NOT ALL GROUP PROCESSES LAND IN COHERENCE. And even when they do, not all of them stay there. Many lose it on the way, and some never quite touch it at all. After our group process — the initial one in Alderlore and the ones that followed over the years, as described in
the first article of this mini series of three — we began to notice that the same kinds of traps, diversions, and coping strategies showed up again and again, even among the most skilled and well-intentioned participants.
Before we dive into the juicy parts in this second article around transformational group processes, here is a small recap of the distinction between cohesion and coherence that we found helpful:
Cohesion is more about sticking together. It keeps a group within certain social boundaries. Often, this is wanted and helpful for creating communities around a special topic, practice or place. It can foster a sense of belonging, but also an us inside vs. them outside group dynamic that, in its toxic forms, can even lead to cult-like characteristics. Sometimes it can be suffocating. A group can be cohesive without being coherent; the reverse is true, too.
Coherence, in this context, means something quite different. It’s the quality that emerges when people, ideas, and ways of thinking resonate – like an orchestra in tune. It can’t be forced. It often appears only after moving through real chaos, silence, and letting go of control. Coherence isn’t something you design or impose upfront: it arises through interaction and shared sense-making within the right conditions and constraints.
So let’s dive into where things tend to go wrong.
1. The Authenticity Trap
After the first Alderlore experiments, and as we began to name what really happens in group processes, we started joking: “The authentic self walks into a bar…”
One of the first traps we fell into: we all showed up wanting to be authentic. Despite all the hand-picked, thoughtful, well-intentioned people, each of us is on a quest for the real, and what we got first was the social self.
The social self is the part of us that knows how to behave, how to introduce ourselves, how to be seen as competent, interesting or appropriate. That’s not a bad thing – it’s often just trying to protect something more vulnerable underneath.
In this kind of group process, the distinction between the social self and the authentic self becomes important. The social self carries strategies, roles and learned behaviours that help us navigate the world. It wants to be seen, recognised, and located in terms of status, skill, or role. If we acknowledge that, we can gently park it and allow the authentic self to appear.
What can help here is ritual. It lowers the energy threshold for shifting from one identity to another. Check-ins, talking pieces, familiar openings – these offer a soft landing. They help people arrive and orient, and in some contexts, that’s enough. But when a process aims for something deeper, staying in ritual mode can actually hold it back.
Sometimes, it takes a deliberate disruption to break through what is rehearsed. Complex facilitation techniques – such as not complying with implicit expectations, avoiding pattern entrainment, ensuring requisite levels of ambiguity and uncertainty – are designed not to destabilise for the sake of it, but to create space for something unrehearsed to appear. For some, this is grounding. For others, disorienting. But often it opens a space where different kinds of perception and presence can begin to emerge.
It’s not about having structure or not – it’s about shifting attention to what’s actually happening. When the group can stay with the discomfort of not knowing, something begins to shift. We move from a surface-level politeness, bound by expectations and social performance, to sensing what’s there.
2. The Belonging Trap
In the early stages of a process, another trap lurks, often unnoticed, just behind the joy of meeting like-hearted people: belonging.
“Yay, this is my tribe!”
Belonging is one of the most powerful forces in any group setting. It’s also one of the most subtle. Often, we don’t even realise we’re adjusting ourselves to stay connected. We sense the norms of the space and, without meaning to, we shape-shift to fit in. What’s okay to say, feel, or question?
The need to belong is partly a survival move, especially in unfamiliar or emotionally charged spaces. But when it dominates, it creates a sticky kind of cohesion that can silence the very parts of us that carry insight, difference, or discomfort. Divergent thoughts get softened or withheld. The group begins to generate surface harmony, masking deeper tension. What could be a needs-based cohesion, bound by interest and politeness, can turn out to be a false sense of coherence. Scott M. Peck calls this stage the psydocommunity.
I once sat with a group of sixty people from a spiritual school, all held in a kind of collective paralysis. No one dared point things out or challenge anything. A spiritual label was quickly found to make it palatable: “We are sitting in silence.”
A deeper process needs space for the unsayable. It needs permission to get things wrong, to show up clumsily, to hold complexity without rushing to a conclusion. It needs spaces where belonging doesn’t depend on agreement – where the social self can rest. Where you can speak a difficult truth and still stay in the room. Where clumsiness is met with attention, not correction. Where the desire to be good doesn’t override the need to be real.
Then, a group can begin to sense what’s moving beneath the surface, not just what’s safe to say.
3. The Fixing Trap
Once a group moves past the early politeness stages, the chaos phase begins, what Scott M. Peck aptly calls the “groan zone.” This is where the process starts. This is the moment when I often feel the sudden urge to be somewhere else or start showing early signs of the flu. Good signals: something real starts happening then.
What emerges here can vary. Often, it starts with an urge to fill the space with ideas, models, explanations. Conceptual sparring, think-battles, intellectual downloads. The rule-bound cohesion begins to fizz out. And it doesn’t feel good or right.
That’s when it kicks in: mistaking what’s surfacing for something that needs fixing.
