50 Ways to Leave Your Group

One of the standout moments of my group-analytic training came toward the end. After a seminar session, shortly before the annual graduation, someone had the audacity to suggest I might need to think about something. I remember very little of what was actually said. I remember, with great clarity, what I said to myself on the way out of the door. What did this place think it was? I didn't need this. I had done the years, written the essays, sat in the circle week after week. I was nearly finished. In my own mind, at least, I had already gone.

So I stormed out.

It is a slightly mortifying memory, and one of the most instructive of the whole eight years. After all that time spent learning about groups, on the threshold of qualifying, I did the oldest thing a group member can do. I left the room rather than stay with what was being said.

Fifty ways

In Paul Simon's song, leaving a lover turns out to be the easy part. There are endless ways to do it, and you only need one. The song's charm is its lightness: leaving is a matter of logistics, a new plan and a quick exit.

Group analysis starts from the opposite premise. Leaving is easy. Groups offer countless exits, and most of them do not involve a door. What is difficult is staying: remaining in the room, in body and in mind, with people you did not choose, while something uncomfortable is said about you, or to you, or near you.

I have not counted fifty. I stopped somewhere past twenty, when it became clear that I had done most of them myself. There is only so much one can bear of this type of enquiry. But it seems worth cataloguing them now, because we live in a culture that has become unusually fluent in leaving, and that has borrowed the language of therapy to do it.

Leaving by the door

The obvious ways first.

Dropping out after the third session. Early leaving is rarely timed to disappointment. More often it comes just as the group begins to matter: the first flicker of attachment, the first time someone else's story lands a little too close to your own. The exit is not a verdict that the group is useless. It is a response to the discovery that it might not be.

The email afterwards. Something could not be said in the room, so it is said in writing, usually to the conductor alone. What was a group becomes a pair, and what belonged to everyone becomes private correspondence. The email often contains the most important thing anyone said that week, delivered to the one place the group can't reach it.

Simply not coming back. Ghosting, we call it now. The ending isn't avoided so much as handed over. Someone else has to carry it: the group that sits with the empty chair, wondering, week after week, whether it was something they said. Foulkes understood absence as a communication. The member who stops coming goes on speaking through the space they leave, and the group is left to interpret a message nobody has sent.

Storming out. My own. It has, at least, the dubious merit of being visible. Everyone knows something has happened. What they cannot know is what, because the person who could tell them has left.

Leaving while staying in the room

These are the subtler exits, and in my experience the more consequential ones, because the group cannot see them as leavings. The chair is filled. The person is elsewhere.

Lateness. Every week the group begins without you, and every week it has to make room again. Ten minutes is enough to ensure you never quite arrive at the beginning of anything.

Silence that waits rather than thinks. There is a silence that is full, where something is being taken in. And there is a silence that is simply sitting it out until the time is up.

Becoming the helper. Asking the good questions, drawing others out, noticing who hasn't spoken. It looks like generous participation. It can also be a way of becoming a second conductor, so that you never have to be a member.

Humour. Every hard moment is met with something funny, and the group laughs with relief, and the moment passes. The joke is often brilliant. The feeling it replaces goes unspoken.

Talking about groups instead of being in one. Particularly popular among trainees, therapists and anyone who has read Bion. The group is analysed from a safe theoretical distance, and no one, least of all the speaker, is actually implicated.

The phone face down on the knee. Not looked at. Just there. A small portable elsewhere.

"I'll just listen today." Sometimes true, and sometimes the right thing. Sometimes a quiet announcement that you have decided in advance not to be reached.

The doorknob moment. The important thing, finally said in the last two minutes, when no time is left for anyone to respond. It has been spoken, so it counts. And it cannot be answered, so it is safe.

Bion would have recognised most of these as fight-or-flight in the clothing of participation. The group is still meeting, and the work appears to be happening, but some part of it has quietly left the building.

Leaving by language

This is the newest route out, and the one I find most interesting, because it uses our own words.

"I'm setting a boundary." In group analysis, a boundary is what makes staying possible. The conductor holds the time, the place and the membership on everyone's behalf, what Foulkes called dynamic administration, so that members do not have to protect themselves from one another. The boundary is shared, and it exists for the sake of the relationship. In popular use, a boundary is more often a line drawn by one person in order to leave. It is announced rather than negotiated. It does not hold the relationship; it ends the conversation.

"That's toxic." A word that locates the poison entirely outside. Jung would have called it shadow with a name and an address. What I cannot bear in myself turns up, reliably, in someone else, and once it has been named as toxic there is nothing left to think about. A diagnosis of the other replaces an encounter with them.

"I don't feel safe," when what is meant is I feel uncomfortable. The two are not the same, and treating them as the same has consequences. Morris Nitsun showed that every group carries destructive forces as well as constructive ones, and that a group unable to acknowledge its anti-group cannot really think. A group that must remain comfortable at all times is a group in which nothing much can happen.

