The Difficulty of Protecting Space

In The Twelve Dancing Princesses, a king is troubled by a mystery. Each morning, his twelve daughters appear, their shoes worn through, as though they had danced all night. He locks their doors, posts guards, and sets watchmen to observe them. Yet every attempt fails. No one can explain where they go or what happens after dark.

Eventually, a soldier discovers the truth. Beneath the princesses’ bedroom lies a hidden passage. Each night, they slip through it into an underground world where they are compelled to dance until exhaustion. The problem was never simply one of surveillance or discipline. The space itself could not be contained. There was another reality running beneath it, drawing them away.

Groups of clinical psychologists often gather with the hope of creating something quite simple, and increasingly rare: a space to think. A room where the formulaic ways of doing things can be disrupted, where uncertainty can be tolerated, and where the group can become a living container rather than a site of performance. And yet, the most persistent difficulty I see in NHS settings is not a lack of goodwill, or a lack of skill. It is the difficulty of protecting space itself.

This operates at the most literal level. Therapy rooms disappear. They are repurposed, overbooked, and interrupted. A room that exists one week is unavailable the next. There is no reliable physical container. The message, often unspoken, is that reflective work is provisional. It can be displaced.

Time is no more secure. Reflective practice is scheduled, but easily eroded. Meetings overrun. Clinical pressures intrude. Administrative demands accumulate. The hour that was meant for thinking becomes compressed, hurried, or lost altogether. The group arrives already pulled in multiple directions.

But even where a room is secured and time is protected on paper, something else begins to happen. The group starts to move. People speak quickly, filling the space before it settles. There is a pull towards explanation, towards reassurance, towards demonstrating competence. Silence becomes difficult to bear. Someone rescues it. Someone interprets too soon. Someone shifts the focus. The group begins to dance.

This is the deeper challenge. Not simply intrusion from outside, but a kind of internal restlessness. A difficulty in staying with the task of exploring, of not knowing what will emerge when anxiety rises. In this sense, the reflective space in many clinical settings resembles the predicament of the princesses. From the outside, everything appears in order. The room is booked. The group is convened. The structure is in place. And yet, something in the system draws the participants away from the very activity they have come for.

By the end, the shoes are worn through.

Clinicians leave feeling more tired than when they arrived. The space has been filled, but not held.

Institutions, like the king, often respond by trying to enforce control. More structure. Clearer agendas. Defined outcomes. A list of the right questions to ask. Evidence of productivity. But these responses misunderstand the nature of the problem. Reflective space cannot be secured through surveillance or performance metrics. If anything, these pressures intensify the compulsion to “dance” rather than to think.

The difficulty is that thinking itself requires something quite countercultural. It requires a tolerance for not knowing. For pauses. For unfinished thoughts. For the possibility that what emerges may be uncomfortable, or unproductive in the short term.

In systems organised around efficiency and risk management, this can feel dangerous.

And so the group adapts.

It becomes more active, more verbal, more structured than it needs to be. It begins to produce something that looks like reflection, but functions as its defence. A choreography of competence. A way of staying in motion so as not to encounter what might emerge if things slowed down.

The question then is not simply how to create reflective spaces, but how to protect them from being used in this way.

This is not achieved through stricter boundaries alone, though those matter. It is a relational practice. It depends on the group’s capacity to notice when it is beginning to move too quickly, to fill too much, to resolve too soon. It requires a willingness to pause, even when that pause feels exposing.

At times, it means tolerating a certain kind of awkwardness. A gap in the conversation. A moment where nothing is happening, and yet something is beginning to take shape.

It also requires recognising the wider context. Clinicians are not simply failing to hold reflective space. They are working within systems that often cannot hold them. The pressure to move, to produce, to demonstrate value is real. The underground world is not imaginary. It is built into the conditions of the work.

Which is why protecting space is always precarious.

It is not something that can be established once and then relied upon. It has to be continually re-made. In each session, in each group, in each institutional context, in each community. It is less like building a wall, and more like tending a fire. Something that can easily go out if not attended to.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses reminds us that the problem is not simply that space is invaded. It is that it is difficult to remain within it.

To resist the pull to perform. To resist the pressure to move. To stay, long enough, for something real to emerge. That is the work.