It’s Not Too Late For Repair
Have you ever been in a group space where careful community agreements have been laid, and then there seems to be a breach of the agreements - but no one speaks up?
Maybe it feels like something drops or hardens in the pit of your stomach, or something tightens in your throat. Maybe you feel a little frozen or queasy or just confused and disconnected from yourself.
This happened to me recently. And I was facilitating the group! 😭
When Agreements Get Broken
More specifically, my co-facilitator was leading this section of the class we are teaching together, and a participant shared into the large group something that someone in their small group had shared, naming that person without their consent.
I immediately had that uh oh feeling in my gut. I felt myself bracing, hoping my co-facilitator would ask for a pause and address it. But they didn’t.
And neither did I!
Finally another student spoke up, naming their vulnerability and fear at doing so, but very kindly checking in: “Didn’t a breach of our agreements just happen!?”
And yes, yes they had.
My co-facilitator offered this person acknowledgement, but also minimized their concern, and gave a reframe of our community agreements that I felt additionally uncomfortable with. It put the onus on the person whose information was being shared without consent to speak up if they wanted it to stop.
This was not the spirit of our agreement, but again, I said nothing!!
Oofffff. Have you been there?
When we don’t speak up
Maybe you can relate to this experience of not speaking up when your gut tells you something is off. So many of us have had these moments of paralysis or shrinking back in the face of discomfort. We get small and scared and lose our tongues.
It’s super normal, I think especially for white folks socialized to avoid conflict and discomfort. And it can be super impactful, as we stay silent in the face of harm.
In this case, the harm was pretty minor. What was shared without consent actually turned out to be inconsequential.
The impact that did occur was at the level of trust in me and my co-facilitator, as we failed to uphold our shared agreements, thereby eroding trust in the intimate learning container we were creating together.
That’s not the end of the story!
What’s very cool about all of this is that this is not the end of the story! 🥳
My co-facilitator and I debriefed after class and were both able to see our complicity and look at the ways we had not trusted our own intuitions.
We were able to come back to the next class and offer acknowledgement, regret and apology for what had happened.
We owned our complicity (her, for not stepping in initially to interrupt an elder in the room, out of fear of conflict, and then for minimizing and ‘making light of’ her impact on the group when it was named, and me, for not listening to my intuition and deferring power to my co-facilitator, not wanting to rock the boat or step on her toes).
We acknowledged any potential harm and made ourselves available to anyone who wanted to connect further. And we revisited, clarified and re-consented to the community agreements.
Why do I share all of this?
Lessons Learned
Well, I want to highlight a number of learnings that were really significant for me:
Facilitators mess up and make mistakes, too! We are all human. What a beautiful antidote to perfectionism.
The ways that my facilitator and I (we’re both white) were complicit here were connected to white supremacy cultural characteristics (not listening to our intuition, defensiveness, avoidance of open conflict, right to comfort, to name a few!). Doing repair was part of modeling exactly what we are working on in this class for white folks, and actually helped us embody the antidotes to white supremacy in a really powerful, real-time, real-life way.
It’s never too late for repair, and going back and doing the clean-up can be incredibly trust building! There’s no such thing as “missing the moment.”
Practicing repair when the stakes are low is a great opportunity to get some repair reps in when there is less charge, and it still really matters. We can grow our capacity to lean into our discomfort around speaking up.
It’s not too late for repair
Call to mind a time when you wished you would’ve spoken up.
Notice why it was hard to speak up. What was happening in your body?
Give yourself some empathy.
You make sense and are ok! There are always reasons that make sense when we are not able to speak up!
Check in with yourself:
Do you feel a genuine desire to offer acknowledgement and practice repair?
If so, take a moment to note:
What would you like to own/take accountability for?
What do you regret?
What do you wish you could do differently next time?
What are you open to hearing from the other about your impact or this follow-up?
Then check with yourself again:
Do you feel ready to see if the other would like to hear any of this from you?
Sometimes at this step, we need to go back to step one. So many of us have a hard time practicing repair because we have been taught that we are bad and wrong and will lose connection and belonging if we acknowledge mistakes.
It takes a deepening into our own self-love and self-acceptance to know that we are still good, that we will survive, even if we acknowledge we’ve messed up. Empathy for self can support this.
More connection is available on the other side of repair
You could even try on noticing that there may actually be more connection and belonging available through leaning into this repair process.
That’s what I experienced in this class recently: It was a beautiful opportunity to actually grow our trust and connection and learning, for the whole group!
Stepping towards accountability and repair is always available to us, even if we need to come back to it after the fact.
And taking ownership of what’s ours, whether or not others are ready to do so, can be an incredibly powerful move, an opportunity to reconnect to our choice and agency. Sometimes it even can invite others in to do likewise!
I’d love to hear how it is for you to try this on. Wishing you well in the practice.