Episode 10: Group Process

[Music] Welcome to the All Gishtalt Podcast where passionate practitioners talk about all things Gishtalt theory and practice. [Music] You are listening to the All Gishtalt Podcast. Today's episode is on group process from a Gishtalt perspective. I have two guest hosts with me, Helen Kennedy and Sveta Vasilyevna. Helen, can you share a little bit about who you are and how you came to Gishtalt therapy? Yes, I'll do that. Well, who I am is a difficult question to answer. I'm a Gishtalt therapist primarily in this situation, but of course in different roles. I have a different identity. I'm a Gishtalt therapist in Edinburgh or Ann in Northbury. I have worked in two places living in mainly in Northbury and I run a private practice with individuals and groups and also supervision. I'm mainly retired now. I co-founded an institute in Edinburgh in 1996 and I worked with that institute for about 20 years. But now I've retired from that and I'm really work as an individual and I work with Gatler as a trainer in Gatler and I've been doing that since around 2003. I'm thinking about that and I'm not quite sure which year it started. And I also work as a guest trainer for the Bill Niels Institute in Lithuania. And apart from that, I do various things like podcasts and lectures in different places. Oh yes, I work in places that I'm mainly training, doing training work now. I do, but I have a small private practice. How did you find your way to Gishtalt therapy? What was your introduction? Well, I came, I was originally a teacher and I had been teaching abroad. I was teaching in Africa and in New Zealand. And I came back to the UK and really felt like I wanted a new direction. I didn't feel my heart was fully in it or certainly not teaching history to 15 year olds. One of the things I was interested in at the time was in dream work. I don't think I knew what it meant really. But anyway, opportunistically, I was invited to join a dream group with a rather Maverick Jungian therapist who thought and who really introduced me to the world of therapy. And it was like, for me, like opening a door, it was just a complete, I knew immediately. This is what I want to do. This is the work I want to do at that time in Edinburgh, which is where I was living. It was only a very conventional Freudian analytic training. And there were just recently, there was a Gishtalt training group starting up. And I think I just looked at the Freudian analysts and the Gishtalt trainers and thought, who do I want to be like? And it wasn't a difficult question. I didn't really know much about Gishtalt at the time. But since then, I've trained first of all in Scotland with a quite a old-style Gishtalt, which was quite counterintational. And then one, I think I went 1990, I think I went to London to work with Erve Polster. And I thought, oh, this is much better, this is much. But at that time, I learned about the Gapath training, and I began doing the Gapath training and felt I'd come home. And it was through the Gapath training, because I felt I really identified as a Gustav therapist. Thank you. I didn't know that history and let's it snow kind of like the iterations that brought you to the Gishtalt that you do today, especially that difference between that old school kind of confrontational Gishtalt and what's become more of a modern relational Gishtalt. Yes, I mean, I just remember the old school and stuff. I worked for three years in a group that met every weekend, you know, a weekend a month. And so we did a lot of work together, and there was a lot of group process. But the whole problem about that style of Gishtalt was it felt, if you open your mouth, you'd end up having to do a piece of therapy work. So that meant people tended not to say very much a lot of the time. So I didn't feel it was the most useful way of working. I just want to say that both Spiet and I started giggling when you said, if you opened your mouth, it meant you had to do a piece of art because I think so much of the Gishtalt training is working within the group, is being experiential with people watching you and commenting on you. So I think we're laughing because we've had a very similar experience. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Spietta, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and how you came to Gishtalt therapy? Yes, I'm originally from Russia, and I live right now in Canada, in Vancouver. I moved to Canada in 2007. I have private practice where I work with individuals and couples, and I also do supervision and I have a supervision group. And I'm also a trainer and one of the directors at Gazi, which is Gishtalt therapy training program and part of Godla organization. And I'm a group leader at the Summer Residential program of Godla. And I do a workshop on group process with Helen and we've done two of those already. And we're planning to do the third round this year. That's my work life. I'm very busy. I could never imagine I'll have such a busy work life. But I like it. I like Gishtalt therapy. How did I come to Gishtalt therapy? It was very serendipitous, I would say, because I was a physician and I was a cardiologist. That was my direction and that was my professional interest. And I love medicine and cardiology. But I also, when I got interested in psychotherapy, I remember that my favorite course in medical school was psychiatry actually. And that was my favorite exam and I read the book from the beginning to the end. But I didn't choose the psychiatry as a residency because the talk between medical students back then in Russia was that if you say psychiatry, that means you're crazy yourself. Going into psychiatry, following my interest back then was very dangerous. I could not admit that I'm crazy. But I think that it was interesting to me always and so when I worked as a cardiologist, I found out that I do my job well, but at the end, my patients are not really very happy. I can't make them happy. I really wanted to make people happy with being a good doctor that felt like if I'm a good doctor, that means they're going to be happy at the end. And they weren't. And I was wondering what's going on. I was very interested and I couldn't understand why with being like the best possible doctor, I am a lot of my patients are not happy. And that was part of my interest and search for something more than that. And also I was also quite unhappy in my life. My relationship wasn't going well. At work, I was very stressed and my child also didn't have an easy time in kindergarten. And the