From Court to Couch: What the Luka Dončić Trade Teaches Us About Group Dynamics

As a preface to what I’m writing about now and hopefully in the future, I’ll briefly speak about the origins of my love for basketball. My earliest and most vivid memories of the sport are watching the 2001 NBA Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Philadelphia 76ers. Without really understanding anything about basketball, I was still entranced by the competitiveness and aerial acrobatics that were being put on display. That was the start of me harboring dreams of becoming a professional athlete. Dreams which did not come to fruition, but birthed in me a love for the sport, and sport in general, ever since then. 

I’m a therapist, not a professional athlete, and I cannot help but to blend these two facts of my experience, to examine sports through the psychological lens of my profession and perhaps share the combination of these two things through my writing. 

A transaction took place between two sports teams last week that by most accounts is viewed as the biggest trade in the history of the NBA, if not the history of professional sports. The Dallas Mavericks traded their start player, Luka Dončić, to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for one of their star players, Anthony Davis. 

Other details were involved but that was the headline, and rightfully so. Decisions involving someone who is considered to be one of the best in the world at their sport do tend to reverberate across multiple channels. The media coverage has been extensive and warranted, and rather than rehash what has already been said, or focus on individuals alone. I want to examine what happened from a group context in order to highlight the other characters involved and understand the situation from a different perspective. 

Why Was Luka Doncic Traded?

The decision to invite a new person into a group or to kick someone out of a group is not made on impulse alone. There may not be an abundance of forethought, but there is at least some consideration given to this decision before it is made. The feeling of wanting to make a change is present in the group before it is ever given verbal expression. It is a process in and of itself for a group to accept and acknowledge the presence of hostile feelings towards one of its members and the possible implications of allowing those feelings to surface in the group. Typically the group allows (or elects) one person in the group to take on the task of being the first person to verbalize their feelings. It is only after this that the rest of the group members can openly respond to the hostile feelings which have been present. 

The Mavericks seem to have made their first acknowledgement of their hostile feelings towards Dončić sometime in January. They did so in the form of a hypothetical question, a soft lob thrown in the direction of the Los Angeles Lakers. Well, would you trade for Luka Dončić? As is the case in groups, strong sentiments are initially shared in a manner that hides the depth of feelings behind them. Hypotheticals often hide the reality of strong desires. 

Reasons for the trade have been discussed ad nauseam. Dončić drank and ate too much and worked out too little. He was temperamental and by their estimation, too expensive. I’m not particularly interested in any of that. My interest is in examining the privileged position Dončić had within the Mavericks organization (their figurative group), how he came to occupy it, and the reasons his position changed so drastically. 

On the face of it the answer is simple. Dončić is a phenom and the culture of the NBA is that players of his caliber are empowered almost immediately. Because they are exceptional, organizations quickly become beholden to them. Every NBA team is a group with established norms and ways of functioning. 

Drafting a player is tantamount to inviting a new person into the group. In most cases the new member must quickly adjust to the rules of the group, but in the case of Dončić, who was so unique, he did not have to make the same adjustment. When someone who enters the group is viewed this way, the group responds by changing to fit the needs of the individual. There is an immediate shift in power within the group. 

This shift represents the renegotiation of a new agreement amongst the members of the group. Under these circumstances the new agreement is essentially this: the group will give up its individual and collective power in exchange for the benefits the individual can provide. In sports, teams give up control to star players because they believe their individual performance will result in organizational success. Such is the case with the Mavericks, who believed Dončić was the key to future success.  

Or at least they did. The first domino to fall, which led to this sequence of events, was the Mavericks losing their belief in Dončić. Ironically it was their success, not their failure, that led to this conclusion. 

The Mavericks have been criticized for trading away a player who led them to the NBA finals just last season. This is taken as proof of Dončić’s ability to eventually lead a team to a championship. But the Mavericks view it as proof positive of the exact opposite. Their loss to the Celtics in the NBA finals did two things. It showed the Mavericks they were good enough to get to the Finals but nowhere near good enough to win a championship. Secondly, it removed the spectre of hope from the Mavericks. Not completely, but resoundingly enough to cause some people to lose faith in Dončić, the person who had been given so much power within the group. 

The Underlying Power Dynamics

General managers of sports teams at times function like group therapists. They are responsible for looking after the safety and well-being  of the group members and ensuring the group is functioning well as a whole. Managers do not act alone and operate within the structure created by ownership, whose presence also impacts the group even if they are not explicitly a part of it. My view is that Nico Harrison, the Mavericks general manager, acted freely in deciding to trade Dončić, but his actions were not free from outside influence. 

Harrison, as is typical of people in his position, was chosen by the group to carry out their wishes. A lot of time has been spent trying to understand exactly whose wishes Harrison was carrying out, but this hard to know because there appears to have been factions or subgroups within the Mavericks organization. These subgroups exist within the Mavericks organization and the larger group that is the NBA and can be identified by the way they responded to the trade. These groups can be divided into players, management, and ownership. Each groups response reveals something about their competing agendas, all of which impact the group dynamics.  

