Being in my own interpersonal process training group over years (many years!) has strengthened my capacity to sit with difficult feelings so I can help my clients receive their essential messages.

Slow. Steady. So much stretching. I couldn’t tell you how it happened but I see more clearly now how, so often, when I go with the protocol, when I take the “common knowledge” of our field for granted, I miss my client.

Through my own process work, I’ve learned I can trust myself and go another way. I am more flexible. I bring more questions and fewer assumptions. I laugh more. I let myself fumble. I meet the human in front of me with a here and now relational response. It can feel wobbly but sometimes, our methodologies are not what our clients need.

So what exactly is interpersonal process?

Interpersonal process is a thoroughly and intentionally unstructured space. No check in. No topic. No agenda.

The lack of structure. The nerves, the meandering, the irritation is all by design. The open nature of this process work puts you into contact with your distinct, essential humanness and the humanness of others. It’s exposing.

You’ll grapple with:

Your stories about yourself and others
Your comfort and discomfort with different emotions
Your own and others’ visible and invisible identities
Your body’s legacies
Your capabilities and your challenges
Your responses to difference
Your relationship to power dynamics

Or…

You won’t. Half of the work is sitting face to face with what gets in the way of effective self and other connectedness. Or what stymies your freedom to be yourself with your clients when it could be of benefit. Or what turns your care and curiosity into invisible eye-rolling or quiet fury or hopeless collapse.

It’s SO MUCH, right? Why the hell put yourself through the interpersonal process ringer when you could take the next level of IFS or SE or EMDR? Because THIS is what’s happening beneath the content of every therapy session.

If you are not paying attention to what’s moving under there, it bubbles up. The connection falters. The medicine fails. Your client keeps quietly going along or they blow up, or they disappear never to be heard from again and you’re left blindsided, confused or scrambling.

In an interpersonal process group, we listen. To what’s within us and to what’s between us. We talk and we’re quiet. In this interpersonal process training group, we build a space of support, aliveness, trust and conspiratorial community.

Gather the skills in this year's Experiential Training for Group Leaders and Relational Therapists