psychologist in my child's kindergarten, she once told me that all you have to pay more attention, what's going on with your kid. And I got terrified. Something is not going well in my life. And I asked her like, oh, I want to learn more about psychology, like, what's that about? In medical school, they don't give you that information. And she told me that there is a group where doctors can learn about psychology. That's literally what she told me. And I said, oh, that's great. That's exactly what I did. And I signed up by the end of the whole year of six weekends. Each weekend was three days. When I came to that group, turned out to be, I was the only doctor in the group. And everybody else was a psychologist. And that was very intimidating for me. And only by the end of the school year group experience, I found out that that was a Gestalt therapy training. First year of a Gestalt therapy training for people who want to become Gestalt therapist. And blew my mind. It was so interesting. I fell in love with a trainer, with the person who was doing that training. I signed up for an individual therapy with her. I've made such a growth. And my worldview changed so much. And I loved it. I loved it that others, another way of looking at the world. And she was great. And I really wanted to become like her. And I think that's where it started for me. Like I strived to become like her. And then when I moved to Canada, I had a choice. Do I pursue career as a medical doctor or as a Gestalt therapist? And I chose something new. And I don't regret it. I love it. Little history here, and I were in the same training groups for many, many years together. So we came up together from newbies, you know, all the way to now both being faculty. And it was quite a journey. I didn't know you're a medical doctor until a while in. I think that showed up, that piece of information showed up maybe after the second or third year I knew you. Because for me, you were always a Gestalt therapist. Yeah, I was hiding my medical background. I was afraid I will be kicked out because I'm not a psychologist. Well I appreciate that you are here with us today. I want to give some context. Both Helen and Spietta have been, as they said earlier, running these workshops on group process. And they have a lot of experience with working with groups. Part of the training that we do is within a group setting. So I think there's just a lot of experience with group process amongst the three of us. And I'm really excited to hear some of the things that you've discovered, noticed, what you attend to when you work with groups. I'm really, really excited for us to get this kicked off. So maybe we can start and just talk about what group process is. What do we mean by that? But we think that the group process is, if we take the overarching lens, like include everything, the field theory of the lens, then we would say that it's everything that is happening in the group. Like everything that you see is happening is the group process. But we can look at it into a smaller kind of categories where we can think about it as the unfolding of the each member of the group, the individual member of the group, what's going on for them. It is the relationship, what happens between the group members. Like if it's a diet or a triad, what happens then folding off the process of the relationship between them. And also it is the unfolding of the group as a whole. Like if we take the whole group and see the whole group as a one developing organism, then what is the process of movement and what's happening to the group as a whole entity? All of that is group process. I think you pretty well covered most of the ground. I agree with you that the main thing about the group process is that we see the group as an organism in the same way as we see the individual as an organism. And we can look at much of what's happening in the group through the same Gestalt lens as we would with the individual. So we look at the development of the group and how it's working very much in the same way and what's getting in the way of the group developing, or the group development. We can look at it very similar way as we can to how you look at what's happening in the individual. Yeah, it's like where and how the group gets stuck also, we look at the interruption. An example that just came to my mind was what you were talking about earlier, Helen. If I opened my mouth, it meant I would have to do a piece of work. And I think about some kind of learning within a group setting like that, why people might be holding back or why they might be quiet, people are quiet because they assume, or at least one person assumed, if I speak up, I'll have to work. And I'm not sure I'm ready to do that. And you could think about how that affects the dynamic amongst all of the group members. And so then the process that we have to do is to look at what's happening in the group and then inquire with the individuals to find out what's happening in the individual so that you can then look at what's happening, how it's interacting in the whole. And this can be the implicit rule that participants thought is the rule. If I start talking, I'll have to work, but that doesn't have to be the rule. And people just inferred that from other interactions. So when we look at the group process, we're interested in those rules or assumptions people hold about how this group should function. And we try to open them up, we try to bring them into the present and talk about them. And is that the rule they want to hold or they want to be different? So in this case, what might that look like? What if a facilitator notices that the group is really silent? How might you check in with somebody? What might you do with that dynamic? I think that first of all, I would let them stay with the silence for a bit and see what happens. But I think that's always a very interesting skill as to how long to leave a group or even an individual working individually in silence, and at what point do you need to move on and say something? And I could intervene in many different ways at that point. I might quite simply say, I notice the group is silent and I wonder what's going on with people, is anyone willing to share. Or I might say, I notice the group is silent and I'm feeling a bit anxious, so I'm wondering whether other people, so I might introduce my own experience or I might inquire directly about other people's experience. That second example is a nice example of how you might even bring that eye thou to the group. Yes. I'm noticing it's