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Fall, 1970: The "real"beginning
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Fall, 1970: The " real" beginning
There was a fantasy during the summer that in the fall we would " really get underway”. We expected other people " like us" - clinical or social work school, would get involved. Then, with all the enthusiastic people, we would put out publicity and make commitments to work with people. So, we had a big meeting for recruiting and got a large number of people from all over the University and community. They had all sorts of different ideas about what Changes should be - and there were more of them than us. It was a very tense meeting in which it became clear to the original people that we didn't want our game taken away from us. It was our first " old" vs. " new" struggle. With some unpleasantness, we survived, and a number of new people decided to work with us.
The transition was rocky. We had decided to form steady teams to work with people, but the original, now somewhat experienced people, who were friends, decided to stay together as a team rather than split up and work with the new people. The new people were told to find friends in the group and make their own teams. The situation made it hard for them to do this, and I think they rightly felt excluded.
A, a psychology graduate student, was " volunteered" to be our chairman (or whatever we called it in those days). He organized a council of one person from each team to help with the drudge work, and that seemed to work fairly well
We had a number of problems. Very little publicity was put out, leaving us with a lot of workers and nothing to do. Our main business was very wordy weekly meetings at a commune. New people kept coming to every meeting, demanding to know what we were doing, and then arguing with us about our ideas. We got very frustrated because we could never go ahead with our own planning or develop a steady sense of who we were. I know the new people were frustrated because we wouldn't really " get with them, " and there was so little action. A few people were willing to stick around and help us struggle through.
Winter, 1971: Steady business begins
Toward the end of the fall, our publicity finally appeared in the Chicago underground paper, the SEED. We advertised that we were willing to talk with people about all sorts of problems and gave five phone listings which were people's home numbers. When we had originally made this plan, the idea was that the person answering the phone would then refer callers to different people on his permanent team as needed.
However, when the calls began coming through, the teams had dissolved through disuse. What happened then was that the person taking the call would check around with the Changes people he knew to do the follow up. The result was that the phone people were very overworked, as were their friends, but that new people didn't get much of a chance to do much.
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There was another coordination problem: some people would call several of the numbers and run through their problem again and again. We didn't have any system for sharing that information except at the next meeting, and then it was often too late to do anything constructive.
There were other organizational problems. A said he had to quit the leadership position because he needed to study for prelims. No-one wanted to take his place, and we began to hassle leadership responsibility issues again. Some people wanted a coordinator.
One thing that pleased us during the winter was that we really were functioning as a resources network. The girl we worked with so intensively brought a friend of hers to Changes who brought other people who helped with things. One of these kids wanted therapy which was arranged within Changes. A friend of my roommate’s was having marital difficulties and stayed with us a while. Someone in Changes was able to offer her counseling. Later she was able to help us cut red tape in getting the original girl on welfare. It seemed that the idea of mutual help
within a circle of friends was really possible.
Spring, 1971: Hassled business
Changes continued to have a lot of calls and see many people during the spring. It also became a majority group opinion that we were getting swamped in our current state of loose organization and needed some structure. We began to look seriously for a place to live in and a person to be coordinator. In considering whether to move into a place or not we were worried that " placeness" would substitute for " groupness. " When we weren't bound to a room, we had to always think of ourselves as people, rather than an institution. The fear was that, if we found a home somehow, Changes would become a non-living, dead structure. The urgent need to have a central phone overrode this concern.
We also began looking for a coordinator, hoping to find a person who would take a subsistence salary made up of donations from Changes members, while looking for money to really support him/herself. There were a number of issues that developed. One was a notion of what this person would do for Changes. There was real concern that having a central person would mean that we would be taken over and lose our autonomy... The idea of one person having authority over the group didn't feel at all right.
We settled on the idea of a coordinator who would somehow organize the administrative work and look for funding. We were able to relax some of our fears by deciding that the group would be responsive to the coordinator and, if he/she was doing things the group didn't like, the group could just let him know.
We were looking for someone with some background in working with people in a close way (clinical training) plus administrative capacities. Within the group was one woman, C, who wanted the job. She was a graduate student in Chemistry who had done a lot of administrative stuff for student groups but hadn't had much opportunity to learn close interaction skills. There was a lot of tension between people who felt that, since she wanted to do the job, we shouldn't judge and should let her try, and others who felt that C wasn't qualified. There was real unease about how C dealt with her own feelings and how we had seen her relate to others. There was also fantastic unease in saying anything straight to her.
