Group Psychotherapy

Power in Numbers

Your family was your first group, then school, work, and friends.

Some of these relationships helped you grow, you experienced them as sustaining you and encouraging you. Think of the impact of those positive group experiences.

That’s the healing potential of being together and interacting in a group setting with people who have similar goals as yours.

A group is born out of its participants.

Often, people think of group psychotherapy as a place where people share experiences, support each other and where the group leader is the one who will provide guidance. That may be true, but the real power of group psychotherapy lies in the group members’ own life experiences, how they can utilize the space to investigate their own behavioral patterns from a different lens. 

People bring their experiences, their wishes and fears and become more real with each other. Through these interactions they get to know how they relate, how they react, how they reach out, how they withdraw. Because the group members are not your family members, you get to test out new ways of being, and take risks which you might not feel would be possible with someone very close to you.

Groups I have facilitated

I have experience facilitating a number of groups, including a women’s group wishing to develop a better relationship with eating and their bodies. What often happens is that a group eventually ends up taking on a “life of its own”, due to the connections formed between participants’

Our group started out as the participants wishing to develop a better relationship with eating and their bodies. As the group members got to know each other, they discovered how women struggle with negative body image universally. All of our members could relate to negative self-talk about their bodies, the unrealistic image of what they “should” look like, years of dieting in an attempt to control a body that they felt was never quite the right size or shape.