Introduction
We’re not just co-leading groups, we’re also rehearsing new ways of being with each other. A partnership in and of development.
The Lukes Build Partnership(s) and Groups
In the ongoing work/play I build with Luke Scaros as co-leads of a monthly social therapeutic group titled Have Feelings?, we’ve discovered something powerful: the intellectual and emotional depth of and improvisational development of our partnership. Our partnership is an activity and an offer we are grateful for and one we wish to give to our groups and all with whom we work, play, live, and love.
Our partnership didn’t start off with a formula. We started off showing up, sharing who we are and are becoming, experimenting, asking questions, making mistakes, and, most importantly, trusting that building together was more important than knowing ahead of time. This is social therapeutics in practice: growing not just ourselves, but our partnership, in relationship with ourselves and with others.
Over the months, something shifted. A kind of intuneness developed. Luke and I found ourselves saying what the other was thinking. Offering nudges at just the right time. Picking up cues without needing to script them. Like any good improv ensemble, our closeness offstage made the performances in our group spaces more alive and more keen to spark development.
One significant activity of growth for us is a movement from principally thinking it out to feeling it out. We’ve both spent a lot of time in the realm of ideas, celebrated for and limited to our cognitive and lingustic skills, but our growth has come not just via these intellectual and verbal offers. Indeed, our partnership has blossomed through emotional honesty. It’s one thing to guide others into building groups in our work; it’s another to step into it ourselves. And yet, every time we do, our groups deepen. Every time we take that risk, someone else steps forward too.
Invitations to Build (with) Our Partnership
We want(ed) to share this post not just as reflection, but also as an invitation. Come improvise with us. Come be unsure, open, messy, honest. Whether it’s your first time or your fiftieth, there’s space here for what you bring and for what we’ll become together.
These comments energed from a recent video Luke and I made about our partnership and our development as co-leads of social therapeutic groups. Check it out here to get to know us (more) (differently).
Join us on the final Tuesday of each month, from 4–5:30pm ET, in our ongoing free “Have Feelings?” group held on Zoom. You’ll find people willing to build something together—even (and especially) when we don’t know what it will become.