The player’s response has mostly been a negative one. They were shocked by what occurred, protesting the unfairness of it, pondered what it meant for them, and quickly came to the conclusion that it meant no player was safe.  

Groups will sometimes elect one of their members to play the role of scapegoat, to take the blame for the group’s lack of progress. As the pressure builds, the scapegoat is eventually expelled from the group. Their may be a momentary feeling of relief now that the problem is gone, but relief is followed by fear and panic. 

This happens because on a deeper level members are aware that the problems of the group are always about more than one individual, and will persist even after the individual is gone. They know that if someone like Dončić can be scapegoated and unceremoniously traded, the same could also happen to them. The group trembles at this realization, and the part they played in bringing it about.  

The common response from players is to think about the personal impact trades have on them. Management, acting as de facto group leaders, must respond by trying to help the group adjust to this change and restore group cohesion. Harrison has done this by trying to instill hope and outlining a positive vision of the future of his group, His belief is that the group will function better now and is better positioned to accomplish their ultimate goal, winning a championship.

This is the appropriate response, but it is not always easy to restore group cohesion but doing so can be a challenge. For the Mavericks, they have had to contend with raucous and emotionally charged reaction from their fans, one they likely did not fully anticipate. This highlights another important aspect of group dynamics. While not directly involved, fans, like family and friends of group members, can exert a large amount of influence on group dynamics. Especially when they are activated by something going on within the group. 

Ownership could take a supportive stance which could bring clarity or help the group move their discomfort towards acceptance. It seemed like Mavericks ownership would have rather not done that given their initial silence in the aftermath of the announcement. A silence that was broken via an interview that was published over the weekend, and almost certainly was motivated by the fact that fans staging protest in front of the American Airlines Arena where the Mavericks play. They seem to prefer to stay in the background, but this choice along with others they make may be the most significant because they lead to a repetition of the same group dynamics that led the Mavericks to this moment in time. 

It has already begun to happen. After the trade a narrative quickly began to emerge about Kyrie Irving now being the leader of the team (group). Over the weekend, after Anthony Davis made his impressive Mavericks debut there was a coalescing around the idea of him being the potential leader of the Mavericks. Another uniquely talented player whose presence once again entices the group into placing their hopes and wishes and power inside of him.

The storm within the Mavericks organization reached its climax with the trade of Luka Dončić and that storm will inevitably come to an end. A new group is forming. They are establishing their own norms and formulating their own agreements, and despite an overall structure that mostly remains the same as it was previously, their is hope that this particular group will take them to new heights. 

We shall see. 

The Beauty in Brokenness: How Despair Can Illuminate the Path to Healing

Image via Marcos Paulo Prado

What exactly is despair? A state of mind entered into not on account of a person’s own will and volition, and not one that they feel pulled into by a strength greater than their own. Despair is more akin to the person who slumps down defeated after a long struggle. It comes to them when they feel they are at the limit of their capacities, when it feels as if they have reached the final step on the staircase of existence and there is nothing new for them to strive for or experience. 

Thankfully, despair, while being quite convincing in this regard, is nothing more than an illusion. Not in the sense that a person doesn’t actually experience the dark and heavy thoughts and feelings that accompany it. Those are as real as it gets. What is not real is the conclusions that are drawn from this experience. Despair is not a final stop or an end to happiness. Despair is a crucible in which everyone, once there, has the opportunity to reach down even further within themselves and discover new strength that they did not know they had. And with the discovery of new strength comes the discovery of new possibilities.  

Much of what we discover and attain in the way of progress can only be gained through difficult circumstances. Anyone capable of examining their own life can agree with this sentiment. The path towards being whoever and whatever it is one wants to be contains both difficult and easy moments, but it is the difficult moments that are remembered most vividly and looked at most fondly. 

A client that we’ll call Johnnie, complained to me for months and months about her dislike of doing hard things, and really that word doesn’t even capture it–hatred is the most appropriate word to describe her feelings. Week after week she would sit and talk about her life and the things she was trying her hardest not to face, using every method of avoidance she could conjure up in her mind. And the harder she tried to avoid; the more difficult things became for her until there was nothing else she could do to avoid the challenges in her life. As dogged as she had been, she was finally all out of tricks, and with this end came the beginning of her own personal encounter with despair. 

Despair is not the final stop or the end of happiness. Despair is a crucible in which everyone, once there, has the opportunity to reach down even further within themselves and discover new strength that they did not know they had.

She had been sick–sad, blue, depressed, ill, any and all of those things, but none of them, no matter how long they lasted, had been enough to make her give up trying to push away her problems. Realizing that she was surrounded so to speak, with no more exits (she had caught on to the fact that her attempts to flee caused more problems than they solved), she was brought into a new psychological state. It was pain in a way she hadn’t experienced pain before. It was blunt and direct, and ached slowly. It felt like it was not only surrounding her, but coming from inside of her, which it was because she was not only facing the things she had avoided, but the failure of no longer being able to avoid them. What was happening to her is exactly what was previously described, she was slumping down into a dark place in which she felt helpless. No longer capable of keeping at bay the problems in her life, and hopeless about her chances of ever overcoming them. 