silent and I'm feeling anxious and that already invites a different level of contact. Yeah, I remember in one group that I worked with on a training program which I went into the group and it was the first time I'd met them and it felt so uncomfortable and because it was a training group, you know, the expectation is somebody's going to work. And I felt too uncomfortable for anybody to work, but the group was silent. So I asked about that and they wouldn't tell me what was going on. So we then had to inquire about what's really edgy in this group or I can ask I think that was the question and there was somebody in the group who felt that if she said what she was feeling, she would be cast out as a group and nobody would speak to her. And so then it moved into some intra-personal work in which she could spend. She suddenly got it. She said, "You know, it wouldn't matter if there were nobody spoke to me." And just that whole opened up the whole group and people could then move on and the revelation on the interpersonal level for that one participant. Thinking about sometimes when really utilizing the fact that it is a group can be helpful to the experience for each person. And I'm thinking of a group that I led years ago when I used to work in a higher level of eating disorder treatment. And there was somebody's mistrust in the group that was what was figural. They were talking about if I show up, I'll be rejected, I don't know if I can trust you. I don't know if I can trust the staff. This was the process for that person. And I remember having seen something similar in a Gestalt group and the experiment was, can you place each person in the group at a distance, a physical distance from you, how you feel about each of those people? And that's what the participant did. They had two people right next to them. They had some people over on the other side of the room because I was the only clinician in the room. I was the group leader. She put me right on the other side of the doorway out in the hallway. And so there were people at all these different distances away. And then it was okay, stay here. And we could do such cool things with it because I was able to say, "Okay, what's it like for you now that you've placed? Look at everybody and see how distant they are." But then I could also ask the members of the group, "How is it for you to be standing where you're standing? Is it where you expected you might have been placed? Is it not? What do you want to do with your distance?" I was able to bring myself up, "Well, I'm in the hallway, so I was able to talk about. I'm curious, is it Stephanie that's in the hallway or is it provider that's in the hallway and test that phenomenology for that person?" And I just don't think I'll ever forget that group because I've done similar things since then. But it was just such a rich experiment using the space. Everybody got to say what it was like, you know, and that person really got it and said, "Well, now I want you to come closer. You can stay where you're at," you know, et cetera, and it ended up being this really rich experience. Very exciting experience to do. You can be playful in groups. It doesn't just have to be conversation, I mean, it really can be playful. Oh, wonderful experiments. I've done something similar though, nothing is dramatic as that, but using everyone making their own plasticine figure and then putting it into the group and then they can move them around and say how they would like the group to be or how they feel it to be and the dynamics where one person moves and then other people will all want to move their pieces too. I think that group experience adds such richness to the person's growth, that environment of the group. From my personal experience, when I started Cerniputus Gestalt Therapy Training and also had an individual therapy, I did feel that the group part was more supporting my growth than individual therapy. I love the group more than an individual therapy. It felt like it's more rich and it gives me more and I can grow there more. That's another part why I'm so fascinated with groups and I want to do them better because I think they provide such a great environment for people to discover themselves and to grow and learn something about themselves, much better environment than one-on-one therapy. Although one-on-one therapy is also necessary, but the group is something really unique. One of the most important things about it is that if you're in one-to-one therapy, you know your therapist is there for you, and so you get feedback, but you could never really be sure how that would be if there wasn't a contract that the therapist is there for you, but in the group, you can get a much wider spread of responses to whatever one's behavioural thoughts are, and there's a certain level at which it can feel more genuine, more authentic. And of course, it provides an opportunity for people to experiment with new behaviours, which they don't really get in the one-to-one. So it's a safe, they call it the 'safew urgency', it can experiment with risky behaviours, which is starting to be on one's comfort zone, but you can experiment with it in a group in a way that you might not want to do it in your ordinary life. The group members are consenting to be there, to be present for the group, for the experimentation, and they're not in the role of a therapist. They don't have that contract you were talking about, so they get the best of both world. These are people who are in it with me, they've consented to do it with me, and I don't have to worry about the limitations of the professional relationship. They might give me something different or something more than what I would have with the therapist. One always has that ambivalent position as a therapist, that you're actually being paid, and therefore there's some limitation on the authenticity of the relationship, or from question about it, can often be difficult to really recognise that even though I'm paying this person, they really are feeling the feelings and thinking the things they're saying. Oh, how frequently that comes up, I think, in therapy. It does. Regularly. It actually came up for me just recently, even this past week, where I gave a very authentic eye-thou reaction with somebody I really showed up, and they said, "Well, yeah, you're a therapist, I pay you," and I had that, "Oh, wait, that's true, yes, I am, and you do." And what I am saying is accurate for me, it's true for me, you know, and yeah, it's interesting. But there is that paid relationship both adds