Quote of the Day

It is often difficult to give up the defences connected with one's own professional role, to modify, even if just for a few days, one's personal life habits, to limit one's own privacy and to accept being put on the spot following someone else's request: in some way it all has to do with knocking oneself off the pedestal.
The entry of the participants in the workshop has many similarities with the admission of patients in a community, even if there are no therapeutic purposes in the experience the participants are going to begin.
This identification process causes interesting effects both on an individual and on a group level and triggers meaningful dynamics between residents and staff group. The small and large group meetings become an opportunity to observe various phenomena, with the implicit, but continuous aim of allowing everyone to understand the developing experience in terms of the learning that can be applied to their own working situation. All the participants essentially are in the role of observing themselves personally, helped by the game of mirroring between the components of the different groups.
An extremely intense emotional field emerges where the different personal features, expectations, resistance to change, aggressiveness, inhibition of some participants and the desire to be in the limelight of others, the emerging of leaders, all constitute a source for reflection. The concrete tasks force everyone to face the need to make decisions: activities are not a simulation but a real need. If the cooking group doesn't work properly, no one eats; if no one cleans up, the community gets unbearable, if. the free time group doesn't offer any organization, people get bored. Very interesting phenomena happen when facing the problem of decision making: indifferent moments participants and staff members tend to place themselves in different positions in the spectrum between dependence and autonomy. Also in this regard, the similarity with the therapeutic community is quite evident.

Staff members: Participants or observers?
Besides having the general function of being responsible for the maintenance of the learning community's setting for all its duration and of chairing some meetings (plenary sessions, community meetings, strain groups etc), the staff have an active role in. the daily activities: the most experienced staff member offers advice in his field of expertise and the workshop director provides constant supervision; all other staff members, one for each group, actively take part in the activities as participant-observer. The continuous fluctuation between the role of participant and that of observer, keeping a neutral stance in the role of group conductor, is not always an easy task to perform.
A twofold way of relating between participants and staff members often emerges according to the way the latter are perceived: either as leaders, thus having decision-making power and skills or as members of the peer group, where distances are extremely reduced. On one side the staff members can be idealized or invested in a projective way with an omnipotent power or, especially for this reason, attacked with envy and perceived as persecutory. On the other side a more or less manifest refusal towards a possible dependence prevails and is expressed through a hyperactivism or the search for perfection in an atmosphere which, neutralizing any possibility of reflection on what happens, is sometimes manic and other times ludicrous.

ENRICO PEDRIALLI and EDOARDO RAZZINI
Pedrialli, E, and Razzini, E. (2002) Decision Making in Therapeutic Communities. Therapeutic Communities Vol.24, No.4. pp 282-283