I’m partly to blame for Johnnie’s situation. As a therapist I insisted that she turn her attention towards the things she desperately did not want to look at. I wasn’t abrasive. Sometimes I could only manage to get her to look at the details of her life for a few minutes at a time, and sometimes less than that. But I was persistent in my encouragement that she keep coming back to her situation and try to see it with clarity. 

The wish for things to be easy is difficult to give up, and it was just as difficult to push Johnnie to relinquish it, but the only way to help her was to convince her to let go of it. The best help I could provide was getting her to come to terms with the fact that life is never really easy for anybody. And, the only thing left for a person to do once they know this is to embrace the struggle and take the hard road. It is a difficult road because to walk an unfamiliar path is to embark on a journey without a map in search of somewhere you’ve never been and are not quite sure even exists, with nothing but the hope you have within yourself to carry you forward. But, if you can make the difficult start and keep moving through the treacherous middle, you find that eventually the journey does become less difficult and even though you don’t know exactly where you’re going or what you’re doing, you start to trust that you’ll know when you get there. 

I didn’t know how the journey would go for Johnnie or where it would lead, but I knew enough about the beauty of despair, the psychological challenges and benefits of it, to trust that if helped through it, she would emerge stronger in the end, and a gradual shift did start to happen as she showed more tolerance for her experience. Though still not easy, the development was positive for her. She doesn’t feel like she has to please everybody anymore, whereas before she could barely stand the thought of not doing so. Now she thinks about what she has tolerated and what she has allowed other people to do to her, and whether or not this ever did or ever could satisfy her longings for happiness. She feels anger, and joy, and guilt, and sadness, and fear, and relief, deeply and genuinely, whereas before she was only capable of being “happy” in the most plastic and inauthentic way.  She started to get angry about all the things she wanted and needed and had gone a very long time without, because she did think she deserved to give them to herself or get them from anyone else, not unless she earned them. 

…life is never really easy for anybody. And, the only thing left to do once you know this is to embrace the struggle and take the hard road.

Despair is what unlocked this depth of experience within Johnnie. It was previously described as being in a crucible, but it’s just as appropriate to compare it to being locked inside of a mental gymnasium and strengthening your mind is the only way to break free. Anyone who continually expects ease and comfort in life will be perpetually disappointed. They’ll sit on the floor lamenting the unfairness of life while wasting away. This is the false conclusion that a misunderstanding of despair leads to, and this is why it is important to realize that even in despair, and in a certain sense, only through despair can a person transform their life.

The person who undergoes this transformation does so by choosing to become stronger, not by waiting for the burdens of their life to become easier.

Turbulent Times: Takeaways from Attending the AGPA Connect 2024 Conference

Image via Sharosh Rajasekher

Things were good, but that wasn’t good enough. Over time I’ve learned that it’s not in my nature to be easily satisfied, a fact that is sometimes as irritating to me as it is to others. I accomplished most of what I had set out to do academically over the last few years. I received applause from the people I expected it to come from. None of it was surprising or particularly exciting, which was the problem. Everything had mostly gone as expected, and rather than feel good about this, more than anything else, I felt painfully bored. I was searching, or at least I wanted to be searching, but I had no idea where to begin, so I was restless and resigned to my circumstances. I felt completely unmoored. I wanted to be standing on the precipice of something different, but it was difficult to know which path would take me in the direction of the difference I was seeking and whether or not I even knew what that was.

Those were the circumstances I faced when I once again was presented with the opportunity to attend AGPA Connect, a conference hosted by the American Group Psychotherapy Association, that I had little interest in attending up until then. By now I had advanced enough in my career to also be swayed by a sense of duty and obligation to attend the conference, and there was also something more to it. The solution to my current predicament, I concluded, was to run towards my boredom, frustration, and career anxieties, and throw myself fully into them. It was counterintuitive to choose to move towards the sources of my discomfort, and that was different enough for me to be convinced that it was worth trying.

Arrival

I flew into Washington D.C late on a Saturday night, and immediately marked myself as a typical Southerner by my lack of preparedness for the change in climate. A year spent living in Pittsburgh had convinced me that my body would get used to it and a light jacket would be enough, but all my northern exposure did was make me foolishly indifferent towards the weather. Standing outside of the airport in cold and windy Washington D.C I quickly realized that I was not prepared for the effect the weather would have on me.

The people seemed nice enough. They were at least willing to humor my questions about where I could find a store to buy proper attire at midnight, but could not provide much in the way of help. Solving that problem would have to wait until later.

I decided I would be using public transportation throughout the week and the man who arrived to bring me to the place where I would be staying was chatty. He described himself as El Salvadorian because of his mother, and Costa Rican because of his father. He was a bad driver, who took multiple wrong turns and drove on the wrong side of the road, but I figured this was the norm for a major city so I said nothing. I rationalized that as far as introductions to a city things could have been worse.

Attending AGPA is like being transported out of time, or at least being transported to a place where time seems to move at a different pace and rhythm, one that is wholly defined by the AGPA calendar instead of any celestial cycle.

