Coerced into vulnerability session

[Watdidusay]

My team were brought into a mandatory vulnerability day with HR because of performance issues.

We were sat down and asked to share our most frightening experience. People were sharing stories of traumatic deaths of partners, being beaten nearly to death by violent family, one watched their mother jump out a window.

Everyone was bawling their eyes out.

We were then asked to share each team members best and worst trait, individually. Once again tears flooding. Comments like "maybe you're like this because of your childhood" etc were flying out.

There was no prep for this and no psychological support. Everyone said they felt coerced and are very upset.

Is this normal? We all think there's something wrong here.

I'd phone in sick tomorrow stating mental health issues brought on by session. And suggest others in team do too!

Hoe horrible without any psychology or counciling experience to have to process your own trauma publicly and then also hearing trauma of others? How do they expect to you be feeling as it ended?

That basically sounds abusive @Watdidusay

Or like the worst sessions of my feminist Consciousness Raising group in 1977. But at least I chose to attend that and it wasn’t all tell people you hate them stuff!

Can a group of you compose a short letter to management outlining the negative impact of this pseudo group therapy? Keep it formal and professional - maybe 3 main points. Then request some sort of compensation - maybe you are all given extra 5 days annual leave as recovery time? Or some other kind of compensation for putting you through a frankly highly unprofessional and unnecessary and counter-productive experience.

Nobody HAD to do anything. I'd have refused to participate.

This is a new nonsense and a complete pile of shite.
In my twenty plus years of management, I have never heard of something quite so harrowing. It's all part of the 'bring your total self' to work bollocks. If I had brought my total self to work, I would have been fired years ago.
What they mean is "bring your total acceptable self' to work and to exacerbate the exposure of the unacceptable reality is disgusting.

God no. This is not a thing. How on earth did someone decide a company should start a business doing this then someone actually decided to book them! I'm doing a qualification in therapy. We sometimes do group activities. The sharing of experiences is much more subtle, structured and comes with health warnings. We then have group supervision and our own supervision with someone therapeutically trained. This is so ethically wrong and I'd raise a grievance

I worked in a school that did this.

They were doing it in four groups and the people in the first group warned us about it.

It's horrendously unethical and a really bad idea.

This is not normal or ethical! I agree a collective grievance if possible, or individual if not.

Why on earth did anyone volunteer any information?!

This sounds like something that might have happened in the 1950s not the 2020s. Appalling. I'd call ACAS about this!!

Exactly. If forced to participate, if I couldn't leave or refuse, I'd have made some nonsense up and told everyone else to do the same.

Ring ACAS tomorrow morning.

Was also going to ask if there was some cult involvement in your line of work!

I have never heard of this - and don’t want to! And I’m an Organisation Development and HR specialist. Unethical, dangerous, I could go on.. Defo not normal.

Sorry, what, pardon?

No, that's really not OK.

It's even less OK to hold a 'Vulnerability Day' because of performance issues - is the idea to impose a collective, psychological punishment on under-performing teams until morale and performance improve? I'm no psychologist, but I sense it's not going to work well.

I got forced to do something similar years ago; "mandatory training" (can't remember what label it had, it wasn't a "vulnerability day"; something to do with communication skills, I think).

As well as having to share the worst abuse we'd had in work (significant death threats from a knife-wielding personality-disordered druggie, anyone?), we had to practice pulling threatening and non-threatening faces at each other and christ knows what other shite. The facilitator was from some external agency, had no working experince in my sector and told us that she had previously been a primary school teacher and honestly she spoke to us as though we were naughty primary school children. Teaching us comm skills? Ha bloody ha!

(I actually refused to engage any further at the point that she gave us legally incorrect "information" about self-defense; the sort of info that would put you in court on a charge of GBH).

OP, you have my deepest sympathy. It is very difficult to kick back about mandatory training sessions; to do so runs the risk of being censured at work for failing to complete said mandatory training.

I'd suggest that your entire team goes off sick with stress/distress brought on by this "training" (and I'm not entirely TIC there!)

My experience actually worsened the issues I had over being the victim of threatened violence in the workplace, and ultimately my employer (the NHS! Ha!) ended up paying for me to have private therapy for what ultimately was considered a workplace injury. (Oh they squealed about that, but it was pay and get me back to work quickly - and I was a v. important team member - or I told them I'd be off for many months waiting for an NHS appointment, and would consider a tribunal claim against them).

"The beatings will continue until morale improves"!

It is hard to swerve. It’s particularly prevalent for senior teams, and run by some of the country’s top organisational experts. So everyone is doing it - the boss, the chair, the board, the executive team, senior management. Not sure ACAS are going to care..

Good grief what an awful idea.

OP, bad therapy is worse than no therapy. They shouldn't have done this. It was totally out of order and I'll bet they have zero training in any type of therapy.

WTAF?! I would have refused to participate and told them all that this is beyond inappropriate and then I'd throw my resume online that same day.

That sounds like a truly terrible decision by management, but why didn't the participants just make something up? Or borrow a plot from a book/film/tv series?

That is horrendous.

And I would have told nobody anything about any of my own vulnerabilities!

Speaking as someone who used to work in mental health (NHS) - totally inappropriate, unethical, unnecessary, ineffective, dangerous.

Who was running the session? What qualifications did they have? Who authorised it? What did the risk assessment say? Presumably you weren't informed of any risks ahead of time or given the option not to participate?

Fucking hell.

Because most people aren't really at their best in constructing elaborate fabrications when they're thinking about the worst actual things that have happened to them. It's a lot easier to say "just make something up" than it is to do it, in the moment, when your traumatic shit is already in your head.

Good for you. Unfortunately, lots of people are psychologically damaged in some way leaving them with, amongst other things, a "people pleaser" mentality. Faced with someone in authority telling them to do something, it's highly likely they'll comply, however awful the thing is. It wouldn't necessarily occur to them to lie. That, coupled with the prospect of disciplinary action for not complying and having bills to pay and possibly a family to care for, risking their job by leaving the meeting wouldn't have felt like an option for many. Anyone without knowledge of therapy would be unlikely to realise how dangerous this could be to them, until it was too late.