One View of Mentoring:
Interview with Anne Alonso, PhD, CGP, DFAGPA

The Women in Group Psychotherapy SIG honored Anne Alonso, PhD, CGP, DFAGPA, and named her Woman of the Year at the AGPA Annual Meeting in Boston. On March 1, she received the prestigious A. Clifford Barger Award for Excellence in Mentoring from the Harvard Medical School. This is the first time a faculty member of the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital has won this award. Anne has mentored many people within AGPA. Here she talks with Eleanor Counselman, EdD, CGP, FAGPA, Editor of The Group Circle about the mentoring process.

EC: Do all mentors mentor in the same way? What is your concept of mentoring?
AA: I always start with the relationship. A mentor needs to be generous and excited about her own career and about the person she is mentoring. It means being eager to share the stage, push people forward, advocate for them, and make sure their promotions get through. It’s a relationship that says “You can do more than you think you can do, and I can help you, push you, challenge you.” If you have an alliance in the relationship, you can do all those things.

EC: Are you talking about vision?
AA: Yes, and passion. The mentor has to be passionate in order to inspire. I don’t think it is possible to mentor people who are not also passionate The passions resonate between the two people. If one lacks the passion, then it doesn’t work. That doesn’t mean there isn’t ambivalence; there always is. But you can’t mentor someone who is flat and lacks zest.

EC: Have you found differences between mentoring men and women?
AA: Not really, although I expected to. I have found, however, that the content of what people struggle with is different. Women who are managing motherhood and career demands always feel they are in the wrong place. Men worry about other things. They put it in terms of “I should be earning money. I don’t have the time to do academic things that aren’t moneybound.” 

EC: Did you have a mentor? 
AA: I did, when I was just 16! Sister Victorina, who was a 6-foot-tall Belgian nun. Until that time, I had many loving people in my life but no mentors. This woman came along when I was in high school. I was deathly afraid of her and filled with awe. She was tough! She would say “You have to go to college,” and she got me the applications. I’d try to thank her and she’d say “Pass it on!” That stuck in my mind.

At Massachusetts General Aaron, Aaron Lazare, MD, was a great mentor for me. He was loving and fun. He called me in one day and said “If you don’t publish, I’ll have to fire you, but I’ll show you how to write.” That suited me just fine.

Then a series of friends helped mentor me, including J. Scott Rutan, PhD, CGP, DFAGPA, who was a big mentor at AGPA, and Jackie Zilbach, MD, CGP, who grabbed me by my ambivalence and yanked me forward. I think that’s what mentors do.

EC: When did you begin to mentor people?
AA: In the mid-1960’s, a group of us women wanted to do something to support the civil rights movement but we didn’t dare go to Selma because we had small children at home. I got really embarrassed about just writing an occasional check. So we started a walk-in called Boston Educational Services in the South End. We found the natural leaders in the project, mostly black women, and mentored them. Many of them were able to go on to college, and that was nice to see. That was the first time I remember thinking about the role.

EC: What makes a good mentee?
AA: Having enough fire. Being able to manage receiving. That’s hard in our profession. People in our profession have so organized their anxiety around being helpers and caregivers that we are lousy about receiving. It becomes a point of pride and autonomy.

EC: What about negative feedback and criticism?
AA: I try very hard to remember that positive reinforcers work a lot better than negative. So I try to say “Oh boy, that was terrific.” When I do criticize, I’ll couch it as what more could be done.

Whether a mentee succeeds is not personal for me. If I am hanging my hat on your coming up with a certain paper, and you don’t, that isn’t about me. As a labor organizer, my father expected to get fired, and I learned from him not to take certain things personally. The relationship itself is personal, though.

EC: What gets a mentoring relationship into trouble? Competition
AA: Not competition. I think there is plenty of room for everyone, especially women. I take such pride in them. 

Divergence of interests has sometimes been a problem for me, especially if a mentee goes on to something I don’t have a lot of respect for. The shift in values is hard for me to absorb. For example, a few people I mentored went over to managed care and started restricting payments. I think that is evil; it takes advantage of the poor and needy. But painful outcomes are sometimes part of the mentoring experience.

A mentor needs to be able to let go. At some point the mentee will want to move away, and that’s got to be okay for both. When someone has forged her own path, I try to move a mentoring relationship to a collegial relationship by going to her for help with something. Often that works and I remain friends with people I’ve mentored. Altering the relationship takes at least as much care as building it does.

EC: Can anyone be a mentor? How old do you need to be?
AA: Remember the myth of Mentor? Mentor was half male and half female and a half generation older. That’s probably the right distance. In order to mentor, you need to have some power to open doors, to be able to say “Let me introduce you, let me show you this room….” You put a lot of energy into launching people, and then at some point you need to let go.

This article was published in the April/May 2001 issue of The Group Circle.