Before my flight even landed I was already watching, looking out for what the experience might have to offer. The culture of the South, and maybe every other place, is this odd mixture of familiarity that comforts and suffocates at the same time. I always forget, when I’ve stayed there too long, that not all aspects of culture travel well. Some parts get left behind, and make space for experiencing alternative views of life. Some parts get dragged along no matter how much you might like to leave them behind. Race falls into the latter category.

At some point my Uber driver decided he likes the black people in Washington D.C more than he likes the black people in other places because he gets along better with them. Through some unknown calculus he decided to confide in me, a black man from another place, about his discovery. The irony of the situation was not lost on me. I feigned a few lines of curiosity, as he told me that I should visit Baltimore to be among my people. I nodded as he told me about his wife who he wanted to take on a vacation to Pennsylvania, in part because it was too dangerous to travel back to her home in Colombia. I kept nodding, and when it was time to get out of the car, I thanked him, grabbed my bag, and went inside. It was the type of conversation that made me feel like I was right back at home.

Start of the Conference

Attending AGPA is like being transported out of time, or at least being transported to a place where time seems to move at a different pace and rhythm, one that is wholly defined by the AGPA calendar instead of any celestial cycle. It’s a phenomenon that is difficult to fully grasp, and while trying to wrap my head around it I was also tasked with thinking about a different question, what it means to be an ally.

A room full of new, unfamiliar, delighted faces, and myself, had to ponder this question. We discussed it while discussing ourselves, which is how a lot of learning is done at AGPA, through a mixture of curated topics that have off-ramps into the realm of the personal built into them. This worked for me because it allowed me to gradually open myself up without being pressured to do it all at once, and always gave me the option of taking my foot off the gas and slowing down if I wanted to.

Even though there are built-in stopgaps, most people tend to ignore them, and strong connections develop fast at AGPA. It’s appropriate that the word connect is included in the title of the conference because it’s greatly emphasized. People who attend the conference are chomping at the bit for it. Secretly I was too, and when asked what I wanted from the experience, I talked about looking for a home. A few years ago I thought I had it, but I was searching once more.

Pain and torture breed isolation and people are more likely to find strength and healing if they have a community to rely on. It is the group, and not the individual that survives, and it is within the context of the group that some individuals can begin to thrive.

Seated at dinner that night, in a sectioned off room full of the faces I had met that morning and afternoon was where I had my first inkling of it, when I gave my first real consideration to the idea that I might have found a home. There were plenty of accomplished people in the room with numerous accolades, but it was their warmth and their willingness to share their stories that most affected me.

After dinner a group of us splintered off and found ourselves in the lobby of the hotel bar, drinking, laughing, storytelling, connecting. A woman brought out a deck of tarot cards and each of us drew from the deck, reading the description of the cards we had chosen and its personal relevance to us. Tarot cards had no significant meaning to me until I was in a relationship with someone who liked to use them to predict the outcome of our romance. It might have mitigated her anxieties, but it worsened mine because I never knew what to expect. It was based on the message from the cards, so on some days our love was inevitable, and on others they provided perfect justification for the chaos and turmoil that existed between us.

Obviously my view of tarot cards was slanted towards the negative, and for that reason, this unexpected gathering was more than random entertainment. The entire experience with the cards and these people served as a medium that allowed me to re-do what had been a painful experience and incorporate something new into it. What used to be an unpleasant association became tinged with the sweetness of that evening spent sitting at the lobby bar.

Torture

Early on at the conference it occurred to me that an aspect of my identity that I don’t think much about is nationality. Despite the historically tenuous nature of my relationship to the term, I take for granted the fact that I am an American. Not much thought or consideration is given to this fact unless I am traveling abroad, or in this instance, still stateside but in a more multicultural environment, which Washington D.C certainly is in comparison to Louisiana.

This is one of the reasons I was interested in learning about therapeutic work with forced migrants, a topic I knew nothing about. I’m less ignorant now, slightly. I know about the millions of people from the hundreds of countries around the world who are violently branded with the term migrant. I know, in the most disconnected way possible, what they have had to survive, and now have a more clear vision of how I might help. Now I understand that as a therapist my own clarity of mind is crucial to helping others because ambiguity is more than just an uncomfortable state. It is also a tool used by torturers and oppressors who come from all walks of life. This is what I am tasked with trying to work against. My own inner clarity is crucial for supporting others as they find their own way out of this web of ambiguity and return to life feeling more empowered. This process can take place one person at a time through individual therapy, but it can be accelerated. Pain and torture breed isolation and people are more likely to find strength and healing if they have a community to rely on. It is the group, and not the individual that survives, and it is within the context of the group that some individuals can begin to thrive.

Full Participation

Which is not to say that being in a group is always desirable. It certainly isn’t easy. Everyone brings their own perspective to the experience. Everyone carries inside of them their own world, colored by the presence of others, yet still wholly unique to themselves. And when there is a confrontation between two worlds, the process of convergence can be difficult.

The beauty and terror of being in a group is that it allows you to excavate thoughts and feelings that you hardly knew were there. Through this process new discoveries are made about the self and others, and concepts that seem vague and coolly intellectual become more personal and understandable through a combination of experience and reflection.

