At a conference last year, someone new to facilitation asked me a question I get a lot.
They wanted to know how I navigate “having to be neutral” as a facilitator. How I hold spaces without taking sides. How I manage my own views while supporting dialogue.
I replied simply, and probably more bluntly than they expected.
I don’t.
Neutrality is not only one of the biggest myths in facilitation. It actively serves power hegemony and protects the status quo.
The person looked pleasantly surprised, maybe even a little unsettled. They thanked me for being courageous and for not beating around the bush. Which makes sense, because neutrality is taught as a gold standard. A marker of professionalism. Something facilitators are expected to aspire to, especially in leadership, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding spaces.
But when I travel back down memory lane, I can see clearly now that my friction with neutrality didn’t start in facilitation at all.
It started much earlier.
It started when I began speaking publicly, politically, and in media spaces about the Syrian uprising and the violence that followed. As someone who asked for basic rights of freedom and dignity and paid a heavy price for that. As someone with lived experience of surviving state torture.
In those spaces, the Western insistence on neutrality felt deeply invalidating. Even humiliating.
I was often met with calls for balance. For objectivity. For restraint. Invitations to “see all sides”, as if all sides carried equal power, equal violence, equal responsibility. As if my pain and my survival were simply one perspective among many.
At the time, I could feel how wrong this was in my bones. But I wasn’t yet equipped with the language to articulate it. I just knew that something was being demanded of me that felt like erasure.
That same feeling crept back years later in different forms.
It showed up in leadership development spaces where neutrality was framed as maturity. In conflict resolution and peacebuilding courses where power was flattened into disagreement. In academic discussions where systems of oppression were turned into abstract case studies, safely distanced from the bodies they harmed.
Each time, my body reacted before my mind could catch up. Tightness. Anger. A sense of being asked to betray something essential in myself in order to be taken seriously.
It wasn’t until I began engaging deeply with decolonisation and collective liberation that things came into focus.
Neutrality is not benign. It is not apolitical. It is not harmless.
Neutrality is a colonial capitalist weapon. It is a defining feature of white supremacist culture. I would go as far as to say it is one of its backbones.
Because neutrality does one thing exceptionally well. It obscures power.
By pretending that all positions are equal, neutrality protects those who already benefit from the system. It reframes injustice as disagreement. Violence as complexity. Oppression as something unfortunate but unclear, confusing, and hard to grasp. Does that sound familiar?
Neutrality allows harm to continue while maintaining the appearance of civility.
Then came somatics.
When I trained in Embodied Conflict Resolution, something shifted at a deeper level. I encountered language and practices that did not ask me to override what my body knew, even as a conflict mediator, especially as a conflict mediator. I finally met practitioners and lineages of practice that did not treat emotional or somatic responses as bias to be eliminated, but as intelligence to be listened to.
And when I encountered the work of Kai Cheng Thom, that long held, bone deep knowing was finally seen and named.
What I had been carrying was not a personal inability to be neutral. It was a refusal to collude with harm.
So let me be clear. When facilitators are asked to be neutral, what they are often being asked to do is to side with existing power while pretending not to.
Neutrality in a room where power is uneven does not create fairness. It stabilises inequality.
It asks those who are harmed to soften their truth so that those who are comfortable do not feel disrupted. It prioritises order over justice. Calm over care. Process over people.
As a facilitator, I am not neutral. I am power aware.
That means I pay attention to who has voice and who carries risk. Who feels entitled to speak and who is calculating the cost of every word. Whose discomfort is attended to quickly and whose is normalised or ignored.
It means I do not pretend that harm is simply a difference of opinion. And I do not confuse professionalism with emotional detachment.
This does not mean I come into spaces to impose my views. It means I refuse to flatten reality in the name of false balance.
There is a difference between holding a space with care and pretending that power does not exist.
If we are serious about transformation, about justice, about collective liberation, then neutrality is not the answer. It never was.
What we need instead is honesty. Accountability. And the courage to name power, even when it makes the room uncomfortable.
Especially then.
I know it can be challenging to break up with neutrality. It is a journey, not a task to tick off a to-do list. So before I close, I want to offer something practical. Not a framework. Not a set of rules. Just a few reflections you can sit with the next time you are asked to be neutral.
When someone asks you to be neutral, pause and ask yourself what neutrality is actually being asked to protect. Notice whose comfort is being prioritised in that moment, and whose reality is being softened or deferred. Pay attention to what happens in your body when neutrality is invoked. Tightening. Numbing. Speeding up. Shutting down. Your body often knows long before your mind finds the words.
Ask yourself what would be lost if you named power instead of flattening it. Who would feel unsettled, and who might finally feel seen. Consider whether neutrality in this moment would reduce harm, or simply make it quieter.
And if you are holding a space, especially as a facilitator or leader, ask a different question altogether. What would it mean to replace neutrality with responsibility? Responsibility to notice power. Responsibility to interrupt harm. Responsibility to design spaces where those with less power are not asked to carry the cost of everyone else’s comfort.
You don’t have to have perfect language. You don’t have to do this loudly. But you do have to be honest.
Neutrality is often framed as the safest option. But safety does not come from silence. It comes from truth, named with care.
This is the second blog in my Power Awareness series. If neutrality has ever felt uneasy in your body, if you have ever struggled to articulate why, you are not alone. And you are not imagining it.
More to come.