Reading the pain that has been waiting
Different Currents Under the Same Surface · Article 1 of 5
In a course I taught on Nonviolent Communication and racial equity, a Black man in the room began to speak about being dismissed by other people because he did not have the formal education or credentials they had. As he spoke, he touched something. The pain was there, and the anger was there, and you could hear both finding their way into the words. The talking became longer than what the prompt had asked for. He did not stop at the time the structure had allotted. He kept going because the words had been waiting.
The room went still with him. People listened. When the moment came for response, my work as the facilitator was to create space for him to keep expressing what was there, manage the attempts of well-meaning participants to caretake or reassure rather than receive, and at the end give the group a chance to reflect on what had been shared and how it connected to the larger patterns of racial harm we had been discussing.
That moment is one I have seen many versions of, and it is the moment this article is about. Sometimes a person in a group starts taking up more space than the structure expected. From the outside, the behavior can look indistinguishable from someone simply taking the room over. The signs of what is actually happening tend to be quieter than the surface behavior.
Pain finally has a place to land
Sometimes the person who is taking up space is doing it because they have finally found a place where the thing they have been carrying can be said out loud. The container has done its work. They felt safe enough, or trusted you enough, or trusted the people in the room enough, to bring it. Once they started, the words kept coming, because the words had been waiting.
This phenomenon often runs underneath someone speaking about a long-held grief, an old loss, an experience of harm they have not been able to put down, the slow weight of caregiving, an illness that has reshaped their life. The vulnerability is genuine. It has often been costly to bring. The person speaking is sometimes surprised by how much they have to say.
It is also frequently underneath a Global Majority person speaking about racial harm in a mixed group, when the room has felt safe enough to let that speaking happen. There can be years of having had to manage, swallow, translate, or stay quiet about what they have lived. When the floodgate opens, what comes through is often a long-restrained deluge.
The signs that this is what is moving tend to be subtle. The speaker is often discovering something as they speak rather than delivering something they had already prepared. The room, if it has the capacity to receive what is being brought, sits with the speaker rather than pulling away or tightening with discomfort. The speaker themselves sometimes sounds surprised by what is coming out, the volume of it, the heat of it, the particular shape it is taking now that it has finally been spoken.
The question that comes before the question
We often focus on the challenge of how to recognize when a person’s vulnerability is no longer serving the group’s purpose or is impacting the group’s functioning. Even before exploring that question, there is another question we can consider. Whose vulnerability gets received in the first place. Some people walk into groups already organized to hold their pain. Other people spend years looking for a room that will hold theirs. Access to a room that can receive you is not evenly distributed across who you are or what you have lived through. Before you ask whether this person is taking up too much space, it is worth asking who in this room has been asked, for years, to take up no space at all.
In a recent session, a facilitator asked me a version of a question I get often. When something serious happens in the world, do you have to ask everyone in the group whether they want to talk about it, in case there is someone who is there “for the bylaws”? My answer was that asking permission to talk about a traumatic event implicitly legitimizes the view that the trauma is optional to address. The question I prefer to ask is the inverse one. Not “is it okay to take group time for this,” but “how could anyone in this room possibly not be impacted, and how do those of us who are not directly impacted want to show up for those who are.” I told her about pausing a class after the murder of George Floyd, telling the group I had been up all night reading and trying to make sense of things, and forming small groups around anyone who needed support.
She then named her own grief about working in white spaces during that time “where there were so many people who didn’t care,” and the difference she had noticed between how much group time was given to grieving Notre Dame burning and how little was given to the murders of Black people.
That contrast names what I am pointing at. The question of which griefs get group time and which do not is both a facilitator question and a structural one. The Black man speaking about being dismissed for his lack of formal credentials was speaking about a pattern that had also shaped, for years, whether rooms had been organized to receive him at all. The pattern that had silenced him was the same pattern that had taught him how rare it was to be in a room willing to listen. Reading the results of his floodgate finally opening as him taking up too much space would have misread the moment. The room, having earned the right to receive him, was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
What tends to help
When this is what is moving in the room, the supportive response is most often to stay with the speaker, rather than try to manage, redirect, or bring the conversation gently back to the time you had allotted. Receiving what the speaker is bringing is not a deviation from the work the group came to do. It is part of what makes that work possible.
