The training experiment that made me leave my job...

This is a weird one.

The final straw that caused me to give in my notice shortly afterwards.

When working in a psychotherapeutic community for children, we were instructed to attend a staff training event. As we arrived at the door, the hundred or so attendees were assessed and sent into one of two rooms. In the room I was sent into, we were ordered to stand facing the wall and not speak to anyone. After ten minutes we were herded into another room where the rest of the attendees (roughly half) were already seated on chairs in rows. The newly-entered group was ordered to sit down on the floor in front of the seated attendees and we proceeded to watch a training video about Jane Elliot’s famous (or infamous) blue-eyed/brown-eyed diversity training experiment which she carried out the day after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. It became clear that those of us on the floor had been separated out from those on the chairs according to our eye colour and were supposedly being treated as second class citizens to understand what it felt like to be black.

Deliberate ordering-about, attempted humiliations, and disrespectful language continued to be directed at those of us on the floor. Three of us decided that we weren’t going to put up with this, so stood up and sat down on normal chairs. The leader of the ‘training’ (who happened to be the head of my community house and thus my line-manager) proceeded to rain verbal assaults down on us, haranguing us about not being team players and insisting that we should submit to accepting the bad treatment for the sake of everyone else and not be disruptive, appealing to everyone else in the room to refuse to support us and join her in condemning us.

I listened with acute interest, fascinated with how clever this was. Leaving aside the intended learning about racism, for me, it was vividly illustrating how the staff at the community controlled the children in their care – attempting to force them to behave via social shaming, appealing to them not to disrupt the group, isolating the disruptors, threatening punishment, implying their judgement was skewed. Given the fact that this organisation styled itself as a ‘psycho-therapeutic’ community based on psychotherapy theories, I assumed that at the end of this exercise we’d launch into a discussion about what we had learned about how it felt to be controlled by the punitive and gaslighting methods exhibited by the facilitators of this experiment, and move into an explorative discussion about how to engage with the children via more psychologically healthy means. I was eagerly expecting this training to turn into something challenging and revelationary.

By this point in my life, I had worked hard to develop strong self-esteem and identity, so when the facilitator yelled at us, her face red with rage, and ordered us to get back down on to the floor, I refused. I had no intention of being coerced into anything, whether through outright aggression or manipulative social pressure. This continued to seem an interesting process that I assumed was going to illustrate what the staff would normally resort to next – physical coercion. (In the real world of racism, physical coercion would likely escalate to extreme violence and the threat of death – but in the world of a children’s home, it would remain at simple physical restraint).

Instead, the three of us got thrown out and told to wait in another room.

Left alone in this other room, the three of us, (two females and one male, one of us mixed-race) discussed what had just happened. We weren’t quite sure. We all assumed that in ten minutes or so, we’d get called back in and we’d then analyse the experiment together including our own resistance and the punitive response to it which resulted in the eventual isolation of us and our removal from the others to prevent our bad attitudes from contaminating them. But then the leader of the training marched into the room, and demanded to know whether we were ready to return to the experiment and resume our positions on the floor. We all said ‘no’ and she responded by looking furious and abruptly ordering us to return to work at our respective houses. Each of our houses were rung ahead to, and informed that it should be recorded in our staff records that we had refused diversity training.

We looked at each other, amazed. She was serious? This exercise wasn’t intended to be a clever means of showing up the subtly emotionally abusive way we treated the most disruptive children in our community, but we were actually expected to submit to the abuse? She had subjected us to that manipulative verbal coercion in a genuine attempt to make us behave as we were supposed to, determined that we’d submit to her.

I lost all respect for my house leader and the community from that moment. If that was how she genuinely tried to control those under her power, then how could I trust her or believe that this community had any sort of clear-sightedness about their own behaviour as regards the children in their care, or the staff that worked for them?