We run groups for teenagers, young adults, and adults.

Westchester Group Therapy prioritizes groups for adolescents in our region, as we know that teenagers often communicate best in a room with their peers, rather than alone with adults. We are eager to support other clinicians by supplementing their individual and family treatment through group intervention. Believing that the guided group therapy approach affirms teenagers’ self esteem and social competencies, we encourage group cohesion and emotionally validating interpersonal interactions at every session. Drawing from DBT and CBT training, we enable teen participants to develop and practice new strategies and skills to manage stress and interpersonal conflict, to improve social skills, stabilize mood difficulties, and regulate behavioral outbursts with family and peers. Applying our orientation toward attachment and family systems, we help young people increase their emotional vocabulary, take social risks, and increase authentic empathetic reactions toward one another and their families and communities. Group members also use our sessions to process recent conflicts and stressors and to obtain peer feedback on problem solving responses to their home and school challenges. In a nutshell, our teen groups provide supportive environments to process shared life challenges and adversity. We offer a specialized group tailored for clients with a sibling with special needs, developmental delays or significant medical difficulties. Other groups serve teenagers living through parental separation and divorce. We also form groups for adolescents processing and healing from bereavement at the loss of close family members. Our groups are usually time limited at eight to twelve weeks while some groups benefit from a “maintenance” phase to continue relationships established through their initial group experience.  

Young adults go through an array of rapid life changes, as they move away from their parents’ and families’ orbits, adapt to the excitement and challenges of living on college campuses, interview for and adjust to new jobs, and navigate the complex terrain of dating and socializing as adults. They embark on major shifts in their identity formation in all areas as they contemplate greater personal, financial and emotional independence from their families of origin. Our groups aim to support young adults facing these major life transitions. We organize our young adult groups around shared experiences, while also encouraging participants to build their social skills and expand their perspective by listening to the challenges others may face that are different from their own. Believing that young adults have during their adolescence established various internal resources to manage stress and overcome hurdles, we approach young adult group therapy with the theme that adulthood requires individuals to become more comfortable with and adept at “taking the wheel” themselves for their lives: building awareness of their own intuitions, identifying their own internal cues about decision-making and risk-taking, and flexibly learning new skills and habits to encourage new growth and greater wellbeing. We design our young adult group sessions so that members feel empowered to share their stories and concerns and exchange new perspectives, validation and support, in a manner that only the peer group at this life stage can offer.  

We guide our adult groups not only to offer support and empathy but also to provide authentic and meaningful insights to participants about where individuals’ frequently experienced thoughts and actions, preconceived beliefs, or other patterned reactions may be impeding personal progress and processing. Creating a group that can provide honest, surprising, and at times challenging responsiveness to group members requires consistency, shared expectations, and a foundation of warmth, mutual concern, and deeply felt connection. We believe that the group can be transformative for individuals whose therapy may feel stuck or repetitious, as members may find themselves willing to take risks in groups in new and unexpected ways. Our adult groups not only offer individuals ideas and skills for new ways to respond to current stressors and distress but also ask participants to consider changing long-standing habits in their management of the difficulties they face.

Besides aiming for personal development for our group members, our groups widen the communities of these members, bringing together individuals from outside individuals’ familiar circles to process similar challenging experiences. Group themes include new parenting challenges, parenting challenging or dysregulated school-age children, launching young adults, coping with divorce, and bereavement support. As with our teenage groups, our adult groups are time limited, and after the group session series concludes, some groups may continue to meet on a less frequent basis to maintain connection and continue the benefits of what members obtained during the active group session.