Circling is an activity I found really interesting in my mid-twenties. I did maybe 7 sessions averaging two hours each, and they had an outsized impact on my life. Facilitators usually refuse to explain the rules for newcomers, which I hate, so I’m just going to do it here.
the ‘rules’
How circling works: you sit in a circle with like 4-25 people. You track how you’re feeling – especially how you’re feeling about something someone else said – and say it sometimes. You can blurt your state out if no one else is talking. You can ask questions of others – “I’m curious how that thing X said made you feel” is a common one. You drop casual deception.
For the most part, you cannot bring in context from outside the circle. It’s largely okay to say, “There’s some stuff going on in my life and I’m holding onto stress. I can feel it in my shoulders. It’s making it hard to focus on the people here.” It’s not okay to go into specifics.
You cannot impose your will or your interpretation on others. Some forbidden statements:
- I think we should just chill out.
- Can we move on to someone else?
- Come on, you’re clearly angry at her.
- You should just tell him how you feel.
- We’re all uncomfortable right now.
(Circling norms are that these errors are not overtly corrected by anyone, but people will get mad at you and express their anger in a circle-compliant way.)
However, in most cases there are allowed ways to say this:
- I notice I have a strong desire for the group as a whole to chill out.
- I’m really bored with this conversation. I intensely desire to focus on someone else. Anyone else. I’m actually tingling with hate for this topic.
- I have the interpretation that you’re angry at her and I can’t think of anything you could say to shake that belief.
- I have a desire for you to tell him how you feel. I feel this way because my prediction is that he will respond in xyz ways, which feel less fucky and make me happy to think about.
- I have the perception that everyone in the group is uncomfortable right now and it’s stressing me out.
When I rewrote these, I minorly tweaked this phrasing, but I found myself going a bit in depth about the speaker’s internal state because that’s a big part of what makes the rephrase good. It centers the speech on the contents of the speaker’s own mind. Something really great happens when people stick to this. Not slipping in their assumptions about what other people want, not trying to take control of the group, not trying to fix people.
So why don’t people just explain the rules?
I think one reason is that instruction and correction are not allowed within the circle’s frame. It’s hard to say “and absolutely no telling people what to do” when you are telling them what to do. (And the floor option of just letting newcomers learn by observation is pretty good in practice.)
Relatedly: if you just list the allowed and disallowed statements above, people will go meta to discuss whether something was or wasn’t circle-compliant, which would break the circle.
Maybe most importantly, it would make circles worse if the “bad” statements were outright forbidden. The facilitator does need to give instructions sometimes. Or the circle-y way of saying something sucks and doesn’t feel right. Better to just burst out with the phrasing that feels right. People will overlook it if they think that’s what’s going on.
zooming out a bit
The visualization I have of circling is a pond where ripples hit objects, which throw back their own ripples in response. Your job in a circle is to (1) pay attention to the ripples emanating from other people, and (2) when they cause motion within you, make that motion apparent by speaking or moving, which puts more ripples back into the pond.
Your job is not to be a pebble thrown in – you only put back motion where it was elicited by motion within the pond.
(But where does the first motion come from? From the tiny, minute random motions of the initial conditions. This makes the first 30-60 minutes of circling really boring.)
risks
Circling suspends many social rules in favor of honesty, but it not a consequence free zone. In my experience, people are pretty conservative. On a scale of 0 to 10, where total honesty is 10 and the normal social level is 4, circling seems to produce 6.
It is hard for a facilitator to set the level of disclosure. If you say you’re going to have an unusually honest circle, you’ll draw some people who want to be unusually honest and some people who are bad at honesty and hope this circle will draw it out of them, and all of them are going to be as honest as the rest of the group seems to permit anyway.
The consequences of what you say do not stay in the circle. I have left circles hating someone in real life, and presumably vice versa. Everyone instinctively understands this – it’s why they’re so conservative.
why do this?
