Dear AAP Brothers and Sisters, Aunts and Uncles, Parents, Grandparents, Cousins, Children and Grandchildren,

My experience at the San Diego I&C convinces me that we are in an identity crisis (again? still?). The choices I see before us are to be some kind of family or intentional community or tribe on the one hand, versus a more traditional professional organization, like APA or NASW, on the other. I see our identity as directly tied to the reasons we have for getting together a couple of times a year. Here are some of the dimensions of those reasons:

To become INformed versus TRANSformed
To gain knowledge versus wisdom
To experience collegiality versus intimacy
To view psychotherapy primarily as a technology based on objective science versus an art based on subjective experience

The first pole of each of these dimensions (they are continua, not dichotomies) is associated with being a traditional profession organization; the second half with being a family or community or tribe. AAP has been immensely valuable to me for the last 25 or 30 years as a family or community, but I fear (yes, I know that this may just be my amygdale talking) that we are morphing into more of a professional organization.

My fear was definitely reinforced at the I&C. The three plenary sessions were very informative and entertaining, but were something I could easily get at the meeting of a traditional professional organization. They informed me and gave me knowledge in a collegial atmosphere, but did not transform me or make me wiser in an intimate atmosphere. Repeated jokes made by one speaker about his marital difficulties left the impression that he really gave little credence to the possibility of struggling for a deeper intimacy with his wife and thereby seemed to imply a cynicism about real intimacy in general. That nobody asked him about this, or confronted him about one or two pretty nasty comments (somebody said to me afterwards that if Penelope were Italian there would have been fireworks) concerned me also in terms of how far we may have already slid in the direction of a traditional professional organization where politeness trumps authenticity.

I went to San Diego with a concern that not having community meetings was a reflection of the way we are moving away from the family, tribal or community model. That concern was reinforced by my experience of missing the sense of community or family that they (community meetings) support. I know people have concerns about being too intimate with each other in the presence of non-members at I&Cs who might be scared out of wanting to become members by seeing all our dirty laundry being vigorously aired. I think this is a real possibility, but see it more as an effective screening device for getting the kind of members that will keep us alive and vital (i.e. focused on transformation, wisdom and intimacy) and screening out those who would prefer something a bit more sanitized and would prefer to dilute the interpersonal soup. One person told me that she was upset about the lack of community meetings even though she almost never attends them, recognizing that they contribute something to the overall vitality of our community.

Oops. I guess I just revealed my bias. I want us to be much more of a family or community or tribe than a professional organization. I know we have to be a little bit of professional organization, but I think we are going too far.

I am worried that we are so frightened by our shrinking membership, and the fear of dying out, that we are getting a bit desperate to get people to come to I&Cs so that they can be recruited to join. This leads to pressure to make I&Cs attractive to lots of people, and one way we seem to be doing that is by making ourselves look like more of a traditional professional organization (get CEUs for nothing more threatening than listening to lectures in a glitzy hotel in a cool tourist destination city) than I ever want us to become.

On the last day of the I&C a long-time member said he was disappointed in the workshop he was in, which was led by another long- standing member whose workshops he had attended in the past. The usual power of this person’s workshops was noticeably absent, as if he had turned down the intensity for some reason. The guy I was talking to speculated that the workshop leader had accurately assessed the level of sophistication of those in his workshop and decided, probably wisely, to pull his punches. This dilution of intensity was very disappointing to the guy I was talking to (he came to get transformed, not informed) but may have made AAP all the more attractive to non-members in the workshop, thus making them more inclined to join. Good news until we have to face the choice between being accused of bait-and-switch when they get to their first summer workshop and find that we are not exactly the same as we have presented ourselves at the I&C, or else watering down the intensity of the summer workshop to match the expectations we have established in the diluted I&C induction process. This is not a choice I want us to have to make. I would rather a few people be put off by the intensity of the I&C experience and decide not to join the Academy, than to have people join who will later complain about the intensity of the summer workshop and try to get us to tone it down.

Another fairly new member told me that he did not feel any challenge toward personal growth in any of the three afternoon workshops he attended, and of course not in the morning plenary, and is considering dropping out of the Academy. He may be the canary in the coal mine. I know a number of old-timers who have quit coming to many Academy events, perhaps for similar reasons. If people who have come expecting something intense enough to promote transformation/ wisdom/intimacy don’t get their expectations met and leave, who will stay? I think it will be those who want an APA or NASW type of organization but where people are a little more friendly or fun to be with. And of course when this process gets to the tipping point, we could really become just another professional organization where you get CEUs and occasionally have an serendipitous intimate encounter.

