Matrix Groupwork

Matrix is a form of group work taught by the Matrix Leadership Institute.

The foundational metaphor: pipes

Imagine there are pipes between each person and each other person (between every 1:1 pair) in your group. Relational energy flows back and forth within these pipes.

With this metaphor you can now describe relational situations like:

• the pipe is blocked (we are not communicating)
• the pipe is narrow (we end up only communicating about specific things, like work, or only in a specific emotional range)
• the pipe is wide (we communicate on a broad range of levels and topics)
• I feel our pipe expanding while we are talking (we brought in new topics we hadn’t talked about before)

You can also talk about the relationship directly. We are not used to talking this way or describing the quality of the energy between us very often. We usually say, “I feel warm toward you” rather than, “The energy between us feels warm”. But part of learning to tend to groups is to build this way of sensing and talking about the relationship itself.

How to form a group the Matrix way

1. Establish a Matrix This is a the process of establishing a 1:1 connection between each person and every other person in the group. This is done by each pair talking to each other, one discussion at a time, always between two individuals, in the eyes and ears of the whole group. This step lays down the pipe between each pair of people.
2. Build a Ground of Health. This means we start talking as our most resourced selves, rather than bringing in our wounded or emotionally-intense parts too early. We start with bringing in what we love, what brings us alive, what is simple and true, and appreciative. This builds safety and trust amongst everyone in the group, which creates resiliency for bringing in differences or strong feelings later. This step makes sure all the pipes in the group are up to the energy that is running through them. Strong pipes can handle grief or trauma and distribute it (see #7). New pipes, shaky pipes, or clogged pipes need more time and connection to become more resilient.
3. Attend to the Whole. Each person tracks who they have and haven’t connected to, and who isn’t speaking as much, and is responsive to creating those connections or bringing people in. Each person also is aware of their own connection to the group, and chooses to bring themselves in more if they haven’t been speaking. In NVC language, we would say that everyone tracks and attends to needs for inclusion, connection, and participation.
4. Access the Intelligence of the Entire Body/Mind System. We connect not just with our minds and with language but with our bodies, both physical and energetic. By mindfully bringing awareness to our entire system (body/mind/heart/spirit), we engage at a deeper level and bring our entire beings into the room. We also gain access to ways of sensing connection that go beyond the mind.
5. Give Connecting Feedback. Humans have a huge need for data about their impact on others, and to share the impact of others’ actions on us. Undelivered feedback builds up and creates conflict just as surely as poorly delivered feedback does. Matrix reclaims and redefines feedback as a vital connective activity—with some education on how to give and receive it effectively in a way that builds connection. Some key distinctions include separating impact from intention, giving people space to share their experience of how they were impacted, and to be curious both about our differences and our similarities.
6. Support Differentiation. We often have the urge to suppress differences within groups. This leads to genuine needs for expression and authenticity being stifled. Needs are living energy though, and they don’t go away. Eventually this energy can come out in unhealthy ways like gossip or conflict. By creating a culture that supports, affirms, and explores differences, we make differences a resource that expands the intelligence of the group. Being able to be fully and freely ourselves, and be fully seen by the group, is a rare experience for most people, but it doesn’t have to be.
7. Distribute Energy. Remember those pipes? The more connected we get, the more any strong energy or emotion that is expressed will run along the pipes between us, which actually dissipates intense emotions. Grief, trauma, and other overwhelming feelings can be distributed by people naming their own versions of these feelings and experiencing them as a group of connected beings having a collective experience. By doing this, “my” grief becomes “our” grief, and I am no longer on an island with it. This builds connection and resilience within the group and the individual.

I see Matrix as a way to create a culture that works—i.e. one that genuinely meets peoples’ needs.

Our cultural norms (in Western industrialized society) do not support interconnectedness. The shorthand for this is an “Island of Me” culture. Matrix brings each person off that island into connection with each other.

NVC posits that creative solutions / strategies arise naturally when people are connected. Matrix takes this further and says that leadership emerges from the group consciousness once the group is connected.

If I were to put it in terms of neurobiology, I would say that both NVC and Matrix establish enough safety that our reptile brains can calm down, and both the compassion and mutuality of the limbic brain and the imagination and creativity of the frontal cortex can come fully online and commune with the other loving and intelligent brains in the room.

This can be profoundly healing to people regardless of whether they have interpersonal trauma, because our culture itself is alienating and almost everyone is walking around feeling in some way isolated or unable to connect.

My first Matrix experience was deeply transformational. I experienced connection and community in a way I never had before; something closed-off and fearful in me dissolved and it felt like I came home to the connection we all share as human beings. It felt like it was no longer me against all of humanity; I am one of you.

The other big gift for me from Matrix was understanding that my isolation and fear of strangers was actually the result of a gift for being sensitive to emotions, spiritual energy, and interpersonal dynamics. Instead of it being this broken part of me I had never been able to fix, it was a gift that was my bridge to connection. This gift means I get overwhelmed sometimes and need certain kinds of self-care to stay grounded and connected to myself—but it’s not a curse, or something to “fix”.

I’ve done many workshops, and the group energy is what I keep coming back for. I love groups. Something magical happens when we get together and see each other deeply.

All healing work is about re-connection. There is a moment where we go from our “Island of Me” to being re-connected to the larger whole. Or, from experiencing ourselves as fragmented, to being aware of our innate wholeness.

I believe a healthy culture would support our innate ability to feel connection, so this work to me is about healing our culture, which in turn heals our wounds of aloneness. There is only so far personal work can take us; to truly heal, we must heal together.