I knew enough to know that AGPA would set the stage for this conflict through its Institutes, all day affairs in which I would become a part of a therapy group, not only as a silent observer, but as a full-fledged participant. As the theory goes, this was supposed to help me learn what it means to be a group therapist, and help me incorporate my learning more fully. Despite knowing this, I was still skeptical going into the institute, but that’s the point. New group members feel the same–they are skeptical about how joining a group will help them in any way. They, which is to say I, experience a mix of fear and curiosity about the whole thing, especially being seated amongst professional peers, which makes a person act with some trepidation. The smallest decisions, such as what chair to sit in, become crucially important, and everyone knows it because everyone is trained to notice these subtleties, and the feeling that there really is nowhere to hide is exacerbated. The paradox is that this is true and it isn’t. You can hide, but really you can’t, because even the act of hiding reveals something about you.

Microaggressions

In any social context the specter of microaggressions looms large. The question is to what extent are people prepared to talk about the presence of this phenomenon, and to what extent are they willing to address microaggressions when they occur.

The topic was introduced early on in the group, and the right things were said about microaggressions often being unintentional, but there was something about the discussion that left me unsettled. It was difficult to say at first, but it became clearer over time that there is something about the way microaggressions are discussed as a universal phenomenon that is unsettling to me because it ignores the complex ways in which this process plays out. Microaggressions may be unintentional products of the unconscious, but the unconscious functions differently from person to person, and this functioning is often greatly affected by privilege and power. In addition to this, conscious awareness also plays an important role in microaggressions that cannot be ignored.

The types of microaggressions perceived to be available to a person are a function of identity. It is difficult for me to recall ever having enacted a microaggression against a white man because of the psychological effects of a legacy of racism that makes it clear what boundaries should not be crossed. But it feels much more probable that in my life I have microaggressed against women, even if I can’t recall specific incidents, because of a different power differential that exists in these relationships. All of these thoughts came to me because I was in the group. It is impossible to predict when and if I would have become aware of them in any other way, which I think is the point. The beauty and terror of being in a group is that it allows you to excavate thoughts and feelings that you hardly knew were there. Through this process new discoveries are made about the self and others, and concepts that seem vague and coolly intellectual become more personal and understandable through a combination of experience and reflection.

Desire

My sideways glances kept directing themselves towards a woman with piercing eyes who was seated across from me and my attraction made me realize how much this room was like so many other rooms I had been in. I realized the prevalence of desire, not just at a hotel with thousands of people closely residing next to one another, but everywhere else too, almost all of the time. I bring desire into almost every room I walk into, and it was in Washington D.C that I noticed that it was constantly by my side. At presentations, panel discussions, and dinners. Walking alongside strangers, and waiting for rides. The feeling of desire was ubiquitous, and in this environment, more easily acknowledged.

Years ago I sat through a lecture on the mate selection process, and listened as the professor named desire as a poor barometer by which to judge someone’s viability as a long-term romantic partner. He encouraged the use of other standards when trying to find a mate, and I couldn’t really disagree with his larger point about the limits of desire, a point which ironically is made valid because of the limitless nature of desire. But I couldn’t totally discard desire as a useful tool for relationship building either. The rush of excitement that we experience when we find someone who we desire is often enough motivation to draw us into an interaction with them. This does not always lead to romance, because feelings are not always mutual and even if they are desire is rarely strong enough to triumph over incompatibility, but this is not the only option and sometimes, desire is the starting point of what may become an intimate relationship of real importance. The lesson one learns over time is how to be careful with desire, not to completely disregard it.

Therapy groups illuminate these hidden fears and desires by forging a crucible in which these dynamics can arise without being immediately discharged or casted aside as is the case in normal life. It is inevitable that you will find within the group, whatever exists outside of it. This is a familiar axiom in the world of psychotherapy, the understanding that people bring their experience with them and recreate it in the therapy situation, or at least act in ways that allow the experience to resurface in this context.

The struggle that every therapist must contend with and resolve is where the line between the personal and the professional lies, and whether or not the line actually exists at all. Professional organizations and licensing boards try to help in this area, but they can’t really decide.

What became evident to me is that this process may also work in reverse. The experiences we have in groups sometimes resurface even after leaving the group, and we become more skilled at recognizing when this is happening. In all likelihood this is because the group is both reflective and experiential–as individuals interact with others in the group they get to receive live and in the moment feedback about how the impact they are having. They also have the opportunity to offer the same feedback to others. This process of slowing down to observe in real time these multiple effects has the impact of accelerating learning.

My own observation is that the learning that began for me in my training group continued beyond the eight hours we spent together. The identified themes of fear and desire were just as present as I moved onto dinner and other activities that awaited me that night, but even more so than before. There was a strange congruence that stayed with me throughout the night, and my sense is that this harmony was somehow informed by my experience in the group.

The Personal and the Professional

The struggle that every therapist must contend with and resolve is where the line between the personal and the professional lies, and whether or not the line actually exists at all. Professional organizations and licensing boards try to help in this area, but they can’t really decide. Attending a professional training where you also are asked to participate in group therapy makes it clear how blurry are the lines between the personal and the professional.