My answer to all this? Trust the process. Trust that by continuing our tradition of going for transformation, wisdom and intimacy we will keep ourselves vital and will attract those who would thrive on this with us. Have community meetings at every I&C and let it all hang out. Let people talk to the larger community about how they have been challenged, shaken, and (hopefully) transformed by their family group experience or a workshop. I know there are folks out there who hunger for this. Ultimately everybody does. Our job as therapists is to promote the vitality that comes from taking risks (slight plug for next Summer Workshop here), and AAP is where we practice what we preach. John Rhead

A response:

I believe this is an important conversation to keep having. I think no answer will suffice nor will there probably be one on which we will all agree. I don't know how you structure our meetings so they produce transformative experiences. The best I suppose we can do is to keep trying to evolve meeting structures that don't close off the possibility of transformative experiences, which for me in the Academy has always happened in the quality of our relationships and sometimes in spite of whatever structure, leadership or location.

I don't see the Academy in an identity crisis and think there is a large "felt sense" of who we are even when we can't find all of the words to express it. The issue for me in our programs is balance. I know that sometimes what is transformative for me are new ideas as well as more existential experiences. I also know that there is a growing on my part by being in significant relationships over time in the Academy. What I anticipate most about meetings is seeing those persons with whom I feel connected and meeting some new ones. Important moments also occur when I can connect, as happened this time, in a deeper way with a few members I have known more casually. I don't go to the other groups you mentioned, John, and I don't think we are in danger of becoming like them in putting the accent purely on academic subjects and cognitive presentations, but I have to confess that when intellectual stimulation is totally lacking in our programs, I get bored. I thought that having three didactic presentations this time was too much. I would have had only Cozolino, but I thought the others were competent and well-prepared. So it was an interesting experiment. I hope it doesn't become a pattern. I do think a good speaker can stir the pot and highlight the theme. I do think it is well for us to know what is currently going on in psychotherapy and for some of the leaders in those trends to get to know us. There is only so much time at meetings and when we structure away too much of it, then there is much less time for family groups, small group offerings and community meetings. In other words, less relational time. Time to hang out together.

My experience in Murray's two day process group was very meaningful to me, maybe I might dare say transformational, but I found there was hardly any time for family group meetings and little for just hanging out and being in San Diego. I got there early and stayed a day over (to enjoy the wild fire smoke), so I made up for the latter. I think the suggestion of having a community meeting on Friday was a good one. For me, three community meetings would have been enough. Although not always stimulating, I do think the community meetings help us retain a sense of community, if nothing else by sitting there and looking at each other. It also gives time for personal sharing about the personal events our members are going through and keeps us current with feelings folks are having about the meeting or the Academy in general. When we reduce these meetings we reduce the possibility of that. I find making connections at the I/C to be much harder than the Summer Workshop, but that has probably always been true. I have great appreciation for Lee, Brian, and their committee. I felt well cared for and thought overall it was a good meeting.

Thanks, Grover Criswell

A response to both:

My reactions to John Rhead: mixed (what else?).

I share your worry that we're going astray, but I don't think that's the reality. My sense of history is that AAP was born out of the opposition to the zeitgeist of that day (unchallenged psychoanalytic dogma), and a compulsion to seek and speak psychological truths even when politically or personally "inappropriate" or painful. Our forefathers (Whitaker, Warkenten, Malone, Satir, Guze, Pearls, Rogers, Jourard (sp?),Kopp, etc.) are famous for taking risks and trying new innovative interventions when conventional techniques failed. They and many others pioneered experiential psychotherapy and the use of "self" as the primary therapeutic tool. My perception is that they acted out of courage and confidence in their ideas, not out of fear about losing membership, or of being sued, or not being licensed, etc.

I believe (like you) this history is also our legacy. If we ever stop challenging conventional wisdom/techniques, stop being oppositional to psychological "powers that be" (i.e., mainstream psychology), stop taking risks (yes, some will fail and make us look foolish), or stop pushing ourselves to extremes of self (including our dark sides) awareness then I think we'll lose our viability. And like our predecessors, we need to act primarily from a confidence in our ideals, not from fear and insecurity. I may not like that this I&C was more cerebral and less personal, but I strongly sense that this I&C flowed primarily from a spirit of innovation and confidence in our ideals, not out of insecurity or conformity.

