2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Many of those who are interested in participating in group therapy projects speak of a desire to gain new experience, to learn something new about themselves, without really understanding how it works and how this experience and knowledge can be obtained and applied. I wanted to share my thoughts on the resource that participation in a psychotherapy group provides.
I'm normal
The first thing they get on the group is the discovery that I'm normal. Other members of the group, and therefore other people in the world, may also have similar problems. Often the difficulties or peculiarities of your life seem unique, it can be scary or embarrassing to talk about them out loud. In individual therapy, clients say to themselves and other “normal” people that the world then cuts me off as different or abnormal. In a psychotherapeutic group, it is possible to live the experience of self-acceptance with the whole set of a complex inner world.
Passive acquisition of knowledge and experience
It also happens that some of the group members' experience turns out to be diametrically opposite, or the person has learned to creatively cope with similar life difficulties. Bingo again! In a group, it is possible to learn new experiences simply by observing different ways of handling the same questions. At the same time, you may not even be an active participant in the conversation, unconsciously absorb skills, be surprised to notice that in life outside the group you are trying to rely on these other ways. The ability to adapt creatively returns, learning takes place through mirroring other people's ways and searching for their own based on them. Someone teaches you, and someone you teach, a very beneficial exchange!
Reassessing your social circle
The group helps to become more sensitive to yourself and your environment. You can look at your social connections, relationships with relatives and friends from a new angle, choose and leave in your environment those people who are valuable and resourceful to you, with whom you are interested. The myth that “you have to love people” or “you can find an approach to each person”, which is found in popular articles on psychology, is being destroyed. Sometimes this is not possible, sometimes we can move away and approach and this is also normal.
A sense of belonging and increased self-esteem
Long-term psychological groups give a sense of belonging. Family, class, teenage friends could ignore me, reject, love only from one advantageous side. In the group there is experience and knowledge that I am loved, valuable, important in itself, they remember and wait for me. This is the place where I am one of all on an equal footing. Why only in long-term groups? To live such an experience, stable, permanent, trusting relationships are important, where not only socially approved feelings will be placed, but also anger, aggression, distrust, envy, competition. In the future, it becomes possible to get this experience outside the psychotherapeutic group, find your people, rely on them.
Reflection in different mirrors
An important resource for group therapy, I consider the experience of gaining a sincere interest in yourself and your stories, the opportunity to be noticed and mirrored. Different people show me different sides of my personality. This is a new acquaintance not with the image of oneself, which can live in an old fairy tale or a legend overgrown with moss, but with the personality as a living and dynamic process. Here I can be gentle and kind, but here I can be aggressive and judgmental. I am noticed even when I am silent or absent. I can ask and receive attention.
The above is only a small part of the resource that can be obtained in a group, I tried to highlight the most important and brightest moments in my opinion. I will definitely return to the topic of the group resource in other articles about group psychotherapy!
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