security and gives a lot of permission, but it also adds its own set of limitations, whereas with a group, it kind of controls for some of that. Yeah, I mean, of course, in the group, there are other limitations, I mean, I think one of the things that we often see in a group is, as we say, the norms come in quite rigid, and the difficulty, and so that in some way you get confidence in the group, and you get difficulty with people breaking that confidence, and you can see the discomfort when somebody wants to say something that's difficult to, sort of, the group think. And working with that is one of the skills, really, of working as a group leader in it. It's like, I'm thinking about character on the individual level, like the group can have its own character as well. I'd love to know more about both of your experiences with that, when there's a group norm established and there's some level of confidence, but you get that sense. As the leader, that something is not being said, so I'd love to know more about your experience with that, what you've seen and maybe what you do. I always remember my first trainer, when I say my first trainer, he was probably not the first person I worked with in a training program, but he was the lead trainer, he was a bluebird, and he was old school, but he was trained by Laura Pearls, and he was very hot on talking about group process. He had a lot to say about group leaders, and he would say that what we're looking for is the emerging group leader, and that it is a good group, in a group that's working well and developing well, leadership will come according to the issue that arises, so you will have an emerging leader rather than a fixed leader. He also talked a lot about confidence in the group, and how difficult that particular issue, how difficult it is for people to break the confidence, and you can usually see it because of their discomfort around it. I think the sort of questions that I like to ask in groups is what's actually in this group, or what's not being said in this group, and find out what happens, often happens in particularly in the kind of trainings we do in the European summer school because as trainers we move on, so the group is already formed, and we move into a group, which has already got its own certainly by the second or third unit, they will already have their own norms of some kind, and so I think it's always fun to ask what's been happening in this group, and seeing what comes out of it, while working with summer schools, one of the reasons why I've been really interested in setting up a group process, training, working with group process, because the way we train, although we train in groups, we do a lot of one-to-one work, and it's possible if you're a trainer to move from one group to another, and not pay attention to the group process at all, because you're only there for three days, and then you move on. So the next trainer who comes in then has to deal with all the difficulties that haven't been addressed in the past few days, so I thought was in a way part of my enthusiasm, but beginning to do training in this kind of group process work. I also think that when we start our group C and Gazi in the Gestalt Therapy Training in Seattle, we set some of them kind of basic group structure, and one of the parts of the structure is that we say that we value differences, and we appreciate differences, and we respect differences, and we invite people to share their difference, and we talk about dialogue, about engaging the difference, dialogically, with respect to the uniqueness of each other. And I think this kind of setting, this kind of structure helps people to show up more with their difference. I mean, they definitely are going to be afraid still of conflict, but that just support also helps people to be more who they are, rather than try to follow the certain script or a certain rule of how they should be in the group. And we also can model our own authenticity and difference as a group leaders, so that is also support for participants to show up more as they are. I want to comment a little bit about the unique structure that we have in our Gatla trainings, because we do something really cool with the group process, and this is not always the case when you do group therapy, maybe in a private practice. But our training groups have two faculty in them. They have a group leader who stays the entire time, and then you have the trainers who rotate for the different segments. So the group leader holds the group process throughout the whole time. They know the history of the group, the evolution of the group, how they kind of norm, you know, and the conflicts that happen, and the trainer will sometimes get plopped in the middle of an ongoing open process. So there really is an interesting way that this is handled because there's the stability of the group leader, but then also there's almost the stimulus or the freshness of the trainer that can come in. It can spark something. I'll give an example. When I was a participant, my very first summer residential, this was back in 2010 in Greece. I was in this group, and we had our trainer and our group leader, but we had another one of the faculty came in and just sat in for the day. And I remember who it was. It was J. Levine, and he watched us, and he was quiet, and he didn't participate. And at the end, he said this, what I call a doorknob comet, you know, he says it with his hand on the door, and then he's going to leave. So now we're stuck with the comet. You don't get to process it with him. But he said, you're all a very nice group. You're very nice people to each other. But I'll be back in your group at the end, and I really hope you get some teeth. And he left. And that's a group process comment. It's a group process comment. And what he was noticing was that we were all being very polite and very kind. And he weren't poking at each other at all. This was still the beginning of the training. And this was one of our new group full of less experienced people, but that comet stayed with the group. And we're like, are you showing your teeth? Are you holding back your teeth? And that comet became something to kind of knock out the confluence, like it was actually really interesting. And he wasn't there to kind of watch the fruits of his labor until much later, but it really did something. He just named it. And then he left. And we all took it on. It really answers the question that you asked, how do you work with these things? And that's an extremely good way of just making in