Luan Hassett

One of the benefits of Circling is that it allows you to see underneath the authority of social convention. You get to see the ‘why’ behind the punishments which society implicitly or explicitly hands out for certain behaviours. For instance, many people are punished for vulnerability. They are met with silence, distance, or gossip. They may be said to be “trauma dumping.” Trauma dumping is certainly not a good thing to do, but from that person’s perspective they might see themselves as trying to find acceptance for the part of themselves that doesn’t fit so neatly into the fun and games. Trauma dumping might not be “real vulnerability” but “real vulnerability” can be hard to define prospectively.

So a person in pain has quite a dilemma. Suffer in silence and feel isolated, or share the pain and… also feel isolated, plus possibly humiliated. Such a person might be advised to see a therapist, and this is often what they should do, but it might be difficult to extrapolate their learnings outside the therapist’s office which rarely mirrors the context of normal social life.

Circling is much more ecological. You are in it with other people who are mostly not paid to be there and who have no role to fulfil. There is no script, nothing that has to happen. You are invited to bring as much of your experience as possible. Where therapy is psychological, Circling is more spiritual. And I think the spiritual plane is a vital one to include in any deep exploration of vulnerability. As Father Intintola says about Tony Soprano, it is difficult to heal the mind without also healing the soul.

I have a story about how my relationship with vulnerability changed. Early in the ‘SAS’ facilitator training I did with Circling Europe aka Transformation Connection, we were exploring our experiences of being in a new and unfamiliar group. One woman said she had a desire to “kick the group,” ie to test its boundaries and how it would respond to rebellion. When this woman was asked if she had a desire to “kick” anyone in particular, another woman chimed in and said she had a desire to kick me. She said that in the 1:1 Circling session she had had with me prior to us all rejoining the large group, she had found the session really boring. I indeed felt kicked, and said as much.

The reason I picked this story is that we are so often told by spiritual experts that telling the truth is a spiritual imperative. A fine substitute for psychotherapy, as Jordan Peterson once asserted. And so we often jump into deep inner work with a kind of brazenness, an all-guns-blazing approach to disclosing our inner experience. That woman felt very vulnerable sharing that she felt bored with me, which I could tell from her visible relief when we got back on friendlier terms. I had seen it as a pointlessly insulting thing to say, and was beginning to decide that if honesty and vulnerability were really so fruitful then she and I were going to need a new definition.

You can define vulnerability as speaking one’s truth even when it’s scary. I got this definition from Joe Hudson who runs the company Art of Accomplishment. What Circling allows you to do is “feel into” that truth and watch it change from moment to moment. You could start out feeling angry at someone. The anger becomes a story about them, e.g. that they are “entitled.” At that point your truth seems to be saying out loud how you’re judging them. But wait – there is care emerging. You see holes in the story, or you realize you really don’t want to hurt their feelings. Then you remember the numerous times someone pointed out your caretaking pattern. You think “I need to learn to be less nice, to not manage other people’s impressions of me, to not soften my presence so other people feel comfortable.” So you sit in the circle telling yourself you should share your judgement, all the while feeling a weighty sense of dread.

These are the complications of speaking your truth in the real world. And these are the outside world patterns of self-restraint that Circling is so good at digging up. I have still not figured out what that weighty feeling of dread means. Does it mean that I don’t actually want the intimacy of self-revelation in that moment, and that that is the truth to respect? Or is that yet another rationalisation to stay quiet and comfortable in the corner of the room? As I got better at Circling I noticed that when society “punished” me for being honest, I was often actually not being fully truthful. I was speaking with a hardened defensive air that broadcasted a lack of trust in the recipient. Or, I was so confident that words were The Truth when in reality there was a strong chance that two months later I’d have disavowed them myself.

Circling is so challenging exactly because these are the questions it faces you with. Another spiritual cliche it brings to life is that there is no ‘should’ when it comes to self-examination. This kind of practice requires a sincere willingness. If you didn’t really want to be there, it would be torture. But for those that do want to jump in, it can be incredibly exhilarating. I have found few things that so rewarded my off-piste flavour of curiosity.