Employing Differences, Episode 71: What's your take (on lingering tensions)?

Paul: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: 0:14

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:15

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:18

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is one I'm asking to Paul:"What's your take on lingering tension?" And this comes from some client work that I'm doing, where a group of folks is saying, "Hey, come do a workshop for us. Come spend a chunk of time with us. And we've got years worth of just things that have kind of piled up." This is a group I've worked with for a long time. They're great people. But they have a tendency to kind of get through conflict, maybe not having worked through conflict, but they sort of get past it and move on, and are finding that after some years, that it's kind of built up for them and kind of shoved it under the rug of parts, they're tripping over more and more. They're saying, "Okay, what do we do about this?" And I'm curious, Paul, what your thoughts are about how do we approach that with a group, and what kinds of activities help groups from that situation?

Paul: 1:23

Yeah. So since this is one of our, "What's your take?" episodes, Karen's asking me what would I do in this situation? And I've going, "Well, interesting..." So I have worked with a number of groups that have this. Every group has this. Over time, there is just this stuff that builds up: the residue of all of the work that they're doing together, the things that get unresolved, the things where comments get made, and never really addressed; and it just kind of builds up over time. And it slows them down. The metaphor I often use is like barnacles on the hull of a ship, which creates drag. Over time, they just grow. And what you have to do periodically is you pull the boat out of the water, and you scrape them off. And it's annoying, but things are in better shape at that point. So the first challenge that I see with groups is one, getting them to recognize that they need to do that. Sometimes even just the lingeringness... They have this feeling. It's like when you ask them like "Well, what do you want to work on?" They're like,"Well, you know... stuff." Part of what I'm doing what I'm asking the diagnosis is around how do they even talk about the current situation and what is it that they want to work on. And when it's a lingering tensions sort of thing, and I like that phrase. That's a really useful way of thinking about it. These are tensions that are there that they'd prefer, maybe not be quite so much, and they're just not getting resolved. Oftentimes, they have a hard time pointing to them, naming them, or acknowledging them. They're little elephants in the room. And so one thing I will do is if I can get them to talk about, well, what are the kinds of things that's useful, but the other place that I'll go with it is, so what do you want it to be like, when we're done? What's the atmosphere? What's the feeling you want to have in the group that you don't have now? I don't even necessarily say that. But it's like, well, what do you want it to be like when you work together? And so that's often the way that I'll frame how we're going to go about doing what we're going to doing is just by asking, what's the vision of when you work together, what do you want it to feel like? Depending on the group, I'll sometimes ask them to explore that through metaphor. I was actually working with a group recently, where they're going through some organizational change, and they don't know what it's gonna look like on the other side, but they're trying to define what will it look like when we get there? And so we kind of took a sideways detour, and I asked them, "If you did this work, and you were changed in these ways? How would you know? What would it feel like?" So maybe we'll get into feeling words. And they talked about like, Oh, yeah, there would be less uncertainty, we'd be more confident. So those are not things they can see. But those are things they can feel. But we also did some things around, "What's a metaphor for what you're going through right now?" How does it feel now how, what's a metaphor for how you wanted to feel? And I had each of the people in the group actually come up with their own separate metaphors and then share which was cool because it was fun and generative but what that does when we're talking about this idea of lingering tensions, it's talking about, here's how we want it to be, and we're doing it in a way that has some safe emotional distance from where we are right now. I'm not saying, "Well, what I want is for you to stop arguing with me about this thing," which is a little blame-y, and also, that may be hard for me to admit; that the problem is that it's a disagreement about a specific thing, because it's often a disagreement about everything, because it's kind of latched on everything. But being able to say, "I really, I would like it when we work together, if they were more of a sense of ease," or "I would like it, when we work together, if it was a feeling of we were actually standing shoulder to shoulder looking out at the problems," or things like that. So getting them to talk often, metaphorically or from an intuitive sense of how they want to be, because then we can back into, "So what would need to change to actually start to move towards that?" So that's the first place that I often go with groups that have these lingering tensions, where they even have difficulty naming that there are tensions or what those tensions are, is not worry about getting them to articulate what it's like right now. Getting them to articulate their dream. Where do they want to go? What do they want the results to feel like?