what you notice. And what it also reminds me of the fact that there are enormous cultural differences, and one of the exciting things about the European summer school is that we have so many different cultures together. And it's interesting, because although we do have so many different cultures together, different people from different parts of the world, I do think that the American culture, what I would call the American culture, is dominant. And when I worked in the UK, people always think I'm terribly kind and soft. And when I worked with Americans, they said, "God, you're so critical." Helen, I remember when I met you for the first time, you were the trainer. At the summer is a dental. And I think it was in Greece. And the way you introduced yourself, well, maybe not the Greece, maybe even earlier. But the way you introduced yourself, you said, "I am a mean squat." I think I told that by one of the groups. I imagine that's where it came from. I didn't feel you as mean, but that was really funny to hear. I realized I got the date wrong. The Greece one was 2011. That was my first year. I just want to correct myself on that. But to speak to what Helen said, I'm laughing, because I'm also the only American amongst the three of us right now. And I would hear that all the time, "Oh, you Americans, you're so saccharin. Can you please show up with something more bitey? Can you show up with something more real?" And I would watch the dynamics and they were right. There's something in the American culture of being really smiley, of being really nice. But it can come across as really inauthentic. And something that really gave me a lot was being in these groups with people from all over the place. I mean, even countries that I had to go look up on a map, because I'm like, I know it's somewhere in Central Asia, but I'm not sure where. So it really, really blew open the scope of who I was, how I interacted with people. I mean, it was a really rich experience. I love that about summer as a dance show as well, because really there's not much confidence, especially in the beginning in people and people really strive to show up as they are. And there's a lot of excitement, a lot of interest, because there's a lot of difference, a lot of cultural difference, and people are interested to engage with each other. It's a high energy training for me, much higher than I ever had in Gestalt therapy, just because of the cultural variety. I remember in the first time I came to a Gestalt training with Gatla, at least it wasn't even Gatla then, it was GTI-LA, but it was in France, and I'd been done all my training really in Scotland, apart from this one week with the posters. And, you know, at the beginning, I just thought, I don't really believe this, you know, I was really suspicious of exactly what you're talking about, Steph, the kind of the niceness, the kindness, the sense of support. But I soon came to realise that it's not insincere or it's just different, it's a different way of being. And I really also felt that this is an atmosphere under a culture, or it's a group culture or training that I can thrive in, that I felt I could be supported and that I could thrive. And I think that, for me, was the contrast between Gatla training or the Gestalt training, which I think is very American, and this is what I've done in Scotland before, because I think that the level of anxiety with the amount of confrontation meant that one doesn't really thrive in the same way. I had that opposite side of what you're talking about. I remember in the beginning, I would experience some things as harsh, or as, again, a little more teeth that I'm used to, and with experience, that it was still very supportive, that it was still really educational, that it wasn't unkind, it was just different. You know, and it really, again, it sparked something. It creates enough friction that you can grow more awareness, which is part of what we do in Gestalt anyway. Interesting that, for me, because I was coming from Gestalt training in Russia, and it's quite pretty cool training and environment, and more kind of focused on what you have to do better, or do differently. And for me, it was, like, for Helen, also, like, it's, wow, this is so nice, so supportive to just people who are so lovely, so felt, I could be myself, I could do what I want, less afraid, definitely, I was much less afraid, more accepted as I am. And all that adds to the group process, again, we're talking specifically about our residential program, but I think this happens in a lot. When you get these differences, when you get people who come from a different ground, have different phenomenologies, all of this creates an opportunity for that awareness. It creates a chance to see, wow, we both watch the same interaction happen. And I was exhilarated by it, whereas the other person said, "Oh, I just want to withdraw, I want anything to do with that." And all of that becomes fodder for the learning. When we start a new group, we know that people have high anxiety. So our focus is to create a safety, to make sure we focus on safety first and connection between group members before we go into differences and conflict and other things. This is actually a great opportunity to talk about if a group needs structures or rules than what they might be, because that's a huge part of managing a group. So at the beginning, I think that's very important. I mean, we do talk about safety. And particularly what creates safety is having firm boundaries, having good time boundaries. We have confidentiality boundaries. All of these, I think, things that we want to introduce at the beginning of a group. And also discuss with the group what would make the group safe for you? What's the boundaries that you want? And that can be one of the early discussions that the group can have. What are the rules, especially around confidentiality. Different people have very different expectations. I mean, in some groups, nobody's allowed to speak about anything about the group outside the group. And you're not allowed to meet anybody from the group outside the group. To the other end, where I remember in one of the trainers that I did in Scotland was that, oh, all gossip is good. If you say anything, you must understand that everybody can know it. So there's a real spectrum of where the boundaries should be on confidentiality. I personally like to have the boundary around. You can't talk about anybody in the group, but you can talk about your own work. In the group outside the group. But some people don't