Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society Graduation Speech, June 24, 2015 Jim Ellis1 issn 0362-4021 © 2015 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 39, No. 3, Fall 2015 251 1 Bronxville Counseling Center, Bronxville, and private practice, New York. Correspondence should be addressed to Jim Ellis, PhD, CGP, 80 East 11th Street, #610, New York, NY 10003. E-mail: jellis207@gmail.com. I’m very happy to be here with you tonight to celebrate the 2015 graduates of the Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society (EGPS) Training Program. When Alan Shanel called me and asked me to do this, he quickly laid out the parameters for this part of the program. He said, “Now, Jim, you really need to keep the speech to 45 minutes.” So I promised him I would not go a minute longer than that. All joking aside, I am very honored to be here with you this evening. When I was 15 years old, I attended summer camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It was great living in the outdoors all summer. Rock climbing and rappelling were two of my favorite activities. When we went climbing, because of the possibility of falling rocks and other debris, we all wore hard hats. On one particular day, I was belaying one of the other campers with my counselor, Smokey, next to me, when a giant mosquito landed on my nose. I tried to twitch my nose and shoo him away, but he wasn’t budging. So for a quick second I let go of my break hand to swat the mosquito away. In that nanosecond, as soon as I was able to grab the rope again, Smokey took off his hard hat and hit me over the head with it and said, “Jim, do you realize you have somebody else’s life on the end of that rope? If you drop the rope he could die.” This was really an important moment for me: What hit me over the head was a lot less that he had just hit me with his helmet and much more that he was trying to teach me to value my role, to value the important part I played on the team. What I learned from this and other experiences at camp was that there is no higher calling and no greater responsibility than someone putting his or her trust in your hands. This is the kind of calling we accept in our role as group therapists. 252 ellis My first formal class in group, taught by Dustin Nichols and Janet Baumann, remains a highlight in my group training experience. In this class, we learned the importance of holding the frame and how this allows a process to take its course. In the first half of the class, Dustin led a group while we watched through a one-way mirror. In the second half of the class, we would gather in a classroom and share our observations. We learned that, as we processed what we observed in the group Dustin led, there was a “parallel process” happening in our group that revealed the same dynamics of the demonstration group. It was an electrifying experience for me. After this class, I knew this kind of learning was for me. As we trusted our process, we not only grew closer as a class but also learned how to do group therapy and supervision through our experience with each other. I am grateful to this day for what I learned from Janet and Dustin and my fellow classmates. Analytic training changed my life, and group training in particular helped me find a place of belonging among great colleagues and friends—and has also helped me to find deeply satisfying work. David Brooks, in a recent op-ed article in the New York Times titled “The Moral Bucket List,” talks about his own desire to strike a better balance in his life in the future by reflecting on how he might think and do more for others. He writes, There [are] two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are...