WHERE ARE WE NOW?
A short-term relational-existential process group for therapists

Facilitated by Jason Winkler, RP

Dates/Times: 

***Please note that Group #1 is fully booked and a second group has now been added starting in January***

Group #1:
Thursdays  9:30–10:50 am (ET)
12 sessions, 80 minutes per session

November 4, 11, 18, 25,  December 2, 9  2021
January 6, 13, 20, 27,  February 3, 10  2022

Group #2:
Tuesdays  9:30–10:50 am (ET)
12 sessions, 80 minutes per session

January 11, 18, 25,  February 1, 8, 15
March 1, 8, 22, 29,  April 5, 12  2022

Location and Numbers:

Online via Zoom – The group will have between 8 and 11 participants.

Fee:

$720 including HST 
($53.10 + HST per session):

Payable in two installments of $360: one due prior to the start of the group, the second due by the midway point of the group.


Approach and group description:

This group is intended to create a supportive and exploratory space for those who work in psychotherapeutic capacities with clients at a complex time of the pandemic, high demands, burnout, losses and also of new possibilities.

The approach of the group is intended to be relational, where deeply-held feelings can be shared, witnessed and held, existential, where we delve into questions and concerns about living in the world, living in this life at this time, psychodynamic, where we pay close attention to transferences and emerging group dynamics and anti-oppressive, where we give voice to injustice, inequity and individual and group intersectionality.

Questions that we may explore together:

*How do I feel after 18+ months of COVID life? Where am I? Where are WE?
*What kinds of anxieties and fears am I aware of in myself?
*How are racism, war, poverty, societal and class divisions, politics, etc. impacting me emotionally?
*What are we going to do in this rapidly changing climate and planet? How are environmental concerns impacting me?
*What death and mortality concerns are stirred up in me?
*What is going well? What is bringing joy and contentment? 
*Where am I feeling seen? Does community help to hold me?
*What am I missing? What am I yearning for?
*How have I changed after living with these pandemic restrictions? How has the world changed?
*What do my relationships feel like? Am I feeling connected to others? Am I holding other peoples’ feelings?
*Do I feel different out in the world, post-lockdown?
*What losses have occurred? What am I grieving?
*What has been gained? What has grown? Am I in a better place than pre-COVID times? Was lockdown good for me?
*What do I want the world to look like? What opportunities do we all have?
*What decisions am I faced with and what dilemmas arise from them?
*Who needs help and how can I give it? What if I can’t give enough?
*What are my personal responsibilities in a racist, oppressive world? How should I hold my privilege and my freedoms?
*What do I do with all of my rage, guilt, shame and sorrow?
*How can I use my creative potential to allow for movement and to get unstuck?


Is this group the right fit for me?

This group is for practitioners who are needing a space in which to connect with other people doing this work (of providing therapy while trying to be self-aware) and who want to dig in to explore personal feelings while also exploring interpersonal dynamics that unfold in the group process. The aim of the group is to check in, take stock, be curious about self and other, and to learn more about how our work as therapists intersects with our own personal experiences of living in the same world that our clients do—with all its risks, emotional complexities and uncharted waters.

Group members will be expected to engage in an emotional process in an online setting and be genuinely interested and curious in what is unfolding between group members and within oneself from session-to-session. We will work to locate and witness each other amidst the unknown and the feelings that arise in our process.

Contact:

Jason Winkler, RP
jason@jasonwinkler.com
(647) 317-3178
http://www.jasonwinkler.com


If you have any further questions about the group, please feel free to contact me and we can set up a time to chat about it.

If you are registering for the group, I’d like to be able to speak online or by phone for 10 or so minutes sometime before we start the group, just to make brief contact with you.


Registration:

The closing date for registering for the group is Monday November 1 (for Group #1) and
Friday January 7 (for Group #2).

A minimum of 8 participants is required for the group to run.



I have 15 years of experience in co-facilitating process groups as a faculty member at the Toronto Institute for Relational Psychotherapy (TIRP). I am a graduate of the Center for Group Studies (in New York) – Certificate of Completion in Group Leadership training program (in a Modern Analytic group therapy approach) and I regularly participate in trainings through the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA).

I am putting out a ‘statement of intention’ of sorts –  a vow, perhaps – to start up a new therapy/process group in 2020. It is very much about finding the right space in which to do it (location/setting, light/sound, etc.) and one that is mutually available at times that I can run a group. It is not the easiest thing to find, but I’m working on it.

If you happen to land on this post and are interested in joining a therapy group, feel free to email me to let me know about being kept up to date on any new information. I will also post here if anything new transpires. There would be a consultation/intake process and I’m considering the different models of short-term and ongoing group.

I am reflecting on how many inquiries I’ve had over the months and years about whether I am currently running a therapy group – particularly because the person writing me felt that group therapy would be the best option for them and, in some cases, had been thinking of it and desiring it for a long time.

This heartens me because I know from much of my own experience how a group offers a unique opportunity for self-learning in the living, interpersonal ‘lab’ of people sitting in a circle talking about feelings. I use the word ‘lab’ only to illustrate the experimental – and experiential – nature of the group setting.

Group process offers something apart from individual, one-on-one therapy (and most other social interactions!) where the work may not be focused at all on what is happening in the moment between the people having the conversation, whereas that is an important component of what occurs in group. It is actually the very vehicle for growth and self-awareness: the paying attention to self while in relationship with others, exploring relationships in the moment by putting thoughts and feelings into words, and giving and receiving emotional/relational feedback. The immediacy in this kind of communication is what helps very much to evolve and heal and learn, and allows participants to identify what is happening for them on a deeper level.