even want that. So I think that's something that can be really discussed in the group. The other thing about safety, I think, is actually paying attention to what is happening in the group and who's not speaking and who's speaking all the time. These kind of issues need to be picked up early on and managed, because that also creates safety in the group, if the group members can see that the leader is paying attention to these things. I was thinking about what Spetta was saying earlier with the safety around differences. I know at least right now in the United States, people's identity is becoming a big part of group process. And being able to honor some of those differences, especially around things like marginalization or oppressed populations, oppressed identities, things like that, that I've found now. It's been evolved since when I started running groups over 15 years ago, is if that's addressed earlier, it's named. And people feel permission to talk about things that at least in the past, there was a, you don't talk about it, you don't acknowledge it. And then people felt left out, again, excluded or I can't bring this in, it wouldn't be safe. And talking about it from the beginning now seems to be something at least in the United States, important for people to be able to come to a group that has a lot of mixed identities, a lot of mixed experiences. So it's a, I see it, we know it, here's the rules around it, we encourage it, here's what we'll do if there's a rupture. And I think about that is creating more safety. And if you have to, I know this is a big thing in your program, I don't know if you want to say more to that, but I know it's something we're doing both in LA and I think we're doing in Seattle. Yeah, I think it's very important that we have some structure for a group, the group, any kind of group will not run well without a structure. When the participants come to a new group, they look to the leader to give them some direction. And if a leader doesn't give any direction, it's very hard. And I don't think it's necessary to challenge them that way. So as a leader, we actually want to make the participants feel safer. And so we provide some structure. It's like simple and can be simple, can be more sophisticated. For example, Bob's structure for Gishtal Therapy, training groups, it's a wonderful structure on thoughts, feelings, events, those articles in God LaRida are amazing. So that we can offer that and we offer our introductory participants this structure. We recommend them to read through those articles. So they already know what is checking, how do they express their feelings, how do they express their needs and what is part of the Gishtal Therapy training. How do we do the training? And we also show the trio, how do we do the trio. So we do a huge introductory round about our training program. And also, I love the structure about Tisha Taka in her article about the structure for dialogue about cultural difference. It's a great structure to talk about unique identities that people have and how important for people to show up with their identities. And I think it's necessary for any group. If we want to do a good group, to first offer structure and structures can be different. It may not be even important what kind of structure. What's important is that there is a structure and that gives people kind of a sense of, okay, this is what we're doing here. And after, when they feel more safe, when they grow, then the group can develop its own structure. So we're really open to flexibility and unique members, people within the group creating what fits them altogether. But that's later, they cannot do it from the start, they need some help. I think that not only, I mean, you've really opened out all the different forms of structure that you could have, but at the beginning of a group, a very basic structure is just to say, what we're going to do today, very basic, we're going to do a check-in and then we'll do some personal work and then we'll do some theory and set that out. And even that can make an enormous difference to people's sense of safety in the group. When I think of like a process group, not a training group, there's still some introduction to that. When I lead a process group, it usually starts with, okay, let's all settle down, let's take a moment, check in with yourself. So we have like a moment of quiet, check in with yourself. And then I say, let's do a check in, I'd like to hear from everybody, where are you at right now in this moment? And is there anything you're wanting or needing from group today? And that gives some expectation, some organization to how the time will be spent. So we have 90 minutes for a group, we've got, I don't know, 68 people in a group. Everybody does their check-in and they kind of arrive. And then you might say, I don't really have anything today, but I'm interested, I'm happy to be here. Or somebody says, no, I really got something that's burning. You know, I'm not sure what I want, but I know I want connection. Then you can start to organize. And over time, as you were both mentioning earlier, you can see what the dynamics are. Is there somebody who always has a crisis that they need to bring in? Is there somebody who always says, I'm just happy to be here, I want to see what comes up. You can check those dynamics and we can come in a little bit and I notice you don't usually come in with something in the check-in and maybe you hang back a little bit. I'm curious about that process and what is it like for the rest of the group that this person is a little bit more hung back or then it becomes something you can still use, living and breathing and moving in the group? Yes. I like those examples. So we can talk a little bit about some of the themes and figures that come up in different types of groups. I know you both have a lot of experience. What are some themes or figures that tend to come up in group work? Kellen, is that the best in that? Sorry for what was that? You are the best in that question. Thank you for throwing them all to me. What came up to me is not really a regular theme, but what's been on my mind is just the sense now of the enormous differences that are in our society. And it's not so much a theme that arises, but something that I've had to deal often with in the summer school is how we deal with people who come from an environment who are more with each other or if not at war hostile and how we deal with that has become an ongoing issue for me. And it's very difficult because we can't resolve the problems