Arguments, confusion, strong emotions – these are often just signs that the process is alive. But the group interprets them as problems to be solved. Someone reaches for clarity. Someone else offers a model. A third suggests a meditation.
These are various moves away from discomfort. But in doing so, the group risks cutting off the energies where something deeper might emerge. Real coherence can only arise if this space is held, not resolved. It helps to let all these moves dissipate, watching them with mild interest but refraining from engaging. Unless… there is a good facilitator (or, God help us, many facilitators?) in the room. Then it gets worse.
4. The Facilitator’s Trap
When the going gets tough, there’s always a moment when someone asks – explicitly or silently – “Can someone get us out of this?” For those of us with facilitation skills, the pull is strong. We know how to hold a process, offer structure and meaning, and soothe tension. And it’s always interesting to see who takes the bait.
The trap is in mistaking arguments or incommensurable approaches for problems that need solving. On the level of the dynamics in the room, a well-meaning mediation (or – not rolling eyes – a meditation) removes the very friction that might be needed to ride that fault line of our conceptual certainties deeper into the process. On a subtler level, it’s patronising.
The same goes for attempts to prematurely steer the group away from the deeper kind of chaos, the kind where tensions beyond the purely intellectual begin to surface. Facilitation at this point usually stems from a lack of recognition that chaos is intrinsic to the emergence of real coherence and a generative group dynamic.
What’s worth noticing here is that facilitation is both wanted and resisted at the same time by the group or single participants, which can be utterly confusing for the person stepping in to save the day. Also, there is no outside to the process. Any facilitator – no matter how skilled – is swimming in the same soup as the rest of us, subject to the same dynamics.
When something deeper is starting to emerge, the most helpful thing may be to stay close, do less, and simmer some more.
5. The Drama Trap
When the process begins to deepen, more confronting layers can start to surface: unresolved tensions, unspoken truths, personal issues, collective trauma. Emotional flare-ups, identity conflicts, or sudden shifts in energy are common. Things get raw.
Faced with rising emotional intensity, groups often reach for whatever coping patterns are available. Some people exit – physically or emotionally, slamming doors. A bit of drama becomes a kind of currency – a way to locate oneself in the storm. Occasionally, the group seeks refuge in a shared spiritual high. Each of these is understandable and each can derail the process.
And yet, many of these eruptions carry something: information, a piece of truth the group needs to feel. Eventually, the charge burns off. Control gives way, and a kind of shared humility settles in. The silence that follows isn’t a technique, but rather more a surrender.
6. The Failure Trap
This one can surface at various points, but it tends to make a final, cheeky appearance just before something starts to gel.
It’s the dreary, familiar feeling that this is not working. Nothing is landing, no one knows what’s going on. Participants begin to give up, the group loses energy. People stop reaching for direction and give up trying to direct the process. A few start to name it: Maybe this time, it just isn’t going to happen. A sense of quiet capitulation settles in, and it seems a good idea to admit defeat, do something else. The resistance to failure is cracking.
This is one of the subtlest traps, because it feels so final. This is not about the usual evocation – often somewhat formulaic – “Trust the process”! It’s staying while realising it’s failing, which makes this trap one of the toughest.
Where the Light Gets In
This is when the tone changes. Authentic selves begin to show up, unguarded. The clarity that sets in doesn’t erase individuality, but the social self has stepped back. A sense of we-being, we-fullness, or we-space becomes tangible.
At this point, the process coheres. Something changes from the inside out. Now, for the first time, new thinking, feeling and sensing become possible. Insights surface or hit us. Bit by bit, we’ve peeled away the overlays of conceptual, emotional and power maps and find ourselves, at last, in real territory. This is why we call it transformational in hindsight.
Overcoming these traps requires at least a minimum of process literacy – the ability to recognise the dynamics at play in group processes, including the different phases and the nature of escape mechanisms. And with literacy, I mean a trained and felt sense through body and mind. It involves not taking oneself too seriously during chaos and understanding that emergence can’t be forced.
The light that comes in through these cracks makes everything worthwhile.
References & Links :
Baeck, Ria (2020): Collective Presencing: An emergent human capacity. Self-Published E-Book.
for a wealth of information and links)
Caspari, Anne. & Schilling, Mushin. (2014): Beziehungsdynamiken, kollektive Transformationsprozesse, „we-space“- ein Vergleich integraler Landkarten und der dazugehörigen Territorien. In: integrale perspektiven 28 – 6/2014
Peck, M. Scott. (1990). The different drum: Community-making and peace. Simon & Schuster.
Pogatschnigg, Ilse M. (2021): The Art of Hosting. Vahlen Verlag.
(Bonnitta was host for several group sessions over the years at her retreat center in Alderlore, Connecticut, USA. Our first encounter was in 2012. Bonnitta hosts Collective Insight Practices for groups who are experimenting with new ways of being)
**This is the second of a series of three essays that Anne will contribute to Emerge over the coming weeks, as part of our exploration of coherence in the context of the Erasmus+ research project Cohere+.
