14. A Safe Social Space: The Group Chat

14. A Safe Social Space: The Group Chat

What it is

Between regular meetings and intensive sessions, a shared chat for program participants is at work — an asynchronous safe space governed by the same core principles as the live sessions: a clear shared purpose, honesty, nonviolence.

In the chat, participants can:

• share what they are currently experiencing;

• ask facilitators questions;

• get support as they apply the practices in everyday life;

• continue their reflection between meetings;

• support one another.

The same prohibitions hold as in a live group: no giving advice, no “treating,” no “teaching,” no addressing specific participants with criticism or directive messages. The chat is not a “messenger conversation” in the ordinary sense. It is a continuation of the space of FSF, only in asynchronous form.

Why the chat is a necessary part of the program, not a nice add-on

At first glance, the chat may look like a “bonus” to the live meetings — a kind of technical accompaniment. In reality it serves several critically important functions, and without them the effect of the program is significantly weakened.

Function one. Keeping the channels open between meetings. To borrow Levin’s terminology, the group’s shared space can be compared to a field in which participants have open “gap-junction contacts” — connections through which states are transmitted. Between meetings, these contacts can “close”: each person returns to their usual environment, to their habitual defensive patterns. The chat keeps the channels open — even with no live session under way, the shared space of the group goes on existing.

Function two. Asynchronous reflection at one’s own pace. Not everyone processes experience at the same speed. Some are ready to share right after a session; others need several hours or days. A live session has a time limit, and some people never get a “slot” to express themselves. The chat removes that limit: each person can express what has ripened, when it has ripened, in whatever amount is needed.

Function three. Active generation through the written form. This is one of the strongest arguments in favor of the written format. We have already discussed the large multi-arm study by Kaveladze et al. (Nature Human Behaviour, 2026): in the contexts studied, active first-person generation tends to outperform the passive receipt of information¹. Written reflection is active generation in its purest form. When you put an experience into words, you:

• translate implicit experience into explicit;

• structure what in your head was a continuous stream;

• create an external trace you can return to;

• trigger an additional mechanism of memory consolidation.

This is the cognitive route Bernard Rimé describes: emotional sharing on its own does not integrate; integration requires cognitive processing². The written form supplies it by its very design.

Function four. Access to the facilitators. In the chat, participants can ask facilitators questions and receive clarifications, support, and adjustments to their practice. This lowers the “activation energy” for applying the practices in real life — the most common reason that even well-trained people stop practicing.

Function five. Extending the horizontal channel beyond a single group. If you have your own small group, the chat also brings you into contact with other participants in the program — and this widens the community’s “cognitive light cone.” You see how others handle situations both like and unlike your own, you learn new facets of the practice, and you discover in yourself things that, without these signals, would have gone unnoticed.

What confirms the effectiveness of the chat

In our data on the Opendialogue.space platform (more than 9,900 registered users at the time of writing), an interesting pattern is visible: the level of activity in the chat is associated with the depth of change in participants. Those who write reflections regularly — even short ones — show more durable improvements on the scales of quality of life, anxiety, depression, and exhaustion than those who confine themselves to live sessions alone. This is consistent with the Kaveladze et al. principle that what a person actively generates is better integrated — though the pattern is correlational, and it may simply be that more engaged participants both write more and benefit more.

The platform also includes a number of elements that support this regularity: an event calendar, a reflection feed, an individual profile, weekly assignments, gamification elements, and analysis of emotional tone through automated text processing³. These are not “technological decorations”; they are tools that lower the threshold for entering the practice and help sustain it.

A metaphor

The chat is the mycelium between the trees. In a forest the trees look as if they stand alone, but underground their roots are linked through a fungal network — the mycelium, which passes water, nutrients, and alarm signals from one to another. Without this underground network, a forest would be merely a cluster of solitary trees; with it, it becomes a single living organism. The chat performs the same function for an FSF group: an invisible, constantly working network that sustains the connectedness of the shared space.