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Judy Henderson, The politics of group process
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I want to say why I think the activities of " listening" and " focusing" are very important for people on the " Left" to know about, practice, and even develop further. I've come to this understanding from what was originally a socialist orientation, activism through the Women’s Movement, and then through the Gay Women’s Movement. Consistently during that time, I have been hurt and seen group potential destroyed by an ignorance of and apparent lack of concern for what individual people were experiencing, needing, motivated by. Most of us have heard slogans such as, “This is politics, not therapy! There is no solution but the collective one; individual solutions are cooptations. " I have been around a number of groups where the idea of dealing with personal experience and interaction was looked down on as worse than useless, as a drain on energy, a misdirection away from " the real issues, " even as " elitest, pampered, self-indulgent. "
I have been in " socialist" groups where I was basically classified as an oppressor, where energy seemed to come up in people often from eagerness to vindicate themselves. There was value placed on cool, intellectual talk with a certain " rational" tone to it that reminded me of a classroom, where emotional struggles and competition went on under that surface. I have been in women's groups where anger seemed to hold the group in a vise of tension, with each of us watching for how not to rock the boat. Talk about gay feelings would be too threatening, and talk about masochistic feelings would be traitorous and unliberated. There seemed to be an iron-jawed defensiveness covering fear of our anger and of the mess we were really in as women, the dreadful questions it raised about personal life choices for each of us. We either kept properly inhibited behind that defensiveness or lashed it out at each other. I have been in gay women’s groups where somewhere in the air there was even a proper way to dress, to stand and sit, and where no-one dared express kind or even ambivalent thoughts about wanting to relate to men - in fact, where male-female interactions of all sorts mostly fell into slots like cartoons. The talk was pushed toward trying to be unified and strong, but more force actually got spent fighting and yelling not to get lost in the crowd.
I am saying that these groups, in the name of radicalism, practiced on me both explicit and tacit kinds of authoritarianism. I'm talking about the tyranny of unspoken norms and roles subtly controlling what kind of thing gets said and what doesn't, who speaks most and who listens, who ends up supporting someone else’s need or idea, but not his or her own. In other words, the operating structures of these groups were microcosms of the institutions they wanted to change or replace.
This thing I've just pointed to is a big issue for me. After some years thrashing around in " protest" groups and groups supposed to represent the beginnings of alternative power structures, I begin to see how little practical understanding people on the " Left, " just like the rest of society, have about how a group actually works, what it really means to be a collective body, whether it is called a union, club, party, government, or meeting. I'm talking about how a social contract gets made, back before it has already become as unconscious and regular as breathing for each of us to assume group identities, as say, in the hospital bureaucracy I've worked for, or even walking down a public street. We seem to be early and easily conditioned into institutionalized roles that we know very little about ever granting authority to. We understand very little about where and how a group starts being invested with authority, how the power of each of us individually gets transferred to that group.
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I want to mark off that activity of transfer, investment, of power from a person to a group, and say we need to study that seriously. And first we need to study where and how the power to be invested sits in the individual person. I think we feel so impotent, and saturated from childhood with group identities, that we often don't take seriously the issue of where power is in the individual and how it has become lost, abdicated, stolen, whatever. We use the word “power" easily in political rhetoric, but I think we won’t get to social-institutional alternatives until we stop thinking of " power" as the relative bargaining positions between representatives of two corporate agencies. I think the real transfers of power happen long before that stage, as in the groups I've been in.
The abdication of my power, for example, has already happened in a meeting when I am too afraid to bring up the familiar way Beth just undermined what Cynthia suggested by making a joke out of it. I feel my power when I step over the line of that fear, of all the reasons why I am afraid to challenge Beth, and state my perception loudly and clearly. And I stick to my perception although everyone is shocked, even when Beth puts me down even before some of the other people begin to support me. I have felt this kind of shift happen in me a number of times. I go from a deflated, helpless sense of just watching others talk to a release of energy through my body and a thrill of congruence between my feeling and my action, my voice. It happens usually when I stop the guard constricting me and let what I have to say out in a rush. Before I or anyone else does this, Beth can control that group interaction through our assumptions and behaviors supporting her, perhaps liking and respect for her, fears of her anger and judgment, selfdoubts about experience or self-expression, confusion about believing our own perceptions. As another example, no agency would operate with a sexist policy on hiring practices and remain viable without having built up behind it the unspoken law of distorted assumptions and perceptions that most of us carry around in our heads about sex differences.
