A DIALOGUE GROUP EXPERIENCE

The Dialogue Group format is now in its second year as part of the AFTA conference. Having missed last year's meeting, this was my first encounter with it and I was pleasantly surprised. This format fits well with AFTA's commitment to increased member participation, personal involvement, and growth through the sharing of ideas with colleagues. I feel that these groups contributed to enhancing the conference experience and to encouraging attendees to be active participants instead of passive listeners.

Ema Genijovich, the coordinator of the Dialogue Groups for this conference, informed me that the goal of the groups was to provide a space for conversation about the plenary sessions and their relationship to our work. In addition, she said that she envisioned Dialogue Groups as a way of affording further opportunities for the direct experience of diversity by encouraging interaction among attendees with a broader range of professional backgrounds and theoretical approaches than would naturally occur in Interest Groups or purely social situations. The method of randomly assigning attendees to groups helped foster this diversity and further enhanced the role of the groups as an additional way for us to connect with and get to know each other better. Such opportunities for connection are particularly valuable for newer AFTA participants such as myself, as they offer another means of becoming integrated into the AFTA community.

The Dialogue Group experience for me, as a guest and prospective AFTA member, exemplifies what I had always heard that AFTA was about. The format provides an opportunity to talk and listen to each other. Removed from the more formal setting of the question period in the plenary context, attendees have the freedom to share even half-formed ideas and to think out loud. The small group format allowed each of us to be heard and to feel comfortable talking.

The group I participated in after the Presidential Plenary Session is a good example of how these Dialogue Groups can be used. The presentation was: "Couples in Today's World," with Peggy Papp and John Gottman as presenters. The discussion that followed in my group, was lively and wide-ranging. Don-David Lesterman, the assigned facilitator in our group, was instrumental in creating a context for respectful conversation. The presentation (summarized in this newsletter) was controversial and created some strong reactions. Some reactions were personal. For instance, some participants reported feeling relieved upon hearing John Gottman state that empirical data suggests that sixty-nine percent of conflicts in couples are never resolved! When this statistic was brought up, the tone of the discussion immediately became more intimate and relaxed, as people began relating their reactions of relief to both their personal and professional experiences. The relief at receiving some validation from the empirical research world for those unresolved conflicts, either in our own successful relationships or among couples we work with and consider functional, was dramatic (I later heard that this small comment had been mentioned as significant in several of the groups!).

Group participants soon began to talk specifically about strategies we each use in working with the different types of couples described by Peggy Papp and John Gottman. This openness about our therapeutic work, was further evidence of how safe participants felt in this small group context. I find this to be rare amongst relative strangers at a conference: to create a safe place where we do not need to be "on" or perfect, where we can get feedback from colleagues. It was notable that most people in the group felt comfortable enough to participate, and that their contributions were listened to in a respectful manner and given active consideration.

Overall, my impression was that people valued the effort to bring the clinical and research domains together in this plenary session, and they appreciated the way the presenters acknowledged each other's work. Nevertheless, many appeared to be troubled by the apparent lack of information on how contextual factors affected the relationships and divorce rates of the couples John Gottman described. The issue of how our clinical experience squares with the research presented was addressed. This then became a springboard for discussing the future of couples therapy and research. Will they converge or diverge? How will they feed into each other? How will they each take into account our changing socio-cultural context?

What was particularly poignant for me in this first dialogue group, especially looking back on the experience, was our struggle as therapists to understand the meaning of the empirical research presented for our practices and our profession. Even though the research on couples and families and their interactions has been going on for decades, with its attempt to deconstruct relationships, reducing them to their basic components in order to understand what makes for successful and resilient relationships, I sensed some fear- for lack of a better word. An almost tangible underlying current fueled the discussion. What exactly it represented is hard to define. How was this feeling related to the mental health field's continuing movement towards tightening budgets and a psychopharmacological emphasis in treatment, towards a premium being placed on empirically validated treatment approaches? Was there a fear of being invalidated as a field by the inherent nature of research, with its need to operationalize relationships and define their basic components in a reductionistic manner in order to study them or to define what is observed? Was there a fear that research will somehow invalidate what we do and what we know to be true about the complexities of relationships and socio-cultural context (which gets "randomized out" or "factor-analyzed out" of the equation)? Or worse, that someone or some entity may use such research to oversimplify what are considered "empirically validated" interventions and manualize all treatment, if not with a "one shoe fits all" model, at least with a "choose one of four possible shoes" approach?

There was comfort in the shared struggle to digest the plenary session. Peggy's therapeutic approach, which appeared to be tailored specifically to the couple she presented - "more art than science," as some have criticized our field to be - and John's hi-tech research presentation. Ultimately, I feel that the Dialogue Group succeeded in remaining open to the contributions of all presenters and seeing their relevance to our work. The resolution seemed to be one of not only taking from research what we can utilize in our clinical work, but also continuing the dialogue with those who are primarily involved in research to work towards a greater inclusion of the significance of context for family relationships. The importance of the socio-cultural context is, after all, one of the most important contributions of systems thinking to the mental-health field.

Of course, we probably all have a tendency to comment briefly (or to even gossip!) about the plenaries. However, I believe that the Dialogue Group space, and the encouragement we encountered there to review what was presented and to connect it with our interests and professional and personal lives, amplified the value and impact of the presentations. By taking the time to focus on our reactions to them and listening to others' reactions, we prevent the plenary presentations from slipping through our fingers, unprocessed.

Veronica R. Barenstein, Ph.D. is Faculty at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and Hospital where she directs the Family and Couples Therapy Training Program in the Medical Psychology Department. She is also in private practice in Westwood, Los Angeles, CA. Dr. Barenstein trained as a Clinical Psychologist and Family Therapist at New York University and at The Minuchin Center for the Family, New York.