Reading who ends up holding the comfort
Different Currents Under the Same Surface · Article 3 of 5
This is the third article in a five-part series. The first two articles are here.
A facilitator I worked with was assisting in a group where people kept getting their pronouns wrong, session after session. At one point a participant spoke up, naming out loud that the group kept misgendering their facilitator. Although naming this pattern was meant to help, it turned the whole room’s focus toward the facilitator. People began to talk about their confusion, their worry about getting it wrong, how hard it was to remember, how much they did not want to mess up. The conversation filled with the discomfort of the people who had been getting it wrong. Feeling the heat of the room, the facilitator offered to meet with the most flustered person outside of class, to talk it through and help them settle.
Afterward, the facilitator mourned that offer. It had been a flight response, made in the moment, that quietly gave the person being misgendered the job of comforting the people doing the misgendering. The room had grown uncomfortable, and the relief it reached for came from the one person least able to hold it.
That moment is one version of the current this article is about. The room felt discomfort, and the discomfort went looking for relief. What makes this current hard to hold is the direction the relief travels, and who ends up bearing it.
Discomfort going looking for relief
There is a loud, recognizable version of this current. Something gets named in the room, a pattern or a history or an impact, and someone hears themselves implicated. They feel the panic of realizing they may be the kind of person who has done some of what is being named, and they begin to talk. They talk about their good intentions, their earlier learning, their relationships, the time they did the right thing, the reasons it is more complicated than what was just said. The content changes from person to person but the function stays the same. The talking reaches for reassurance, and the people listening usually supply it, telling the speaker they are not that kind of person, that no one thinks they meant any of it, that it is all right.
Often what is moving in the implicated person is shame, the hot conviction that they are not just someone who did something that impacted someone else but someone who is bad. A room can feel that heat and reach for comfort, wanting to reassure the person back into ease so everyone can keep going. In equity work the pull is especially strong, because we want people to stay engaged rather than shut down. The trouble is that comforting someone to release their shame usually asks the rest of the room, and often the person most affected, to set their own experience aside in order to manage the implicated person’s feelings. Co-regulation is a real gift in many settings. Offered here, in the wrong direction, it implicitly teaches the room that the most important thing to tend is the comfort of the person who caused the impact.
This shows up well beyond equity work. A parent in a parenting workshop explaining why a child’s struggle is not their fault, while the other parents reassure them. A manager in a leadership training clarifying that they would never do the thing the trainer just described, while the room nods along. A person in a grief group who turns to comfort someone else the moment their own grief gets close. In all of these, relief is being supplied by people who stand at roughly the same level as the one feeling the discomfort. The reassurance moves sideways, between peers, and the weight of it stays light and widely shared.
There is a quieter version, and it is usually the more costly one. Here the relief moves in a particular direction. It flows from the person with the least power in the room toward the people with more, and the demand to provide it lands on the one least able to decline to give it. This is what happened in the opening, where the relief that settled the room came from the facilitator, the very person the misgendering had been landing on.
It helps to slow down on what power means here, because it is easy to read it as the wrong thing. The power that matters in this current runs deeper than the power of role or title. By the logic of titles, the facilitator in the opening was the most powerful person in the room, since they were the one leading it. What matters in this current is position relative to the impact, which is to say who contributed to it and who absorbed it. The facilitator was the one absorbing it, so when the relief flowed from them toward the people who had been getting their pronouns wrong, it ran from the impacted person back to the people who had contributed to the impact. The person with the most need for care became the one doing the caring. Holding role power did nothing to prevent this, and may even have hidden it, since a room does not expect the person leading it to be the one quietly carrying the weight.
Why this current is hard to read
This current hides well, because the talk that supplies the relief looks like good participation. The implicated person who keeps explaining is engaged with the material. The peers who reassure them are offering comfort. The facilitator who offers to meet outside class is extending a hand. From the outside, what you see is people doing what groups ask them to do, talking and connecting and trying.
Harder to see is the direction the relief is flowing and who is left to bear it. When the relief comes from someone in the impacted position, and especially from the person with the least power to withhold that reassurance, work is being done that no one names, and that work is often invisible to the people receiving the comfort. Over many such moments, the same people end up supplying the same relief, and whatever the room came to do gets done on top of their unnamed labor.
This is where the question from the first article in this series comes back. Who in this room is asked, again and again, to absorb other people’s discomfort? That question is the structural form of this current. A room that does not catch it will, over time, treat the discomfort of the people who contributed to an impact as the problem to be solved, and ask the people who absorbed that impact to be the ones who solve it.
What tends to help
With the loud form, the talk that explains and reassures, the kindest move is one that gently declines to feed it. When the room rushes to reassure an implicated speaker, the speaker rarely lands anywhere new, and the group gets pulled away from its own work and into the work of settling one person. A facilitator can interrupt that gently, holding the room without shaming the speaker, and point the speaker toward support that asks nothing of the group and asks no one present to absolve them:
“I can hear that a lot is moving for you right now, and this material can be hard to sit with. I am going to ask us not to stay there as a group. If it would help to keep working with what is coming up for you, I would encourage you to find some time outside of the group, with a trusted friend or someone who can offer you support, to give it the space it deserves.”
This keeps the care intact while moving it out of the room. The speaker is pointed toward their own support rather than asked to draw it from the group, and no one present is put in the position of having to reassure them so the conversation can move on.
With the quieter form, the work is to slow the room down before the relief lands. When a participant offers something that would let the implicated people off the hook, a facilitator can pause and name what they are noticing before the offer settles:
“I want to pause for a second. It sounds like we are moving toward making this easier for the people who contributed to the impact. Before we do that, I want to stay with what just happened a little longer.”
And when the person in the impacted position begins to absorb everyone else’s distress, the facilitator can gently hand that labor back rather than let it pass unnoticed:
“I notice you are the one offering to help everyone else feel okay about this, and you are also the person it landed on. You do not have to carry that here. Let’s keep the focus on the impact rather than on making the rest of us comfortable.”
Done with care, this protects everyone. The people who contributed to the impact stay with what is theirs to stay with, and the person who absorbed it is freed from work that was never theirs to do.
None of these moves are easy. The current shows up fast, often inside what looks like a generous moment, and slowing it down can feel like spoiling something tender. What gets protected, when you do slow it down, is the chance for the room to do the work it came for, and the chance for the people who have been carrying the unnamed labor to set it down.
Reflective Practice
If you are facilitating
- In your most recent group, who was supplying relief for whose discomfort? Which direction was it flowing, and was that visible to you in the moment or only later?
- When the room rushes to reassure someone who feels implicated, what helps you hold the group without either shaming the speaker or letting the conversation reorganize around their comfort?
If you are a participant
- If you have been the person who started talking a lot when the material got close to home, what were you trying to manage? What would you have wanted from the facilitator in that moment?
- If you have supplied relief for someone else’s discomfort, especially when you were the one most affected by what they were uncomfortable about, what did that take from you, and what would have made it possible to set it down?
This article is the third in a five-part series on the currents that move underneath the surface of difficult moments in groups. The next article looks at a current that often arrives wearing the language of contribution, the participant, or the person who holds the contract, or sometimes the facilitator, who is sure they hold wisdom the room does not yet have.
If reading this stirs questions about how to hold these moments in the rooms you facilitate, you may also be interested in Equitable Facilitation, a deeper training in this work, beginning in July.