People do change, don’t let anyone tell you differently. I’m in the business of change after all, and from a front row seat I can unequivocally attest that it happens every day. But I can also tell you that some types of growth require a different critical ingredient from what a lone professional can offer in a quiet room. Personal change after all is almost always interpersonal as well, with one dimension mirroring the other’s trajectory. When a person find themselves blocked in old patterns of not only their own functioning, but particularly in how they relate to others, this is where group therapy is the tool of choice.

Individual therapy helps you peel back the obstacles and projections that prevent you from connecting with others, but taking those risks in real-time can still be an incomprehensible leap, like standing at the base of a ladder with a six foot gap up to next handhold. Group therapy however offers a supported process of exposure to connecting with others and perhaps most frighteningly, being seen and known oneself. Group therapy and individual therapy work especially well in tandem, in consonance with the principle that intra- and inter-personal work are two halves of a whole.

The rules of engagement are different in group therapy from normal life. It’s ok to ask people what they think of you. It’s ok to tell them that you want to practice setting boundaries, so you’re about to tell them you don’t want to talk about something, in order to do just that. It’s ok to ask how that landed for them when you said that just now. It’s all on the table! This level of honesty can feel downright thrilling.

While the therapist helps maintain safety and collective goals, members who are asked about the most meaningful part of their experience ultimately point to the impact of the other members. Irvin Yalom, one of my favorite therapist authors and theorists, outlined eleven different factors of change in group therapy (shown in the graphic below.) Almost all of these happen in part if not primarily through interactions with other members.

This list showcases the buffet nature of group, a shifting dynamic redefined by every new constellation of members and what they’re bringing on a given day. As a commonly held apothecary of social healing, these factors exist not just in formal therapy groups but in healthy community holding environments of all kinds.

Group therapy is a particularly nourishing oasis in our culture’s desert of meaningful relating. In the context of our hypermobile culture, Americans have fewer friends and more fractured communities than ever. Particularly in large urban areas like Austin where I practice, this means it can be hard to find your people. Such rootlessness leaves us disconnected, depressed, and nihilistic. The problem needs solutions on many levels, but through group therapy we can reinvoke the grounding nature of deep, authentic relationships.

While recognizing the structural reasons for disconnection, there is also the eternal truth that relationships are also just hard. Other people are wonderful. They are also frustrating, incomprehensible, and pig-headed (not me, of course, just them).

Schopenhauer preferred the company of a series of poodles to other humans (relatable.) He named all of them Atman, Sanskrit for “soul” or “self.” Painting by Eric Drass.

Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher known to be not un-prickly himself, described the inherent difficulty of human relationships with this parable:

One cold winter's day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the need for society which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men's lives, drives them together; but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks once more drive them apart.

(I would not recommend Schopenhauer’s conclusion, which was to limit one’s dealings with others. He was not a happy man.)

Forming relationships as an adult can be especially daunting. There’s both more effort needed to maintain the relationship, and more easy ways to evade it. The idiosyncrasies you find challenging to tolerate can be explored in group, especially if there are certain patterns around who and what trigger your defenses.

Group therapy places us in a microcosm and a laboratory. Through group we find a chance to connect on a deep and truly human level; and when that connection breaks down we can examine the play-by-play of why. Following this breadcrumb trail points us toward understanding and resolving our longstanding patterns of response and withdrawal. Group therapy offers us the gift of rehabilitating the wounded creature within us that craves contact and yet never fails to flinch away when someone come too close. We can learn to stay, to pause, to look into the eyes of the other, and maybe smile.

“But Other People Are Scary”: The Awesomeness of Group Therapy