A group of people writing bylaws is still a group of people. A group doing somatic training is still a group of people. The capacity of a group to do anything together depends on whether the group can hold what its members are carrying. When one person speaks something that has been waiting to be said, the people in the room who have been carrying similar things in silence learn something about what this room can hold. That learning makes the room more capable, on whatever it is the room is here to do. The bylaws get written by a group that has become more honest with itself and thus better able to consider all needs. The somatic training is done by people who trust the container more than they did an hour ago.
Staying is harder than it sounds. It asks the facilitator to let go of the structure they had planned. It asks the room to sit with something that may not resolve in the time available. It asks people who hold less of the carried weight to listen without rushing toward repair. The most common forms of unhelpful response are caretaking and reassurance, both of which sound like care and both of which often tend to the listener’s discomfort rather than the speaker’s need. Part of the facilitator’s work, when this current is moving, is to gently manage those impulses in the room and protect the speaker’s space to keep speaking. At the end, a closing reflection on what was shared, and on the larger patterns it points to, lets the group make sense of what just happened together.
Where it gets harder
Receiving pain that has been waiting is one of the most important things a group can do. It is also a current that, if not read carefully, can drift across a threshold into something else.
A facilitator I worked with told me about a group she had been holding for six years. The stated purpose was somatic training. One member had ongoing trauma and significant life challenges, and over time, without anyone naming it, the group’s energy had reorganized around supporting that member’s capacity. One session, the facilitator finally said the quiet thing out loud. She had come to see that the group had become a group whose purpose was supporting one member’s inclusion in the work, rather than a group doing the work everyone had originally gathered to do.
Hearing the facilitator’s words, the member became upset and left the room, then sent a text dropping out of the group. Despite the facilitator’s efforts to call, the member responded entirely by text, refusing to pick up the phone or meet in person. The facilitator lives in a small rural community and is now worried about how to interact and respect her boundaries if they run into each other at the grocery store. Six years of accommodations, each one made for what at the time felt like a clear reason, had ended in a rupture neither of them could repair.
The threshold the facilitator crossed was so gradual that she did not see herself crossing it. From inside, every accommodation made sense. Every one was generous. Every one was the kind of thing a good facilitator does. It is only from a distance that you can see the group’s purpose had quietly become something other than what people signed up for.
This is the threshold question that runs underneath the rest of the series. The current of pain finally landing is the one most often misread as someone taking up too much space when in fact the room is doing exactly what it should be doing. The same current, sustained over time, can also drift into something the room was no longer agreeing to. Reading which one is actually happening in front of you, and when one has become the other, is one of the central skills of facilitation.
The next four articles in this series take up four other currents that look similar from the outside but call for very different responses. The first article had to be this one, because if you start treating every floodgate opening as a problem to be managed, you will do the most damage to the people who needed the room the most.
Reflective Practice
If you are facilitating
- Whose pain in the rooms you hold has been received easily, and whose has had to wait for the right conditions, or has not been received at all?
- How do you decide whether to invite a hard conversation about something happening in the world, and whose comfort does that decision protect?
If you are a participant
- If you are someone who has been asked, often, to swallow your grief in groups, what would it take for you to know a room was actually ready to receive it?
- If you are watching this current move in someone else, and you are not the facilitator, what is one small thing you could offer (a question, an acknowledgment, a steady presence) that supports the speaker without taking over the room yourself?
- If you have ever been the person who needed to ask whether it was okay to bring something hard, what made the asking feel necessary?
This article is the first in a five-part series on the different currents that move underneath the surface of difficult moments in groups. Each week for the next four weeks, I will publish another piece, looking at one current at a time. The next article looks at the current that is easiest to mistake for this one: an individual need being framed as a group need.
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.