Odd Training Exercise, Madams!
My actual (tell us how you really feel) review of the professional development training: Type: anecdotal Reason: unknown
One of the activities our organization has us (residential, crisis line, community therapy workers) complete during our initial socialization to the program is the following.
They tell us (15-30 people) to line up in two rows about 10-15 paces apart. Then they tell us one group on one side are the “walkers” and the other side stands still. They tell you to make eye contact with your partner (across from you— they make sure it’s not someone you already know or work with) and instructed not to break the eye contact for the duration of the activity.
Then they have you, the walkers, walk toward the stander-stills, maintaining eye contact, without speaking.
It is the decidedly most intimate moment many people have ever had in their entire lives, in terms of eye contact and silence. Only while falling in love is that level of silence + eye contact comfortable. Today it felt almost too intense to bear.
This is probably the fourth time I’ve participated in this activity, because I keep having to be re-trained when I leave places and come back later, or am completing required refreshers later in the year. The actual purpose of the activity is (I think) to make you imagine how a child feels when you start focusing on them in a critical way and stare at them, walk up to them (they tell the walkers to cross their arms and put their hands on their hips), so might imagine it. But for me, it never felt like that, but a love dance, forced upon us, not entirely horrible, kind of amazing.
This last time, my fourth, was the hardest ever. For the previous one, I got paired with this large, kind, (okay, huge teddybear), guy with dred locks who kept talking about his “faith” and also sounded great with kids, very calm, very safe, strong. So I was happy to walk up to him locking eyes on him. I thought we were probably both high, and chill.
I don’t remember the first time. I think it was also someone I felt an easy connection with.
But here was a sort of blue fire or dangerously emotional water.
But this time it felt excruciatingly personal, she’s too raw, too obvious, loud with mediocre begs for attention, an obviously “hurting-person” with childish body language, a big open, moon face, freckles, tattoos, a Germanic witch-chin (like me), and when we locked eyes, I knew she knew I saw her and she wanted to cry so badly. She wanted to look away so so badly, and I did, too. We kept breaking the eye contact. I could barely hold it. I kept telling myself, “We’ll get through this… We can do this.” But she was similarly shaken after the activity, saying she now needs family therapy to recover from it (good one, from a family based therapist in training). She was so young. I’m so old. I didn’t want to tell her the things I knew she would read in my face and eyes. Or I’d have to take her at my lap by the fire, pet the kitty, stir the brew in the cauldron in the chimney stove.
Her eyes were hugely blue. Mine are blue too, but my pupils aren’t dilated like that, so wide and full of grief, while mine are full of another kind of grief, the kind that waits for you. I felt bad for her. I felt annoyed that we had to do this. But I also felt grateful because who else am I going to look at like that, enter the pools of their eternal souls, tell them, we can do this, we’ll get through this.
The other thing the exercise requires is for the standing-in-place person to hold up a hand when the walker has approached their comfortable space boundary. My girl said, Oh no, I don’t have a boundary, I might not know! I smiled at her and said, You’ll know. And she did. She held up her hand at about 1.25 arms lengths. When we switched roles (required) and she walked toward me, I stopped her at about 1.75 arms lengths. I wanted to give her more space, because I knew she she was fucked up after feeling my laser beams.
Throughout the whole exercise I was taking huge, slow breaths. It’s the only way I could get through it.
My girl was like my mom when she was young. ADHD cute, impulsive, performing bits, baiting conversation, flirting indiscriminately, wearing emotion on sleeve, being fun and exciting, fidgeting, doodling, bouncing leg.
And she had to stare with me for almost 5 total minutes.
I hope I healed her, because it wasn’t easy.
I didn’t want to be there. And I didn’t want to look at her, into her soul.
I could already see it from far away. And I don’t want people to really see me, either. I’m already dodging eye contact and keeping my face averted until I’m listening. God bless the freckled faces, for crying out loud, their eyebrows look sad before they even get sad. I didn’t really want her sad.