Apprentice Training 2023

Understanding Potential Space, Vitalizing Space, & Transformational Space in Groups

The 2023 Training Year

Activating Aliveness in The Group Container

This year, we build on the foundation of previous years – by returning to familiar and essential themes in our group work, and by learning what it takes to deepen a group’s process by working more actively with one’s own internal process of what is happening in the group. 

Vitalizing encounters require groups to creating the necessary conditions for for novel experiences to take place, in a space where the ignition of an enlivening internal process can come about through engaging with a vital other.

OUR GROUP WORK FOR 2023

We have been exploring what it means to be a part of an ‘interpersonal field’ as a group.  

How does the potential and potency of the whole group exist as a budding possibility within each of its members?

We will work with making ‘potential space’ for direct exchanges and lived encounters with one another that we can track and experience with ‘a felt sense’ in our bodies.  How can each group member be fed by these encounters?

We will pay attention to the necessity of ‘dynamic tension’ in group processes in ways that are life-giving ‘potential space’ to our desires, and give ‘generative movement’ to our aggressive and enlivening impulses.

We will also explore the notion of ‘vitalizing moments of meeting’, where potential shifts into a transformative moment for each person involved in an exchanges, and comes into clearer form and focus through the group as witness.

FOR THE 2023 FALL TRAINING WEEK

I am providing you with book recommendations, and some photocopied and highlighted chapters for a more focused distillation of the material we will reference during the fall training week.

Supplemental Reading for 2023:

• Beyond The Anti-Group: Survival & Transformation, by Morris Nitsun. 
• The Group As An Object Of Desire, by Morris Nitsun.
• Dramatic Dialogue, by Galit Atlas & Lewis Aron.

2 – Required PDF Readings for Fall 2023:

• Facilitating Aliveness in The Group Container – by Michael Mervosh. READ – REVIEW

KEY CONCEPTS

Chickpea Poem – as a vivid representational metaphor for the ‘intersubjective field’ in group work.
Aliveness is in the details – focus on getting clear and specific details in a narrative being shared.
Explaining vs Describing – a fundamental difference between stopping a process and furthering it, and going beyond understanding into lived experience.

• Chapter 11 – The Group As Witness – by Morris Nitsun.
• Chapter 11 – The Group As A Witness – Book Notes – by Morris Nitsun.

KEY CONCEPTS:

Immediacy & Intensity – brings about a sense of recognition, a coming into being in the moment.

 Required PDF Readings for Fall 2023:

(from the extra email from Micheal) 

• VITALIZING ENGAGEMENTS IN GROUP PROCESSES– The work of Margaret Black Mitchell- Adapted Notes by Michael Mervosh For the HJAP Training Group.

KEY CONCEPTS:

• Shift in therapy towards an “intersubjective process”
• Moving away from authoritative interpretation
• Emphasis on co-creating meaning and vitality in groups
• Transformative thinking involves recognizing limitations and generating new ways of thinking and relating

AUDIO RECORDINGS – September 2023

FOR THE 2023 SPRING TRAINING WEEK 

I am providing you with book recommendations, and some photocopied and highlighted chapters for a more focused distillation of the material we will reference during the spring training week, along with some brand new chapters that have not been highlighted or underlined (yet).  I highly suggest you consider purchasing the Vitalization in Psychoanalysis & Pscyhotherapy book

I think you’ll find these to be quite relevant and worthwhile to our group process experience this year.

We’ll deepen our understanding of vitalization as a fundamental life-giving presence, both as a generative force and as a unbinding force to free up one’s own transformation.  We will experience first-hand together how vital and transformative moments can take place through the relationships we have established with one another.  

As well, we’ll keep on exploring the ways we are animated, moved and troubled by our experiences of desire, and our assertive movements forward in pursuit of our desires.

We will  continue appreciate the essential skill of active witnessing – to be both a part of and apart from –  and the way it provides a container for the experiences of another to be held by, as well as a space for which something new or novel can emerge through the interpersonal field of the group’s presence.

We place an emphasis on going beyond what is, and see how furthering processes can happen in groups, by examining more closely and precisely those various aspects of our humanity that keeps a group from moving forward.  

