I feel like this post is lacking an explanation of what’s good about this practice, so I’ll share my experiences.
I think I’ve attended a couple of Doom Circles (weirdly, my memory claims that there would have been one at my 2014 CFAR workshop but the post says they were first done is 2015, so maybe I’m mixing that up with some later event). I’ve usually thought of myself as pretty thin-skinned (much less these days but much more back then), but my recollection is that the experience was clearly positive.
It’s very rare to actually get critical feedback that you can trust to be both honest and well-intentioned. The fact that it was purely opt-in and with an intimate atmosphere of people who would also hear their doom in turn made it feel safe and like there was a definite feeling of bonding with the others, in a “we’re all doing a thing that might be slightly unpleasant but we also trust each other to be able to hear it and are making ourselves vulnerable both in hearing and speaking the doom and at the end we’ll have gone through a slightly challenging experience together” kind of vibe. It definitely felt to me like a privilege to be able to participate.
I’ve forgotten most of the dooms I personally got, but I recall one I got from a doom circle in my 2018 CFAR mentorship training. I’d had a bunch of social anxiety when I’d initially gotten to the training and then it had gradually subsided over time. I think someone then referenced that and said something along the lines of “you’re being too tame when you could be more powerful, you should lean into weirdness more and be like a cackling mad wizard”. I can’t say I’d be totally sure about what they meant, but there was something about that which stayed with me and which I’ve occasionally thought about. Maybe something like, even though being a cackling mad wizard isn’t quite the type of identity that’d be my thing, it felt significant to hear that someone thinks that I do have more power than I’m letting myself believe, and that I could play the role of a cackling mad wizard if I chose to.
That’s another thing that can also make Doom Circles positive. Because the doom you can see facing someone else can also be a thing like their own potential that they’re not letting themselves see and are thus letting go to waste. Normally, it would still be weird to state that kind of a thing aloud. But if you take the opportunity to say it in a Doom Circle, it can actually become something that ends up landing as a compliment that they’ll think about for years afterwards—“huh, would I really have it in me to be a cackling mad wizard?”
Thanks, Kaj! This is really helpful. This inspired me to make a picture of you as a cackling mad wizard using DALL·E. Let me know if you’d like to see it!
I feel like this post is lacking an explanation of what’s good about this practice, so I’ll share my experiences.
I think I’ve attended a couple of Doom Circles (weirdly, my memory claims that there would have been one at my 2014 CFAR workshop but the post says they were first done is 2015, so maybe I’m mixing that up with some later event). I’ve usually thought of myself as pretty thin-skinned (much less these days but much more back then), but my recollection is that the experience was clearly positive.
It’s very rare to actually get critical feedback that you can trust to be both honest and well-intentioned. The fact that it was purely opt-in and with an intimate atmosphere of people who would also hear their doom in turn made it feel safe and like there was a definite feeling of bonding with the others, in a “we’re all doing a thing that might be slightly unpleasant but we also trust each other to be able to hear it and are making ourselves vulnerable both in hearing and speaking the doom and at the end we’ll have gone through a slightly challenging experience together” kind of vibe. It definitely felt to me like a privilege to be able to participate.
I’ve forgotten most of the dooms I personally got, but I recall one I got from a doom circle in my 2018 CFAR mentorship training. I’d had a bunch of social anxiety when I’d initially gotten to the training and then it had gradually subsided over time. I think someone then referenced that and said something along the lines of “you’re being too tame when you could be more powerful, you should lean into weirdness more and be like a cackling mad wizard”. I can’t say I’d be totally sure about what they meant, but there was something about that which stayed with me and which I’ve occasionally thought about. Maybe something like, even though being a cackling mad wizard isn’t quite the type of identity that’d be my thing, it felt significant to hear that someone thinks that I do have more power than I’m letting myself believe, and that I could play the role of a cackling mad wizard if I chose to.
That’s another thing that can also make Doom Circles positive. Because the doom you can see facing someone else can also be a thing like their own potential that they’re not letting themselves see and are thus letting go to waste. Normally, it would still be weird to state that kind of a thing aloud. But if you take the opportunity to say it in a Doom Circle, it can actually become something that ends up landing as a compliment that they’ll think about for years afterwards—“huh, would I really have it in me to be a cackling mad wizard?”
Thanks, Kaj! This is really helpful. This inspired me to make a picture of you as a cackling mad wizard using DALL·E. Let me know if you’d like to see it!
Yes please :D
That’s great, thank you :D