Expanding Your Emotional Range in Group Therapy

Group Therapy is the ideal place to increase your emotional range. Some people need a certain suspension of disbelief.

Many people when they enter group therapy are in touch with the danger: what if someone calls you out on something humiliating? What if someone triggers you so intensly that say something scathing and scar them forever?

If you’re going into group therapy with these fears, you’ll want the group therapist to assuage you. Will they stand by and do nothing if you’re being savaged? Can they really handle you at your worst?

Other people are not in touch with this fear. For them group therapy, especially over Zoom is safe. What could possibly happen? Everyone agrees to keep it in the room. The other members may not even know your last name so why worry?

When you have a nightmare, it can be very comforting to remember “it’s only a dream, it’s not real.” But this is actually a mistake.

Dreams are real. They are not happening to you in waking life, but they are real events. Nightmares depict symbolically the actual dynamics of your psyche in the moment. On some level, they show you honestly what you are contending with.

Similarly, group therapy is like a dream. If you lean into this, you’ll discover that you feel all kinds of things that you wouldn’t have thought possible in a 90 minute Zoom session.

A flicker of sexual attraction is the tip of an iceberg of infatuation and longing. A barely noticed irritation at someone’s tendency to people-please hides decades of seething resentment at how your ex-husband lied to you. The possibilities are endless.