Finally, we will introduce the notion of the core of one’s being, a space that is not to be communicated with directly, and is wordless in its origins and in its essence.  We will have opportunities to create spaces for this to emerge in group members through the fullness and spaciousness of a silence contained by presence.

Supplemental Reading for 2023:

• Beyond The Anti-Group: Survival & Transformation, by Morris Nitsun. 
• The Group As An Object Of Desire, by Morris Nitsun.
• Dramatic Dialogue, by Galit Atlas & Lewis Aron.

Supplemental PDF Readings for 2023:

• to be determined.

AUDIO RECORDINGS – April 2023

Wednesday 1 – Guided Embodiment- A New Start- Allowing Companioning with Soul, 25 mins

Wednesday 2 – Vitalizing Dynamics in Groups, 11 mins

Wednesday 3 – Attentiveness is the Prayer of the Soul, 4 mins

Thursday 1 – Guided Embodiment – The HJ Myth and New Possibilities for Aliveness, 21 mins

Thursday 2 – Vitalizing Presence – Facing the Early and the Deep, 16 mins

Friday – Eternity – Going into the Early, Deep, and Real, 26 mins

Saturday – What is Deep- Going Beyond Understanding, 20 mins

Sunday 1 – Reflections on Group and Individual Becoming, 14 mins

Sunday 2 – Who Would You Want To Become, 30 mins

Supplemental Reading for 2022:

• Difficult Topics In Group Therapy, by Jerome Gans.
• The Group Therapy Experience, by Louis Ormont.
• Who Do We Choose To Be? by Margaret Wheatley.

PRIMARY PDF READINGS

Chapter 3 – The Analyst’s Witnessing & Otherness – Warren Poland

Chapter 7 – The Group As Witness – Morris Nitsun

Groups – Chapter 3 Notes – Learning & Hating in Groups – Mick Landaiche

Aggression & Destructiveness – Chapter 1 – Making Sense of Aggression – Celia Harding

Aggression & Destructiveness – Making Sense of Aggression – Book Notes – Celia Harding, Cliff Notes by Michael Mervosh

Facilitating Intensive Group Work – 2022 – Michael Mervosh

REVIEW THESE  PDF READINGS

HJAP Group Training Manual 2022- Mervosh 

Destructiveness is a part of Aliveness – Eigen

The Therapeutic Functions Of Aggression – Cornell

The Group Therapy Experience – Ormont – Lecture Notes with Highlights – Chapters 1 -13

Please read all of the primary PDF Readings in preparation for the upcoming week!

FOR THE AUTUMN TRAINING WEEK (from 2022)

I have distilled the amount of content to be read. There are a few PDFs of my personal notes from a new book called Vitalizations: On Being and Becoming.  It is a collection of papers that I find quite inspiring, but not the easiest to read.  (Thus the book notes.)

Below are three short PDFs to read in preparation for the autumn training week.  They are representative of new material that I am excited about sharing. The content fits in very well with understanding the particular skills needed for more intensive group work.

Embodying Essential Process Work Capacities for the Group Facilitator/The Ruthlessness of The Group – Michael Mervosh

Facilitating Aliveness in The Group Container – Based on the work of Rachel Peltz

VITALIZATON Perspectives on Being and Becoming – Between Mythos & Logos – Boaz Shalgi

PRIMARY PDF READINGS

Chapter 3 – The Analyst’s Witnessing & Otherness – Warren Poland

Chapter 7 – The Group As Witness – Morris Nitsun

Groups – Chapter 3 Notes – Learning & Hating in Groups – Mick Landaiche

Aggression & Destructiveness – Chapter 1 – Making Sense of Aggression – Celia Harding

Aggression & Destructiveness – Making Sense of Aggression – Book Notes – Celia Harding, Cliff Notes by Michael Mervosh

Facilitating Intensive Group Work – 2022 – Michael Mervosh

REVIEW THESE  PDF READINGS

HJAP Group Training Manual 2022- Mervosh 

Destructiveness is a part of Aliveness – Eigen

The Therapeutic Functions Of Aggression – Cornell

The Group Therapy Experience – Ormont – Lecture Notes with Highlights – Chapters 1 -13

Please read all of the primary PDF Readings in preparation for the upcoming week!