All facilitation requires three basic skills: listening, inquiring, and connecting. Listening to what is being said. Inquiring to unearth and surface what is not being said. Connecting what is being said and what is not, as well as making connections between people, ideas, current, past and future states. Facilitation processes also tend to be goal-agnostic, focusing on the how and why over the what and when. What distinguishes Belonging-Based Facilitation from other methods or modalities is that we practice these basic skills while actively focus on three aspects of the process:
1) Building belonging
We start with an understanding that trauma—the interruption of safety, agency, dignity, and/or belonging—is incredibly common in our current human experience. The interruption of these basic human needs is a traumatizing event, often (but not always) resulting in physiological trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, etc. Interrupting belonging, for social animals, is an existential threat.[1] So when facilitating we work to build belonging at the individual (felt sense), collective (turning toward one another), and organizational (codified practice) levels.
2) Facilitative regimes
Regimes determine appropriate conduct and responses (thanks Foucault). Typically, we have mostly been exposed to authoritative regimes (patriarchal families, non-democratic teaching, hierarchical workplaces, etc.). The most obvious ways we see this is through listening, inquiry, responding and group agreements (how they are created and enforced). Authoritative models so typify our experiences that our facilitation can tend to compel conformity through a practice of “constrain, contain, or discard,” even if we don’t hold those values personally. We can also tend to overvalue the mind, cognition and logic, while undervaluing the body, emotion, and intuition. In Belonging-based Facilitation, we make room for all of these and orient toward creating liberatory processes and practices in which we use space, place, and pace to shape the process.
3) Staying in the room (and in your body)
Our trauma responses often have a dissociative quality, separating our mind-body into a mind separate from our body. This dissociation makes it difficult to listen, empathize or respond to the current moment. Unconsciously, we may be opting for safety or scanning for threats instead of listening for what’s (un)said or making critical connections. And when we aren’t being triggered in the moment, our stress responses can still takeover, manifesting our trauma-responses or “conditioned tendencies.” The skill of staying in the room and in our bodies or quickly coming back if/when we exit is an embodied practice fundamental to BBF.
So in short, Belonging-Based Facilitation is you are looking for facilitation that is trauma-informed, liberatory and somatic.
[1] My fave scholars who talk about this are Brene Brown and Leslie Briner, though there are others who write well about it.