of the world in the group, but exploring your feelings and dialoguing about it can support people to meet as human beings. It's one of the most useful things that we can do in our parlors position in the world at the moment when I say parlors as individuals, most of us feel very parlors to have any impact on what's happening in the world. You're talking about a very figural field condition, something that's showing up everywhere. Yes, absolutely. I'm throwing up now with a little ceremony of my clients too. And I think the important part for us as group leaders is to really support participants to take ownership and hold the boundary for themselves and for their feelings and speak from the eye point of view that this is my perspective and this is how I feel about it and this is my emotion about it. And then see that the other person can be different from them about that and see if they can allow that difference to stand without trying to fight the difference or erase the difference. That requires slowing down. People who are different or who are hostile to each other, to tune into themselves rather than focusing on their other. Like shifting the focus on this is me and this is how I am right now in this moment and speaking from that place. Because what people do when they are in conflict, they focus to shift it on doing something to the other, changing the other. That's our role as group leaders or trainers to help them to shift back to themselves. And acquire a sense of a boundary, not cross a boundary. You also have the benefit of the observers, the people who are in the group who are not in the immediate interaction, but they're impacted by it, they're observing it, they're reacting to it, and you have also the benefit of being able to involve what was it like to watch, what did you notice, were you surprised how you came across these people in the group? It can be so incredible for awareness building. I'm also looking at what you'd provided Svetta about themes of power, rules, safety, conflict, competition, loss, these are common themes, yeah. Anything can become a group figure. In our recent Gestalt Therapy Training Group that just started, the group figure became like, on the second day, it is anxiety and because it's a training group. Can you be an anxious therapist? Can you come to the session anxious and is that ethical? And we spent a good chunk of time talking about that and that was the group figure. And people contribute to their points of view and their concerns about that. So usually what I notice, like a group picks up the topic and starts working on that topic. It's an amazing to observe and eventually if they support it and time allows, they resolve it to some degree and they come to some new understanding of this question. So it's very fascinating how much a group can do in comparison to one person doing that reflection. It's also making me think of what can happen in ongoing groups over time is that themes arise and people in the group seem to be synchronized about what becomes foreground for them. I mean, I noticed it particularly when I used to run a lot of dream groups and you know, often in time people would begin having dreams about the same issues and things. Even though they obviously were not dreaming in the group, this was something before. So there's something that happens in a group and to do with, you know, really it is the aspect of the organism becoming greater than the parts, the more than just the individuals is there seems to be a level of communication that's going on that is not in the conscious world, you know, out of our awareness, basically. That's fascinating that their dreams are sinking up. Yeah, how amazing that we impact each other. Very interesting. Following on from what you were saying is better, that groups develop over time and often the same things will come up the beginning anxiety, then the next time it will be something of a particular issue. The whole group will move in the same way, often in groups it can be one person will work on the issue, but actually they're speaking for the whole group. That should excite you more of working. And the permission that gives somebody might do a piece of work and the person who's observing isn't directly involved in it, but they might be deeply affected, deeply changed their phenomenology might shift. I mean, because of something and they'll come back, there was this piece of work. It was between so and so and so and so. But then I took it and I took it to my individual therapy and now, so it's really amazing. The ripples that can occur. Do we want to say anything about any specific interventions that you enjoy doing in groups? Something that you like. I gave the example before about moving people in space, but I know there's many different interventions or experiments. People can try anything that stands out to you or things that you particularly loved doing over the years. I'd run a lot of dream groups and trainings with, you know, working with dreams and I often like to do a psychodrama so that people will take different personalities in the dream and act the dream out and speak from different places. And that always produces lively, lively effects. But also, again, thinking about dream groups, one of the things that I've done with dream groups before now is just an exercise in which one person will tell the dream and then everybody else in the group will say, if that were my dream, I would think and then they will say, "Oh, I would feel whatever," and the person just listens and that, you know, you go around the group and then person couldn't say, "What's being triggered or what resonates for them from what other people have said?" I feel like I want to be in one of your dream groups, Helen. I also want to say that Helen is amazing at noticing what is happening in the group and just given a phenomenological description of what she observes is happening and that's always a great intervention because it's like reflects to the group, the group process back to them and they become more aware of their group process. And that's a difficult skill to develop. It takes time. It takes time to notice, start noticing the group process and then it's quite a risky kind of challenging move to say it because they can disagree with you to say, "No, I don't do that." And so what do you do then? But that's always a great intervention like what Jay did with your group Stephanie and it takes time, Helen is amazing at doing that. It's a mutual admiration group's vessel. What you're describing is technically