NOTES FROM THE BASEMENT: DEVELOPING THERAPIST COMMUNITIES THROUGH COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE GROUPS

There is a wealth of experience within any therapeutic community, but too few opportunities for practitioners to come together to share these knowledges and to co-innovate. This paper describes how a group of practitioners have responded to this dilemma by forming a number of “collaborative practice groups” of front-line workers from multiple agencies who meet on a regular basis to not only exchange ideas, but to practice alongside each other. The paper provides a picture of how these groups were formed, and how they operate. It also includes participant interview data on the impact of the experience of engaging in these collaborative initiatives. For a profession so intently focused on relationship, therapeutic practice can be remarkably isolating. In the heady days of graduate school, cohorts of aspiring therapists collectively examine and discuss their work in countless group settings. Then they disperse. Stepping into a pragmatic world of practice, most have few opportunities to reflect on and dialogue about what they do. Instead, they are taken up with managing caseloads and keeping up with paperwork. Yearly allotted professional development experiences temporarily recapture the energy of graduate school; but without a community of peers with whom to process the training and experiment further, scribbled workshop notes become increasingly opaque, and the learnings fade. Working separately from each other, therapists and counselors can only compare their sometimes uneven practice to the carefully selected success stories of the “master therapists” they have witnessed. The comparison is