3 friends today (independently) told me they've been struggling but are afraid of "emotionally dumping" on me
I've been super struggling the past 2 weeks & have felt stuck, unable to express things in an "emotionally safe" way
Gotta setup some bidirectional dumping
Conversation
it's nice to timebox it. i've done variations of things where each person gets 20 minutes to just talk about their stuff and focus on their issues and the other person or people focus on them, then switch. feels nice and equitable. 20 minutes can be replaced by w/e
1
11
✨🦋✨👋
is this circling?
1
3
actually it was called hamming circles! circling isn't timeboxed and isn't problem-oriented at all (which in some ways i consider a weakness)
2
2
B/c you see people getting caught up in less important problems?
Or jumping between multiple & so not making much progress on any?
1
2
circling just isn't about problems, at least the intention is not set in a way that has anything to do with problems. at its best it's about "exploring what is happening, here, now, with these people" but it's not about doing anything about that
1
3
stuff might happen but it's not part of the intention. so it's a very non-doing-y sort of thing at its best. but sometimes it's good to set more specific intentions and look at specific problems and circling as it's practiced isn't really appropriate for that
1
2
Would you still recommend it despite all that?
Is there another angle in which the "non-doing-y-ness" is helpful with something?
E.g. Alexander technique's non-doing still seems to have a purpose of sorts
1
1
Replying to
it was incredibly helpful for me in showing me a bunch of ways i was running social scripts, a bunch of ways i was avoiding feeling things in social situations, and then a bunch of incredibly strong feelings i had about social situations
importantly, none of this was in my awareness as a potential problem, so if it was my job to set the agenda it would never have occurred to me to ask for any of this. so the openness of circling can be an opportunity to find things it wouldn't have occurred to you to look for
2
1
but also: it's not therapy and while it put a bunch of stuff in my awareness that wasn't there before it did not, like, actually heal my attachment wounds or anything like that. i needed much more targeted solo work for that (IPF, bio-emotive, IFS, etc.)
2
1
Show replies