Opening Hearts, Opening Minds: Therapeutic Group Consultation

Opening Hearts, Opening Minds:

Therapeutic Group Consultation

Advance Praise

Opening Hearts, Opening Minds: Therapeutic Group Consultation (TGC) finds two highly respected clinicians’ combined clinical wisdom and vast therapeutic acumen in a brief but highly accessible manual. In contrast with most contemporary group therapy formats and supervisory group processes, TGC possesses a unique design cultivating the psychic tastebuds of the becoming clinician, the clinician in becoming, creatively challenging the developing of a powerful and evocative language of feeling.

The TGC format furthermore reflects the intentional blending of cognition and emotion, theory and action, therapy and education focusing on the therapist as a unique subjectivity by recognizing and encouraging the expression of authenticity, honesty, receptivity, vulnerability, and self-reflection within a securely framed microcosm regardless of participants’ theoretical position! The therapeutic alliance, empathy, emotional sensitivity, and corrective emotional experience scaffold the TGC’s underlying attachment theory approach, liming the participants’ ability to learn from experience. Various felt anecdotal material is also included, clearly illustrating a powerful emotive process serving as a welcome counter-point to psychotherapy as a sterile and overly observed reality. Although positioned as a brief manual written for young inexperienced clinicians (but hopefully of some interest with more experienced therapists as well), the novice and experienced clinician-reader will soon find themselves in the creative-creating-affective field of two evocative clinicians and the product of a unique collaboration. This is a welcome contribution to the field.

Becoming a psychotherapist requires us to lean into emotional discomfort, confront psychic pain, and genuinely examine our relations to self, others, and world. Being open to professional development also requires a personal commitment to taking risks in training and supervision. In their consultation and supervision model conducted in a therapeutic group format, Raubolt and Brink provide just that kind of holistic environment lacking in formal training programs. This is a highly recommended venture for therapists looking for psychological depth as a person in the role of helper and healer where authenticity, vulnerability, and existential awakenings are explored.

—Prof. Jon Mills, PsyD., PhD, ABPP, University of Essex & Adelphi University; author of Debating Relational Psychoanalysis: Jon Mills and his Critics.

Raubolt and Brink show us that psychotherapy is beset by emotional discomfort, psychic pain, and fear of failure. Which is why anyone who engages in this kind of experience will find themselves, at least to begin with, imitating other people and repeating themselves (which is imitating oneself). And imitation is fear of failure. But no one can know what they can do until they have tried. Knowing is experimental, and knowledge is of the new. So we must shed the limitations of tradition, break away from institutionalized allegiances, refuse to be compromised by the past. What we must strive to do is, as Emerson suggests, illuminate the untried and unknown. Our interest should be in the birthing stage of the self. We should want nothing more than to be always beginning.

Too often, a sense of impossibility is the unwillingness to see the possibilities. There is no knowing beforehand in our field. The only use of what we think we already know is to make surprises possible. What we need to offer our patients, as well as our supervisees, are answering responses, not answers. This is the only alternative to doctrine or dogma. And this is what Raubolt and Brink are encouraging the beginners they are writing for to do. In other words, what they are encouraging them to do is to find different ways of living with themselves and different descriptions of these so-called selves. As people like Marion Milner, Winnicott, or Adam Phillips tell us, the most interesting thing about psychoanalysis is its unpredictability. It’s a real risk, and that also is the point of it. We need to accept this, to not fear this, otherwise all we will ever do is repeat the past.

—Michael Larivière is a psychoanalyst working in private practice in Strasbourg, France. He is the author of five books, the latest on Masud Khan. He has taught seminars in New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Turin, Milan, Padua, Zürich, Paris, and Strasbourg.

Opening Hearts, Opening Minds:

Therapeutic Group Consultation

Richard Raubolt, PhD, ABPP and Kirk L. Brink, PhD

Write My Wrongs, LLC, P.O. Box 80781 Lansing, MI 48908

United States

www.writemywrongsediting.com

Copyright © 2021 by Richard Raubolt and Kirk L. Brink

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without written permission from the author.

No one can cure another if he has not a genuine desire to help him; and no one can have the desire to help unless he loves, in the deepest sense of the word.

—Sacha Nacht

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Well, Mr. Therapist, Mr. Wise Guy, let us see what you are made of. Put your money where your mouth is. Only true emotional reality will do. The thing itself. Isn’t this what you talked about all these years?

—Michael Eigen

Contents

Preface

Note to the Reader

Introduction

Beginnings

Principle 1: From Individual to Group Consultation/Supervision

Expanding Self-Knowledge and Experience, Alone and Together

Principle 2: Harnessing the Power of Group

Guiding Energy, Power, and Effect

Principle 3: The Group Contract

Maintaining Promises, Honoring Commitments

Principle 4: Two Leaders

Exercising Nurturance and Direction, Taking Turns, Together and Alone

Principle 5: Practicing Ethically, Practicing Effectively

Practicing with Integrity

Principle 6: The Person of the Co-leader

Knowing Strengths, Accepting Limits, and Staying Sane

Consultations

Coda

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Therapeutic Group Consultation Questionnaire

References

Authors’ Biographies

Preface

Surprisingly, this preface ends up being the last thing we are writing for this manual. We originally wrote the manual exclusively in our dominant professional language as we described our model, which we have been developing over the past 30 years, Therapeutic Group Consultation (TGC) for therapists. Briefly and essentially, TGC provides voluntary, experiential learning in a co-led group with and for mental health professionals.

Along the way, we were getting feedback that our approach was too academic and even antiquated-sounding. This critique seemed to capture the missing something we were beginning to feel, so we began to change the tone of the vignettes we were using while keeping the sections about the operating principles primarily in our profession’s native tongue.

After completing our first draft, we began asking members who were participating in these groups to give us feedback on what we had written and, more importantly, on what they had experienced. Little was said about what we included regarding the principles involved in this model. The most enthusiastic feedback concerned what was missing or what there was too little of: our relational interaction. By extension, this included the flavor of what actually happened in the groups as described best in the vignettes. Still, we clearly believe the vignettes work, because they are essential examples that demonstrate and apply the principles employed in this model.

We also began hearing a choir of different group voices saying, This is the stuff that we did not learn in graduate school, and It is also the stuff that we did not and could not find in most of the workshops or training programs we attended which, while helpful, were not enough. In graduate school, both of us, along with our fellow classmates, learned how to do therapy—kind of. Here, we are writing from our accumulated experience about how to become the therapist we had dreamed of being so many years ago—emotionally alive, engaged, present, creative, and effective with the patients we treat. So, we thought it would be wise to change the preface of the manual to reflect this intention. Welcome. We are pleased to have you participate in our groups if only via reading. Actually, joining or starting your own group with our model may come later. Let’s, at least, keep those possibilities open as we begin.

Note to the Reader

You are holding a unique manual in your hands (or, to be more contemporary, viewing it on your screen). We wrote it to describe our model of consultation/supervision in a manner that will approximate what members come to know experientially through TGC participation. We offer only a taste here, sometimes subtly, sometimes provocatively. Our hope is to stimulate your appetite for the full-course meal.

In the meantime, we have made few attempts to separate our authorship. While some examples will clearly reflect Richard’s or Kirk’s experiences, we seldom specify whose stories are highlighted. The writing styles will also reveal differences that may initially give the reader pause. Then again, group members experience