Opening up my perception, seeing and feeling a situation in a new way, seeing how it could be for me instead of how it is, seeing how I made a choice when I didn't even know it, that I had options I didn't know about, has been the crux of getting a grip on my personal power and wielding it differently. An instance of this occurred when I had to look inside myself to discover what was underneath the vague uneasiness and timidity I took for granted feeling around men I was involved with. I had to get into and raise to consciousness from my own reliving of it the fact that these feelings were connected to an old expectation of rejection that had to do with me feeling a certain inferiority about my body. I had to reach a place in my own awareness where I noticed my sense of my body, holding it in, ashamed, in many little ways. I became conscious that that same set of feelings felt familiar from male-dominated classrooms in graduate school, and had created a lot of the anxiety I went through when I spoke there.
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Getting clear hold of what these bad feelings really were, was the first step toward wanting and imagining how it would be to feel differently about my body. This consciousness allowed me to get angry; it heightened my perception of how I held my body in different situations, how that was part of the interaction with people around me, and how their body language and non-verbal cues reinforced it. Two things ultimately came out of that for me: I began to develop a relaxed, flowing, integrated, assertive sense of my body that I had never felt before, and I began to confront men more directly about the parts of their behavior that seemed to constrict me. I noticed how much qualities of " authority" and " masculinity" were linked in body language, how crucial having the right body language was to the assumption of roles, and how much violating the norms of body language could alter the interaction.
It is because I have used such methods to produce big changes in my way of living that the issues and attitudes surrounding responsible use of certain therapeutic techniques for self-discovery and for stopping bad interactions do not appear " counter-revolutionary" to me. There are people on the " Left" who would see them as arguments against the need for group action, ways of diverting energy into seeking personal comfort, or ways of getting embroiled in personal conflicts that destroy the possibility of group action. These fears and suspicions of “a psychological approach” come from the ways industry and the establishment have used techniques of psychology skillfully, within the confines of their own institutional goals, to keep people committed to them.
I myself have experienced the kind of traditional " therapy" where a medical resident in a starched white coat consults his watch every 15 minutes, pretends he has no feelings or reactions to me, or if he does and I am picking up on them, the issue is irrelevant, since I am the one who is " sick" and paying the $25 an hour. I have been in the kind of group therapy where the therapist is always right, and anything he or she does goes, even if it means laying their own trips and projections on people. I know there are therapies where you can get wrapped up in memory, reliving old pains in the privacy of a therapist's office, using up a lot of energy and relieving some tension, but without confronting present life situations. I know there are therapists who explain away social discontentment as personal pathology: women angry at men have " penis envy, " gay people have failed to overcome certain Oedipal conflicts, and so forth. I know there are forms of fantasy and body relaxation that can soothe the eruption of frustration and discontent without getting at the social root of it. And, worst of all, I have seen well-meaning people on the " Left" take up some vocabulary about " sensitivity, " " encounter, " " dealing with feelings, " and proceed to unleash the chaos of their undiscriminated anxiety and frustration at each other in very destructive, unilluminating ways that ended by reinforcing their trapped, defensive feelings, their distrust of others, adding to that a renewed distrust of facing those feelings or ever trying to share them again.
