Tributes and Memories
Remembering Rhetaugh Dumas - April 20, 2008
Where One Met Her : Learning Who One Is
I met Rhetaugh early in my AKRI life - I think we met when we were both on the staff of an Amherst conference in the early 70’s. So I met her at the beginning of my learning how to work, how to understand the framework of group relations, where the learning occurs on the person/role boundary, usually in the context of conference experience. I want to recount an encounter with Rhetaugh which stays in my memory vividly still, because it captures how she taught. I can’t locate the exact context of this encounter – it took place after the conference, I’m sure, and reflects where I thought we had met – the “where” being located somewhere within the person boundary that had a different location in me from the “where” she was carrying of that meeting. I had formed an intense attachment to her in the course of the conference experience. What I felt was something like “I intend to have this person be in my life forever.”
So, operating from that premise, as I recall it now, I had felt some disappointment in a personal exchange, some failure of an expectation I had of her – is how it comes to me now. As we tried to process what had occurred, she said to me something like, “You think a conference relationship is the same as a friendship, and it isn’t.” I was stunned, on the edge of feeling rebuffed, but somehow rescued from that context by being relocated in a very different one. This happened to her frequently, she said, and she had come to understand that her color had a lot to do with it: “the darker and closer to the color of the earth (I am), the more I become “Mother Earth” who is supposed to be “there”, available for the deepest, most personal needs (unconsciously), and not seen or regarded as the person I am.”
This was delivered in a steady, sober, patient but also clearly felt, way. I had never had this kind of conversation ever before in my life. I remember feeling abashed but also suddenly in a much wider realm where hitherto unexpected and unexpressed responses to me now opened up a different domain of exchange. Such delicate and powerful feedback from someone telling you about the experience of being regarded as a stereotype.
Rhetaugh and I went on to have a long intimate relationship through many decades of our lives. I loved her great mind and heart, her amplitude of spirit, her humor, her capacity for joy and for sorrow. She represents for me a superb example of the kind of teaching we have been privileged to receive in group relations work, “the telling of it like it is” that is the core of our work.
Zeb Schachtel
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