APPCIOS Community Meeting

Emma Higgs and Jenny Sprince are facilitating a Community Meeting once a term - open to all members of the Community Site. 

We schedule our meetings for Sunday mornings between 10.00am and 11.30am.   

This is a chance to ask questions, compare notes, and influence what APPCIOS can provide for its members.  

Here's the link to our Zoom Room.

We do hope you will come - we look forward to seeing you. 

Here's what we wrote about the APPCIOS Community Meeting held on Sunday May 10th,  2026

The meeting brought together a rich and fruitful mix of perspectives and experiences from members with different backgrounds.  

We talked about the challenge of thinking through difficult and complex issues, without resorting to denial and avoidance;  and reflected on the tendency to split into exclusive, polarised groups in the face of so many huge societal and global anxieties.   We recognised how people withdraw for protection into what they feel to be a like-minded group - and their need to project their anxieties and their feelings of exclusion into others.  We acknowledged how often such projections are the consequence of unprocessed personal and generational trauma.  

We discussed examples of how members can encounter prejudice and racism with thoughtfulness and compassion, and without responding to provocation;  and how understanding the anxieties of other groups can support us in preserving our thinking or standing our ground without causing conflict.

We acknowledged that this temporary group also provides a place of safety that may exclude others;  but that it is defined by a commitment to thinking together,  processing trauma, and exploring nuance.  These are values we can attempt to sustain and maintain in other contexts, whether or not we come together in the same configuration in future Community Meetings. 

Here's what Jenny and Emma wrote about the first APPCIOS Community Meeting, held in September of 2025.

In our roles as CEO and Deputy CEO, we co-facilitated the first APPCIOS Community Meeting on Sunday 28th September 2025.  We weren’t sure how many people would want to give up their time on a Sunday morning, and we were very pleased that such a representative cross-section of our Psychodynamic Thinking Community attended. 

We were glad that the conversation did not avoid the rage that we all can find overwhelming at times - our own and other people’s - in response to world and societal events;  and that the group tried to make sense of how to process this rage usefully.  Personally, and perhaps most of all, we were grateful that the group did some thinking on our behalf about the nature of good and helpful leadership, at a time when political leadership is so prone to avoidance, deceit and manipulation.  As the joint leaders of APPCIOS, we rely on you all to help us to build and maintain a community that will support us and all our members in continuing to think in the face of fear, anxiety, toxicity and narcissism;  and to preserve compassionate humanity on our own behalf and on behalf of others.