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The other side of this wooden nickel is that a number of companies have lately incorporated counseling programs, weekend marathons, ongoing groups, for personnel up through the executive level in order to maximize efficiency and keep that irritation that results from inhuman pressure down at a socially " safe" level. Such companies have also become increasingly careful, I have heard, about controlling the kind and extent of therapy they expose their employees to, after losing a number of them when the process of self-discovery got working too well. Our industrial system and the culture supporting it and perpetuated by it is actually extremely conscious and sophisticated, more so all the time, in the way it manipulates people’s values, self-concepts, perceptions and assumptions about the world, in order to keep them programmed into everyday roles that keep it all running. There is evidence of this manipulation in any popular magazine; just study the contents and the ads and think about who reads it. All of which simply goes to prove that there is no powerful idea, no area of real knowledge, that cannot be corrupted and misused.
So, there is this fear some people on the " Left" have of dealing with feeling and personal experience, and also a belief that people complexly entrenched in the system's roles can be appealed to through logic, ideology, and argument alone. Many radical organizers of one faction or another have leafleted, given speeches, coaxed and propagandized people whose underlying sense of values, whose perceptual framework, they understood very little about or else considered irrelevant. So, they might appeal to people through a certain moral sense, using certain concepts and arguing in a certain intellectual style that might be valid, comfortable, convincing to themselves (if that), but had little to attract the people it was directed toward. Many of us, in trying to politicize others, have failed to see that theory, concept, intellectual argument, is only one arena of real experience, only one narrow aspect of " the truth, " an aspect which, by the way, is particularly familiar to and valued by our own class, by those with our social background. Other people we speak to may filter us through a complex set of beliefs: for example, that human nature is corrupt and greedy, that all political people lie, and so you are ultimately helpless, and may as well leave things to the authorities. Such people probably don’t even hear our arguments; their jobs and homes, children, vacations, hobbies, private hopes and fantasies are where their energy is invested. And they are probably not aware of how these very personal hopes and fears are part of a huge social-economic system.
Our prejudices against dealing with reality at the feeling level are thus a perfect way to keep us away from sources of mind and behavior control that stay hidden, and to keep us wasting much of our effort. Another way to look at it is that we are all so indoctrinated in our culture, in ways of experiencing our individual power negatively, that even the most executive " rulers" of the establishment do not need to be (and probably are not) consciously aware of using that cultural experience to keep people under control. In fact, they may not be more aware than any of us as to how their own values and assumptions about power were determined and keep them plugged into the machine (although at the other end of the stick) that just perpetuates itself like clockwork. Except that it is a clockwork that may also destroy itself through the unhealthy ways it collects and channels the energy and consciousness that it feeds on.
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What I can say about the concepts of " listening”, " focusing” and " rational communicating" as I understand them is that they provide germinal tools for a radical self-experience, interaction, and group process. To me, these techniques are the material basis for discovering a new politics and a new approach to politicizing others, coming from a rich, as yet untapped, understanding of and access to the locus of power in the individual. Briefly the way I see it working is this: the processes of listening and focusing are made to get you in conscious moment-to-moment touch with what goes on in you, what you feel, what affects that and how, what's really important, all the complex parts of it. The first thing about this is that you get conscious hold of yourself in a full, present way, so you see clearly what's happening in you and to you in a situation, making you aware of what all your choices are. The second thing is that that consciousness comes directly from what's rooted in you alone. Even though it may involve larger social issues that affect us all, it comes at those issues from the meanings you bring out of you, from your experience of them, and only from that, not from what someone else says next to you, or from someone else’s idea of what's going on in you. It makes you and lets you be ultimately responsible for defining what is relevant to you and how. Then you can deal with the experience and opinions of others without losing your own feelings and identity.
So, I see it as a way to wake us all up to awareness of ourselves and responsibility to that awareness. It could mean continually rediscovering what we need and want and going after it, instead of being muddled or taking what we’re told to. And the point about this process of rediscovery is that we learn to keep it distinct and clearly separable from anyone else’s process, anyone who tells us what to feel. This includes people we value a lot and relate closely to, even authority figures, and high-pressure groups we depend on for support, which I think are all prime tests of autonomy in our lives.