On the second day my group insisted on making the distinction even messier than it already was in my mind. They had spotted my deception, the easy way I’m capable of hiding by giving the least required information about myself, and using it as a launching pad to ask other people questions, pivoting the conversation away from myself. They had noticed it, and would no longer abide by it. They wanted more from me. They wanted me to be more vulnerable, to join in with them, at which point the group started to feel less like professional development, like an intellectual exercise, and more like a referendum on my chosen way of being with these people. I bristled at the request, but it no longer made sense to try to hide. I tried to bring myself in, and initially I stumbled because it was difficult to figure out what parts of myself to show. Maybe I was unsure of what parts of myself were allowed.

The group waited as I wrestled for quite a while, trying to identify what I wanted. Eventually I found the thing I wished for, and being far off from the realm of the professional by this point, offered my wish to the group and waited to see what would happen.

When you risk vulnerability and your leader does not respond as you want them to, you are left with only two options–blame yourself or suffer an inevitable loss of faith.

There was a silent pause, then a request for more clarity, and finally a feeling of stuck-ness as the group reached an impasse. To me it felt like a defeat. I thought I had expressed my wish in the clearest way possible and yet I was left facing the coldness of miscommunication. And after surrendering my previous position, I was left with nowhere to hide. Nothing came of the request for clarity, and no common ground was found. In hindsight, I was also to blame for the miscommunication. I spoke clearly, but shared a wish that was completely outside the realm of normal expectations in professional training, which is exactly the conundrum that underlies this situation. I was operating completely from the personal side and moving further and further away from the professional side of things. I was moving towards the anger and frustration I was accustomed to finding mixed in with my disappointment.

The Role of the Leader

I have a certain level of respect for any therapist willing to take on the task of leading a group, especially a group that is formed impromptu with minimal input from themselves on the group’s formation. Especially a group with me because I don’t consider myself to be a good group member, meaning early on I am resistant to being led and maintain a healthy amount of skepticism towards the leader. The respect that I mentioned usually isn’t shown until after the group is over and I’m at least somewhat assured that the group leader is capable of earning it if I needed them to. It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is with me in groups. In this context, I expect just as much from others as I would from myself.

I expect that when someone takes a risk in a group, the leader is able to support them and help them complete the motion so to speak. If someone attempts to build a bridge, even a flimsy one, the leader has to help the group connect to the person's efforts and complete the bridge, and if the group cannot do this then the group leader has to model how it’s done by doing it themselves. When this happens, the group is able to progress towards its intended purpose, but when this opportunity is missed, the group becomes disjointed, and without intervention, withers and dies. People take up residence with each other by forming sub-groups with one or two others whom they think might be able to provide some protection from the outcome.

Feeling anger and frustration, I wasn’t sure what to do, but it no longer felt like I could look towards the leader for direction. When you risk vulnerability and your leader does not respond as you want them to, you are left with only two options–blame yourself or suffer an inevitable loss of faith. I was well beyond the point of taking on blame for others, and not so fervent in my faith to begin with that the other decision would come at a terrible cost. So I watched and observed the group wrestle with the question of what we were doing while silently personalizing it and turning it into a singular issue, thinking only of what I wanted to do. What did I want from this experience? This was not new to me, having to figure out for myself what to do because I could not rely on the adults in the room. I was experiencing the group as I had experienced some of the earliest groups I had been a part of in my life. I suspect the same was true for everyone else in the group, and it may have even been true for the leader too.

Years ago I was at an open mic event for poets and I watched a man perform a poem in which he uttered the phrase “repetition is the father of learning,” riffing on the original phrase to share his painful experience with his father. I recall it now as I think about the repetitive nature of group therapy, the way that themes from one’s life surface again and again throughout the group experience. Repetition can be a means to experiencing great pleasure and also great pain, but it is the latter that produces the most impactful kind of learning.

Large Group

I was beginning to get my bearings. I wasn’t as wide-eyed about the experience of the conference, and I was starting to solidify in my mind how I wanted to show up in the space I was in. I had begun to learn the routes in and out of the hotel, recognize the now familiar faces of some of the workers as I stood in the morning breakfast line, and had a sense of the people I wanted to be around. I was networking, a term I’m realizing I dislike, but still had the goal of building community and broadening alliances, finding more people I felt protective of and felt protected by in return.

All of this was crystallized during the large group, which, as I understand it, is an experience meant to allow for the observation of broader social dynamics within a confined space. It is a microcosm of societal dynamics, and with this being the case and society being what it is, the large group is also wildly confusing and at times blisteringly painful. I’m used to therapy groups of six to twelve people, so sitting in a room with hundreds of people who were all trying to participate in group therapy felt like I was spying, like I was watching something I wasn’t really supposed to be a part of. It felt like I was privy to a conversation that was not meant for me.

But, maybe that’s part of what you’re supposed to get from the large group. You get to be privy to the conversations that you intuitively know must be taking place all the time–how could they not with things being as difficult as they are at times for certain groups in this country. You know that some segment of the population must feel indifferent or hostile towards you, and some other segment must be busy fetishizing you, but it is still strange to become a witness to it. Especially when the confirmation comes from a room of your professional peers.

