see, I could have said, “X’s statement wasn’t a blaming; it was a gift.”
It wasn’t blaming; it was a gift. She was angered by the situation but held herself aside, held no one responsible, and chose to give us a gift by going meta, making an astute comment about the nature of the discussion that no one else in the room had noticed (or at least, I doubt they had noticed it), and connected it to her past experience. It was wisdom.
It provoked a defensive reaction. I stayed within the constraints of the discussion, kept engaging with the person who got defensive. To no end, and I knew, even as I batted the ideas around with that person, that it was pointless, that no learning would come out of it, but I didn’t have the wherewithall to extricate myself.
“It was a gift. Let’s just think about the gift we’ve just been given, end this particular conversation, and move on to something else.”
