Posted by noa on September 25, 2003, at 20:04:52
In reply to Re: Started group therapy » Penny, posted by Tabitha on September 24, 2003, at 19:41:16
I was in 2 different groups, too--one a good experience, one a bad experience.
The first for almost 4 years. It had rocky moments for sure but was mostly supportive.
The second was extremely confrontational and didn't feel safe and everyone kept dropping out. There was way too much shame felt by everyone in the group. In this harsh group, which was held in the outpatient dept. at a public hospital, the therapists were two psychiatry residents and now that I'm an older person in the world, I wonder now if they had any idea what they were doing.
This group had existed about 6 months before I got there, and had already had a 60% turnover! In the year I was there, 100% of the people that were there when I got there left, plus a couple more people who came after me and left before me. I stayed way longer than I should have--about a year, but then couldn't take it anymore and dropped out just like all the people before me had--precipitously. The therapists never made eye contact with us, were sometimes silent for long periods, and when they did speak, their comments were rather hostile. Sometimes they were trying to be pithy with these rather grand "group process" comments but these just came out as incredibly hostile or cryptic and clearly not therapeutic because to be therapeutic you gotta at least be able to keep the people in the room, right??? And they would not ever relate directly to us or any comments we ever mustered up the courage to make about how the group felt or how the therapists' comments felt, etc.---they constantly framed any of this as being transference and about our pasts and coming from our illnesses, and not at all about what was really happening right there in the room. It was positively CRAZY-MAKING!! When anyone had ever brought up that they were thinking of leaving, the therapists basically said they couldn't leave until they accomplished their goals. This was basically based on this contract we got when we started. But give me a break! They were so literal about it and besides, you can't make anyone stay! So, the comments of the therapists made people feel like leaving was a sign of sickness, etc. It was such a catch-22 because it felt like it was horribly uncomfortable to stay but felt horribly shameful if you wanted to leave. Geez--it was way too much like the sick families we had all come from and not therapeutic. So everyone just started disappearing when they wanted to leave. I ended up doing that, too, tho, like I said--I stayed too long because of my own self doubt about trusting my own instincts. Ironically, the decision to leave that group was very therapeutic for me!I'm glad I had had the previous group experience to know that group therapy doesn't have to be a bad experience! The first group ended because of a change in the agency where it was run, but we ended on a positive note.
poster:noa
thread:262977
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20030925/msgs/263325.html