You don’t get fully settled, even after you get past the initial strangeness of it, because there is this tension in the room that at times borders on becoming explosive. I shouldn’t have been surprised. People suffer and struggle to make sense of why this is so, and when it seems impossible to cut through their suffering with logic, violence becomes optional. This tension always exists and there is a need for people who are willing to give of themselves and guide others towards a different path that allows them to deal with their pain and hurt. There was plenty of it in the room after the anger subsided, along with a deep feeling of sadness, but there was something else present too, in between the lines of sadness wrapping itself around everyone in the room, which to me felt like a renewed sense of belonging. If people could tolerate their suffering long enough they could notice how it connected them to every other person, and allow them to leave the room still hopeful.

Being a therapist sometimes means that you get too comfortable living in the world you have created.

That final feeling must have carried over because the last large group was still combative, but less so compared to the others. People were still angry, but their anger didn’t seem to be genuine. It was the anger that is used to cover up true emotions. There were beautiful moments of connection in the last group. Moments of unity, moments of solidarity, and moments of transformation. The group got closer and closer to connecting, and then anger, which was really fear, would get in the way. Everyone was wrestling with this in their own way. The path was not necessarily open, but it was there, and the group had begun to turn towards it. Given how the group started, the willingness to even entertain the thought might be considered a sign of progress.

One Last Chance

By the end of the week I was ready to go. Ready for the Southern warmth that I knew was waiting for me. I had planned for an early morning flight that would allow me to get back with plenty of time left in the day, and meant that I would be waking up in the middle of the night to leave from the hotel. This presented logistical issues for me which I decided to resolve by sitting in the hotel lobby and staying awake all night until it was time for me to leave. I underestimated the discomfort of doing things this way, and the temptation to lay down on the floor and close my eyes if only for a few minutes, having reached a state of mental exhaustion days before. Neither option was appealing to me but I was accepting of my circumstances and would manage to suffer through one uncomfortable night at a hotel.

I had spent the early part of the night with two friends from home who were also attending the conference and we had said our goodbyes so that they could go back to their room and rest. After we parted ways I sat in the hallway thinking about everything I had experienced throughout the conference, trying to keep myself awake and alert. I was wondering about the next few hours with a tired sense of dread, when my phone started to buzz. Instead of responding to the text I called my friends and listened as they invited me to take one of their beds so that I could have a few hours of sleep before leaving early in the morning. Initially I wanted to decline the offer because my instinct is to refuse help unless I really need it and the standard I’ve set for what qualifies as a need is not met often. But, because of the experiences I had at AGPA throughout the week I paused and thought about it. I thought about the ways I had been tested and pushed to learn not only how to give but also receive, and how this was a necessary challenge for me to overcome in pursuit of goals that were both professional and personal.

Being a therapist sometimes means that you get too comfortable living in the world you have created. You invite your clients in and though they are able to influence it, for the most part you get to maintain control. Group therapy is about something else. It is about co-creating that world with other people, and one quality that I am sure is necessary to be a good group therapist, is the eventual willingness to give up control and let yourself be a part of the process. With gratitude I accepted the offer from my friends, and made my way to their room, still reflecting on all the beautiful shades of humanity I had encountered in myself and others throughout the week.

From Creation to Consciousness: An Existential Review of Poor Things

I suspect that most men find themselves in an unenviable position when trying to say anything intelligible or wise about the lives of women. After watching Poor Things, the latest film from Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Emma Stone, I feel no less confident in expressing that sentiment.

Poor Things is an interesting viewing experience. It’s a story that transports you to the past while simultaneously making you more aware of the present and making you ponder, sometimes solemnly, what the future will be like. It’s easy and tempting to say the film deals with issues that exist between women and men, but really it disabuses the audience of this notion. There really are no issues between women and men in the world of Poor Things. There are men with issues who, for lack of awareness, raise hell and wreak havoc on the lives of women.

The film quickly establishes the setting as one where women are objectified and lack the agency of their male counterparts. In the beginning, the main character Bella is treated less like a person than she is a psychological mirror for the men in the film who project their own thoughts and feelings onto her. For most of these men the content of their projections never rises above the level of their base desire. Bella’s cognitive shortcomings are easily overlooked by them because they are only concerned with her physical features. Their entire view of her is informed by and filtered through the lens of her beauty. A larger point is being made about male-female relations, which are often entered into and kept alive solely by the power of attraction, which moves people in the direction of what they would like to do without forcing them to consider whether or not they should do it.

Known Unknowns

There is an interesting relationship that exists between the characters and truth. They have an ambivalence about it, a selective amnesia that is used to blot out and hide certain parts of themselves and their reality. At one point the character Godwin, speaking about his father says “They pushed the boundaries of what’s known and they paid the price. That’s the only way to live.” This statement essentially summarizes his life philosophy and his view of how people should live, and yet, in several moments throughout the film he shies away from it. He fails to live up to his ideals and when he is confronted by those ideals through Bella who personifies them, he struggles to accept their presence in her.

