Vulnerability is sharing a perspective that is personal, meaningful, unpopular, or otherwise scary. Not to belabor the point, but, again, this almost is the goal of facilitation. None of us can be truly neutral, so anything we add to a space is going to push or pull, and we can’t know how intensely others will feel that push, or how much it will pull out of us.
Meet Courageous Compassion
The two words are familiar. One means not being deterred by fear, danger, or pain, and the other means sympathy, empathy, or concern for the suffering of others. And like how we’re using “vulnerability” in this book, our use of “courageous compassion” is based on common understandings, but with a twist.
In this book, the phrase courageous compassion means choosing to overcome the fear, anticipated danger, or pain of empathizing with another’s suffering. In this way, courageous compassion, like vulnerability, is as much of an action as it is a mindset. Courageous compassion is embodied in moments, and it’s carried with in us between them.
Courageous compassion is rooted in empathy, and assumes that--when we choose to--we are capable of great feats of empathy, something Sam Richards calls radical empathy[13]. At its most extreme, courageous compassion might be thought of as loving one’s enemies, but we’d never generally recommend you think of participants as enemies. (Though it’s okay to think of some participants are enemies. You know the ones. And they know who they are. Jerks--but we love those jerks.)
What does courageous compassion look like?
In the trapeze analogy, courageous compassion was the second person who was swinging in to catch the first. While this is a helpful mental image, it’s missing one piece in particular that we now think you’re ready to know: what was happening in that trapeze artist’s mind.
In the story, we said “having chalked her hands and cleared her mind, recentering herself, she inverts on the trapeze.” What we didn’t tell you was that earlier, backstage before the show, the first artist was a complete asshole to the second. And in her mind, as she was climbing the ladder to her platform, was the repeated thought of “How easy would it be for me to just not catch him?”
But that’s not who she is. She’s here to catch him, no matter how much of a jerk he is, and recentering her mind on his well-being, and inverting herself (literally turning herself upside-down for his benefit), is what’s needed to ensure she has both hands free to catch him. And that, our friends, is courageous compassion. It’s not just what happens (the catch, the saving of someone who is falling), it’s the mental gymnastics that had to happen before the catch.
Now, what does courageous compassion look like in facilitation? In an interview we hosted with Erik Tyler[14], a facilitator and life coach, he told us that people tend to open up to him in ways they don’t open up to others. We asked him why, and the conversation turned to him sharing with us that he chooses to love someone before he meets them. Further, he said that in facilitation, “it’s fun for [him] to actually have the person that’s least likeable feel like someone loved them by the end of it.”
That is what one form courageous compassion takes in facilitation. Here are a few more:
● Finding common ground with someone who has said something that makes you feel like you’re diametrically opposed, often by asking “Why?” (e.g., “Why do you believe that?” or “Why did you think that was the right thing to say?”) with genuine curiosity, instead of as a thinly veiled value statement.
● Being patient with a participant, or a group, when they are being obstructive or impatient themselves.
● Exploring a concept you’ve explored a thousand times before with the excitement of someone who is seeing it for the first time.
What does courageous compassion feel like?
Courageous compassion feels like internal liberation. That’s probably not what you were expecting us to say, after all the sweating and sobbing we talked about above. And we understand why you may be in doubt, and we want you to know that we often experience that same doubt. The doubt, actually, is one of the things that inhibits us from acting with courageous compassion.
But the doubt isn’t courageous compassion any more than a frozen bum is snowboarding. The doubt pops up when your courageous compassion recedes. It happens when you get out of that mindset, or before and after a moment of courageous compassion. The more time you spend in doubt, the colder your bum gets, because it means less time you’re actually snowboarding. And it’s not just doubt. It’s fear, it’s judgment, it’s resentment. It’s a lot of things. But none of them are what courageous compassion feels like, because you can only experience that feeling when you’ve overcome the others.
And when you do access courageous compassion, it feels like freedom, because you’re releasing yourself from of all those internal chains. It feels like disinhibited connection. It feels like trust, access, and sometimes joy. And then, after you’ve made the connection with the other person--and felt the freedom from everything that was preventing you from doing so--courageous compassion feels as close as you can imagine to whatever the other person is feeling.
If the other person is feeling afraid, courageous compassion feels like fear. If the other person is feeling shame, you feel that shame. You may feel another person’s rage, remorse, or rejection. And in the same way that vulnerability often leads you to experience emotions that you can’t rationalize, you may find yourself, in moments of courageous compassion, questioning the emotions you’re feeling (“Why am I feeling this sadness?”). This question may pull you out of the feeling, or sometimes a twist of it will be an anchor to find your way back in (“Why are they feeling this sadness?”).
