Inner & Outer Roles

At the Center for Right Relationship, we talk about Outer and Inner Roles as essential structures in relationship. The former describes an executive function and usually has a job description: CEO, Mother, Piano Tuner. The latter refers to the emotional functions in relationship: nurturer, initiator, peace-maker.

Recently I was doing some work around my own Inner Roles with a colleague. At supper, I’d described a way in which I am always accommodating in relationship. This is so natural to me, I rarely notice it is happening, until I begin to feel ripped off somehow, as though I never quite get my turn. It simply doesn’t occur to me to say what I want or even voice my opinion about a matter until so much tension has built up inside that I’m making a speech with wild gestures in the restaurant. Sometimes on an unrelated topic.

Or I walk away dissatisfied because I never said what was on my mind.

This role can make me tired.

So I began to play with other roles, less familiar to me, and came up with The One Who Claims Things for Himself. The gesture I came up with to express that had me step forward and reach out to grab something in front of me. There was a fierceness about the gesture that I found invigorating.

My colleague had me go back to explore the gesture of accommodation, and I came up with hands moving out from the heart, and then I bowed. When I slowed it down, I discovered a great deal of generosity and honoring in it. Not all bad, this accommodation, but too much too often, and I grow bone weary and resentful.

Then it occurred to me to combine the two gestures: the one of claming and the one of accommodation, and in doing so, I found out something about sinking in to scoop it up (attention, new ideas, acknowledgement) and draw it into my heart. It was out of this new energy that I could then offer to others. A workable compromise.

Some of the people we passed on the way back to my colleague’s hotel gave us curious looks, for I kept sinking and scooping and filling my heart and then opening it to offer the World.

But what of the fierceness that I found so invigorating?

In what way does that want to be given expression in my relationships?

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