It’s commonplace for the relationship between a parent and a child to develop like this. Parents somehow think they can instill certain ideas and values in a child without eventually being challenged to live up to them. Bella goes along with this contradiction early on because she has the mind of a child and cannot for one second fathom how Godwin could ever act without her best interest in mind. But as she continues to develop, she challenges him more and forces him to reveal what is hidden behind his paternalism. Godwin has his own desire for control, which he satisfies in part by instilling a sense of fear inside Bella. Watching this manipulation play out, it’s impossible not to think of other people like him, who twist and contort their own minds until they are able to believe that a human being is somehow something less than that. Godwin accomplished this by labeling Bella as an experiment, but all he really accomplishes is the recapitulation of his own experience with his father who also deemed scientific progress to be the most important thing.

Unfinished Business

The film goes through the trouble of hinting at Godwin’s past relationship with his father multiple times to show that he is still anchored to it and his inability to be honest about that makes it difficult for him to be honest about anything else. His stated goal is scientific progress but really, his existence has become a matter of running from the past and everything else about his life converges on that fact. So much so that he lies to Bella instead of telling her the truth about her backstory and lies to himself about his reasons for doing so. He denies the fact that his relationship with Bella is about more than his morbid scientific curiosity, and eventually he admits that his bond with Bella satisfies what he suspects is a parental urge in him.

What’s interesting is that in order for Godwin to wrestle with his own experience of family he had to recreate it, except this time he served as a stand-in for his father. He had to become him in order to make sense of him and the things he did. The crux of the issue is that Godwin, for various reasons, wants to control his environment and Bella, for reasons of her own, wants to be free. She tells him “You love me too tight.” Which is exactly what it feels like when you are trying to separate from someone you love so that you can find your own identity.

Discovering the Self

Separation is never an easy task. Alexis Carrel said that “Man cannot remake himself without suffering for he is both the marble and the sculptor,” which is why redefining yourself and your relationships is nearly always done in dramatic fashion. For Bella, the force that compelled her to seek separation was pleasure. The discovery of which represented a seminal moment in her growth and development. To her mind she’s found the secret of life, and she not only wants to indulge it but share it with others, and she’s disappointed when she’s reprimanded by the lady of the house for doing so. From Godwin she receives nothing but silence, and her response was typical and no different than that of any young adolescent mind faced with this situation. She ran off with the first person willing to indulge her interest.

This escape marked the next and most exciting phase of her adventuring and for a brief period of time she was able to experience pleasure without consequence or consideration, but this was short-lived. What she came to find after the initial thrill of her escape was that golden, gilded, ornate cages are still tools of bondage, no matter how pretty and exciting. A different type of confinement is all her companion has to offer.

She indulges, but after a period of time Bella begins to realize there are limits to what pleasure and even freedom can provide to an individual. Her seeking and adventuring made her blind to the reality of others and their suffering, the realization of which mortifies her. She is overwhelmed momentarily but then she is energized by her feelings, and able to find another side of life worth exploring. The pleasures of the flesh subside and are replaced by the pleasures of the mind. She’s fascinated by ideas and starts to wonder about the world and her place in it.

Down & Out

The film is Kafkaesque in the sense that instead of helping Bella to rise up from her sunken state, she has to go even further down to find her way out. What’s interesting and important and difficult for us to understand about the character of Bella is that she embraces her descent with a sense of amusement. For her, difficulties shouldn’t be avoided because they are also opportunities. She views difficulties as the fertile ground on which she can further explore the possibilities of her existence. With this attitude, even time spent in a brothel is informative. Her time there allows her to continue to learn and receive an education that is more empirical, one based on the lived experience of others and her own. She is made to see that sadness and dysfunction make us whole beings, and wanting to be happy all the time is a childish state. Acceptance of suffering, and not avoidance of it, is what leads to the overcoming of it.

Going Back Home

With this understanding, Bella returns home to find out the truth about her origins. She confronts Godwin and in doing so is able to achieve something better than the separation she originally intended. She becomes an individual in her own right, capable of honoring the story she is living and creating about herself, while preserving the parts of her relationship with Godwin that are still important. Her example may be what makes it possible for Godwin to do the same. He is finally able to renounce and break the fantasy bond that he has with his father, and by doing so, is able to be present in his relationship with Bella. He can experience his world with wonder and curiosity instead of trying to control every aspect of it.

For Bella, it wasn’t until she resolved the issues with her father that she was able to establish a mature loving relationship with someone else. One that encompassed desire while preserving her freedom and individuality. What I appreciate about the film is that it doesn’t simplify Bella’s bliss. This new loving relationship isn’t an end, but a precursor to her greatest confrontation with the past. The order of these events speaks to the psychological truth that love does heal, but often not until it has brought us face to face with our demons,

Bella achieves her victory over the past, and most importantly she does so with integrity. She remains curious and hopeful throughout the film. At the end of her journey, having arrived at the place that she is in, she is able to say “I am never happier than when I’m here.” She has made important discoveries along the way about what really brings her happiness, meaning, and purpose.