How does group therapy help people?

Group therapy allows members to obtain concrete skills and strategies to navigate social anxiety, regulate emotions, manage stress or emotional pain, and improve conflict resolution with friends, partners, and coworkers. We offer these new skills through psycho-educational instruction and through practical applications during and between group sessions.  

Group therapy provides foundational self esteem building opportunities, especially for individuals who lack adequate social support or connection. Especially for teenagers, peers can offer positive feedback and encouragement to improve feelings of self worth, mastery, and competency in social situations. For these reasons, group therapy can be the critical add-on treatment for individuals struggling with social anxiety or weak self esteem. 

Group therapy helps both adults and teenagers broaden their awareness of their interpersonal behaviors and make significant changes in their relationships with and responses to the people in their lives. When interacting regularly with family members, co-workers, schoolmates, friends and acquaintances, we are often unaware of the habitual ways that we respond to others. Those habitual responses can often be self-defeating and defensive, frustrating our goals of gaining more empathetic closeness. Group therapy helps people to obtain profound insights about these patterns in the immediate context of the group situation. Through this insight, members can reflect on their patterned interpersonal behaviors and make long-awaited changes to improve their relationships.

Finally, group therapy provides an opportunity for people to process difficult shared experiences, such as bereavement, trauma, and other life-altering events.  Recognizing that others have coped with similar challenges involving adolescent development, parenthood, and loss can help people to normalize their reactions, feel deeply comforted, and continue to embark on the process of healing. Group participants who authentically care about one another but do not live in the same communities and neighborhoods can help one another to communicate emotionally and gain support that feels both empathetic and private. This combination can stimulate psychological growth in transformative ways.