How Group Therapy Helps with Trauma

The prophet in the cult says “Keep Sweet!” meaning suppress all negative emotion.

Hyman Spotnitz, the grandfather of Modern Psychoanalytic Group Therapy believed that mental illness is primarily caused by unexpressed aggression. When we’re not allowed to express our frustration, disappointment, anger, sadness and hate towards our earliest caregivers, we instead direct that energy towards our own mind.

If it’s not safe to hate our parents, we’re left no choice but to hate part of ourselves and to try to eliminate those hateful parts.

This takes enormous energy, as we are at war with the instinctual life-force within us. All animals are prepared to deal with the aggression of their neighbors. They will fight, run away and when neither is an option, freeze and play dead.

Fight

Flight

Freeze

When we’re little, we can’t run away and we can’t fight, so we freeze and part of our psyche dies—goes unconscious. This is dissociation, the most common result of trauma.

Dissociation

Therapy can be the antidote, the place where we can thaw out, re-associate and reclaim the parts of us that were lost. It’s supposed to be a place where we can access our aggression and express it constructively. In group, we encourage members to tell us when they’re angry with us. When they can express rage and disappointment to the leader, the next step is to be able to express it toward other members. This is a big step and a vital one. When you can tell someone what bothers you about them and you know that they will do the same, you can trust them. You can be yourself, in a way that is impossible with people who can’t receive your criticism and won’t share theirs.

We all have an inner cult of obedience. The more you allow yourself to think any thought, feel any feeling and give voice to your experience, the more you speak truth to power. This is the truth that liberates and topples tyranny.

A story about speaking truth to power.