You sit week after week in a circle with strangers. You gotta be kidding me. How is this experience helpful?
1. Installation of Hope. Growth and change are possible. We can move along the continuum from collapse to coping to thriving. Observing the improvement in others provides needed optimism in this course of progress.
2. Self-Acceptance. There is not a feeling or thought we might have that is outside the experience of others. Disclosure of our inner worlds provides a grand reception to the “Welcoming to the Human Race.” This introduction to universality counteracts the tendency toward self-attack and isolation.
3. Correction of One’s Presumptive World. Your first group therapy experience was in your family growing up. In such an environment, you internalized messages about yourself that you have played out in decades of living. Group therapy puts you right back at that family dinner table with the original cast of characters. You get to duke it out once again … but this time with a different outcome. An outcome that will serve you better as you work, love and play.
4. Emotional and Relational Education. Within a live-laboratory of human interaction, group is educational. You get a front-row seat to experiential learning in all the skills you missed out on …. how to identify a feeling, how to put it in words, how to construct and maintain personal boundaries, how to fight constructively, how to form and maintain connection to another, how to be generous in relationship and more importantly, how to receive that generosity back … just for starters.
5. Integration and Solidification of the Self. Groups have a way of taking you right back to that point where you stopped growing and are now stuck emotionally. The unconscious and cut-off parts of the self are revitalized for new development and further maturation. Within the group, these wayward fragments are coralled and given a voice toward the totality of the greater good in the evolving self.
Intrigued? I got a seat for you. Dinner is on the table ready to be served. Call me.
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