My Experience of Group Therapy Training
at an Ideologically Captured Institution
Published with kind permission of Critical Therapy Antidote
Preamble
At the end of my training course in group therapy I have decided to share some thoughts about my experience in the following essay. My intention is to write an honest and respectful insider account. I will be naming my training institute but disguising the identities of the staff and students referred within. I believe it is important to give people some insight into what happens on training courses that are ideologically captured. I am writing under a pseudonym because I am well aware of the potential negative implications of naming myself at this stage of my professional career.
Introduction
Another day, another invite to an intersectionality workshop. I’ve been getting a lot of these since starting a course in group analysis at the Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) in London. This particular workshop comes highly recommended by previous participants who describe it as ‘transformational’. It will focus on “psychosocial dynamics associated with identities such as race, gender, sexuality, ability, age and class and their interplay with power, privilege and position within group contexts.” These words, in varying order, seem to follow me everywhere just now. I feel stalked by identity, a concept I am beginning to loathe. Privilege really is everywhere, it’s impossible to escape tortured conversations about it at the Institute.
Prior to joining the IGA I had been spared the thinking that has become de rigour in psychotherapy training courses. At no point during my integrative counselling training did I encounter Critical Social Justice Theory and I know I am extremely fortunate. Despite having previous form (I did my masters dissertation in the 1990s on the work of Foucault) I never envisaged a practical application for these ideas. Foucault was nicely sealed off in the academy, of interest only to philosophers, anthropologists and a few historians studying method. Yet it seems that if you put his ideas of power/knowledge and his method of archaeological analysis, add some third wave feminist critique, a good dose of the Black Power movement and mix them with whatever your interpretation of the current moment is, the applications are endless. For instance:
Laura Dodsworth in her Substack, The Free Mind, bemoans the demise of St John’s Voices. The St John’s College, Cambridge Coral Choir is being disbanded in favour of something more diverse. Dodsworth, exasperated at how the college thinks it can improve on the likes of Mozart, Handel, Bach, Monteverdi etc., comments:
“The attacks on English culture come from without, but more often they seem to come from within. The very people who should be defending what is good and true seem to be most intent on destroying it. At this stage, I can only believe that they hate what is beautiful”. (Dodsworth, 2024).
Background
Hating what is beautiful is an interesting way to conceptualise what’s going on right now. I’ve been trying to think of a suitable way to understand the process of destruction that I’ve been witnessing over the past year at the IGA. Because this is what I believe is happening, destruction of the institution. I hope that group therapy is stronger than the institutions that teach it.
The IGA is currently in the tight grip of self-selected committee called The National Diversity Power, Position and Privilege Working Group (PPP) set up in November 2018. Their aim:
“to ensure the tools of our profession are adequately employed to address racial inequities, starting with our own organisational culture, trainings and consulting rooms. This is the responsibility of us all and not solely members and trainees of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) heritage. We consider it the responsibility of our white colleagues throughout the group analytic communities to respect, listen to and learn from BAME colleagues’ and patient’s lived experiences of racism.” (IGA, 2020).
In one sense you could think this statement is fair enough. The IGA are the good guys. They want to do everything they can not to reproduce discriminatory social hierarchies within the training environment. Everyone should be given an equal chance. I’m sure this is most peoples’ assessment of such statements on first encounter. By December 2023 the aims, as described in “Decolonising the Curriculum of Group Analysis (Phase 1)” had developed:
“Over the long-term, the mission of the curriculum subgroup of the IGA Power, Position and Privilege working group is that all aspects of the curriculum will come under a decolonising review, including taught theory, professional competencies, all structures relating to the teaching and learning of group analysis, and teacher/supervisor/student/therapeutic relationships within the training.” (Nayak, S. 2023, p.14)
and later:
“Examples of using decolonised group-analytic language that foregrounds intersectionality could include a lexis that speaks of the unconscious, transference, countertransference, projective identification, mirroring, and resonance as intersectional to deepen our understanding of why the unconscious finds intersectionality hard to tolerate and how we work towards developing emotional intersectionality.” (Nayak, S. 2023, p.47)
You certainly can’t accuse the authors of lacking ambition. This is quite some scope. It’s clear the focus for the committee is the decolonisation of pedagogy, the therapeutic relationship and the unconscious of students. It suggests using concepts from psychoanalysis to transform discussions of the unconscious which, when taken together, seems to confirm Nick Opyrchal’s argument that, “Psychotherapy becomes an arena for ideological conversion; clients are reduced to merely potential converts” (Thomas, V., 2023, Chp 2). From my experience at the IGA I’d say it was an attempt to pathologize the unconscious of those students who do not agree with Critical Race Theory (CRT).
