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Chapter Nine – An Ending – Page 277
are a way in to this account of an episode, a Sticky Moment, and so far I have talked
mostly about myself. The reason that I am doing so is to try and tap in to some of what
ended up unspoken in this Session, in other words, to think about what might have been
transpired had we facilitated differently. I am particularly interested that my first
response to trying to think about the teaching was a fairly strong sense of shame, and
I’ll try and make sense of that in what follows.
Taken together, the threads that follow convey a context to the ending of the group. I
hope that I can link my introspection to events and dynamics in the group, and in doing
so make some sense of these events and dynamics.
The Case of the Missing Twenty Minutes
When I look back at Session Fifteen, I see that a practical expression of the problem for
Judi and me in ending ‘properly’ is that for some people we allowed far more time than
was in the budget. Put more simply, we should have had 20-30 minutes at the end of the
session, but instead we ended up with about 2-3 minutes. So this enquiry becomes The
Case of the Missing Twenty Minutes, to borrow a form of title from detective fiction.
After I wrote ‘more time than was in the budget’, I was going to write ‘at the expense of
the experience of the other members’, but as will become clear, now I’m not so sure that
this is true. It may be that what happened was, at some level, to the benefit of the other
members, and, unconsciously at least, that it took place at their behest.
A summary of the session
The group as a whole were slow to take up the invitation that the staff offered. They
seemed reluctant, “to take turns to reflect on your experience of the course, in relation