Karen: 6:25

That makes a lot of sense. And you're right, that groups don't always know. I mean, a lot of times what they say, "We keep bumping into this stuff, but we don't really know what it's about," or, "It seems like people are still upset about that one decision." But some people are, but some people aren't, and other people are just aware that there was that thing that we don't really know what it's about. So that sort of passing on tension related to a thing. New people have joined since then, and it's like carrying forward even. And nobody's saying. And in fact, a lot of the feelings associated with it aren't actually consciously associated with it.

Paul: 7:05

Right. And it's also the thing where, because it's just stuff that accumulates over time and kind of builds on itself. So you and I we were on opposite sides of the disagreement about how we were going to resolve this thing. And I won and you lost, but neither of us felt really great about how that resolved, which created some tension between us that never really got resolved. And then, you know, and then Sharon joined the group later. And then she was involved in a decision that we were involved in, and there was some background unconscious stuff going on between us that now flavored her interactions with the two of us. And so now she's like, "Why is Paul always being so mean to Karen?" So now we have a thing... And that accumulates in a group over time, and you can't point to well, "It all goes back to that one decision about the parking structure." That may be one link in this causal chain, but there are all of these different things so that there is no one thing anymore. And so it's less about for me less about being able to establish what happened, because that's not necessarily useful, and more about, "Okay, so what do we want to do about this now?" Yeah, and it's often super unconscious.

Karen: 8:30

Yeah, I'm picturing the conversation with a client about that. Because I think the assumption is, what we have to do is go back and walk through. We have to go back and label that place where it all went wrong, and clear up the difference we had then. And I feel like what you're pointing to, and what my instincts are telling me is that if there isn't a one point where it all went wrong. And even if we could name that one point, clearing it up, may not be as easy as we think. I wonder what you think, though, about the lingering stories. So each person kind of in their own heads still carrying to use your example the story that I have of that time that Paul overpowered me and I lost and he got his way, and he really wasn't fair to me. I'm still sort of rehearsing the story in my head. And I'm contemplating, is it worth kind of revealing not so much trying to dig into the thing that actually happened in the past but is there a value in speaking, bringing into the room, bringing into the group the stories that are very present today. They're about past tense, but the story is present today in my mind, or in a mind, or in some subset of minds, and it's still showing up sort of unconsciously or unnamed. Curious what you think about that.

Paul: 10:09

I will sometimes do that. It depends on my sense of the emotional maturity and the safety of the group to be able to do that. Can I talk about things like the idea of the story you're telling yourself about what happened, recognizing that you also played a part in it, recognizing that you're carrying that. How able are people to say, "Oh, so this is story that I'm telling myself about this, and then I recognize that that's actually that may I may be being unfair." How much are they willing to be able to say, "Yeah, you know, I'm probably harboring this judgment against you for something that may or may not actually have happened?" So there's a real question of whether or not they're able to do that individually. If they are, then I think it can be useful to bring that out in some safer spaces in the group. To be able to recognize, "What's the story that I'm carrying, that's influencing my interactions with other people, or that's influencing my view of people?" I sometimes will flipped this around the other way to start with, where I will ask about stories that other people tell about you not somebody in the group, somebody else where you did a thing and a thing happened. How might your worst enemy uncharitably describe what you did? And to get them a sense of, "Oh, yeah, this is what's happening. Here's what I was trying to do. Here's my intention. But this other person is always describing me as the meany." So to go back to our parking structure example, where it's like, "Look, I was just trying to make a point around this thing, and Karen didn't seem to be understanding the details. And I was just trying to be clear on the details. And now she thinks that I think she's an idiot." And so if I can see someone might have that uncharitable interpretation of my actions, then we can flip it around and say, "Okay, but that's just a thing that people do. Where are you doing that to other people?" And it can sometimes help them to slide into that. So I'll do that sometimes. It is useful to recognize where we're carrying that baggage. And what's the thing we actually want to put down? Because that's exhausting to carry. It's the whole idea of, the saying about how holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. It's like, what would you need in order to be able to let go of that? So sometimes I will do that with groups. But it really depends on how long I've been working with them, if they already have that skill, that ability to sort of see their own actions through other people's eyes, and then flip that around and be able to go, "Oh, yeah, I really am just carrying this thing." And the other piece of it is, it doesn't matter if it's true or not. It doesn't matter if that's how it happened or not. What do you want to do now? You can't change what happened.

