TORI
I wish to engage a second perspective regarding Trust. To access this perspective, I turn to insights offered many years ago by Jack Gibb (1978)—who was one of Barry Johnson’s mentors. Gibb was one of the founders of the T-Group (Sensitivity Training) movement in North America and offered a program for many years that focused on the formation of trusting relationships. Often offered at the Torrey Pines Golf Club in La Jolla, California, the TORI program consisted of loosely structured group-based explorations of interpersonal relationships. Like the original T-Groups, Gibb’s TORI programs provided a safe environment for open and interactive exploration of one’s true and caring self as related to other people.
Focusing on Trust (T), Openness (O), Realization (R), and Interdependence (I), this intense multi-day (weekend) program was based on the assumption that Trust is a “Process of Discovering” (Gibb, 1978, p. 20):
“To trust with fullness means that I discover and create my own life. The trusting life is an inter-flowing and interweaving of the processes of discovery and creation. These processes have four primary and highly-interrelated elements:
* discovering and creating who I am, tuning into my own uniqueness, being aware of my own essence, trusting me – being who I am. (T)
* discovering and creating ways of opening and revealing myself to myself and to others, disclosing my essence, discovering yours, communing with you – showing me. (0)
* discovering and creating my own paths, flows, and rhythms, creating my emerging and organic nature, and becoming actualizing, or realizing this nature – doing what I want. (R)
* discovering and creating with you our interbeing, the ways we can live together in interdepending community, in freedom and intimacy – being with you. (I)
Use of such words as “discovering” and “creating” may suggest to some that I am talking here of largely cognitive and conscious processes. I do not mean to imply this at all. I am referring to organic, holistic, bodymind, total-person processes that have the quality of an intuitive or instinctive quest about them. Each process is both a discovering and a creating—indistinguishable in fusion.”
In many ways the TORI programs were a “pure” form of the highly unstructured, richly exploratory and often unpredictable workshops conducted when T-Groups were being “invented” during the early 1960s. When reviewing the original book written about T-Groups by Gibb and two of his colleagues (Bradford, Gibb and Benne, 1964) one finds an excitement in the first pages of the book regarding this new kind of training that had just been “invented” or “discovered.” Building on the pioneering social psychological perspectives and practices of Kurt Lewin (Marrow, 1969), the first facilitators of these training groups were learning in real time about how best to provide a safe environment for the exploration of “interpersonal sensitivity.”
In line with Lewin, the original T-Group facilitators were “learning by doing.” They represented the old John Dewey dictum (that became known as “action research”): if you want to truly understand something then give it a kick and see what happens. Try to change something and you will gain a true appreciation for how it really works. Sadly (in many respects), the excitement of new learning and discovery was soon lost in the original T-Group book. They were still doing the kicking (offering a challenging experience to T-Group participants), but they already seemed to “know” how participants would respond to the kick. We find definitive statements after the first chapters about how the T-Groups should be conducted and what can be expected from these groups if they are properly facilitated.
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