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This made it very clear that the group really wasn't " open" in a sense that we could give feedback to each other without fear of hurting. A few of us were finally able to make our reservations clear and, of course, it wasn't a disaster. C could hear us very well. We then spent a great deal of time looking for someone to do the coordinating to no avail and finally gave the job to C anyway. Though partly out of expediency, this was also done with the agreement that C would get some real backing and training on " getting with people" skills.
C took the job with the agreement that she would do it through the summer. What she did was jump in energetically, get us involved in a number of activities, and then she pooped out. She was in a bad place personally, felt she couldn't handle the job, and wanted to get to California. C's cycle reflected what was happening with the rest of the group also.
We had made the decision to move to a place and been offered a room at the Blue Gargoyle. By looking at our numbers, we felt that we had enough people to man a 24-hour phone. So, we had the phones put in and kept trying to pull together a phone schedule. Every time we tried, we only came up with odds and ends. It seemed as if we had jumped in enthusiastically, only to find us a mirage when we tried to get real commitments. It was almost as if the push toward structure and organization, with the commitment this implied, was too heavy for people, and they beat a hasty retreat.
The other side of a structure issue was a self-conscious push toward greater intimacy in the group. I can't remember which came first, but there were two events which really affected our group process. One was that we had a meeting out at a beach house. As usual, not everyone came, but those who did spent the day relating in a way that had never happened before. We played frisby, made sand sculptures, and really got to know each other. When we finally had a meeting, it was very productive.
The other incident was a regular Sunday meeting at which there was very open talk about how exhausted people were of doing things for others, and at how we never did anything for ourselves. We dredged up our earliest memories of Changes, remembering that the group had been formed because we wanted to have fun with each other and build a network/community of people who would support each other as well as outside people. I remember very clearly that H said wistfully, " The other day, I needed a ride somewhere but didn't feel that I could call anyone because rides should be saved for people we are helping. "
We had a long talk about this and essentially reaffirmed our number one commitment to each other. There was a great feeling of warmth, caring, and goodwill. In this atmosphere, M and C, who had had a long-standing misunderstanding, were able to work this out with a small group of people supporting them. The end result of this meeting was planning a party for the next Sunday.
The next Sunday, no-one showed for the party, and very few people came to the meeting which followed. It became clear from that that, although people could be a community, they didn't necessarily want it and weren't really ready for it. Just like the rush for structure resulted in no-one wanting to be counted, the rush for community made people withdraw.
This was a very clear example of the desire and fear of intimacy and commitment and how these opposing needs affect our process. When I talked with people later about the Sunday debacle, it was clear that, although people in theory wanted " community, " it wasn't clear to them that they wanted Changes as that community. For the first time, a few people at least looked openly at how they saw Changes people. For myself, I had to ask, " Did I want to be a community with people whose cultural and intellectual backgrounds are so different than mine? "
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Most of the people in Changes I felt friendly to but didn't consider as my friends, nor did I want them as my friends. Did I really want to make commitments to this group? I wasn't sure and, evidently, a lot of other people weren't either. I think one could say there was an elitist edge to this, to say the least. I think there were other side concerns, such as time availability, some people not being big on community anyway, old tensions between people that had never been resolved, etc.
On top of all these organizational hassles, we were learning a lot about people. We came up with the chronic caller problem which again was difficult to handle because we didn't have a central way to coordinate. One of these callers was a man who was interested in women's clothes and who wanted to masturbate over the phone. The issue of what one's own boundaries and values are as opposed to the caller's was raised by this. We were also learning from this that there were definitely people who were really " using" us, who just wanted to run their problem through over and over and didn't want to change (how come that's a surprise each time? )
A major input that spring was that L and I went to a radical therapy conference in Washington which helped us see what other people were doing. I think that part of the pressure toward community came from us when we came back. A number of us were talking about making a commune together, but we never got that together.
The spring ended in pretty much a disaster. We didn't have a coordinator. Absolutely everyone whose phone number was advertised was leaving town. After having had the phones installed (and someone running up a big long-distance bill), we weren't together enough to use them, and then we found out the Blue Gargoyle was closing for the summer. We were down to about 12 people and feeling very shaky.
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