Facilitating Discussion Groups

Tips for Facilitators

Here are a few suggestions to help you facilitate a partnership group process.

• Be sensitive to the potential emotional impact of this material on participants. Strong emotions may surface. Anger and rage may spring from unknown sources and mask pain. Tears and expressions of anger are clues to underlying strong emotions that people may have difficulty acknowledging and articulating. Give yourself and the other person time and room to express emotions. Make a decision about how to act when participants become emotional. Do not confuse support with agreement. You may support a person in her or his grief, fear, or anger, and be critical about what she or he does with it. Strong emotions are energy and as such can be channeled into constructive action. Ask questions, use your intuition, challenge assumptions, and make suggestions.
• Be flexible about session plans and adapt to the needs and preferences of your group. Encourage group members to suggest different formats or content. Maintain an even balance between activities and instructive content of the book. Invite the group to explore their present knowledge and feelings about an issue or topic before presenting new information.
• Begin each session by allowing participants time to reflect on their thoughts and experiences since the last meeting. Listen to the group and encourage clarification.
• Respect each person’s contribution or right to keep silent and remind the group to do likewise. Guarantee the right to pass. It is important for group rapport and trust that members not feel pressured into sharing more than they are ready to reveal. Keep a single individual or small group from dominating the discussion. If this occurs, ask yourself what is happening. Has the topic released an issue of great concern? Are there individuals who feel threatened and are using this as a means to control? Ask the group members to help keep everyone focused on the main discussion. If individuals start to talk about other things, remind them of the subject or task, and make a note of their concern so that it can be addressed later or privately.
• As facilitator, seek a balance in your own participation. Encouraging others’ participation is usually more fruitful than inadvertently being the one everyone turns to as the expert.
• Be sure that group insights and learnings are gathered up and given expression, and that personal sharings are honored in some way. Provide a time in each session when this can be done or use opening and closing ceremonies, where appropriate, to accomplish this purpose.
• Support group trust by ensuring confidentiality. Ask the group to agree to keep confidential anything shared in the group. No one wants her or his story retold elsewhere. 

Discussion Questions

Five sets of questions focusing on the following topics:

• Visualizing a partnership world
• New ways of relating to one another
• Adopting a domination-partnership systems perspective
• Exploring the link between gender and social systems
• Developing partnership ways of living

Adapted from The Partnership Way: New Tools for Living and Learning by Riane Eisler and David Loye.

Visualizing a partnership world

Ask participants to relax and close their eyes. Visualize what the world would be like if women and men were equal partners. Invite the group to be as specific as possible. What would they see, what would they hear, what would they feel? If they were writing, producing, and directing a movie of a world where men and women were equal partners, what would that movie be like?

The following questions may be of help:

• What do you think our lives would be like if there were equal partnership between women and men?
• How would it affect our self-image as women and men?
• How would it affect our family relations?
• Would international relations differ? Race relations?
• Would our religious institutions change?
• How would it affect our education?
• Would the corporate sector and the workplace be altered?
• How would it affect social priorities?
• Would there be changes in entertainment, art, and humor?
• What kinds of things would be considered funny?
• What would be most highly valued and rewarded?

New ways of relating to one another

Many of us are exploring new ways of relating to one another. We are discovering that the old models of relationship do not really work, and are seeking better alternatives. A way of cutting through some of the confusion is to look at our exploration as an attempt to shift from dominator/dominated to partnership relations and to ask ourselves to look at our own relationships from this new perspective.

The following questions can help stimulate this discussion:

• When have you been dominated? What did it feel like?
• How did you cooperate with this?
• What do you think you might do differently now?
• When have you been a dominator? What was that like for you?
• What were its advantages? Its disadvantages?
• When have you participated in a partnership? What was that like for you?
• What were its advantages? Its disadvantages?
• How do you think you received social support for a partnership relationship?
• How do you think it was opposed or undermined?

Adopting a domination-partnership systems perspective

The introduction to The Chalice and the Blade shows that we have been taught a limited vision of alternatives. For example, we tend to think that the opposite of patriarchy is matriarchy without realizing that they are both dominator models and that the real alternative is partnership.

We have also been taught to divide the world into opposing camps such as religious vs. secular, capitalist vs. communist, developing world vs. developed world, light-skinned vs. darker-skinned races, and so on. To gain real insight into how these systems and structures affect humanity, it is useful to look at the dominator or partnership aspects in each of them.

The following questions can help stimulate this discussion:

• How does the distinction between patriarchy and matriarchy differ from that between the domination and partnership systems?
• How does thinking in terms of partnership and domination cut through conventional polarities such as religious vs. secular or comunism vs. capitalism?
• Name or identify partnership and/or domination aspects of particular religions, philosophies, and political structures focusing particularly on contemporary trends toward partnership and the domination resistance.

Exploring the link between gender and social systems

Many of our contemporary global crises--such as environmental pollution and the threat of nuclear holocaust--are the result of the emphasis a domination system places on so-called masculine values of conquest and domination. For example, in the United States much of our federal budget goes to financing foreign intervention, nuclear weapons, and other military expenditures, with only a fraction of it left for human services. And in the poorest, most overpopulated, and most warlike "developing" regions of the globe, women and so-called feminine values such as caring and nonviolence are most suppressed and despised.

The following questions address this topic as well as the growing awareness that a fundamental shift in priorities is essential:

• Why do you think that all over the world today there is so little social priority given to so-called women’s issues?
• Do you think we would have massive overpopulation if women had free access to both birth control technologies and equal educational and job opportunities?
• Do you think the fathers who today see their role as including the traditional “feminine” mothering will be less likely to consider warfare “manly” and “fun”?
• Why do you think the modern feminist movement has met with so much resistance from both the extreme right and left?

Developing partnership ways of living

Many of our contemporary crises are also opportunities to develop new and better ways of living, working, and loving. For example, on the personal level, the changing roles of women (and men) are sometimes confusing. But they are also opening many new options to both women and men.

On the social level, we have seen the piecemeal replacement of old dominator forms (like the despotic rule of kings over their “subjects” and of men over the women and children in the “castles” of their homes) with more democratic families and states, where linking rather than ranking is the primary organizational principle. But such fundamental social changes cannot happen without a certain degree of social and personal dislocation.

• Why do you think some people focus on the “breakdown” of the family and others recognize that if new partnership family forms are to emerge, the older dominator family forms cannot remain in place?
• Why do you think that people are more likely to deny and suppress their real feelings in a dominator society?
• How do you think the modern development of psychology relates to the movement toward a partnership society?
• How do you think current psychological priorities support or impede the movement toward partnership?
• How do you think the civil rights movements and the struggle against racism and colonialism are central to the modern partnership thrust?
• How do you think rapid technological changes have worked in creating for us both crises and opportunities?