Family Group Conferencing will start up in Japan!

Today, Sunday 19 July 2015 at 9.00 AM the third day of the training on Family Group Conferencing took place in Tokyo. I joined the training group of FGC-coordinators which was trained by Hedda.
First we looked back at the role play conference that was done yesterday, and participants were asked to give feedback. It was said that at the conference at first induces many intense feelings for the family group, such as insecurity, frustration, anger, sadness, and it will be really hard to create an atmosphere where it is possible for the family group to deal with that. It is a very big change for Japanese culture. – which is exactly why a good preparation before the Family Group Conference is so important. Also it was said that families of divorced parents are unlikely to be willing to meet and talk together. – but maybe this is possible if all understand that the FGC is for the sake of the children who need both families, and not to please the other party, which also illustrates why it is so important to have an independent FGC-coordinator. Another question was on the private family time and how to break the ice when some persons meet for the first time. – but FGC-experiences show that this happens naturally, there is always someone who starts, someone who will become the chair and someone who will write down the agreements, so “trust the process”. And what to do if the main person pretends he agrees just to get away from the pressure, but doesn’t really mean it. – again this is also a matter of good preparation and inventory of what someone needs to feel safe in the FGC and empowered to speak the truth, and also a wider circle, where many perspectives and many ideas can give a new dimension (not just yes or no). Another interesting question was: What to do when culturally the story is already written: “The person is already broken and will go in and out the hospital for the rest of his life” – but maybe that story can be changed by FGC, after all, FGC is a process of change. And finally: what to do when there is a very dominant person in the family, who will probably be the only one talking? – this will probably come up in the preparatory conversations with the family group members, and then one can ask what would be needed to prevent this, and if there is anybody who could dim the person a bit.

After this round of questions, Hedda elaborated on the role of the coordinator, by explaining that there is a difference between the life world (informal world of families, which is undervalued) and the system world (organizations and institutions, which are overvalued). These 2 worlds do not mix naturally and the role of the coordinator is to bring these worlds together. The independence of the coordinator is again obviously important, because the coordinator should not belong to any of those worlds: not a family member and not a professional, so in the Netherlands the FGC-coordinators are trained citizens, about 700, and they get a contract per Family Group Conference that they organize, and they get paid for that (in the Netherlands the FGC is paid by the local government/ city).

After the coffee break, it was time for the participants to make a choice on whether they wanted to proceed with FGC. The participants formed smaller groups to discuss 3 questions:
1.Is it possible to start FGC in Japan and to work towards the first conference?
2.What should be the first steps / how to start FGC in Japan?
3.What would you need to make a start?
After half an hour the answers were inventoried, and all participants of the coordinator training group said YES, we can and will start FGC. They will set up a network and become coordinators themselves, and had many good ideas on how to make a start, such as by awareness raising, finding good example cases, lobbying, finding key partners, look for a place to start and start the practice. What they needed were things as: to continue what was started here, get resources, ambassadors and organizational structures, connect to the human rights views, study and collect cases and try to achieve a mind change by education on FGC.
Altogether they had made a nice practical plan of how to start.

Then the other group of the referrers training done by Rob also came into the room, and they were less unanimous in their decision, and some were still ambiguous. But altogether there was more of YES than NO or inbetween.

So that meant that the training will continue, and that the Japanese participants are motivated to put the theory into practice, and to set up Family Group Conferencing. This was a very nice moment. An achievement and a milestone, and it gave me a special feeling of happiness. But of course a lot of work remains to be done, so this was not the end, and we continued.

After the lunch break, the training group of coordinators exercised in role plays to learn how to ask helpful questions to the family group members. Coordinators are not social workers, so they aim to stay out of the substance, and not talk about possible solutions or suggestions. They basically only ask open questions such as: What would you need to overcome this obstacle? What would help you to overcome this obstacle? These questions are the same for all persons, but the conversations differ every time, because every situation is unique. This approach also activates the thinking about possibilities by the family group members themselves, which is what FGC is about.

For the Japanese context this was a very special day. The day that the choice was made to set up FGC in Japan.

After the training, I went with a group including Yoshikazu Ikehara (the main organizer of this event), to have a very nice Japanese dinner. It felt like a celebration of the success, and we had a great evening. This was all very positive.

But also I had felt something a bit negative today, which is merely a sidenote.
Personally I feel a bit weird about my role (or rather no role) in this training project. I have no place or influence in the FGC-training programme here. All of this isn’t the biggest problem. But this comes on top of some unpleasant experiences with the Dutch report that is being finalized on the Dutch pilot project of FGC in the Netherlands by researchers from VUMC University (the researchers call me “the spiritual mother of the Eindhoven Model (applying FGC to prevent forced psychiatric interventions)”, but I feel like I lost custody… , and the medical language of VUMC researchers seems to be polluting the final report). I still had faith in the FGC-people, but today, I felt ignored again when I wasn’t given the chance to give some helpful feedback, and combined with having no role or influence, this gave rise to more doubts. I don’t know what this is or where this is going (do I have a voice? am I co-opted? A spectator? Will it be restored or get worse?). All I know is that I feel somehow hurt by this all. I hope my faith in the Dutch relations will be restored.

But if I put these personal Dutch irritations aside, I can say I had a great day in Japan. I am proud that the FGC-project will be started in Japan. And I still think the training was very valuable, even though some parts could have been better, I think this training surely made a positive difference, and the Japanese delegation will develop their own practice of FGC. That is wonderful of course. I’m curious to see it grow. I have enough reasons to be happy here :) It’s time for change!