Fear, shame, rage, and remorse are all challenging feelings to feel, especially if you’re feeling them alone. Through reaching out with courageous compassion, no one person is alone in feeling those things. You and the other person are sharing the burden of those taxing emotions--along with the sweaty palms and spontaneous sobs that may come with them. So while they’re challenging emotions, they’re made a little easier to navigate when you’re navigating them together.
Why is courageous compassion important for facilitation?
If you’re asking others to leap, as a facilitator it’s your responsibility to catch them--no matter how twisted or turned they get in the air, or how terrible of a person they may seem to be or were backstage. It may take inverting yourself, and it will always take you deciding to be swooping toward them before they need it. The only way that you can safely make learning happen from vulnerability is if you meet it with courageous compassion. And even then there’s risk. You may lose your grip, or mistime your swing, despite your every intent to catch that person. And that’s where the following chapters come in: we can think of them as the safety net. The first safety net is learning to navigate triggers, and it may be the most important of them all.
Triggers
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
- Alice Walker
When you’re driving your car in your neighborhood, it’s easy to be relaxed, even to the point of autopilot. You cruise around corners, know when there’s a railroad crossing or pothole to watch out for, where kids generally run across the street--you’re always one step ahead. When you’re driving in a new place, or driving a vehicle you’re unfamiliar with (e.g., a friend’s car, a rental), the opposite is usually true: you’re on high alert, where little surprises can lead to huge overreactions.
All of this became evident to Sam when he and his friend decided to rent motorcycles (that they didn’t exactly know how to drive) in Chiang Mai, Thailand (where they didn’t exactly know the traffic laws, language, roads, etc.). Learning how to “go” on the motorcycles was a hurdle, then they had to quickly figure out how to do so on the left side of the road (being Americans, this served up another hurdle). After about 30 minutes without dying, lulled into a false sense of confidence, Sam turned to his friend at a stoplight and said, “We’re r
eally getting the hang of this.” Then they accelerated, rounded a bend, and saw, up ahead in the distance, a massive, congested traffic circle.
Navigating traffic circles, if you’re not used to them (as many of us in the U.S. aren’t), are tricky in and of themselves. Navigating a traffic circle on the opposite side of the road on a vehicle you barely know how to drive in a country where you don’t know the language or traffic laws -- well, that’s what this chapter is all about.
In this chapter, we’re going to talk about triggers: what they are, how they work, and how we can best navigate our own triggers as facilitators.
And that last part is the most important--and perhaps most controversial--because we’re going to tell you that it’s not just in your best interest to learn how to navigate your triggers as a facilitator, but it’s your responsibility. If you’re hung up on that idea, let us build the ladder before we ask you to leap, but know that everything we present in this chapter is anchored in vulnerability and courageous compassion.
What are Triggers?
At the time of this writing, the term “trigger” has achieved its zeitgeist moment in popular media. There are calls for “trigger warnings” in writing and teaching, and a sizable amount of controversy around the entire issue. In fact, in doing train-the-trainers recently, when we’ve brought up the term “trigger,” we’ve noticed many educators reacting in what could only be described as a triggering response. Yes, folks are being triggered by “trigger.” We’ve achieved the trigger singularity: the meta-trigger.
If you’re familiar with the term from popular media, we ask that you take a huge step back, and consider the word without all of the context, prejudice, controversy, prescriptions, or other preconceived notions you may have attached to it.
In this book, a trigger is a stimulus that invokes a disproportionately negative response. And that’s it. A trigger doesn’t have to be as extreme as an oppressive remark (though those often are received as triggers); or something that resurfaces PTSD, or a traumatic experience (though, again, these certainly are also triggers). It can also be something as comparatively minor as an eye-roll, a sarcastic comment, or someone saying “I don’t care.”
Similar to how we discussed that no one experience may be universally vulnerable, no one stimulus is universally triggering. You need to have a trigger for someone to pull it, and we all have different triggers.
How Triggers Work
Dr. Kathy Obear’s[15] writing on navigating triggers was, for us, a turning point in our understanding of the concept. It also reframed for us what our role as facilitators is when we are triggered.
Dr. Obear created a model called The Triggering Event Cycle, noting the recursive nature of how we experience triggers as facilitators--and how our poor handling of our own triggers can often retrigger someone else (or ourselves, but we’ll get into that in a bit). This is a great way to think about how triggers work in the context of facilitation.
In the section above, we said someone must have a trigger in order for someone else to pull it. Dr. Obear would call this a person’s “intrapersonal roots.” Obear describes intrapersonal roots as being any or all of the following: “current life issues” (e.g., “fatigue, illness, crises, stressors”), “unresolved or unhealed past issues, traumas,” “fear and anxiety,” “needs” (e.g., “for control or approval”), and “prejudices and assumptions.” Her model has seven steps, which are as follows:
Step 1: Stimulus occurs.
Step 2: The stimulus "triggers" an intrapersonal "root."
