AGPA
Posts related to the American Group Psychotherapy Association
Twitter Responses
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 03/06/2011 - 15:30@EricTTung #swct #sxsw @MatthewBrowning #agpa @dr_bob @GroupTherapyCal @gracesonia @nachc #fqhc @RicDragon @2ndot #beerup @dinothinks
This morning, I received an email from Postling listing people that mention me or responded to something I’ve written on social media sites. Instead of responding to different people individually, I thought I would respond to several of them here.
First, there are the Follow Friday messages and replies. Shoutouts to @EricTTung @HarpethRising @MatthewBrowning @DME1661 @Jordanfenster, and @NewHavenRentry
Then, there was my Hashable invite. I’ve signed up, added friends to my inner circle, but so far, it hasn’t clicked for me.
@EricTTung asked me and some others about some good social media based conferences. @TedRubin responded highlighting ‘#SXSW, Mashable Connect 2011, DigidaySocial, #BWE’. There is a good discussion on Quora about this.
Hopefully, Social Web Week Connecticut will be a good local event this year. Planning is starting to get underway
On Saturday morning, I was at the American Group Psychotherapy Association conference where I participated in a panel with @dr_bob. We tweeted parts of it, and it was great to meet @GroupTherapyCal
@gracesonia, who I met through the National Association of Community Health Centers (@nachc) which deals with Federally Qualified Health Centers, #fqhc asked what #agpa was. Grace, it is the American Group Psychotherapy Association, which is a great group. I was surprised not to see overlap between AGPA and NACHC. That’s something to explore.
After the panel I was on ended, I headed up to the Cloisters with @dr_bob where I checked in on Foursquare. @RicDragon commented that it was a nice place to be on a Saturday, and I agree. I hope to post some pictures soon.
Two final Twitter replies. @2ndot comment about what a great time the #beerup at Eli Cannon’s in Middletown was. It was great. I was glad to see many friends there. During the #beerup, I mentioned to various people some of my cider brewing activities. I get many of my supplies at Maltose Express in Monroe. They just had some special event and @dinothinks ousted me as mayor of Maltose. I don’t expect to challenge him for the mayorship until next fall when cider brewing season rolls around.
So, that catches me up on my replies to various friends on social media and helps provide a glimpse into different aspects of my life.
#ff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/04/2011 - 07:37@harpethrising @dme1661 @newhavenreentry @emacartney @yougottacall @jordanfenster @sparkenergyCT @EricTTung #agpa @dr_bob @drcdrury #beerup @joecascio @cherylbudge
Okay, its a kind of scrambled Follow Friday. Starting off the list is Harpeth Rising, a really great band that I’ve been following for a while. They recently followed me, so it is a good time to mention them again.
Next is @dme1661. I know David from other circles, and while he is new to Twitter and hasn’t tweeted anything yet, I expect his tweets will be interesting.
@newhavenreentry also also just followed me. This is a city initiative ‘to help formerly incarcerated residents reintegrate into New Haven’. Worth the follow.
@emacartney recently came on to my radar she works for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and has been writing a lot of interesting health care tweets.
I was surprised to get a message that @yougottacall recently followed me. I’ve been friends with Tim from @yougottacall for quite a while, and I thought had been following each other for quite a while. Anyway, it is time for another shout out to Tim.
@jordanfenster writes for the New Haven Register. We’ve recently had some good discussions about social media and kids. It will be interesting to see what else he has to say.
@sparkenergyCT recently followed me. If something that sounds a bit like a company follows me, like @sparkenergyCT or @YouGottaCall, I’m unlikely to follow them unless I have some sort of relationship with the company or people in it. At first, I did not recognize @sparkenergyCT, but then I got a message from @EricTTung that he works there and hoped that I would #FF the company, so, here you are Eric.
Next up are @dr_bob and @drcdrury. I am supposed to lead a panel early tomorrow morning with @dr_bob at the #agpa conference. @drcdrury was supposed to be on the panel as well, but unfortunately can’t make it. See AGPA 223 for more details.
I had hoped to make it to the whole conference, but that fell through so I’m just going Saturday morning. This means that I will be in Middletown this afternoon, so I hope to stop by for #beerup with @joecascio @cherylbudge and other CT Twitter friends.
That’s it for today’s #FF.
Self
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 12:52Yesterday, I posted a Wordless Wednesday image which I left untitled and invited people to share their thoughts on. Today, I’ll explain it a little bit more.
First, I should talk about Wordless Wednesday. It is an old Internet meme. Every Wednesday, people post images, typically with no words or a minimum of words. Wordless Wednesday participants visit each others blogs and share comments and links. It is an important way of being part of a blogging community.
My blog is decidedly eclectic. I write about politics, technology, psychology, media, marketing, what’s happening here in Connecticut, and anything else that captures my imagination. For me, it is important not to be a niche blogger, but to be a connector. I want to get people coming to my blog for one reason to stop and spend a little time and perhaps read about a topic they don’t normally pay attention to. Wordless Wednesday is a great way to do this.