In practice I have found this to mean:
A focus on emotional content without context
Affirmation
A denial of theory (in initial phase)
A requirement to intuit theory (later on)
Asking questions is an attempt to silence black voices
Asking for an explanation is re-traumatising
Anger is used as a weapon against criticism and to disorientate
Any attempt to work with this anger is an expression of white privilege and leads to exclusion
A rejection of ‘why’ questions
A reframing of every issue in racial terms
A denial of any historical progress on racial issues
What happens in the training room?
This plays out in the training room; a black student shares a negative experience with the group which he has interpreted through a racial lens. In response others express empathy, thank him for sharing, and perhaps someone ask why he thinks this happened. Another student interjects that we should just focus on and sit with our felt sense of emotions in response to what has been shared, rather than ask unnecessary questions. The black student says he now feels unheard, frustrated and that this is typical of what happens every time a black person tries to speak. Someone else points out there were two parts of the story, the incident and the interpretation and surely questions about both are relevant if we are to understand and tackle such issues. Now angry the student explains that questioning him is an attempt to silence him and is an expression of white, Eurocentric ideas designed to keep him down. I don’t understand what you mean by ‘white, Eurocentric ideas’ could you explain, someone chips in. His response; It’s not my role to explain anything to you. Why are you so angry the questioner asks – the whole room erupts. Suggesting a black person is angry confirms you as the worst type of racist.
It seems there is a protection being put in place against discussions of CRT in my group. Contributors attempt to steer the group away from asking questions or discussing the concepts raised. There is always an attempt to bring people back to their bodies and felt sense. Meditating on your instinctive reactions to what was said, on your confusion over the presentation of a concept as fact and the aggression that accompanies any inquisitiveness about this, gets you in contact with the white privilege within you. Why am I inquisitive? Why can I not just accept what a black person is telling me? I am confused because I am in contact with my own conditioning, with the racist structures of society internalised in my unconscious, with myself as an oppressor. If you can’t feel the white supremacy within then the demand is you must educate yourself. I have been told on numerous occasions that I must instinctively know, intuitive feel, what white privilege means. I am being difficult when I say it makes no sense to me. I just need to meditate on it longer I guess, in time I will feel the truth. As a revelation maybe.
This is perhaps what is meant by ‘emotional intersectionality’. If one should be able to feel what is meant by a theoretical concept like white privilege, then a lack of understanding is an emotional deficit. If you don’t feel the truth of CRT there is something wrong with you. You are diseased by your privilege.
As Leonydus Johnson points out in Raising Victims: the Pernicious Rise of Critical Social Justice Theory (Johnson, L., 2023, Ch 4), there are similarities to Michael Radford’s film of George Orwell’s novel 1984. In one scene John Hurt’s Winston Smith is lying on the bed in room 101, while O’Brien, played by Richard Burton, asks him how many fingers he’s holding up. Smith answers five and is told there are only four. Eventually, after much torture, Smith accepts that his inability to see only four fingers when five are being held up is because his mind is sick. He must see only four. The problem, O’Brien explains, is that he has opinions. Opinions cannot exist in the individual mind, they come only from the party.
My experience of training at the IGA has been something akin to what I imagine being inducted into a cult might feel like. The charismatic leader, the O’Brien character, is represented by the softly spoken CRT activist whose righteousness and anger are always bubbling away just under the surface. The followers emulate this way of being, meek and gentle, aware and understanding, but pivot in a moment to reveal the vitriol and contempt underneath. They hold up five fingers and call you lacking and tell you to educate yourself when you can’t see only four. Language and emoting are real, objective reality is fake. Asking questions is oppressive.
The experience of facing a wall of CRT activists, and others who have at least imbibed some of the thinking, is to begin to question whether they have a point. In the context of therapy education where we are discovering new things about ourselves and learning new ways to be more open and willing to explore, you begin to question your inability to understand. It seems it’s never possible to express enough empathy or in the right way for them to feel they’ve been heard. What is it about my questioning that seems to prove to them I have a closed mind? Am I missing something? Why are they so angry at me? Perhaps I do need to educate myself. I am lacking.
How did the ideology get into the institute?
To be fair to the IGA much of the CRT ideas were introduced by students, many of whom are already psychotherapists trained in other modalities. While some group conductors are fully paid up members of the Power, Position and Privilege Working Group, others are more traditional group therapists and educators. This distinction was revealed by one early lecturer in answer to a students question about why we had been subjected to a lecture which consisted almost entirely of political opinions when we were here to learn group analysis. There is a division in the IGA he revealed, between those who think group work is about the application of psychodynamic ideas to understanding group process and those who analyse groups. Analysing groups turns out to be shorthand for an ideological sorting into oppressed and oppressor groups. A thinly veiled call to take sides.
