Think back to your first group of friends. How did you come to meet and become a group. Was it a similar interest? What did you agree to do? What disagreements did you have? How did you resolve differences of opinion?
At some point most of us heard that we shouldn’t be hanging around someone as he or she has a bad reputation. It is said to us at our earliest days of innocent behavior that there is someone who can have a bad influence on us. It is like the young individual’s first moral statement is, “That’s not fair.” At the group level we learn that people in groups can be good or bad or even neutral. Just like life isn’t fair, the moral awareness comes that all friends are not helpful or indispensable.
One of my significant memories as a father when my children were young was having one son running up onto our deck of our home on the Chesapeake Bay one summer to declare with an enthusiastic voice, “I found a friend!” It was as though he discovered gold.
People often ask on profiles for a job or applications for school, what were some of the groups to which you have belonged and among those which one of those shaped you in a profound way.
A few weeks ago, I heard from a classmate of mine who was in my group at Duke University and Duke University Medical School. He sent me the above photo. It was the first time that Duke was combining an academic component with a clinical experience as a trial run. He sent me a picture of us in one of the conference rooms. He is pictured front right around the table. He was a smart, engaging and caring guy. I am in the center of the horseshoe. When Vicki saw the picture, she said, “Too much hair and too many sideburns.”
The group was made up of folks from all over. I also participated there in a summer program before my senior year at Berkeley at Yale. When I sent my application to Duke for the intensive program, I knew there would be few accepted. I applied to other programs on the West Coast as well. When I was admitted to Duke, Vicki and I were ecstatic. She had left her program as a biology major with many friends and a sorority and joined me for my last semester in New Haven. This admission to Duke’s program meant she could return to North Carolina State University and graduate with her class. After graduation in New Haven, we traveled with a U-Haul to Raleigh/Durham. The following Monday I started at Duke and she started summer school at State to catch up with her class by taking organic chemistry and physics.
I am biased that what made this group experience at Duke such a life formation experience was the level of academic excellence and supervision of counseling. But to take a few words from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s title of her book regarding Lincon’s Administration we were "a team of rivals" who worked together bringing out the best in each other. Note, there is just one woman in the group, Maxine Wallesky. At that time women were just breaking into uncharted realms. In the early 70s Yale began admitting women. Girls entered Episcopal for the first time in 1984. It is true that the first women to break into all male institutions have a pioneer attitude filled with a positive attitude, brilliance, and grit. That was true of Maxine as well.
But think who is missing. There are no people of color in the program. That never crossed my mind then. There were few southern license plates in the parking lot. People there were from other areas of the country with some from the South. Why would you pass up an opportunity to attend UNC or NC State to go to a private university like Duke?
What made my program great was the fact that there were so many diverse perspectives in the group. DEI is not just about race or religion. It’s about how people see things differently from one another. That diversity enriched everyone particularly in our required group therapy meetings. That’s how people of color and those from another social class enrich any program. The value of DEI as I have experienced it could be the most important aspect of my education. Trump has been able to surround himself with “his kind” of people. He has chosen people who are merely an extension of his own ideas and are afraid to cross him because of his power to publicly humiliate them.
There were tears in one intense group therappy session where unhelpful behavior was highlighted so that awareness may change the negative behavior. The group leader was aggressive. My usual response would have been to take him on so that we were competing against one another (and I needed his recommendation to get to the next level.) He called me into his office after one emotional group meeting and said, “You and I are too much alike, too assertive and competitive.” I’ll stop my stuff if you stop yours. It will help the group to flourish. I did and he did, and it changed the dynamic of the group, and I learned something important. I agree with Janis Joplin’s line in one of her songs that “freedom is another word for nothing left to lose.” I couldn’t be a phony for a recommendation from this guy. I didn’t know it then, but I was getting ready for the EA motto, Esse Quam Videri, "to be rather than to seem to be.”
I was always proud of EA kids as well as my own children that when faced with someone with more power than them, they would not give up their authenticity. What you see is what you get. Freedom is just another word for being who you are. That was a lasting lesson built into the program at Duke. That, in essence is what the group work taught. Be real with those people who come to you for help. They will progress in their counseling if that ingredient is present.
I was elected President of my high school class, and I bring together my closest friends from that era from time to time each year for dinner and conversation. I wondered why Iv alued those times now so much. We value who we are after all these years. It takes me back to my working-class roots where I first learned the lesson of being authentic, for my classmates did not suffer fools lightly. Duke just underscored it!
Enjoy the pic! Don’t laugh too hard at the sideburns!
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