"That's not mine to carry." Sometimes true. But in a group, a great deal of what we carry is not ours. That is how a matrix works. Members hold things for one another, feelings resonate from one person to the next, and what one person cannot yet bear is voiced, for a while, by someone else. Declining to carry anything that isn't yours is a way of declining to be in a group at all.

What these words share is that they work like spells. They are said in order to close something rather than open it. In an earlier piece I wrote about institutions describing themselves in language too large for their task. This is the same inflation moving in the other direction, out of the clinic and into ordinary life, where therapeutic language does a job therapy never intended. It makes exit sound like health.

Leaving by institution

Organisations leave too, and they have their own repertoire. The reflective practice group is cancelled because the ward is short-staffed, and then cancelled again. The team that has finally learned to think together is restructured out of existence. A staff survey takes the place of a conversation, and an away day takes the place of a group. Each decision is reasonable on its own terms. Taken together, they amount to an institution quietly leaving the room in which its own difficulties might have been understood.

When leaving is right

To be clear, this essay is not an argument for staying at any cost. For many of the people I work with, survivors of complex trauma and of coercive relationships, learning to leave is a hard-won achievement. The words boundary and unsafe gave them language for things they had been told were not happening. Groups can be harmful. Conductors can fail. A group is not a place anyone is obliged to remain in regardless of what it does to them.

So the question is not whether leaving is good or bad, but what a particular leaving is for. Does it protect me from harm, or protect me from being known? Does this boundary protect the relationship, or protect me from being seen within the relationship?

The difficulty is that, in the moment, these feel identical. Walking out of that supervision session, I would have told you with complete conviction that I was protecting myself from something unreasonable. That is precisely why the question cannot be answered alone. It needs other people, and time, and a frame that holds long enough for the answer to emerge. In other words, it needs a group.

The one way to stay

Winnicott described something he called the survival of the object. We only discover that another person is real, rather than a creature of our own fears and wishes, when they survive what we throw at them, and when we survive what they throw back. The relationship becomes usable precisely because it has been attacked and has not collapsed. But this discovery requires staying. Leave at the first rupture, and you never find out whether the other person would have survived you, or whether you would have survived them. The fantasy remains intact, and so does the fear.

This is why staying is not passive. It is often the hardest thing anyone does in a group: to remain present while being misunderstood, criticised or simply seen more clearly than is comfortable, and to trust that the frame will hold long enough for something to change.

Earl Hopper described a state he called aggregation, in which people remain side by side but insufficiently connected for any real collective work. It is a good description of where fifty ways of leaving might take us: a society of individuals, each well-bounded, each protected, each in contact with no one. Everyone has "boundaries". Nobody is in a group.

The Romans had a god of boundaries, Terminus, who was nothing more than a stone set between two neighbours' fields. Once a year, at the Terminalia, the neighbours met at the stone. Each garlanded his own side of it, they built an altar together, and then they shared a meal. The boundary did not separate them. It was the reason they met.

Coming back

After I stormed out, I rang home. Group had taught me, now almost by reflex, the necessity of another mind when in a heightened state. And so I talked it through, which means I delivered the whole speech again, at speed: I hate this. I hate them. And they hate me.

There was a pause, and then a steady, vaguely amused voice gave me a question I have thought so much about ever since. Which answer do you want me to give?

Three were on offer. That sounds like a nightmare. Come home, and we can watch TV. Or: Maybe it's not what you think it's about. They sound like they wanted to help. Or, more simply: Stop being a twat. Turn around. Go back.

It is hard to stay furious when someone hands you a choice like that.

Looking back, that question did what a good group does. It didn't collude with the exit, and it didn't rush to interpret it or tell me off. It set out the options and handed the choice back to me, so that my leaving became something I had to think about rather than something I had simply done. And all three answers, I realise now, are ones a group gives. Groups comfort, groups interpret, and groups, occasionally and usefully, confront. A culture that offers only the first, come home and protect your peace, is offering half a group.

Even the speech itself, I hate them, and they hate me, belongs here. Winnicott thought hate was not the end of a relationship but part of how it becomes real, provided it can be spoken and survived on both sides.

What I understand now is that storming out was not the opposite of my training. It was part of it. The group had offered me something I could not yet take in, and my leaving was, in its way, the most honest communication I made that term: I am not ready to be known this well. It took the group, and time, and a frame that was still there when I came back, to turn that exit into something that could be thought about.

I still feel the pull. Most of us do. There is always a door, a phone, a joke, a well-chosen word that ends the conversation. There are fifty ways to leave your group, and probably more.

But only one way to stay.

You come back through the door you went out of.

For fairy-tale companions to the groups we stay in and the ones we leave, see my Into the Woods books at Spinning Circle Press.