I Was Fired Last December
I was fired in December. There it is. I haven't been able to say those words out loud until now. As a person with lived experiences of mental illness and substance use disorder I've been fired many times. But those were instances where my illness crashed into my performance. This time was different.
Rather than describe the incident in detail, it might be more helpful to short-hand. I was facilitating a group as part of a project that gave me a great deal of meaning. I invited a guest speaker with similar life experiences as my own. He disclosed the nature of his criminal history. It resulted in people's lived experience of harm being triggered and brought unexpectedly to the surface.
As someone with experiences of trauma, I know how that feels. We trivialize the term "trauma" in our culture. Let me make it real. When trauma is triggered, it can be a head to toe bodily possession. For me, I feel sick and dizzy. My mind "dissociates", which feels like a drugged dissolution of your mental state, taking you from presence to particular separateness. When I experience it, uncomfortable tremors rise sporadically over the next few days, much like the way heat exhaustion sticks unwelcome long after hydration.
This is why people have a reasonable expectation of psychological safety. They want more than a trigger warning. They demand the right to remain in the room emotionally and cognitively as everyone else. I get it.
Which explains how it all led to termination. Their complaint about the unexpected disclosure ran headlong into my own very real lived experience of exclusion and exile - of stigma. I reacted from that place, growing defensive and angry.
Then I caught myself. I sat down and tried to process with them what had happened. I said the words of responsibility for inviting the speaker without preparing the room. But I also defended a principle I won't bend - that I would never ask someone to disclose their criminal history before allowing them to speak. That was me trying to hold the speaker's full humanity and their experience in the same hands.
The principle is real. Stating it then, while people were expressing harm, was the wrong thing at the wrong time. It was the defensiveness still moving in me, even when I thought I'd stepped back from it. The room read it correctly. My responsibility came through as partial. I was still defending something. The work I did was real. It also wasn't enough, and some of it caused harm of its own.
The rupture didn't end in the room. About ten days later, I sent a follow-up communication. The participants were expecting responsibility. For some, the communication deepened the rupture instead. It had been shaped with partners in the work, but that doesn't change what landed. Leaders are responsible for impact.
This is why groups, especially groups that walk professionally in the world of mental illness and trauma, need a container. Group agreements aren't just trivial and high-minded principles. They are ways of anticipating the unexpected and shaping expectations about how the facilitator will slow down and attend with care, not with defensiveness.
These were very hard lessons. It's easy to see in retrospect, but not in the moment. But they were also lessons learned in the moment. I had to go through it to learn it. The worst part, above all, is that the group outrage that ensued foreclosed the possibility of repair. That's what made this the worst experience of my professional life. It was another exclusion, another exile.
Repair is what should have happened instead. Not erasure of the difference. Not one side winning over the other. Repair is the knitting back together of what pulled apart.
It's the careful work of acknowledging the complexity each of us was holding. Moving back toward each other. Watching the artificial "two sides" framing dissolve into something more honest. All the values and perspectives in the room invited in. Connection. Learning. Something new emerging in place of what broke.
Even the words of responsibility I offered couldn't bridge it alone. Repair has to happen between people. That work didn't happen between us.
So I've had to find other ways of making sense of it. It might take me more weeks, months, or years to create a new model of the world.
I knew I couldn't stew. But I could take what I've lived through, and what I'm still learning, and offer it to other leaders and facilitators carrying ruptures of their own.
I imagine I'm not the only one. If you've ever walked out of a meeting you led with a sick feeling and a closed door behind you, if there's a rupture in your work you've never been able to repair, this may be landing somewhere familiar. If the possibility of rupture lurks in a shadow behind you, haunting your facilitation and leadership, you’re in good company.
That's why I'm leaning right in. On Tuesday, May 26 at 4:00 pm GMT / 9:00 am PT, I'll be co-facilitating - alongside the brilliant Fisher Qua - an interactive workshop called Rupture, Harm, and Repair. We'll use exciting facilitation approaches that deepen our understanding of what happens when rupture occurs, so that we can more skillfully move forward. While I'll probably gain enormous benefits as a facilitator, it's more of an exploration about how leaders, facilitators, and humans move forward after the damage is done.
I hope you'll join us! Please register today: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rupture-harm-repair-tickets-1989121332451?aff=oddtdtcreator