I can’t speak for Vaniver or Circling, but I’ve participated in related practice T-Group, and what they said there is:
This isn’t supposed to be how you communicate every day, any more than Tai Chi is supposed to be how you walk every day. But if you practice the weird, specific movements of Tai Chi, you will find yourself with more options and fewer problems when you move in your everyday life, and that is helpful. Similarly, T-Group (and I assume Circling) uses weird social/verbal muscles to give you the ability to do different things in your relationships, but that doesn’t mean you are non-consensually T-Grouping people all the time.
Note that this doesn’t apply to NVC, which I have the impression is meant to be direct practice for handling conflicts.
I think Circlers are more optimistic about Circling’s ability to handle conflicts that arise in a Circle, or to use Circling as a method for mediation. I think this comes from an implicit (explicit?) belief that a lot of conflicts are the result of either simple or complex misunderstandings, and so by pressing the “understand more” button you can unravel many of them, or make them much simpler to resolve.
This seems like useful advice for how to engage with Circling, etc., but I’m not sure how it responds to what Said wrote in the parent comment.
Is the idea that it would be okay if Circling asks the wrong questions when dealing with cases of potential betrayal (my quick summary of Said’s point), because Circling is just practice, and in real life you would still handle a potential betrayal in the same way?
But if Circling is just practice, isn’t it important what it trains you to do? (And that it not train you to do the wrong things?)
(FWIW, I don’t share the objection that Said raises in the parent comment, but my response would be more like Raemon’s here, and not that Circling is just practice.)
I also go to T-Group (have been around a half-dozen times). T-Group, more so than other flavors of Circling, has a very rigid and restrictive format that couldn’t possibly work for everyday life. It took me many tries to be remotely good at it, but it’s helped me improve less heavily used aspects of my communicating/relating/connecting.
I can’t speak for Vaniver or Circling, but I’ve participated in related practice T-Group, and what they said there is:
This isn’t supposed to be how you communicate every day, any more than Tai Chi is supposed to be how you walk every day. But if you practice the weird, specific movements of Tai Chi, you will find yourself with more options and fewer problems when you move in your everyday life, and that is helpful. Similarly, T-Group (and I assume Circling) uses weird social/verbal muscles to give you the ability to do different things in your relationships, but that doesn’t mean you are non-consensually T-Grouping people all the time.
Note that this doesn’t apply to NVC, which I have the impression is meant to be direct practice for handling conflicts.
This seems pretty accurate to me.
I think Circlers are more optimistic about Circling’s ability to handle conflicts that arise in a Circle, or to use Circling as a method for mediation. I think this comes from an implicit (explicit?) belief that a lot of conflicts are the result of either simple or complex misunderstandings, and so by pressing the “understand more” button you can unravel many of them, or make them much simpler to resolve.
This seems like useful advice for how to engage with Circling, etc., but I’m not sure how it responds to what Said wrote in the parent comment.
Is the idea that it would be okay if Circling asks the wrong questions when dealing with cases of potential betrayal (my quick summary of Said’s point), because Circling is just practice, and in real life you would still handle a potential betrayal in the same way?
But if Circling is just practice, isn’t it important what it trains you to do? (And that it not train you to do the wrong things?)
(FWIW, I don’t share the objection that Said raises in the parent comment, but my response would be more like Raemon’s here, and not that Circling is just practice.)
Seconding this.
I also go to T-Group (have been around a half-dozen times). T-Group, more so than other flavors of Circling, has a very rigid and restrictive format that couldn’t possibly work for everyday life. It took me many tries to be remotely good at it, but it’s helped me improve less heavily used aspects of my communicating/relating/connecting.