The image, ‘Self’, ties a lot of this together. It is an image I created with Graphviz. Graphvix is a popular graphing program and my tutorial on using GraphViz continues to be one of the most popular posts I’ve written.
The image is a combination of Graphviz images. Each of the eight larger circles contain an image I created in Graphviz, and Graphviz was used to combine all of them into the one image. The smaller images were created with a PHP script that randomly created connections between 25 nodes in a graph. These smaller images are meant to represent neural networks. In biology, a neural network is the network of connected neurons and are associated with how we perceive and learn things.
This has led to work in artificial neural networks. These are computational models especially well suited towards pattern recognition. I spent a bit of time looking into artificial neural networks back in the 1990s, and it struck me that when you combine various networks with one another, you end up with an ‘internet’ or simply a larger network.
Social networking is all the rage these days. Our social networks are, essentially, networks biological neural networks, or a larger neural network. I don’t find a lot of people thinking about the social networks this way, perhaps because it is a bit too geeky, but I do believe there is importance in thinking about our connections this way.
I explored this idea a bit recently in my blog post The Self at the Intersection of Podcamps and Group Psychotherapy . I quoted a line from one of the keynotes at the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) annual conference in Washington, "The self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks."
I believe it is important to explore our social networks as an extension of our internal neural networks and think about how they are affecting us. How does your blog surfing, email reading, Facebook status, twitter tweeting affect and change who you are?
I felt that a good way to illustrate some of this was to create my Wordless Wednesday image. Each larger circle is a person in a social network. The links between them represent the links they have in their social networks. The images inside of them are their own internal neural networks.
Is your social network changing your internal neural network? Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Or neutral? What are your thoughts about this image now?
Footnote: PodcampCT was a great chance to explore connections in our social network face to face. Today, Wendy from Life With Wendy wrote about her social media experience at PodcampCT. Check it out as you think about further explorations into your social network.
The Self at the Intersection of Podcamps and Group Psychotherapy #PCCT #AGPA
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/17/2010 - 11:42Note: This blog post started as a message to a mailing list of Group Psychotherapists and has been adapted.
Yesterday was PodcampCT, an unconference about podcasting and social media that I helped organize. It was also the fourth anniversary of my first message on Twitter. I spent the day talking with many people, face to face, about the role of social media in their lives. In one of the discussions, I even brought up the line I often quote from one of the keynotes at the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) annual conference in Washington, "The self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks."
It seems to me that there is something important in the idea of thinking about the types of relationships that we have as a result of online social networks. As I write this, I have 1,775 Facebook friends, 3,128 followers on Twitter where I am following 2,910 people. When I have time I try to read at least 300 different blogs a day, and get at least one blog post written each day. The stream of incoming emails is endless and many go unread.
Yes, the self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks, and for me, that is a very busy intersection.
The British Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, has proposed a theoretical limit to the number of people that we can maintain stable social relationships. The work was based on studies of limits to group sizes and Dunbar suggests is based on the size of the neo-cortex. The exact number varies, but is typically presented as around 150, although Dunbar's work does also explore tribes in the 500-2500 member range.
Are my connections online more tribal than an indication of stable social relationship? Or, has online technology given us the ability to maintain multiple groups of stable social relationships? e.g. In writing this message, I'm stepping into the Group Psychotherapy group of stable social relationships after spending yesterday in the Connecticut Social Media
Enthusiasts group of stable social relationships?
What does all of this do to my 'self'. Is it more fractured? Is it richer? Some combination of both? How does this relate to people coming into small therapeutic groups? How are they changing and what is changing about what they bring into a group?
On top of this, what role does machine mediation take place. I was struck by a journal entry where the writer talked about calling people on the phone instead of contacting them via email. Later, in the entry she spoke about how Facebook has produced a new form of relating to people through a machine. This really struck me. Calling someone on a telephone is also relating to them through a machine. Actually, through a collection of machines, and these days, more and more of the machines involved in transmitting the audio signal from one telephone to another are computers.
Last month, there was an interesting article on NPR about functional connectivity MRIs. They are being used to better understand what is going on with autistic children. Instead of measuring the brain size of children, researchers have been focusing on the connections in the brain. The broadcast spoke about how some connections grow and others are pruned away as brains grow, but that process seems to get delayed for children with autism and some other developmental disorders.
What particularly struck me was about how autistic brains do not function as well because of abnormal retained connections all over the place. Does this say something about how we should be managing our social networks? Was the writer of the journal entry who was unsubscribing to many of her mailing lists on to something important?
