I was authorised by Group Relations India, to direct a Group Relations workshop – Listening to the Unconscious in Self, Groups and Systems – in November 2022. This two part blog captures my reflections on this experience.
If my dreams post the LTTUC workshop are a road to the unconscious, they tell me the extent of my fears – on what all may go wrong in the workshop. From the rooms not being set, to me forgetting my role or even absenting myself from staff meetings – my dreams were somewhat nightmarish. My biggest fear of leadership speaking through these themes of letting down or being let down. Can I depend on others? Can I take the responsibility of their depending on me?
In my intention for the workshop, I wished for staff, members and myself to be learning and to experience the basics of group relations. This informed design of our first preparatory staff meeting where we looked at the primary task of each event and our experience of being in these events as consultants and members. We had to remind ourselves as staff system that we needed to practice what we were expecting members to do – sometimes expectation from members were more than what we were ready to do ourselves. This brought a degree of humility to the task of consulting and a jointness in the learning enterprise.
A second intention was to find and express joy and play in this learning. Day 1 of the workshop and the first concept session on unconscious and self, refreshed for me the intense and spontaneous nature of our defenses – to protect oneself from hurt and challenging the idea one has of oneself. If the challenge to self is experienced as a sting, how can it also be a process of joy?
I learnt that an insight need not show me what I am not – not doing/not being. I can also see GR as a way by which I can strengthen my intention. I accept the presence of the unconscious, I also need to accept the limitations of my ability to counter it or manage it. In fact, we got a new name for this phenomenon – In-turn -alization.. see something, name it and then see if you can skilfully manage it by yourself! In -turn-alization approach will deplete joy in GR work.
Holding some ideas about myself lightly allows for new discoveries and re-examining of cherished assumptions. I found that thinking about these assumptions about oneself by and of oneself is easier to handle. Unpacking assumptions one holds of others, and then seeing what that says about you, is a painful and difficult re-examination of oneself! These feelings when not worked with, can lead one to derail the task.
I have had a lived experience with male privilege and entitlement and how fragility in men gets projected on the women in authority. I became aware how I had perhaps loaded more onto these experience and I was lodging my apprehensions of colleagues privileging working for their ambition or narcissism and abandoning task, in my male colleagues. Why do I locate this fear more in men, when envy, narcissism and working with women in authority are wider phenomena – something I have encountered in myself too!? Acknowledging these feelings needs me to acknowledge and own my experiences – as a girl child, a young girl and a woman – and the projections I may have loaded on these experiences over the years.
Once named, I could ask myself what is this fear of being let down, abandoned or of being let down, that I locate in certain people, and my consequent stances? Who then do I also set up as those who I need to validate me and for me to feel accepted or acceptable? These words emerged from this emotional turmoil
Listening to the unconscious is first listening to one’s own fears and assumptions about oneself and about others – held so deep that they are unknown. It seems at times safer to stay with one’s consciously and unconsciously arrived at assumptions or conclusions than to put them out, meet them again and again; and invite some new experience to challenge and reexamine them. To listen to the unconscious entails trading permanently the wish for comfortable endings, with a commitment to courage and curiosity.
Thoughts. Insights. Action 