Before circling, I’d never had an opportunity to tell someone to their face that I found them irritating, or that what they said didn’t seem honest and it made me mad. When I or others did this during a circle, here are some ways it played out:
- me: I notice I’m irritated at you.
- X: I’m curious what it’s like to be irritated.
- me: It’s… gritty in my mind? I feel like an oyster, spinning out all this material over something quite small – this single comment, this single perception I have about you. It spawns all these other expectations about what kind of person you are, how you treat people around you.
Or:
- X: I’m sad that you’re irritated. I feel insecure and a little hurt.
- me: I feel a strong desire to cause those feelings to not be there, by taking back what I said, or apologizing.
- X: I feel a little violated and intruded on because you want to make my feelings not be there.
- At this point I have little to say, so I nod, looking at them, soaking in the sense data I’m getting from this person who feels a little violated and intruded on.
- Or maybe something about their comment strikes me as disingenuous – I think they’re having some bad feeling about me but it’s mostly about being rejected rather than being intruded on – but I have a high bar for expressing disbelief about someone’s honesty in the circle, so I don’t respond. I hold both possibilities in my mind, still looking at them, still taking them in.
or:
- me: I notice I’m irritated.
- X: I kind of don’t care? I’m glad I said what I said. Does that make you more irritated?
- me: (thinks about it) No. Same amount of irritation as before, but there’s a bit of additional happiness now. I’m relieved that you kept your center. If I can’t destroy your happiness about what you said, it makes it safer to tell you I disapprove.
or:
- me: I notice I’m irritated.
- X: I kind of don’t care. Does that make you more irritated?
- me: Yeah. Irritation with an edge of… giving up? Because if you don’t care about whether you communicate in a way that irritates me, that probably means we don’t have enough cooperative will to make pleasant conversation. And because I feel given up, I feel less interest in you.
- X: I’m sad you feel less interest.
- (a pause that feels both tense and amiable. My heart is racing but I also feel good because we’re being honest. Things may be hard – but the hardness of having to figure out what social lie to tell is gone.)
- me: I’m curious if there’s any lashing-out-ness accompanying that sadness. I think I might feel that way in your shoes – like, this person finds me irritating and isn’t interested anymore? Well! I, too, don’t care about them.
- X: Hmm. No. I don’t think so.
- me: Now I feel inferior to you because you’re more emotionally advanced than I am.
Getting to say these things let me see what (a limited sample of) people look like when they hear those things. Having any data on how those conversational branches could go allowed me to not spend enormous effort giving those branches berth.
Sometimes I tense my body to let a cart pass me in a narrow aisle. The range of places I can exist in is suddenly curtailed, and I’m practically sucking in my stomach to fit into the safe zone. I used to be like that but with any conversational branch where I or the other party communicated any dislike of each other. Going down the ‘bad’ conversation branches over and over again in circling was like running into the cart repeatedly on purpose. I stopped feeling like “the range of places i can exist is curtailed”. I went from ~90th percentile conflict averse to ~30th.
It also introduced me to the unique warmth and safety of having a conflict with someone I did like and would never like, but a conflict in which there was no manipulation or dishonesty. The weirdness of that extraordinary safety was on my mind when I wrote a short story about one woman healing another in such a conversation while their species were locked in mutually genocidal war.
that said, circling kind of sucks
I mostly stopped circling because of the energy injection problem: because you can’t bring in outside context, you have to wait around for the initial conditions to snowball into a context meaty enough to start reacting to. It seems like there’s a period where people have to lie or exaggerate a bit to get the circle to a point where the truth alone is interesting.
As a result, people grandstand. They do weird things or have showy emotions that seem inauthentic. They talk about how their body feels. I guess it’s prosocial, because it shortens the waiting time. But it irritates me.
I’d bet that a variant that started with everyone getting 2 minutes to talk about some of their life context would be better, as long as the circle after that banned followup questions.