Meetings Under Spell

It began, as these things often do, with a meeting that looked entirely ordinary: chairs pulled into a semi-circle, a lap-top propped up on a chair, a big screen flickering as people joined remotely, a list of cases to get through, someone apologising for being late, someone else needing to leave early.

We were there, at least in name, to think about patients. At first it showed itself only lightly. A comment about a recent incident, a disagreement about how it had been handled, a question about escalation. These are the kinds of exchanges that belong to clinical work: difference, uncertainty, the slow, sometimes painful, effort to understand what has happened. But they did not quite land that way. The responses came quicker, sharper than expected, and soon other voices joined. Not to develop the question but to reposition it. Within minutes the conversation had shifted from what had happened to what this said about us.

Someone claimed the team had failed to protect a vulnerable patient; someone else insisted the real issue was systemic neglect; another asked why this case was being singled out when others were just as serious. Were there racial motivations at play?

The patient slipped out of the centre of the room. And what replaced them is harder to name: maybe a sense that the meeting had now become a place where something had to be proved. No one was presenting evidence but each contribution and comment seemed to carry a second function, a demand to declare where one stood.

It began showing itself in small movements: the use of formulation became a political position, a question became a challenge, a silence became suspicious.

People began speaking not only to be understood but also to avoid being misunderstood. The feeling in the room was heavy.

Someone tried to bring us back: “We’re here to think about this patient” and for a moment it seemed possible.

But another voice asked again why this case was receiving attention when others had not, and another insisted the wider context had to be addressed, and another reminded us of harms that had gone unspoken for years. The meeting filled, not with clarity but with material: examples, comparisons, references to past cases, other teams, other failures. Each one relevant, each one adding something real, and yet something else was moving further and further away.

No single comment could be held long enough to be thought about. Every attempt to stay with one idea summoned another; every effort to name one difficulty was met with another that also needed to be included. Thinking did not stop it simply could not settle. The spinning wheel was at full speed, but the thread was fraying faster than it could be pulled back in.

Bored. Or maybe overwhelmed. I found myself disconnecting and watching the objects in the room: the details on the screen, the clock on the wall, the patient’s name on the notes. Each one moved in and out of meaning.

At one moment the patient was a person we were trying to understand; at the next, they had become evidence of how useless the world is, the risk of failure, of something that should have been done differently. The same happened with everything else: a policy became proof of control, a silence became proof of complicity, a question became proof of allegiance. Nothing stayed simply what it was. Someone said we were misrepresenting what had happened; another replied that the misrepresentation lay elsewhere. Colonisation. That grabbed me back in, not that anyone would have noticed. The word hung in the air, passed back and forth, each person using it to describe what the other was doing. The possibility that multiple lenses might coexist seemed to fall out of reach.

Eventually the emotional temperature shifted. The room was no longer just tense; it became flattened. One colleague said they did not feel able to speak; another said they were afraid of saying the wrong thing; someone else said they were exhausted by these meetings. Cameras went off. Someone left early. Another stayed silent.

Then, briefly, something else appeared: a colleague spoke about how hard the work had been recently, the repeated crises, the sense of carrying too much for too long, the difficulty of knowing where responsibility began and ended. For a moment the room softened. People listened. There was recognition. Something like shared experience became visible. But it did not hold. Another voice returned us to the earlier ground. To structural issues, unresolved matters, the next thing that had to be included and we were back at the beginning. Like Groundhog Day.

By the end, the meeting felt full. Not productive, not resolved, but full of words, positions, references, tensions. I had a headache. I suspect I wasn't the only one.

The patient had disappeared entirely. No real plan had been made. No shared understanding had formed. And yet no one could say that nothing had happened.

Walking away, I found myself thinking about what had failed. Not agreement. Agreement had never been the point. Not even conflict; conflict could be useful.

What failed was something more basic: the group’s capacity to let anything remain symbolic. In a working group, an object (a case, a story, a comment) can carry multiple meanings at once. It can be clinical and political, personal and systemic, emotional and organisational. Groups at their best can approach an object from different angles without collapsing into accusation. That is what allows thinking to deepen. In this meeting, that capacity had disappeared. Everything had become evidence of power and only power. The patient had become a case to prove something; a comment had become a position to defend; a silence had become a statement to interpret.

Power is a necessary lens. But when it becomes the only available language, groups can lose the ability to encounter one another symbolically rather than defensively. Once that happened, the group lost its ability to relate and, therefore, to think. People were willing, but the space could no longer hold more than one meaning at a time.

I should add not all failures of the group take the form of overt conflict. At times, what emerges instead is exhaustion: a loss of energy for engagement, a sense of being unable to speak without being attacked or misunderstood, and a gradual retreat from shared space.

Language may become increasingly formal, performative, or defensive, while more direct, human forms of contact feel unavailable. In such moments, the difficulty is not only that the group cannot contain aggression, but that it cannot sustain the vitality required for thinking together. The risk is not only rupture, but disappearance.

Later, someone told me these meetings always ended up like this. I was not sure that was true, but I understood why it felt that way.

What failed, I think now, was something like the loss of the mirror. Not the benign mirror of Beauty and the Beast: the one that shows the position of the other and could hold multiple truths at once. But the mirror in Snow White, the wicked stepmother’s mirror, the mirror that only ever return a single answer. Mirror, mirror on the wall… In that story, the stepmother cannot use the mirror for reflective insight into how another might experience life; she can only use it to confirm her own fairness. For the Wicked Step Mother, anything the mirror shows that does not match her need to be seen as fair becomes a threat.

That was the feeling in the room. Everyone needed evidence that they were fair, responsible, justified, or on the side of the good. The case, the comments, the silences: none of them could remain symbolic long enough to be thought about. Each became evidence. Each became proof.

Once the group’s mirrors hardened in that way, fixed at a single angle, unable to reflect complexity, the work became impossible. Without a mirror capable of bearing ambiguity (one able to hold more than one perspective at a time), a group cannot think. It can only defend.

And in that state, even the most principled team may find itself unable to do the very thing it came together to do: to look, to see, to reflect, and to think.