How Group Therapy Helps with Conflict Avoidance

Hyman Spotnitz, a prominent contributor to the theory of Modern Psychoanalysis, writes about the “objectification of the ego.” What he is referring to is the need of most of us to project onto others the unresolved feelings we have about our earliest caregivers—usually our parents.

What unresolved feelings? The basic premise of Moderan Analysis is that mental illness is aggression turned inward. To the degree that it wasn’t safe for us to express negative feelings to our parents, we attack our own mind instead, creating neurotic habits, addictive/depressive tendencies and in extreme circumstances, disorders of personality and psychosis.

We’re haunted by what is unresolved. This is part of the meaning of the Jung quote — what remains unconscious shows up in our lives as “fate,”— circumstance beyond our control. This is why we’re attracted to people who remind us of our parents (siblings, etc.). It’s why despite our best efforts we find ourselves at times exhibiting the same behaviors we hated, whether in our romantic relationships, our families, our friendships, or at work.

Therapy can provide the opportunity for this inhibited, distorted aggression to finally be released, but only if the therapist is prepared for this process. The therapist must know how to approach the patient in away that makes the therapist seem safe enough to gradually express more and more disappointment, frustration, anger and rage. The therapist must be willing to receive and respond to these expressions, without collapsing or punishing, but also without a contrived invulnerability or harmlessness. Eventually, the hope is that the patient will be able to feel towards their parents what they couldn’t when they were young. What you can feel, you can heal. As the these feelings are allowed and articulated, the possibility of working through them emerges.

Group helps this process immensely. In addition to expressing aggression to the therapist, patients learn to assert themselves with the other members, people who inevitably remind them more vividly of their parents, siblings and whoever else in their life triggers them.

Facilitating this process is not easy and you can’t learn it in a class or from a book. This is why individual and group therapy is so essential for therapists themselves—it is where we access and work through our own aggression, and become able to tolerate others’.