After Reading Group: How One Therapist and a Group of Strangers Saved My Life

I don’t remember why I chose this book. I think it came up as a suggested read when I was browsing books on Amazon. The part about “changed my life” was the hook as well as the key word “group”. Pam Cordano has been teaching me that life is not about “I” as much as it is about “we”, and as someone firmly committed to the “I” camp, as someone who has worked hard to establish a sense of “I” her whole life, the idea of moving on to “we” before my “I” feels fully formed seems…

Insane.

And yet, insanity is often where the really good stuff is. 

If “we” is where you felt like an outsider in the past, in your family, your school, your group of friends, your community, it can be compelling to build a fortress of I and make that your main groove. Me City. Me World. Me Universe. But we all know what happens when you breathe your own air for too long.

You croak.

Dead as an unblinking, unseeing eye.  

Other people can be terrifying, especially if you use how they see you to figure out how you see yourself. 

I got the Audible version of Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life and proceeded to listen to it while I was feeding the chickens, while I was weeding the walkway, while I was stretching on my yoga mat, while I was in bed, refreshing the sleep timer to yet another thirty minutes of reading time again and again.  

This is what I heard: being with others and being yourself the same time brings you to a life that feels real. Dare I say it? What I heard was that if I am myself with others, I will get the life of my dreams. The narrator and author Christie Tate is like a person who takes you into their house and shows you every dark and light corner with a furious, often funny intensity that makes you just as interested in her light switches as she is. 

What she wants is love, a husband. What she gets is…

Well, despite yelling and acting like a, like a, like a person in front of her group members for years, she gets the love of and for her therapist and the group members. 

And then she gets heartbreak after heartbreak out in the dating world. She gets hurt, both in and out of group. She gets all Velveteen Rabbit on her self, her heart, and then comes the happily ever after. 

Group is so satisfying because it makes the heroic available to everyone: all you have to do to scale the mountain of impossible is be yourself. I’m doing my own version of group with Pam Cordano and a bunch of adopted people, and I have the sense we’re doing ground-breaking work together. I have the sense that adoptees have historically existed as “I”, and yet here we are, we-ing it, and all these really hard feelings are coming up, and there we are, united, facing them, overwhelmed and yet staying, over and over and over again. We are learning as a group to tolerate what once felt impossible.

At the end of Group, Christie thanked Lidia Yuknavitch and said she would not have been able to write this book without her. All things are delicately interconnected. I’m not sure I would have been able to write my book if Lidia, back when we both were in graduate school at the University of Oregon hadn’t told be about the wonders of white space between paragraphs, about how the space carries mystery and its own story. 

It’s connection that brings us to life. A spider knows this, lives out the stringing together, making a web of being in order to catch what feeds it. 

It means something to me that a book I loved was brought into being in part by a person I love. Why? Who cares. Why question meaning? It feels so good in the guts, the bones, the feet. 

I have noticed in the classes that I teach that it takes some work to get people to name what really, really means something to them. These things can get buried, hidden either because we think they are out of reach or trivial or stupid. It’s so scary to openly want something. What if we openly don’t get it? What if we get it and it turns out to be the wrong thing? What if we look ridiculous for wanting it? What if we are supposed to want something bigger, something worthwhile? 

 What if it isn’t really a big house and a Lexus that you want? What if what you really want is peace of mind? What are you going to do? You’ve worked yourself into a corner: your stressful job, the bills you need to meet each month. It’s not like you can just drop it all and move to Costa Rica.

Right? 

Wouldn’t that be a terrible life? Sitting with some friends around a table you built with your own hands and some leftover wood? Eating beans and rice and some greens you grew out back? Wouldn’t that be awful, laughing and crying over the events of the day, listening, talking, taking all the time in the world to chew your food because there was nowhere else you wanted to be? 

Someday COVID will be over. Someday we will be able to gather again, and this time of enforced I-ness will come to an end and we will be able to more freely choose what we would like to do next. 

The other day I saw a woman right after she had received her first COVID vaccine. Her face was luminous. “I finally feel hope,” she said. “There will come a time when I see you that we can hug.” I’d known her for a year and had never hugged her hello or goodbye. I liked her quite a lot and it felt so weird to not cement a friendship with physical contact. Not even a fist bump! 

Hugging is the best. It’s the cementing of we.

Soon.