Invisibility

Sallyann Roth

Family Therapist, Trainer, and Co-Founder of the Public Conversations Project in Watertown, Massachusetts

Interviewed by Julian Portilla, 2003


This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).

In our work we hope that the facilitator becomes invisible and not so focused on. We feel that the more the group gets to feel it's doing its own work, the more powerful it will be, so that's another parallel we want to bring into the training. This means when we collect people's questions we don't expect to answer them. We're not going to change what we do. People will have a different filter to experience whatever happens in the room then they usually have. They'll be filtering it through. "This is what's important to me and this is what I mean by a coach, a coach says to you, gosh you're dragging your right leg, get them even. If the questions are a coach, and your question is how can I bring some of these ideas to my context, in a medical context, for example, and that's your question, then you'll be thinking about that no matter what we're doing.