Group therapy is a powerful modality of psychological healing, either on its own or as an adjunct to individual therapy. While group therapy cannot offer undivided focus on one person’s life and mind, as happens in individual therapy, the group format nonetheless offers specific and invaluable opportunities for learning and healing that may not be available in individual therapy.
In the psychodynamic therapy group at Royal Road Clinic, group members will explore:
- how to recognize, respect and enjoy similarities and differences with other group members and within themselves;
- how to seek and express intimacy and connection when others are present and watching;
- how to balance authenticity and responsibility, autonomy and cooperation, individuality and belonging;
- how to to be in emotional contact with the group but also to think about what is going on and what needs to be done.
By working through these dynamics and the challenges they present, group members will better understand:
- how to accommodate diversity within themselves and others;
- how see oneself in and through others and to discover others in and through oneself;
- how to maintain a sense of genuine connection with others, even when you may disagree with or dislike them;
- how to think and feel at the same time;
- how to sense and respond to the influence of the personal unconscious as well as the unconscious dynamics of others.
The psychodynamic therapy group is 12 80-minute sessions, including two different types of events—experiential sessions (sessions 2-5 and 7-11) and reflective sessions (sessions 1, 6 and 12).
In experiential sessions, group members are given the opportunity to learn through experience. Members are not told what to learn, at what rate to learn, or how to learn. Rather, members are authorized to work and play, learn and grow in the way they choose. In the face of this freedom, members will discover their ability to self-authorize in a group as well as how the unconscious life of the group encourages or impedes their self-authorization.
In reflective sessions, group members are instructed in concepts and ideas they can use to make sense of group dynamics. Members are given the opportunity to reflect on what has gone on in experiential sessions as well as to make links between their experience in the therapy group and life outside the group.
Royal Road Clinic: mind body care 