Palo Alto relationship specialists are sometimes criticized for being very uninterested in the history or background of the facts in a situation for which they
intervene. In fact, we take history into account, but how?
Here we have a situation that presents a survivor syndrome.
What does it mean ? We see a group of victims complaining together about their suffering and because they are suffering, they are resisting the enemies as a whole.
These people talk a lot to each other. They speak of the illegitimacy of the director, of the HR department which turns a deaf ear, and they come to the conclusion that the company is an ungrateful one which does not find an effective solution to their situation (we could even have chosen a slightly more offensive word than ungrateful ). These people, who are not well, suffer, they relieve themselves by talking, and finally they manage to be resisters in the face of the difficulty of the environment; thanks to this way of reacting, they manage to anesthetize their suffering by joining a group of survivors, which is done at a given time. The survivors are, for example, the traumatized American soldiers of the Iraq war who, once returned to the country, form groups of vigilantes on the Mexican border to prevent immigrants from returning to the territory and thus continue to protect their country. .
It is typically a survivor's situation, which we will associate with a symptom of post traumatic stress. The difficulty in this kind of case with this type of syndrome is the presence of this story which was so hard to live with, a story continues to be hard in the present. We therefore relieve ourselves by talking about this difficulty together and the purpose of the group becomes to be good vigilante resistance fighters.
This means that the purpose of the group changes in nature along the way: it is no longer a priority to be a successful team, to produce things, services or other, or to be a team that can bring actions corrective measures in case of difficulty, but it has shifted towards the purpose of being a team of survivors. There will therefore be a new relational norm that is established in the group and it will be very important that our intervention makes it possible to act to change this norm, and to intervene at the level of the suffering itself, which is under underlying all this, suffering often linked, as is the case here, to conflicts and disagreements that we cannot manage. In this situation, Le Chevalier Blanc, believing he is helping, relieving, supporting, will participate in the problem, his action will help us to hold on in the group, and this cement represented by holding on. together will participate in strengthening this standard even more, even if it is very costly for each of them but on which it is very difficult to act on their own.
In the case that Madame described, where support groups have been set up in her company to manage a trauma, it will be important to be vigilant that speech is released as agreed to reduce excessive pressure, to so that people are not too isolated in the face of demands that they set for themselves and which would obviously be difficult to manage on their own, but we must also put a limit on this freedom of speech and frame it to prevent this syndrome from setting up with its history and its landmarks, and thus avoid the formation in certain places of Gallic villages which do more harm than good to everyone and prevent them from being a correct resource for the company
