“Containers” are dream stuff 🫙

A lot of group process leaders like to talk about “the container.”

It’s a useful concept if we remember it’s fake—a mental construct that we overlay onto stuff happening. Many containers are wonderful, like sports and board games (a bunch of weird, made-up, often unspoken and illogical rules). 

So why even contemplate how containers are collective games?

• Presence: To stay present to what’s here, rather than what we want to be here, keeping us more responsive.
• Empowerment / Creativity / Freedom: To remember the container is not sacred; we can always re-construct it. (Someone can only ‘break the container’ if we let them, by declaring it so)
• Integrity: To decline impossible responsibilities like ensuring “group confidentiality”.  How could you possibly know if people’ll keep their commitment to confidentiality? How would you enforce it they don’t? How would you even know?
• Compassion: To remember “the container” is an ideal that we will always fail to achieve.
• Integration: Remembering the container is a we-dream helps generalize session insights into other contexts.
• Truth: ​​There are no guarantees.
• To unlock a potentially simpler alternative: Love. Let love always be where we come from, and what we go to.

I think absolutely everything is “dream stuff” in the same way containers are. Value. Money. Prestige. Instead of being nihilistic, recognizing this exponentiates our capacity to love each other, to create structures that liberate, to tell the truth. We find ourselves creative beyond our imaginations, playful, surprised at what gets shown to us.

This isn’t always “fun” even when it’s good—this past Monday Valerie and I containerized in this construct-aware way, and it seemed to take the whole group into a very core experience of loneliness/unworthiness related to the (possibly false) nature of individual identity, and all of our various brilliant defense mechanisms against facing the subjective experience of such. But in the willingness to go there together, we both saw truth, liberation, and love shine forth.

Perhaps even those are dream stuff, and in a few more emails we’ll be exploring the nature of non-being…

With love, Jordan