Reading what is actually moving when one person’s need shapes the room
Different Currents Under the Same Surface · Article 2 of 5
This is the second article in a five-part series. The first article, on the current of pain finally having a place to land, is available here.
A facilitator I worked with brought me a situation she was holding mostly alone. She was co-leading a forming group on attending to conflict, the kind of group where members come together to work with what they have lived through and what they are still living through. One member, who was physically unwell and likely struggling emotionally, had said no to every group decision the rest of the group was aligned about. No to the chat name they had chosen. No to breaking into smaller groups. No to the structured agreements the group was developing. What she asked for instead, every time, was that everyone “slow down and breathe together and move together.”
The facilitator suspected that what the woman was actually asking for was co-regulation, which is a different thing from working with conflict, and a thing this group had not formed to do. The facilitator was also the only Global Majority person in the group and was finding herself alone with the question of how to address it. She had a co-facilitator, who was white, but had not yet talked it through with him.
This is a current I see often, and it is one of the easiest to miss, because the person bringing it usually believes, sincerely, that what she is asking for is something the group needs. From inside her own experience, she has not yet noticed that what would help her is different from what would help the rest of the people there.
An individual need framed as a group need
Groups have rightly moved toward naming access needs at the start, building in pauses, asking what people need to participate fully. That movement is good, and this article is not a quarrel with it. The current I am describing is not a request for access that a group should meet. It is the subtler moment when one person’s need takes the shape of a group need, and the group reorganizes around it without anyone deciding to.
The phrasing of this current is part of what makes it hard to read. It almost always sounds like care for the group. “Can we slow down?” “Can we stay together?” “Can we not break into small groups right now?” “Can we co-regulate first?” Each of these can be a genuine group need at a particular moment. Each of them can also be one person’s individual need wearing the language of group care.
The signs that the current is moving in this particular direction tend to be subtle. The asks accumulate around what one person needs, the way they did with the member in the conflict group, rather than what the group has said it needs. The structures the group had agreed to keep getting renegotiated. Other members go quieter, because the room has narrowed around her in a way that does not leave them much to say. The facilitator notices she is working harder than she was a few minutes ago, and the work has shifted into accommodating one person’s requests rather than holding the group’s purpose.
The need underneath is often genuine. Someone who is asking the room to slow down may be carrying something that does require slowing down. The work, then, is to honor the need while staying curious about whether the strategy she is asking the group to adopt would actually meet it, and whether the group is the place where that need can be met.
What tends to help
The first move is to separate the strategy from the need underneath. What the woman in the conflict group was asking the group to do was a strategy. Slow down, breathe together, move together. The need underneath, which she may not have fully named even to herself, was something more like co-regulation, support for an unwell body and an overwhelmed nervous system. Once you can name the need without enacting the strategy, you have room to ask whether the strategy is the only one that would meet it.
Often it is one of several. Co-regulation can happen in a paired call before the meeting starts. Slowing down can happen in a smaller breakout that has formed itself around that pace. Holding space for an unwell member can happen through a different structure than asking the entire group to organize itself around her capacity. The facilitator’s work is to honor the need without enacting the strategy, and to surface other ways the need might be met.
What I suggested to the facilitator was something like this: bring it to the group as a question, rather than as a decision you have already made. Name that the group seems to have different process preferences. Some members may want a slower, more co-regulated structure, and others may want the structure the group originally formed to do. One possibility is that the group needs to organize differently to make room for both.
Then ask, very directly: if the request is for co-regulation, is anyone in the group willing to join this member for twenty minutes before the main session starts? If no one volunteers, that is information. It tells the group that what she has been asking of them has been hard for everyone else, and that the request was an individual one all along. It is also information she could not have gotten from inside her own experience. She needed the group to show her, by what it was and was not willing to take on, what was actually shared and what was hers alone.
Sometimes this kind of conversation makes clear that the group is not the right container for what the person is needing right now. There is grief in that, on both sides, and there is also the possibility that the person could find a container better suited to what she is actually carrying, rather than spending months in a group whose purpose she keeps quietly bending to meet a need the group was not formed to hold.
There is one more layer worth attending to. The facilitator I was working with was the only Global Majority person in the group, and her co-facilitator was white. The work of distinguishing an individual need from a group need is hard enough on its own. Doing it as the only person in the room who carries a particular weight makes it harder, and the weight of being read as the one who said no to a struggling member should not fall on her alone. The first move I suggested was to bring it to her co-facilitator before doing anything else. That move served the work, and it also served her own sustainability.
Reflective Practice
If you are facilitating
- When you notice a member’s requests starting to move the group out of alignment with its stated purpose, what helps you tell the difference between a request that serves the group and a request that serves one person at the group’s cost?
- If you are alone in the room with a particular kind of weight (the only person of color, the only one with a particular lived experience, the only one new to a role), what kind of support do you need before doing the work of naming a difficult dynamic in the room?
If you are a participant
- Have you ever asked a group to do something you later realized was for you alone? What helped you notice the difference, and what did you wish someone else in the room had said?
- If you are watching this current move in someone else, and you notice the group quietly accommodating in ways that are starting to cost something, is there a way you can name what you are noticing that opens a question rather than putting the speaker on the spot?
This article is the second in a five-part series on the different currents that move underneath the surface of difficult moments in groups. The next article looks at a current that often gets confused with this one but works differently underneath: discomfort that goes looking for relief, and the cost it asks the room to absorb.
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.