2018 EGPS Training Program in Group Psychotherapy Graduation Address: Learning How to Make Mistakes

Abstract

2018 EGPS Training Program in Group Psychotherapy Graduation Address: Learning How to Make Mistakes David J. Dumais1 issn 0362-4021 © 2018 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 42, No. 3, Fall 2018 271 1 Faculty, Center for Group Studies, and private practice, Brooklyn and Manhattan. Correspondence should be addressed to David J. Dumais, LCSW, CGP, 303 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1403, New York, NY 10016. E-mail: groupworksfe@gmail.com. I want to talk to you today about something that I never wanted to do when I was starting out as a group leader—make mistakes. As a novice, I wanted to get it right, to understand everyone in my groups and to make sense of every interaction. I had studied, as have you, with marvelous people. There were a few giants of the group therapy world that were alive when I was coming up, and I quickly made them my teachers, my mentors, my supervisors, and my group therapists. To watch them work, you would think that being a group leader was an elegant, almost surgical process. It reminded me of once watching a man in his 70s skiing the Alps, how he seemed to almost float over the snow, graceful and showing no apparent effort. These mentors made it look easy, which was frustrating, because I was working very hard and was not sure how well I was doing. The funny thing was that these mentors were not telling me what a horror it was when I made a mistake; they were not judging me. They remained curious about what was going on and, because most of my early group work was with adolescents, they were steadfastly supportive and admiring of how I persevered despite incredible odds. I think I survived my first few years running groups by borrowing from the good feelings they had about me and my work. I counted on them to see the victories in my disasters. They were unrelentingly positive, and I had no choice but to take in their resiliency. Lou Ormont , whom I hope you have read this year, had a knack in his writing for putting you in the room with him while he ran his groups. He reports, “We feel dismayed or furious or blank or incompetent, without knowing why . . . and, unless we’ve had good experiences treating groups in the past, we may even come to doubt our 272 dumais ability to work with groups.” I can’t tell you how powerful that permission was not to know, to be aware that something was off, but not to know what it was or how to fix it. And what was the response to not knowing? Was it severe self-criticism? Was it the dread certainty that I would never be good at this job? Was it envy of those I trained with, who seemed to understand more completely and feel more exquisitely than I did? Nope, his response was to trust himself and remain curious. His response was to stay open and use all his powers to investigate what was going on. What I did not see then was the effect it had on his groups, modeling an openness to what was going on in himself and in others. When he did make a mistake, Ormont had the best line ever for being confronted by a group member. He would say, “What was I thinking?” and very often the accuser would say, “I’ll tell you what you were thinking . . .” Instead of focusing on himself for making the mistake (if it was a mistake), his only concern was the group’s reaction to the mistake. God, I remember seeing these things for the first time. I remember feeling such hope, such freedom, to do the work and not do a number on myself. Leslie Rosenthal, whom you also probably read this year, would say to me, “If you remain patient and keep exploring, sooner or later the clouds will part.” Then he would laugh and say, “But of course, knowing what’s going on is the easy part. Then you have to figure out what to do.” So the first hurdle in making mistakes is to free yourself from...