This experience has led me to wonder what has happened to the leadership of the IGA. Where are the traditional group therapists defending the healing that can be take place in groups? How has the institute come to hate what is beautiful? I wonder if these senior therapists have a similar experience to mine. I’ve found myself calculating how many more sessions I need to attend in order to achieve the 80% attendance requirement. Perhaps the equivalent for senior therapists, when faced with the CRT barrage, is to retire. A partial explanation for this came from another lecturer who relayed that there is a sense within the IGA that group analysis as a modality is losing favour. There is concern for the future out of which has developed a need to appear relevant. While groups are common in therapeutic communities, addiction recovery and some National Health Service departments, outside of institutional settings groups play second fiddle to one to one work. Embracing a political turn appears to be the solution to declining popularity.
What have I learnt from this experience?
While my experience of studying at the IGA has been frustrating and demotivating at times, and I feel my education in group analysis has been minimal, I have gained greater insight into the process of ideological capture by CSJ. I have experienced an attempt to capture me. In particular I have experienced the disorientation that accompanies attempts to make non-believers feel ‘less than’ should you not proclaim yourself redeemed. In those moments when you are the focus of CSJ’s ire, it feels toxic. Like being stuck in a house with a couple going through a messy divorce; the atmosphere is heavy with destruction.
The group I was in could be supportive, hear each other deeply, and be a healing experience. But we could not talk about racism. If the subject came up it would quickly stop being a conversation about racism and become about CRT. Any attempt to argue that these are different things was shut down. It was a barrier between us which is a shame, other barriers were broken down. I was particularly struck by how creatively transferential material can be addressed. Groups are powerful things. At the same time when CRT ideas were present in the room my group could be the opposite of healing. To hear mixed race colleagues beating themselves up about their internalised white supremacy, chastising themselves and being encouraged by others to separate out the white part of themselves and declare publicly their shame, was painful to witness. It was a process of mortification and sanctification akin to the self-flagellation practices of the catholic church in the Middle Ages.
Conclusion
Wherever my need for higher level psychotherapy qualifications comes from I now realise I have missed the boat. I embarked on the various stages of counselling training, which is three years of study, because I was not in a position to commit to five years of psychotherapy training. I started training at 48 years old, I have commitments and responsibilities that mean I can’t do things like take time off work to observe infant behaviour in a nursery. Counselling training was the only option. The training organisation I chose was upfront with us, they will get us ready to work with clients by introducing us to and giving us space to practice various types of therapy. Whichever modalities we are drawn to is where we should consider further study, which we can do while working as counsellors.
Unfortunately for me what I thought was a sensible staged approach to training is no longer possible. As I look at training courses in London, at some of the most established and internationally renowned schools, social justice and CRT buzzwords appear throughout course outlines. I find it hard to believe that these institutions are fully ‘captured’, delivering indoctrination rather than learning. Whatever the level of capture it is clear that those therapist / educators not tied to ideological, political ideas do not feel the need, or do not feel able, to speak up.
It is tricky to speak up. There is a performative aspect to the way CRT operates. It needs a protagonist and an antagonist to be successful. Lately I, and a few other questioning students, have been less active in the group and it is noticeable how CRT issues have less traction. There have been attempts to goad us into reacting with comments like, ‘there are still people in this room who don’t believe white supremacy is real’. Not biting means the statement is left hanging and we move onto another topic. It’s a coping strategy but not a solution.
References
Aiyegbusi, A & Benjamin, A (2020) ‘IGA Statement in Solidarity with Black Lives Matter’. Institute of Group Analysis. Available at: https://www.groupanalysis.org/_files/ugd/2f4551_f0309baf7f3d42af91f339c1af9bc3b3.pdf(Accessed: March 2024)
Dodsworth, L. (2024) ‘The War on English Culture and Beauty’. The Free Mind. Available at https://www.thefreemind.co.uk/p/the-war-on-english-culture-and-beauty (Accessed: 23 March 2024).
Johnson, L. (2023) Raising Victims: the Pernicious Rise of Critical Race Theory’ Salem Books.
Nayak, S. (2023) Decolonising the Curriculum of Group Analysis (Phase 1) Report on Findings Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) Power, Privilege and Position working group.
Opyrchal, N. (2023) ‘Psychotherapy, Ideology, and the New Aristocracy’. in V. Thomas (ed.) Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice. Ocean Reeve Publishing. Chapter 2.