Step 3: These intrapersonal issues form a lens through which a facilitator creates a "story" about what is happening.
Step 4: The story a facilitator creates shapes the cognitive, emotional and physiological reactions s/he experiences.
Step 5: The intention of a facilitator's response is influenced by the story s/he creates.
Step 6: The facilitator reacts to the stimulus.
Step 7: The facilitator's reaction may be a trigger for participants and/or another facilitator.
While this experience is described above neatly in seven discrete steps, we aren’t always cognizant of these steps happening, and can move through the entire triggering event cycle--from being stimulated to retriggering someone else--in an instant. It’s often only through experiencing the cycle several times from the same stimulus that we are able to identify that stimulus as a trigger.
With these steps in mind, let’s consider an example of a trigger a facilitator might experience, and how they would move through the cycle. Imagine a facilitator who cares passionately about the topic they’re facilitating, and who asks the ever-great question “Why do you think I had you do that activity?” and a participant’s response is “Because you like wasting people’s time.” Ouch.
The stimulus of “Because you like wasting people’s time” occurs.
It hits the facilitator's intrapersonal roots of a need for approval in the content being covered, because they care so deeply.
The facilitator sees the statement as a personal attack on them, their profession, and everything they’ve done in their life.
This starts to make them want to fight back; they feel angry; their pulse quickens.
An intention of “giving that person a taste of their own medicine” is formed, and the facilitator thinks of something to say that will hurt the participant just as much.
The facilitator says “If you were better at your job, I wouldn’t have been hired to have this conversation with you.”
The participant (or another participant) is triggered, having their competence attacked directly; and/or the facilitator is triggered by their own reaction, realizing they’ve just compromised their own values and ethics. The cycle restarts.
This is a relatively minor trigger, as you’ll likely note. The trigger wasn’t an experience of PTSD, or even that nasty a remark. It was a snide, petty statement. And yet, it had the power to derail the learning, knock the facilitator off kilter, and in retriggering, it has the potential to escalate to a point that it derails the entire training.
So what can we, as facilitators, do to prevent this from happening? Well, we have just the thing.
The Triggering Event Traffic Circle
In teaching facilitators to navigate their own triggers, often using Dr. Obear’s model as a launching off point for the discussion, we found it difficult for folks to separate “this is a thing that often happens” from “this is how this will always happen.” That is, we had a hard time helping facilitators realize that while this often happens, we’re not suggesting it has to happen. In fact, that’s the opposite of what we’re suggesting.
Inspired by Sam’s [triggering] experience in a Chiang Mai traffic circle (also called roundabouts or rotaries), we began to use this metaphor to help folks shift their focus from the cycle itself to the exits we have available to us.
We’re going to discuss this model in-depth, but first we want to highlight that the traffic circle itself -- the seven segments of the road, not the exits -- is the phenomenon discussed above, the seven steps of Dr. Kathy Obear’s Triggering Event Cycle. Here they are presented by themselves, in case it’s helpful to hold them as separate in your mind as we build on the idea.
As we said above, in our model, we are going to focus on the exits. With that in mind, know that you can only take a particular exit on the traffic circle provided that (1) you know you’re on the circle to begin with and (2) you’ve made it far enough along to get to that exit. But if you’ve made it through a step of the triggering event cycle, and raised your awareness to knowing that you’re on that step, you can focus on the corresponding exit.
Once on the traffic circle, you have five exits ahead of you before you do something externally that you might regret, another exit that might prevent harm in the moment, and a final exit that might keep you or others from taking another lap around the circle.
We’re going to start with Exit 1: Unrooting, which is without question the
most difficult exit to take. If you’re feeling your hands clench on the steering wheel, know that things get easier as we go along.
Exit 1: Unrooting
A stimulus has occurred. You likely don’t need us to tell you that stimuli are unavoidable in facilitation (unless you’re doing it really, really poorly[16]). Similarly, stimuli that lead to triggers are also unavoidable. They’re going to happen. And as soon as a stimulus that is connected to one of your triggers happens, you’re cruising along the traffic circle.
Taking your first exit, Unrooting, requires that (1) you’ve encountered this stimulus triggering your intrapersonal root before; (2) you’ve had the opportunity to engage in healing work around that intrapersonal root; and (3) through that healing work, you’ve managed to “unroot” this issue (i.e., disconnect it from your core sense of self in relation to stimulus, preventing it from creating the lens through which you see the stimulus).
The healing work we mention may be anything from internal, extended dialogue, to discussions with a co-facilitator, to time with a helping profession (like a therapist or counselor). This is not something that everyone has access to, the ability to engage in, or the capacity for the time and effort it takes, and as such, many of us will never be able to take the Unrooting exit when we’re triggered, and will keep cruising along the traffic circle to form a lens. And that’s okay.
Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation Page 8