Though I don't like some of our decisions and trends, I trust our process. It's likely that we’ll continue to make mistakes and then right our course as long as we keep an open dialogue. That's human nature. I so value how you often voice opposition and your truth. I also value that others respond openly to you. This back-and-forth helps my faith that we'll keep our edge.
Nick Kirsch

One last one to John Rhead,

Thank you for raising great issues, and although I believe I share most of your values about the Academy, I don't share your alarm. Why don't I?

1. The most personal reason is that I myself had a wonderful, challenging, deeply satisfying set of experiences at the conference. It felt like the culmination of something I'd been working towards for the 13 years I've been coming. I began in AAP as mistrustful, impatient and cynical. As I began to take risks in relationships to individuals and groups, I felt actively angry, excluded, unappreciated and judgmental. As I began to trust and learn from other people, I felt a little more accepted and valued, and the risks didn't feel as frightening. The last few years, I've had rich and meaningful interactions at meetings, and they looked on the outside like interactions I should have enjoyed. I even made myself have thoughts consistent with the idea that I was enjoying myself, but I wasn't really. This time, I REALLY enjoyed my time with lots and lots of wonderful psychotherapists (and psycho therapists).

My family group, the Un-group, again defied commonsense notions of reality and boundaries: having pronounced itself dead in Georgia, it pronounced itself alive and well again in San Diego. I love seeing the cumulative changes over long spans of time in all the Academy people who work so hard on themselves, almost as much as like getting to see what is still distinctly unique about each of them. When I connect with the people at meetings, it sharpens and recharges me as a person and a therapist on many levels. I learn from what they say to me about myself, about each other, about themselves. The laughter and the tears and the focus: it's all priceless.

2. I took away a great deal from the neuroscience focus of the meeting. To do good therapy IS to rewire the brain, and to learn some of those particulars is interesting, and stimulates new ideas. For instance, I am appreciating this week how much simply putting difficult experiences into words can do for someone: new pathways in the brain are developing, and old patterns are being broken up. Another idea I keep playing with is that brains didn't evolve to work solo. Through relationships, they function in many ways as if they are wired together, from the help with affect management that parents offer their infants, to the more subtle things we give each other as adults. I got to see this in action vividly while waiting in line at the microphone to challenge one presenter in a plenary. I lost my nerve, started walking away from the microphone, only to find my path blocked by you, shooing me back to the mike. I pictured our brains wired together, with yours loaning some functionality that mine needed at that moment.

3. I didn't feel that the presence of newcomers diluted our particular style. On the contrary, the contrast sharpened our self-awareness. For instance, though [one presenter’s] lowbrow humor made many of us laughs, we also exchanged eye rolls. It was easy to see how much unease he was unintentionally revealing, and we knew we wouldn't talk that way unconsciously to our patients. Or, in the Gs' sex workshop, when discussing how difficult it is to share sexual material, they asked if any of us had ever experienced a sexual problem. Virtually everyone in the room raised a hand, and the G's, who've been training sex therapists since the dawn of time, couldn't hide their astonishment, and we giggled a bit, exchanging nods. They said they'd never seen a group that open before, and our self-awareness as a group, and our cohesiveness, increased a notch.

4. We can't grow without taking risks. The Academy's unique culture developed through continually challenging ourselves, and one of those challenges is to encounter the outside world, and to attempt to integrate the resulting experiences. I don't want to blindly assimilate dominant paradigms, but I don't want to blindly oppose them either. We need to encounter whatever is out there, and trust that if what we have is real, it will endure and emerge from the fray even more vital and relevant. Lex and I had a lunch with three students, and they asked good, hard questions, and gave us a fresh look at some of the struggles involved with initiating the AAP process that integrates personal with professional growth.

5. As I read the above, I kind of miss my old cynicism, and I'm a little embarrassed to be so positive: I hope it doesn't make me seem like a cheerful, mindless borg. Maybe the nostalgia for my own cynicism accounts for some of the fondness I feel for skeptics when I meet them, including the "professionalism-types" whose impact you fear. I guess I don't see them as bad or even dangerous: they just don't know where to go to get what they need. Thanks for providing the chance to put some of this into words. And thanks to the I&C committee for the hard work that did so much for so many.
Yours, Jon Farber