Group Therapy
FAQ'sWhy Group therapy?
How do we best expand our connection with life? the easiest way is simply to expand our capacity to connect deeply and openly with other people. After all, people are our most satisfying points of connecting with life.
Outside of specializing our skills in our chosen professions, the greatest influencer of our success, happiness and satisfaction looks to be our ability to relate effectively to others, to negotiate needs, to care for and be cared for, to build solid community and sense of deep belonging. Yes, the most useful and satisfying skills we can possess that determine our levels of happiness and success is our capacity to love and connect with others. All of these skills are developed within my Group therapy work.
The intention of group therapy is to provide members with an opportunity to face and expand how they meet themselves, their relationships and life as a whole. To see and face the many dimensions of who they are, and how they show up in themselves, with others and in life.
As a microcosm or miniature fractal of life, Group therapy provides an opportunity and the support to grow and heal our relationships and ourselves through understanding how we are relating to the world via understanding how we are relating in the group. In group we learn where we have overlooked our strengths, to realise and face the parts of ourselves we protect the world from seeing, and to learn how to blossom into the best we can be.
What does Group therapy look like?
Group therapy involves meeting for 2 hours fortnightly with 7 to 9 other people. Group commences with a quick check-in where members offer and distill their present experience and share what is lingering with them from their lives that they may need to share.
I then facilitate and tease out the needs from the members and facilitate the group to move deeply into dialog about these needs and their experiences of each other’s needs, whilst inviting members into bespoke experiments, supporting them to meet their needs in themselves and within the group. Feedback is a strong part of group and sharing how one experiences another is a skill developed and facilitated so members feel both safe to give and receive feedback whilst ensuring the feedback provides an opportunity to grow for each member.
Who does it help – is it for the whole family or just individuals?
Group therapy is for individuals looking to understand why they do the things that don’t serve them, whilst providing the space to resolve and heal from these patterns and grow into new ways of being and relating. Group therapy works well for people struggling with intimacy, people who want to improve personal, family and work relationships, people who are looking to build self-awareness and emotional intelligence, people looking to change how they are being in their life in any kind of way.
Can more than one person from the family go to the group – which works better?
Group is intended to provide individuals with a space outside of their lives context, where they tend to replicate the same dynamics that unfold within their lives. As such group therapy is not ideal for several family members to be a part of the same group.
If just one person in a family is willing to do the work – how does this work – will there be benefits
If just one person in a family is willing to do the work will my family change?
Families operate as systems. In any instance where one aspect of a system changes, the entire system changes.
Relationships are reciprocal and circular, not linear. Which means that behavior is typically co-created within a couple or within a family, so by changing my own response, the others response also changes; For instance, when a loving and committed wife is upset that her husband is absent emotionally, she often comes to me with the goal of having her husband become more available. Through working together we typically uncover the unconscious needs she has placed on the husband; through processing these needs and finding a way to satisfy them within herself, she is subtly different with her husband, who now unconsciously responds differently towards her. She shares that her husband isn’t sure what’s changed but he feels more able to be closer with her.
By working through our own experiences and feelings, we untangle the unwanted co-creations within our relationships, bringing about deeper satisfaction and harmony.
Best case scenario for outcomes – What to expect?
Healing therapeutically is a beautiful and organic journey, unique in every way to the person going through it.
Through my work, I have witnessed people move from uncontrollable rage into being able to hold and use their anger constructively, I’ve watched people addicted in all sorts of way become self-regulated and able to happily abstain, I’ve witnessed parents find their closeness once again and share that their children had become calmer and happier, and I’ve witnessed people move into deeper capacity to be present with themselves and their loved ones.
Healing and untangling from our hang ups requires us to understand what influences us and has influenced us , where we have taken on beliefs without thinking them through and what needs we have that we were not aware of; through this process we begin to untangle from our family system and begin to strengthen in who we really are, not who rather than being who we have needed to be to belong to our family system. There is often an experience of separating from family and friends in this process, only to come back together in new ways as a new person.