Why You Should Try Group Therapy

You should go to group therapy. I currently generally make a living by providing individual therapy and l still urge most people to consider giving some form of group therapy a shot.

Why Try Group Therapy?

• Relationships are necessary for recovery. Isolation is a major contributor to hopelessness and connection is the way out of isolation. Connection facilitates hope and the struggle to cultivate hope is essential to recovery.
• In your everyday life, you interact with non-clinicians on a far more regular basis than you meet with any kind of professional. Group therapy directly incorporates the interactions between group members to promote a process of positive change, which means everyone gains real experience using non-professional interactions for mutual growth.
• A great deal of folks who pursue some form of therapy discover (or have validated) that in addition to things like depression and anxiety, there are also interpersonal problems which originate and/or exacerbate symptoms of mental health conditions. The treatment for such problems requires meaningful interpersonal practice.
• Process group therapies that focus on relationships have inherent potential gains in helping with emotional regulation (Flores & Porges, 2017), a common interest for people seeking therapy.
• In addition to everyday supportive interactions (which are also essential for recovery and personal growth), group psychotherapy is a distinct form of interaction where the group’s purpose, framework, and leaders are meant to facilitate connection that is uniquely and intentionally productive for treatment, meaning it includes active interventions that facilitate greater vulnerability and risk-taking, emotional richness, and interpersonal feedback.

A Very Brief History of Therapeutic Community

Dating back as early as the 1940s, the field of psychiatry began to treat relationships and community as an essential part of what makes treatment work, and leading hospitals then created and revised their programs with this as a central principle. In technical terms, Skinner (1979) defined the therapeutic milieu as “a scientific structuring of the environment in order to effect behavioral changes and to improve the psychological health and functioning of the individual.” In plain language, milieu therapy is based on the idea that people recover best in a therapeutic community, rather than merely in one-on-one relationships with providers. Although these two-person relationships are meaningful, there is unique power in multi-person relational experiences. Group psychotherapies provide an opportunity to be a part of a therapeutic community outside of a formal treatment programs or hospital.

Process Groups Are Powerhouses of Connection and Growth

Rooted in psychodynamic psychotherapy and different from educational, skills-based, or support groups, process groups are less structured and focus on the here-and-now relationships between group members. As members attend group, get to know each other, and interact as people, they can use the group as a relational playground to observe themselves and others, reflect upon how they form relationships, what works, what doesn’t, etc., and provide real-time feedback to one another (which is quite unusual in most everyday relationships!). This emphasis on unstructured, but contained (a lá Bion, 1961), relational risk-taking and mutual learning is a good dose of therapeutic community within everyday life—it is set apart from other aspects of daily life, but not disconnected from it. The intentional reprieve is safe, but temporary, and seeks to promote richer engagement with life outside of that space.

Typical Process Group Objectives

1. Learn to use relationships (with people other than providers) to promote recovery.
   1. Increase connection and ability to meet one’s needs through developing interpersonal flexibility, “the ability to meet the demands of different situations such that one’s needs are met” (Whittingham, 2024).
2. Use here-and-now interactions with group members to learn about patterns and problems of interest in your life.

Other Kinds of Groups

While this post emphasizes process groups, there are other ways to incorporate some form of group interaction and community into your journey towards relief and positive change, all of which can help reduce isolation, decrease shame and stigma, and cultivate hope.

1. Psychotherapy/Process groups
   1. Facilitator is a professional mental health provider.
   2. Focus on group dynamics and therapeutic process for the group-as-a-whole as well as individual participants.
   3. Established treatment intervention within which there are specific evidence-based group modalities that are shown to promote recovery in treatment.
2. Support groups
   1. Do not require a professional mental health provider. Typically FREE. Examples include:
      1. National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) chapters in practically every county across the United States.
      2. Refuge Recovery, AA, NA
      3. Postpartum Support International (PSI): support groups for a variety of fertility, pregnancy, birth, loss, and postpartum experiences.
   2. Participants support each other and give feedback or suggestions when asked.
   3. Support groups are beneficial to treatment and are often recommended as a supplement to other forms of treatment with a professional.
3. Psychoeducational and/or Skills groups
   1. Facilitator is a professional healthcare or mental health provider.
   2. Focus is on education to increase understanding of oneself and mental health-related experiences and/or on teaching and practicing specific skills for coping or functioning, such as improving effective communication in relationships.
   3. These groups may be a part or form of evidence-based treatment such as a dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) or cognitive processing therapy (CPT) group or informed by clinical research and practice and led by an experienced professional in a specialty subject/issue.

Professional Call to Action

Successful encouragement for more people to try out group psychotherapy and other therapeutic group experiences depends on providers actually providing these services.

So to the professional audience, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, etc., I encourage you to also consider expanding your clinical horizons and explore education and training on group psychotherapy and be a part of building more opportunities for therapeutic community and connection.

To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.

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