Walking Each Other Home: Enter the Interpersonal Terrain

The name Entangled Minds refers not only to our inner condition—what I previously described as a dense, living forest of thoughts, sensations, and emotions—but also to the shared terrain we enter through group therapy. Here, a group of up to ten individuals meets regularly to learn about themselves by exploring their relationships with each other—and with me, the therapist. What was inwardly tangled now becomes relationally entangled. In this way, Entangled Minds becomes not just an image of the psyche, but a landscape of the interpersonal field.

As these relational threads accumulate—through ruptures and repairs, silences and missteps, shared laughter or long-held grief—something begins to take shape between us: a culture. Not in the usual sense of norms handed down or imposed, but as a spontaneous, unspoken agreement that arises from sustained presence. A tone. A feel. A collective nervous system.

I’ve come to experience this emergence as a living thing. It cannot be forced or faked. While certain conditions—safety, honesty, consistency—may support it, culture, like mycelium in the soil, grows invisibly at first. Then, one day, it’s there—like a mushroom erupting from the forest floor. Members begin using language born in the group. They stop performing and start relating. Someone risks saying the unsayable—and instead of flinching, the group leans in.

Attempts to engineer or direct this process often backfire. If I assert too much structure, I risk short-circuiting the group’s capacity to self-organise. If I centre myself as an authority, the culture becomes about compliance rather than authenticity. In this sense, the role of the therapist becomes paradoxical: I must hold the space without holding the reins.

I think of myself less as a guide and more as a host. I ensure the room is warm, the time is honoured, and the container is strong. Beyond that, I resist the urge to manage, and instead focus on being deeply present. Some of the most transformative moments I’ve witnessed in group have not come from therapeutic insight or intervention, but from a spontaneous moment of truth—someone staying with their shame, or risking eye contact when everything in them wants to turn away.

This work invites a slow shedding of the ego’s tight grip: the part of us that wants to look good, be right, stay safe. The more we surrender to what’s unfolding—messy, emergent, and real—the more the group becomes a mirror, a crucible, and eventually, a kind of home.

Tracking these micro-shifts in group culture—naming them aloud and inviting reflection—has become one of the most gratifying parts of the work. Rather than treating culture as a fixed goal or ideal, I’ve come to see it as something alive, unfolding between us. It’s not so much taught or learned as it is tended to—gently noticed, nourished, and shaped through our shared presence.

A guiding question I return to again and again is this:
How can I stay sensitive, present, and deeply engaged with the group, while refraining from interfering with the wild, spontaneous aliveness that stirs in the group?