When we as radicals try to talk to people about politics, we don't have to get them stuck in abstractions about their environment and the world, meanwhile taking for granted the way their personal lives, jobs, and homes are set up. By listening to people, we can begin to offer them a way they can make personal sense of how roles at home and at work might be oppressive to them as gut experiences, and, most importantly, because they are gut experiences, not because we, or a newspaper editorial, or the President, tell them so in generalized rhetoric.
Exploring these techniques can also mean repossessing the rights of judgment and decision that we give over to structures that rule us. Listening-in-communication provides ways to make groups and relationships really go rational and democratic. We get to build into the process of interaction mechanisms for keeping each individual’s experience and choice continuously present and clearly separate from everyone else’s. This, of course, protects the rights, power, and responsibility of each.
Here is an example of how radically these techniques can improve group interactions. It happened when the women in our South Side Chicago Gay Liberation group were negotiating a monthly Gay Women's Coffee House with a local church that supported a number of radical community groups. A problem was the deeply-rooted desire of the women to ban men, and the church commune’s policy of keeping an open door to everyone at their coffee houses, regardless of who was sponsoring it that week. Most of the negotiation took place between a very sensitive lesbian, who felt overrun by men in both gay and straight worlds, and a male member of the church commune staff, who wanted to protect the trusting, transcendant view of the open-door policy, and did not understand the history and necessity behind the defensive, strictly all-female approach to a lesbian coffee house.
There were personality clashes and strain in trying to work out a policy suitable to both sides; a number of events caused tension to escalate mostly through misunderstanding, until the existence of the coffee house was threatened, and a general meeting was called. Without advance planning, it just happened that members of both groups present were involved in the radical therapy community " Changes" and they had learned and incorporated these techniques in their behavior. Because of this, the two pivotal figures who had the history of difficulty negotiating were able, not only to state their positions, but to go into their hurt, misunderstood, distrustful feelings with the help of the rest of the group. That stopped the polarization, shifted the defensive energy inward for each, and cleared the air for a new negotiation, based on a clear, open, thorough sense of the underlying needs and fears of each group, from which developed a specific procedure for the Coffee House which compromised neither group's ideals. The incident, in fact, opened up possibilities of communication between the two groups at a level deeper than would have been likely given their original social alienation from each other. The Gay Women’s Coffee House became and remained a flourishing community institution for the rest of that year.
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All of this stuff does work; I have seen it many times transform what was horrible and familiar into something new and transcendent. But it doesn't happen without backsliding and exhaustion. I say this after struggling for a year now, together with a number of people, to integrate these attitudes and processes into our personal, collective, political lives. It goes slowly; it requires large belief and perseverance. It starts by opening the Pandora’s box of each of us, the place where each of us had had to begin crawling out of the personal compromises we had made with our pains in this culture and grow new skins. This has meant frustration, fear, chaos, and gains appearing only very gradually. The beginning seems to last a long time; there is need to relearn what it means to be myself, then to be with another, and then to form a group. I have to keep sight of long-range goals when I feel mired down in personal hang-ups. I have tried to keep hold of the processes I have learned to trust, even when I am fearing and doubting everyone around me and what we are doing. I have to keep remembering, with some relief, what a new thing we are trying to find and how much we are up against, when I start envying the efficiency of established institutions and the easy action of groups that organize their power in the showy, familiar ways.
It is damned hard to keep writing, theorizing, and applying things we learn to organized work with other people when our own community and our own selves are so much in upheaval. But it seems to me, after a year, to be very much worth it, because I see in myself, and in the challenges, we have begun to face as a community, real change and the possibilities of a new social system that gets at the roots of our disease. This opens into new alternatives to offer people politically and new ways to approach them with what I have to offer. Of course, the task is difficult. The thing is, I feel good and right doing this particular struggle in a way that I never have before. There is a sense of clarity in myself and human beauty in anyone I might work with that is strongly infusing my political vision and action, and bringing me great joy, in the oddest, unexpected ways, even when I " lose. "
Revised from Rough Times, January-February 1974
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