Rings

I read about this concept in an article recently, but I can’t find it now, so I will do my best to explain it from memory.  I wrote the bulk of this for my family to help them understand and empower them to advocate for their own needs.

The gist of it is that you draw a small circle, and in that circle is the person who is most affected by the crisis. In our case, that is Eirik. Then we draw a second circle around the first one. That represents the people who are closest to him, so that would be us, his immediate family. The next ring contains those who are next closest to him - extended family and his closest friends. Each successive ring of people is more removed from the situation until you have total strangers at the outside edge. When someone is upset, they can complain to and seek support from anyone in a ring that is bigger than theirs. So we can complain to friends and other family, they can complain to their friends and they can complain to people who are strangers to us. Eirik can complain to anyone he wants because everyone is in a bigger circle than his. We may never complain to a ring smaller than ours. Our job as an outer ring is to support and comfort those in the smaller rings. So the rest of us (his immediate family) can complain to anyone we want except to Eirik. No one in a ring larger than ours is allowed to complain to us. They may only offer support and comfort. Comfort in, complaints out. If other people start complaining about it to us, we can tell them that it is not our job to support them, and asking us to do so puts an unnecessary burden on us. Our job is to support Eirik, not our friends. Their job is to support us and if they need to complain, they can complain to someone else. This may be important later on, if our friends say something like, "It is so hard to see him go through this," or anything similarly thoughtless. Like we don't know how hard it is. I will likely get very sarcastic. I’m not trying to sound cold, just trying to manage our energies.

If you don’t know what circle you are in, you are either in ring 4 or 5. Similarly, this is the order in which we will share information as well. Once all of Ring 3 knows, I will make this public.

Center Ring: Eirik
Ring 2: Immediate family
Ring 3: Extended family (blood, marriage, and official honorary), closest friends
Ring 4: Church friends, SCA friends, work friends, classmates, etc. that don’t spend lots of time with us, so pretty much everyone else that we know
Ring 5: People who don’t even know us