The Dinner Table You Never Had
For the past year, I have had the privilege of co-facilitating an ongoing, weekly co-ed therapy group each Tuesday night at Sage Hill Counseling with Blake Blankenbecler. I think it could be said, ‘if you ever want to really get to know someone, facilitate a therapy group with them.’ And so, for the past 8 months, Blake and I have gotten to know one another and the members of this group by sitting at the proverbial dinner table with one another. And in the last several weeks, the group and I have felt the sadness of losing one who sat at the table so well. While I am excited about Blake and Jordan’s new adventures that await them in California, I know I will miss Blake.
Blake, it has been a pleasure to watch you work, to enter into the stories of struggle, loss, joy, and redemption as they unfolded each week. I will miss your honesty, your curiosity, and I will miss our time together striving to improve ourselves as group facilitators.
Below is a post written by Blake Blankenbecler about what it means to be in a therapy group. If you are interested in recreating the dinner table you had or didn’t, please consider contacting me about joining a group. While Blake will no longer co-facilitate the Tuesday PM co-ed process group, the group and its work will continue. I hope Blake’s writing below helps give you an idea of what might be waiting for you if you decide to join!
The Dinner Table You Never Had
Blake Blankenbecler
What was your dinner table like growing up?
Did you and your family sit down to a home cooked meal every night? Was there loud, jovial laughter as everyone dug into Mom’s famous chicken and broccoli casserole? Or was life too busy to all sit down together? You grabbed your plate that your Mom covered in tinfoil to keep warm after you got home from a hard and sweaty practice. Was your Dad present and curious about your day or was he on yet another call with work giving you a sympathetic wave from his office?
Was dinner time a place of love, safety, and belonging where your heart was filled up just as much as your stomach?
Or was dinner time a place of loneliness, sarcasm, and the sound of forks scraping plates?
I learned how to eat fast at our dinner table. The faster we would eat, the sooner dinner would be over. My siblings and I each had to share three things about our day. Once we figured out we could work the system, our responses became shortened to three words about our day. “Tired, busy, good.”
Curiosity was exchanged for sarcasm and there were rarely second servings of kindness and generosity given out.
I remember the day my older brother decided his “assigned seat” at the dinner table was suddenly the seat I’d been sitting in for years. It seems irrelevant thinking about where I sat to eat dinner every night, but I was infuriated that he could just waltz in and take what was mine. My parents responded to this by saying it would be good for me to practice being flexible because things won’t always go my way. I think the blood was boiling over in my gut at that point.
Do you want to know the sad thing?
No one in my family knew I was angry. I’d already become an early master at hiding my emotions. I’m pretty sure I smiled and nodded, not letting out a single peep to voice my opposition to this abrupt change.
I suffered in silence.
I might not have had the words for it then, but some part of me knew that order, routine, and consistency in the little things, like where I sat at our family dinner table, helped me feel safe. My same seat let me know that I had a spot in the world that was reserved just for me. So when that seat suddenly belonged to my brother without any conversations with me, I began questioning if my place in the world really mattered, which inevitably got me to the place of doubting if I mattered.
It’s probably been two decades since that story happened and yet, I’m still talking about it. As I’m writing this, feelings of fear, hurt, sadness, and anger are coming up.
The way a co-ed process group works is to create space for the parts of us that didn’t have a voice or weren’t listened to when we were younger.
Was your anger not allowed to be voiced? Sharing your anger in group then becomes your work.
Was your Dad distant and cold? Someone in group will likely remind you of those qualities in your Dad and you will get to share your experience of that.
Did your siblings gang up on you and mock you? In group, you’ll be invited to share who you’re fearful of mocking and judging you.
Did you suffer in silence like me? The group will confront you about your silence and challenge you to come out of your shell and be fully present with them.
Did you have to take care of your family? Your care taking tendencies will show up in the group and you’ll get to process what’s really going on underneath your urges to make other people okay.
Does the opposite sex bring up all of your trust issues from growing up in a family where Mom was manipulative or Dad was absent? You’ll get to share that and receive feedback about what it’s like to be with you when you’re distrustful.
The gift of co-ed therapy is that group becomes a microcosm of what happens in the outside world. While that may not seem like a gift, especially if your life is defined by broken relationships, drama, and codependent tendencies, you will get to begin putting words to your internal experiences so that the group can encourage you and challenge you to show up with integrity.
You get to both give and receive feedback from men and women.
Where there is codependency and caretaking, you’ll learn to show up with boundaries and limits.
Where there is fear and hiding, you’ll learn to voice those fears and not live in shame.
Where there is rage and manipulation, you’ll learn to ask for what you need.
Where there are toxic relationships, you’ll learn earlier what relationships are safe and what relationships are not.
Group becomes the dinner table you never had when you were younger. You are loved, pursued, challenged, cared for, and invited to bring the fullest you to the table.