I have not unsubcribed from many of the mailing lists that I am on, but I am selective about which emails I read and how closely I read them. I still read the Group Psychotherapy list fairly closely, but often with a little bit of a delay. I often simply glance at the title or author of emails on other lists before simply deleting them, and if I find the percentage of interesting emails I'm getting on some list drops below a specific threshhold, I unsubscribe. I have multiple email addresses and go for long periods without checking some of the email accounts.
Yes, I do believe the self exists at the intersection of our internal neural networks and our external social networks. Online social media has made that intersection very busy for many of us. Changes in technology will cause this to continue to evolve and our means of handling this and what it does to our 'selves' need to evolve as well.
Thoughts? Comments?
(Categories: )
Carol: I will remember you
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 10:42
I will remember you
Will you remember me?
Don’t let your life pass you by
Weep not for the memories
In the nineties, I was working as a technology manager for a large international bank. I often found myself flying to Zurich to negotiate technology strategy. New York and Zurich were more than four thousand miles and a six hour flight apart. They were cultures apart. I was working with a group of open source gunslingers committed to Unix and writing their own special programs and I was flying to a very staid Microsoft worshipping community.
To help me better navigate these waters, I hired a management consultant who had her Ph.D is psychoanalysis and specialized in a psychoanalytic understanding of groups, especially as they formed in the workplace. This appealed to my natural curiosity and I learned a lot, not only from our meetings but from so much reading that I did on the subject on the side.
I started reading the work of Wilfred Bion and attending Group Relations conferences where I participated in experiential learning in large groups. I became fascinated with how this worked itself out online.
This led me to joining several mailing lists of people working with groups, including a group psychotherapy mailing list. Many of the people on this list became close friends whom I would meet from time to time.
I often brought up aspects of online groups on the list, including discussing Second Life from time to time. It seems to me as if Second Life and related virtual worlds have the potential to be great platforms for psychodrama. As a general rule, I met opposition on these topics. However, a few people were very interested, and one actually joined Second Life and started exploring the possibilities.
We met in Second Life and explored the possibilities. I introduced her to friends in Second Life with similar interests. Then, at the 2008 American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) Annual Conference, I had the opportunity to meet her face to face and have a wonderful dinner with her talking about not only Second Life and psychotherapy, but many other issues as well. We both participated in the large group at the AGPA and she encouraged my full participation, even though I was a blogger there to write, instead of a group psychotherapist honing their skills.
Then, early this year, there was the bombshell. On January 23rd, Carol checked into St. John's Mercy hospital with severe anemia. A visit to an Oncologist and some bone marrow tests revealed Acute myeloid leukemia (AML). In the message, it was predicted that the treatment would take about eight months.
Look out of any window
any morning, any evening, any day
Maybe the sun is shining
birds are winging or
rain is falling from a heavy sky -
What do you want me to do,
to do for you to see you through?
this is all a dream we dreamed
one afternoon long ago
I wrote my initial reactions in a blog post, The Great Dance back in February, and then again in Random Stuff about a week later. The following month there was a drive to sign up bone marrow donors in Connecticut. I realized that it was unlikely that I would be a match for Carol, or for Manny who the drive was for, but I thought I should sign up in case I could be a match for someone.
It was also during this time that Irv Stolberg died from leukemia. There was a wonderful memorial for Irv where his son singing Ben Harper’s “with my own two hands”.
I can change the world
With my own two hands
Make a better place
With my own two hands
Make a kinder place
In many ways, it seems like Irv and Carol would have been good friends and kindred spirits if they ever met.
Carol eventually found a donor, and we were optimistic. There was progress and there were set backs. In August she was back in the hospital and wrote about Graft Versus Host disease. In September, she wrote about celebrating her 63rd birthday. Then at the beginning of this week came more bad news. The leukemia was back. There were messages on CaringBridge and emails to the Group Psychotherapy mailing list. She was at home with her family and with Hospice. She was fading fast. I wrote some of my reactions on Monday.
I am standing on the edge of the water,
And I am watching the wild birds fill the sky.
And I am longing to be lifted up among them.
I am not dying, I’m getting ready to fly
The words of a great song “Getting Ready to Fly” by Calaveros comes mind. Yesterday, Carol was lifted up among the wild birds and she is flying.
During the final hours as we all waited, Peter Howie posted a wonderful collection of YouTube videos that he had watched as he processed his own anticipatory grief.
He started with Free Hugs Campaign - Official Page (music by Sick Puppies.net ) and moved on through the AMV Final Fantasy - Snow Patrol Run, a clip from Blade Runner, The Last Day On Earth Lyrics- Kate Miller-Heidke and Fortress – Dala.
To this, I add sarah mclachlan - i will remember you and Grateful Dead - Box of Rain - March 24 1986.
As I was thinking about all of this, I found A thousand words writing prompt number thirty-eight. The emptiness, looking out of a window to a box of rain captured many of the feelings I am going through right now.
Today is another beautiful sunny autumn day in Connecticut. I have a lot of work to do, but I need to take time to remember. Carol, I will remember you.
