If you are wanting more for yourself, in your relationships, in your career or your life, Group Therapy may be right for you. Group provides an emotional learning laboratory, which can support you to know yourself better, to get clear about your relationship preferences and when it feels right, to speak your mind directly, so others can hear and receive you. Learning to tolerate the natural, healthy ebb and flow of connection and disconnection that enables true intimacy is a journey. Making this journey with others is a powerful support.
Is Group for me?
It could be, if you describe yourself in any of the following ways:
You want a balance of connection and time and space for yourself and notice you struggle to hold clear boundaries.
You are sorting big questions about who you are, where you come from and how you want to engage in your life.
You are looking for richer, deeper connections with the people you love.
You notice ways you disengage with conflict shows up and you‘d like to learn to stay through the discomfort and find solutions.
You get stuck in your own world, or ideas or opinions and you forfeit relationship to drive home a point.
You want to understand more deeply mood and motivation shifts that continue to impact your life.
You would like to learn to communicate more effectively with colleagues, life partners or family members.
You want to understand your anger and express it in healthy ways.
Some of these experiences may have more to do with the larger culture we are all immersed in. Whether they are ancestral, attachment based, cultural or interpersonal, and depending on your goals, group may be able to provide the just right setting for exploration and learning.
Upcoming Group Opportunities.
Be You: With Others
Mixed-Gender Process Group
This exploratory ongoing group offers participants a laboratory where feedback and new ways of engaging support change.
Openings in my Tuesday 5:45pm and Wednesday 4pm groups.
Reach out here for a free 20 minute Consultation.
Supported OnRamp to Group Therapy
These supported Process Groups
offer more guidance one what group is about and how to use group well.
Get a taste of the process with peers who are working on
self and relational connection too.
Why Group?
Although most adults seeking mental health and personal development think of individual work when they consider therapy, the group format is a powerful method of transformation and healing. Individual therapy is the right choice when we are working through a traumatic history and need individual holding, when the work of getting to know ourselves is primary or when we are trying to build a basic sense of self and security in the world.
When we are ready to look at the ways our physiological histories are impacting our success and satisfaction in relationships, work and life, group is the right next step. If feel a little nervous thinking about joining a group, you’re normal. Groups presents the possibility of interpersonal conflict and the majority of us, especially out here on the West Coast, feel most comfortable when we all get along. The problem with this is we lose the opportunity for real intimacy. Comfort not only robs us of our true needs and desires, it squashes so many of the experiences that make being human so exhilarating. Safety and comfort can feel similarly in our bodies and it’s important to be aware, when considering a process group, that part of our work, is making room for difficult feelings.
Getting to the root of the stuff all our self-help, personal development work and even individual therapy hasn’t touched in a group of peers means exposing ourselves. Sometimes in ways we would never have anticipated. It’s thrilling and scary at times. But never unsafe. Those of you from oppressed groups, I’m not actually talking to you so much. It’s important you know, I will actively, to the best of my current knowledge base be looking out for microaggressions, implicit bias, and white fragility. Outright discrimination is not welcome in my practice. I am committed to bringing the reality of our multicultural world into the therapy room. Bypassing this reality does all of us a disservice.
Nerves are healthy and learning to tolerate a little discomfort in a supported setting where help is available means expanding your capacity to be with and experience the value and meaning of feelings such as anger, disgust, fear and others because they come up, even in healthy relationships. Maintaining connection is possible, even in the face of disagreements. Some trust that we can work through difficulties, leads us into the kind of intimacy and self-actualization we’ve always wanted.
What is an interpersonal process group?
Process groups are different from support groups, where content tends to be focused on an area of likeness or a shared challenge. All the groups I run, to varying degrees, shine the light on what’s happening between people. Support groups tend to contain interaction in service to shared encouragement, identification and empathy, while process groups are interested in a broader range of experiences.
Although difficult events might be shared and experiences of support and connection felt, the purpose of a therapy group is different. In addition to all of these positive experiences, we notice our thoughts and feelings in response to the other members in real time. It is through these real, less facilitated interactions, that we access those old immovable patterns and find opportunities to step into new ways of engaging.
Pearl Waldorf MSed, MA, LPC is a Certified Group Psychotherapist (CGP.) See the Frequently Asked Questions page for more information on the CGP designation.