Group Therapy
By Mira Williams
Group Therapies
Nine people make their way into a room, each looking tentatively at others. Although each person has met the therapist during a diagnostic interview, no one knows any of the other clients. Some of the people seem reluctant, others enthusiastic. All are willing to follow the therapists recommendation that group therapy might help each of them learn to cope better with their problems. As they sit down and wait for the session to begin, one thinks, Will they really understand me? Another wonders, Do the others have problems like mine? Yet another thinks, Can I stick my neck out with these people?
Group therapy is diversified. Some therapists practice psychodynamic, humanistic, behavior or cognitive therapy. Others use group approaches that are not based on the major psychotherapeutic perspectives. Six features make group therapy an attractive format.
1. Information. Individuals receive information about their problems from either the group leader or the other members of the group.
2. Universality. Mainly individuals develop the sense that they are the only persons who have such frightening and unacceptable impulses. In the group individuals observe that others also feel anguish and suffering.
3. Altruism. Group members support one another with the advice and sympathy and learn that they have something to offer others.
4. Corrective recapitulation of the family group. A therapy group often resembles a family (and, in family therapy, the group is family), with leaders representing parents and other members siblings. In this new family, old wounds can be healed and new, more positive family ties made.
5. Development of social skills. Corrective feedback from peers can modify flaws in individual interpersonal skills. A self-centered individual might see that he is self-centered if five other group members inform him about his self-centeredness; in individual therapy, he may not believe the therapist.
6. Interpersonal learning. The group can serve as a training ground for practicing new behaviors and relationships. For example, a hostile woman might learn that she can get along better with others by not behaving so aggressively.
If you think that you are also having some problems with people communication socially or anything like that, then you should be looking for a group therapy. However, you should know about the therapy before you go so that you could be able to do what is required to solve your problem easily.
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