Cw: discrimination, discussion of PTSD
I’ve been reading more of Priya Parker’s book on facilitation, The Art of Gathering (go read it! I cannot stop talking about it).
In the chapter ‘Don’t Bring Your Best Self To My Gathering’, Priya Parker talks about the compulsion, particularly at formal events, for people to continually talk about their job and how successful they are. Parker provides guidance for setting up activities, where guests share stories from their lives where they were confused, unprocessed, morally complicated, unimpressively human in some way. By getting every guests to be vulnerable, this builds cohesion, reassures everyone that they don’t need to be perfect, because everybody else has also had an imperfect life (The Art of Gathering, page 207). Parker interviews professional dominatrix, Stefanie Zoe Warncke, who relates that if people acknowledge their weaknesses, their dark side, then they feel less compelled to compensate for it in other parts of their life (usually with self hatred) (TAOG, p213). Parker then applies this theory to the way events organisers should hold space for attendees, (with a little dilution of the dominatrix angle, of course).
“Darkness is better inside the tent than outside it. We all have it. It’s going to be at your gathering. And if you bar it from the proceedings, it doesn’t disappear. It shows up in ways that do your gatherings no favours.” (TAOG, p214)
This was particularly interesting to me because, like a lot of Parker’s philosophy, it seems, at first glance, to be contradictory to the safety and comfort that we as facilitators are expected to bring to an event. I don’t want people showing up and feeling like they have an excuse to be awful to people, and to unload all their unconscious biases on the other guests just because ‘we’re all a bit bad inside’. But that isn’t what Parker is asking, of course. She works in events, but she also works in conflict resolution. She doesn’t go around letting people be dicks to each other because of ‘free speech’ or, whatever. It’s exactly that kind of vague ‘free-for-all’ mentality that she recommends organiser abstain from at all costs.
How does this philosophy fit alongside common contemporary understandings of inclusive spaces? I undoubtedly feel safer when I show up at an event and the organisers say ‘we don’t allow racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism, etc.’ But doesn’t that force the darkness out of the tent? …I don’t think it does. By acknowledging discrimination ‘in the tent’, especially verbally, we acknowledge that this darkness exists, and what the consequences will be if it appears. We bring the darkness into the space, and reassure participants that it will be faced, and the organisers will be there to look after them if it happens. But is there a way to take this acknowledgement further in facillitation?
PH Lee, a journalist who writes on games, sci-fi, and fantasy, wrote a fascinating blog post about safeguarding in Table-Top Role-Playing Games. Lee (who requests on Twitter to not be gendered) has PTSD, and cites a method of dealing with triggering moments in roleplaying games that Lee calls ‘The Luxton Technique’. In Lee’s experience of PTSD, it is strongly linked to feelings of powerlessness and loss of agency. If Lee is triggered and there is pressure to pretend the triggering moment never happened (to keep the game moving and avoid any awkwardness), Lee, yet again, has agency taken away while in a traumatic situation.
The Luxton Technique is less a single technique, more a mode of holding space where triggering moments may happen. At the start of a game, there is an honest discussion about potentially triggering things that may come up in gameplay. People are, however, not pressured to disclose laundry lists of every terrible thing they don’t want to hear about. Also, everyone is made aware that not every trigger can conceivably be put on the table. It is simply acknowledged that triggering things may occur, and they will be acknowledged and worked through when they happen, and the triggered person will be given full control over how the triggering thing plays out in the narrative. This control is typically framed as a need or want, e.g, ‘I need for that character to not get away with this’. The others at the table might do other things at the triggered person’s request, whatever that person needs, to feel in control. The Luxton Technique explicitly centres the triggered person’s healing process, and their agency over the moment when they are triggered, rather than glossing over discomfort to maintain the status quo.
I want to bring this conception of agile safeguarding, back to Warncke and Parker’s idea of ‘bringing the darkness into the tent’. I wonder if the Luxton Technique can be used in conjunction with house rules to create more robust safe spaces. Unconscious bias often rears its ugly head before we can stop it, even if house rules are set. People who accidentally say discriminatory or hurtful things should not be glossed over quickly because it was ‘just an accident’. I think that acknowledging that these moments happen, and that they are damaging, is possibly a way to fight implicit discrimination in our communities, and centre the needs of the people who are harmed, even if they aren’t in the room. I don’t have a diagnosis of PTSD, but I definitely have some moments from my life that I consider to be triggering. I’m trans, but I’m also binary masculine presenting, white, and thin, so I have a modest amount of experience of discrimination. I welcome the perspectives and criticism of other people on the topic of dealing with darkness and wellbeing in facilitation spaces.
The Luxton Technique is borrowed from the realm of games and improvisation. If you enjoy that stuff, check out my previous blog, where I explain how to devise educational games, or read about how I use the paradigm of games in my work with remote teams.