simple but artistically difficult, very difficult because it takes for me, it takes a tremendous amount of learning how to observe and to also be able to say what you observe. You can go back to some of that American culture, at least for me, I've been socialized as a woman in American culture that you don't do that. You don't speak up, it's not socially polite. So it's been something I've had to really work on and it can be some of the most powerful interventions. Yeah, exactly. I'm remembering once in a trade group that I was a member of, there was some tough it that I cannot remember what it was about, but I don't think it really matters. But what I noticed was that only the men spoke and they always spoke first and I made that comment, it was a delicious comment to make. And something changed. Oh, it all changed after that, they didn't like to speak after that, so not quite. It did certainly happen in part. And I think actually I also wanted to add something to what you were saying about making comments on the group is actually one of the things that we learn to do and we learn to do as therapists anyway, is to use yourself as the barometer to stay with your own feelings, your own emotions, your own physical sensations to give you information about what's happening in the group. Because that's where you'll really know what's going on, much more than thinking about it, is just using yourself, but the whole of yourself, rather than just thinking and looking out there, it's always this thing of always keeping a certain amount of focus on your own process and your own response, your personal response. That internal felt sense, yes, absolutely. And trusting that, that's what I'm learning always, all the time, and again and again, and even right now, learning from you, Helen, that my own experience about the group, I can trust that. And this is what I say. This is what I, the comment I make about the group, it's nowhere else. There's no, like, the right kind of psychological observation of process, it is my observation of what I saw and, yeah, taking the risk. Is there anything else about group process that we want to make sure we talk about our cover before we end our episode? Yes, I want to say something. It was sitting with me that the group leader is as much a participant in the group. Yes, we have that role of organizing structure, respondings. We do have a certain role as a leader or a trainer, but we are also impacted same way as the group members are, and we are impacting the group members as a leader, but also personally as the human beings. And I think that's also important for us as a leader, to remember that we are also a part of the group. And I got to add to that that this is very much a distal way of working, because you can do classic BL groups where the group, the group leader or the train or whoever it is, is really sitting on the outside of the group, just making process comments. I noticed that there's anger in the group today, and then silence, nothing more. And it's not the way I have ever worked as a Gestalt that I do think there are different levels of identification as the leader where you put your own identity, because the way of working Gestalt is very particular and special, although of course there are variations in that too. I learned that lesson very acutely my first year as faculty at the residential. There was an issue that was happening, and there was frustration building, and then one of the participants looked at me and basically called me out for not commenting and not sharing. Why won't you tell us? Why aren't you sharing about this? And I had that moment of, well, I'm not supposed to or something, I had my own process. And I said, you know what, okay, fine, you asked for it. And I showed up, I showed up as a human, I showed up, I respectfully, but I showed up and I shared how it was impacting me and what was going on for me. And it was like a collective sigh in the group. And it moved again, and then we talked, what was it like to hear me say that, why didn't you tell us earlier, now we can set it like it was such a huge, it was really focal for the group, this piece of information. And it really changed them and it taught me, I mean, I've been leading groups for years by this point, but something about showing up authentically with my experience and a touch of vulnerability was a tipping point for that group. It's a reminder to show up, but it's a reminder of how powerful and important that can be. Nice, nice example, thank you for sharing that Stephanie. So let's go ahead and wrap up for our episode. And I would love as we end today, just to hear a little bit about what you are doing now, where people can find you, if you're leading any trainings, maybe you can share a website if you are taking on clients, just how people might be able to find you and interact with you. Helen, would you like to start? Okay, if people want to find me, they'll have to go on the email, because I don't have a website, and I have an email, and I'm very happy to share that. And I'm working at the moment, I run supervision groups, and I go work with LiveEstrop. And we meet three times a year, once in person and twice online, and I'm open to starting another group similar to that. So that's thinking about that. And I'm also working, of course, with our working with group process training with Sveta. And I'm doing some work with the Iranian training, and also with the summer residential. I'll put your email in the episode notes, so people can find it. Sveta, how can people find you, and are you running anything currently? Same as Helen, nothing much different. People can find me via email, but I also have a website. So my website is wherechoices.com. It has my email in private practice. Data. Other than that, it's Gotla, also Gotla Facebook page, sometimes I post things there, and Gotla website contains our training program in Seattle, Gotseve, where I'm a trainer as well. I want to thank you both so much for joining me to talk about group process and how we apply Gestalt Principles to group process. It's been an absolute delight being here with you both in our own little group today. Thank you. It was very interesting. I really enjoyed just this discussion about group process, and all here, both of you experiences with that. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Stephanie, for inviting us. Thank you. I've enjoyed it too. Surprisingly, it's been fun. Thank you. Thank you for listening to All Gestalt. 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