This brief statement to update this very neglected satellite website of mine will hopefully give interested visitors a sense of where I am in terms of plans to run a group, and the sort of group it might be.

Existential Reading and Process Group for Therapists
Starting January 2016

This is a group for psychotherapists to explore key concepts in existential philosophy and psychology, as applied to the therapist’s internal process and approach to client issues. It is intended as an ‘Existential Psychotherapy 101’ in which the material will include a small amount of primary source existential philosophy, but with the focus more on the writings of prominent figures in Existential Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

Group members will be encouraged to share the personal application of what they’ve read and reflected on between sessions and their thoughts and feelings generated in discussing the assigned readings.

Themes/topics of the group:

*’The self’ as a being-in-the-world, always in relation
*The existential ‘void’– what it is, how to live with it
*Time and mortality – learning to live in the shadow of death
*Creating meaning in a meaningless world
*Isolation and loneliness – being a separate self in a crowded world of others
*Freedom and responsibility – the burden of our freedom, the “tyranny of choice”, engaging one’s own will
*Ontological guilt (not fulfilling the potential of one’s being), living in good or bad faith to one’s self, and the notion of the ‘authentic self’
*Fear and dread – the annihilation of the self as expressed through anxiety and depression
*Modern comforts and the response to existential despair
*Relationships and their transformative potential in existential crisis
*Creativity, courage, and bringing one’s self to life
*Ethics and virtues in living a good life
*The four-dimensional model of existence: physical, social, psychological, spiritual

Why offer a group with an existential lens?

In my (Jason’s) experience as a therapist, I notice in some clients an ennui, or malaise that has no one origin, rather, what I see to be the totality of struggling to be in the world, or a feeling of “not being built for this world”. There are also those who have a natural inclination towards melancholy and/or deep existential reflection and questioning on the meaning in life, and on being itself, as an orientation to the world. Having existentially-based dialogues with our clients can have a profound impact (on both parties!) that connects us as we grapple with all that is being human. Paying attention to our own existence helps us, as therapists, to feel deeply into the existence of the other. The existential is the examination of what is common to all humans–the givens of existence–and the potentials of suffering and joy that we all face as we acknowledge our existential position in the world.

As our society speeds ahead to an increasingly complex and unknowable future, many people seem to be ill at ease, restless and anxious, tired and overdrawn, even with all of (and possibly because of) the modern conveniences and distractions available to them. Many people have problems with living and have questions about how to live a good life, but need help to be guided to more awareness of what they are actually grappling with, particularly if the source of the trouble is either elusive or very expansive.

An existential lens considers clients’ being-in-the-world– not just the self, but the self (in its different modes of selfhood) always in relation to the world and its systems, its vast numbers of people, its chaos, its options, its wonders and its uncontrollability. The ontological is the examination of being, and the existential is the examination of that being “thrown in to” a world not of one’s design, constantly having to find its way through life with choices and responsibilities, freedoms and limitations, meaning-making opportunities and meaninglessness, connection and loneliness and the omnipresent, inescapable living-towards-death.
(For a deeper exploration on the topic of ‘existential crisis’ that I participated in, see here: http://ow.ly/T3qQd).

What facilitation/teaching methods will be used in the group?

This group is an opportunity to engage in an active self-reflective process of exploring existential themes through reading articles and book chapters together, discussing how we understand the themes through our own selves and our own roles as psychotherapists, and how we might begin to effect meaningful change in our lives and the lives of our clients by delving more deeply into existence, itself.

This is intended as a discussion and process group in which group members will explore their own personal and professional realms, as applied to the topics of that session’s assigned readings. I will facilitate the group with a relational approach, which includes looking at the dynamic of the group (as a being-in-itself) unfolding in the here-and-now as the existential material is discussed. As this is a group for psychotherapists, members’ ‘professional egos’ will also be engaged in the spirit of curiosity of how existential themes guide and shape us as practitioners, how we live them inside and outside of our consulting rooms and how we might work with them in our client work.

Members will be provided with electronic copies of articles, housed in a cloud storage file (Google Drive or Dropbox), which one will access via a web link. There will be a scheduled list of readings, and accompanying reflection questions/scenarios that members will work on between meetings. For each group meeting, a member could expect approximately 100-120 pages of reading material (or 25 pages per week, on average).

Supplemental audio or video material will be sent out to explore, on some occasions.

What material will be part of the reading program?

The group will explore the existential ideas of philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Tillich, Husserl and Camus, among others. We will be reading the writings of those who have been foundational in applying existential philosophy to the practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, in both Europe and America, including Binswanger, Boss, Rank, May, Frankl, Laing, Yalom, Spinelli and Van-Deurzen.

Group size:
The group will be comprised of between 6 and 10 participants.

When:
Sundays – 11:00 am-1:00 pm
January to December 2016
Every 3 to 4 weeks, 12 sessions, none in July/August

Dates: January 24, February 21, March 13, April 10, May 8, May 29, June 19, September 11, October 2, October 23, November 13, December 4 2016.

Location:
Bloorcourt Therapy: 823-A Bloor Street W, Toronto (at Bloor & Shaw Sts.)

Fee for the full 12 months:
Early-bird: $600 if the fee is paid in full by December 15 2015.

Regular: $675 (can be paid in two 50% installments starting in January). Fees are inclusive of HST.

Contact Jason for more information, or to register for the group:
Jason@jasonwinkler.com
(416) 378-8344