Karen: 13:43

Yeah, I have had some experiences of working in a fishbowl kind of environment with this. If I have two people who are willing to venture out and do the work and of course, it's super vulnerable to do it in front of others, other community members and usually with a pretty bounded topic, so we're being careful about where we're covering. And as facilitator, I'm holding a good bit of safety for that space, because I'm going to hold a structure and kind of hold them in it. But I have found that surprisingly impactful. I'm not so surprised how impactful it is for the two people. I expect that kind of deep conversation to be helpful. But what's been surprising to me and I'm learning to kind of depend on more is that the the others witnessing that also experience healing and connection and a profound sense of closeness to the two people who are sharing and doing that vulnerable work in front of an audience. So I'm contemplating some of that kind of space and what it would take to set that up with enough safety for it to work.

Paul: 14:52

One of the things you're pointing to there is you might have a couple of people in the group who are ready and who are willing to do that. Who you can say, "Here's what I want to do. Are you up for this? Are you willing to do it?" If they're in the fishbowl with that, and they're doing that sort of reconciliation work, and other people are witnessing it, you're right, that's another way of kind of bringing people along. And it totally builds that connection. People being willing to say, "Here's where I've been holding this thing, and I'd like to let go of it." And the other person's like, "I totally want you to be able to let go of it. How can we do this?" Everybody else sort of witnessing helps them do their own work. Even if they're not doing it out loud, even if they're not doing it in the group. That's one of those catalyst-y sorts of things. I love the notion of doing it in a fishbowl. I think that one of the other things that shows up in that as an undercurrent that's shown up in a number of places is that oftentimes going back to our parking structure example when a thing happens in a group between two people, but it happens in the group, if there's any sort of reconciliation that happens between the people, it also needs to get addressed in the group. Because it might be afterwards we have this big blow up, and I go, and I talk with you, and I'm just like,"Karen, I'm so sorry, I really didn't mean to do this," or whatever have you. Great. But everybody else's experience of this is Paul and Karen are at each other's throats. And so unless we circle back around to the group and say, "Hey, Karen, and I actually, worked through this. And we know that the argument we had in front of you had an impact on all of you. And so we need to figure out from the group standpoint, what still needs to be done to resolve this." That's another thing that your fishbowl idea does really well. It not only gives the people who are reconciling around there, so working through whatever it is the opportunity to do it. It gives an opportunity to the people in the community to sort of see,"Here's a model for how I might want to think about my own interactions," but also addresses any of the other residual stuff of how that interaction has been influencing the group, as well.

Karen: 17:15

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I'm, and I'm thinking too, about even doing that sort of fishbowl work, and then letting pairs go off and kind of explore, "What did I see? How did that impact me? Where am I with it?" so that there is a sense of, "Right, because that thing was playing out in the group." And you early on sort of pointed to we want to avoid the blame and judgment space here. This is not an exercise in who can we point to to say, "You're the one who did the Wrong Bad Thing." And we will fix it by you promising to never ever do it again, which of course, is what groups want actually. A lot of times clients come looking for, "Can you identify who did the wrong thing so that we can make them never do it again? And then that will be the answer." And of course, that's not ever in my experience been an answer. But if we can get away from the blame, or it's anybody's fault, and into the space of "What were the impacts? And what would we like to shift those to? Or how would we like those to be different?" That that's going to be much more useful space than the typical kind of either "shove it under the carpet" or that the "find blame" kind of story.

Paul: 18:27

Anything else you're looking for my take on any of this? Because that sounded that sounded like a pretty good summary.

Karen: 18:33

Yeah, I mean, I feel like what I'm hearing from you is, first, let's get really clear about what is the need here. Let's be more forward looking, toward what would we like it to be? And that metaphor might be a useful way rather than trying to point to particular events or actions, but getting more into the feelings and less tangibles. What are we trying to get actually shifting relationally? And then, you know, when we need to go back, it's not going back to figure out what happened. It's looking at the stories that remain now. And what do they tell us about what we might need to put down. And then how can we work successfully as a group potentially using a fishbowl kind of approach or maybe something else to get there. Did I get you?

Paul: 19:16

Yeah, you got me. Well, good luck with that. So that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 19:26

And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.