Group

I was hanging out with some acquaintances and one seemed antsy. Finally, she excused herself because she needed to decide what food to prepare for a party and make it. I asked what kind of party. It was the graduation party for her anxiety group. So, you’re agonizing over what to bring to…never mind. Stranger things have happened in and with group therapy. I ran a nonprofit mental health/drug & alcohol clinic for eight years. If a group was short on participants, the therapist would grab me to bring it up to critical mass (I usually worked late and was handy for them). There was no violation of privacy or anything as the therapist would identify me and get permission from the group. I haven’t encountered many outsiders who know much more about group therapy than the term. The advantages that most professionals in the field list are hope (participants can see others who have advanced in their healing), help from those who’ve “been there,” feeling that you’re not alone, catharsis and existential factors (group support and direction leads people to recognize they are responsible for their own actions and choices, as well as the results of them). To me, the last one is an important one because the weight of the group can sometimes accomplish this better than a single therapist. You can experience that single therapist’s frustration as part of a group and understand why their burnout rate is so high. I’ll illustrate two of the most common scenarios. They’re common enough in group situations that there’s no chance it will identify an individual. A man beats his wife for having dinner on the table a little late, maybe for the third or fourth time. He gets arrested. He’s enraged. Why did they arrest me? She made me do it! To this type of mind, he had no responsibility in this for his actions. She brought it on, not him, so she’s the one responsible for it. Yeah, there are people who dismiss their own responsibility for their actions like that (more than you want to know) and it takes a ton of effort to get them to see the light, if that ever happens. A variation of this shifting of reponsibility goes something like the estranged husband leaves a death threat on the woman’s answering machine. She calls the police and he’s arrested. He’s furious because she caused his arrest. In his mind, it’s not that he threatened her that caused his problems. It’s that she called the cops. She caused his problems. He had nothing to do with it. He did nothing wrong. Just so I’m not weighting the gender scale, a woman complained that her husband always yells at her when she doesn’t pay the bills and they get nailed with late fees and interest (she insists on handling the checkbook). Some probing revealed this occurs about four out of every six months. In her mind, he’s the problem and the only problem. So, if you’re in a lot and you park a wheel on his foot, the problem isn’t you’re crushing his appendage. The problem is he’s yelping about the pain? He’s the problem? By denying her responsibility, you can see that she has little chance of correcting behavior. That’s the problem. These people will have the same issues over and over with different people but they refuse to see that clearly illustrates wherein lies the problem. The group will attempt to play back the described scenario to them to help them grasp reality, but that’s usually met with a dodging of the facts and an attempt to turn it around. “You’re using my own words against me!” That’s the frustration and I pretty much ODed on people on create their own issues and then blame others. I give therapists a lot of credit for coping with this on a full time basis. But, the most exasperating encounter took place outside of group. A woman stormed into my office to complain about the treatment of her adolescent son, who found himself in group as a condition of parole on drug charges. Her complaint was that we stuck him in a group with a bunch of users. I explained that group worked on the principle of interacting with people who shared a common problem, which she dismissed out of hand. That’s what got him in this mess to begin with, associating with users (not his own decisions?). She demanded he be reassigned to another group or she’d sue. Who did she expect to be in a group for addiction therapy, nuns?