A Feelings Experiment Gone Awry

“Turn it off,” he sang, “like a light switch just go click!”

From the Book of Mormon musical, this song was a comedic satire on how missionaries controlled their feelings. The audience erupted in laughter. A week out of Touchy Feely retreat, I cringed in my seat. An hour later at curtain call, I would tearfully push my way through the same boisterous crowd, desperate to get away from the applause that seemed nothing but cruel.

For a formative part of my teenage years, I had been involved in a religious cult that believed in an imminent apocalypse. Through coercion and manipulation, most members eventually learned to switch off emotions and behaviors that were deemed out of line. Well aware that the experience had left a mark on me after leaving the organization, I was nonetheless of the mindset that I would live life as normal.

When I got to the GSB, I was skeptical of the hype around Touchy-Feely, frequently cited as “the most important class” offered and with reported enrollment from over 90% GSB students. Admittedly, the class format reminded me of bible studies that went on for too long. But why not? I thought. Personal growth was why I came to school in the first place.

I was honest in the pre-class survey and explained my background in detail. Unsurprisingly, a professor reached out to me. Before the quarter began, we met for approximately 10 minutes, during which I was told I would under no circumstance be forced to share, and that I would be absolutely fine in the class. I believed those words, and I still believe the professor’s reassurances were sincere. The problem, as I would later find out, was that the T-group experience was an experiment. What happens when you put 14 strangers plus all of their baggage and biases into the same setting for hours on end? Research in this field suggests that stirring the pot can create learning.

It is true. Conflicts in T-group taught me I was capable of drawing boundaries which people respected. Many of my peers who took the class have reported getting better at initiating confrontation, giving constructive feedback, and becoming more self-aware. But others I’ve spoken to have also questioned the validity of the format, especially when difficult emotions were involved. The facilitators, while well-intentioned and trained on some level, were not psychologists equipped to deal with trauma, something most people, if not all, carried. How much force can we stir the pot with before it spills over, or explodes?

I was anxious about the retreat, a mandatory weekend event. The idea of going somewhere with a group of nice strangers and not being allowed to leave reminded me of religious retreats that had been nothing but unpleasant. On Friday night, we wrote down learning goals on large sheets of paper and put them up on the wall. I learned that the professor, the one who had met with me in the beginning of the quarter, would be joining my T-group for the weekend.

Saturday morning came soon enough. I walked into my group’s meeting room on the second floor of the hotel. Perhaps it was too bright and sunny outside; someone had drawn down all the blinds. The handwriting on the wall looked furious in the dim light. My chest tightened. A few hours in, a member in my T-group became emotional talking about how difficult it was to be at the retreat. As people rallied around this person and passed out tissues, a hard lump rose in my throat. I felt the same.

When the session ended, I ran out holding my breath. The setting of the room, the writing on the wall, the push and pull of emotions, and the feeling that I could not escape brought back memories that were too dark to bear. It was the start of many meltdowns. At some point later in the day, in true business school fashion, I found myself sobbing into a friend’s lap at the pool while a concerned group kept pouring me red solo cups of rosé. It seemed sensible, then, to try to leave.

I was informed that the professor would only speak to me in the morning, so after an agonizing evening, I promptly showed up at the designated time with support. Before the door was fully open, the professor had refused the presence of other people. S/he wanted the conversation to only be between the two of us.

I went in. Already in tears, I asked for a glass of water.

I don’t know if you know this, the professor said, after I had seemingly calmed down. I’m a licensed psychologist.

No, I said.

I used to work with veterans, the professor continued, and I think you have PTSD.

I nodded only because I was crying too hard to speak, too fragile to push back on a diagnosis I had not asked for.

In the minutes that followed, I gathered that I could leave, but would be downgraded for not being able to finish the retreat. I was also informed that I was probably incapable of becoming an Arbuckle Fellow because subsequent retreats would likely be similarly triggering.

There is one thing I would like to ask you, the professor added. Don’t tell your T-group the real reason you’re leaving. This is like someone committing suicide and leaving people behind. They’ll have survivor’s guilt, s/he said.

I barely made it through the last week of school. Weeks later, after a few therapy sessions in London, where I was working for the summer, I had a call with a different instructor about the Fellows program. I was surprised I had to brief the instructor on what happened. The instructor then asked to speak to my therapist, to reassure her it was unlikely I would be triggered by the program, and that I could continue on as a fellow. What a curious request, I thought, before saying no.

When I told my therapist about this a week later, she was appalled by the audacity of the ask. You would have been fine though, she added, smiling. I know, I said. I had been feeling a lot better, and although the memories of my experiences were flooding back, I was no longer afraid of them.

But I wasn’t ready to engage with a system that did not know how to care for me. After some distance from the retreat, the injustice of it stung. I reached out to the student life office informing them I didn’t think it was right that I had to face negative consequences for prioritizing my mental health. It suggested that the integrity of the class structure was more important than a person’s wellbeing, a principle that was archaic at best. I was told to speak to the professor myself. But how? To approach someone who had given me an unsolicited diagnosis to talk about fairness was unthinkable. I let it go.

Thankfully, time is a great equalizer.

Now almost a year out and very much recovered, I see Touchy-Feely as a net positive. I made some unexpected friends, dealt with buried demons, and learned to be more open and direct about my feelings. I’m using them as I write this piece. My point remains, however: the class is not built to cater to what it induces. How will it teach us to be more empathetic and inclusive if the class infrastructure itself is not? In a school that preaches authentic leadership, the irony is not lost on me.

“I have spread my dreams under your feet,” the poet William Butler Yeats wrote. His words remind me of the value of higher education; the aspirations students carry; the trust we place in the process of learning. Did we not, too, spread our dreams under the feet of this great institution? And having made ourselves vulnerable to the process, should we not be met with a safety net worthy of the diversity and weight of our past experiences? In the aftermath of the retreat, when I had to find my own plan B to cope, it seemed logical to me that the school should design a better support system around the course.

Yeats must have known how much was at stake.

“Tread softly,” he writes in the poem’s last line, “because you tread on my dreams.”