Belonging · Becoming · Engaging:
Finding Your Place in a World on Edge

Flagship Group Program

The problem BBE addresses

Everyone I talk to agrees that our community, nation, and the world is on a razors edge. And most of us are overwhelmed and do not know how to engage. Our self-judgments include that we have “low” political energy, that we are just not cut out to be an activist, or simply do not know what we can do. In a BBE group we explore this without judgment. We recognize that each person has unique sensitivities and capacities and cannot fit any cookie cutter mold of activism. What we are finding is that each one of us has something unique to bring into our families, neighborhoods, workplace, and maybe our communities. We do not predetermine this but explore it, which leads to new discoveries.

Those who have already found a path to community leadership and activism face different challenges. Too often we’re expected to restrict emotional expression in public roles, creating what research participants describe as an “ambivalent relationship to emotion itself.” We navigate organizational conflicts while managing our own political energy. We work across ideological differences without spaces to explore our own emotional responses to these encounters. This too often leads to the experience of isolation and burnout—too few people heroically doing too much work.

In BBE groups, we make room to explore the price of leadership and activism. We explore the emotions involved that activate our experience of belonging. This strengthens our faith in ourselves, in our relations, and in our faith in our contribution. As a result, we become more capable citizens, more emotionally intelligent people.

Psychotherapists have a unique opportunity to extend their work by training as psychocultural practitioners — exploring the strengths and limitations of their existing clinical skills, including group skills. Also, therapists will have the opportunity to explore their values, ideological identifications and deepen their understanding of how emotions operate not just in families, but in groups and communities. It’s a natural next step toward bringing a psychological consciousness into the wider world.

Those who have experienced traditional psychotherapy have a lived experience of the power of healing attention. With courage and humility, we can harness this potency by bringing it more actively into our relations with one another.

In BBE groups we explore our emotional and communal experience without dividing them. This work is personal, safe, and helps us find the natural joy that lives between people caring for one another and their communities.

The Three-Part Structure

Belonging

Groups begin by establishing genuine belonging; not simply “feeling good together” but the deeper experience of being known, accepted and valued for who you are, including your rough and growing edges. Through practices supporting close listening and emotional attunement, we cultivate awareness of opened and closed boundaries in yourself and the group.

When belonging is established, something remarkable happens: we become curious about each other’s differences and how our own limitations might be addressed through relationships with others who have different limitations and strengths. Through our collaboration we become strong together, as is meant to happen.

Shared Becoming

Once belonging is established, groups become curious about what they could collectively accomplish: their shared becoming, their collective development. This isn’t a planned curriculum but an emergent process arising from genuine connection and mutual curiosity.

Groups examine the strengths and limitations of their own and others’ political leanings, exploring how different worldviews are shaped over generations. We develop what I call a public emotional intelligence: the ability to use emotional awareness effectively in personal, professional, and civic contexts. We learn to track how deeply issues like climate change affect them and explore this in supportive environments.

Community Engagement

As capacities develop, participants naturally direct their growth toward self-determined forms of community engagement. The group becomes a resource for consultation about life situations, no longer artificially separating private and public experience. We maintain effective boundaries without closing off our personal and shared experience. Members develop confidence in their ability to engage their communities, navigate conflicts productively, and sustain political engagement without burnout.

Who BBE Groups Are For

Current groups bring together individuals who identify as progressive or liberal and who hold diverse professional backgrounds: community leaders and activists, psychotherapists and psychotherapy students, nonprofit managers, organizational development consultants, mediators, academics, and engaged citizens who recognize the integration of healing and justice as essential. We are also open to people who hold different ideological beliefs and see this as part of our own development, becoming open to such differences.

You might be drawn to this work if you sense that your community engagement and personal development are connected but lack spaces to explore this integration. Or if you’re curious about examining your ideological identifications without abandoning your values. Or if you recognize that addressing challenges like climate change requires unprecedented collaboration across the healing-justice divide.

To learn more about how groups are conducted, see Groups and Trainings.