Why choose group psychotherapy?

When a person decides to start going to a psychologist, the option of group psychotherapy is not always considered. However, in many cases, it may be the best format. Group psychotherapy is not usually one of the preferred options when starting a therapeutic process. However, its effectiveness is supported by many studies that compare it to other individual, family, or couple psychotherapies.

Failure to consider this work methodology in many cases may be due, in part, to ignorance about its operation, advantages, and patients in whom its choice may be more beneficial. Here are some tips about group psychotherapy.

What is group psychotherapy?

Group psychotherapy is a therapeutic methodology that treats individual psychological problems using the power that group dynamics can have. Many experts in the field consider that group interventions have a greater diversity of functions and certain advantages over individual interventions.

In fact, scientific research equates group and individual psychotherapy to therapeutic efficacy. It has even been discovered that, in various psychopathologies, it may be more effective, particularly in those that have to do with difficulties in the patient’s social sphere.

Group psychotherapy has precedents dating back many centuries. Some examples may be tribal rituals in indigenous cultures with healing intentions, the advice of sages conducted in India, or the first therapeutic self-help groups for people who could not afford individual therapy.

Later, some doctors and psychologists, such as Joseph Pratt or Kurt Lewin, explained the term group as its own entity, the group was no longer just a sum of individuals. In 1931, the psychotherapist Jacob Levy Moreno would promote group psychotherapy with great success in the United States, later reaching consultations around the world.

Today, group psychotherapy is used in many settings. Some of the most popular groups in this regard are the so-called self-help, personal growth, or psychotherapy groups, and the treatment of specific disorders.

Advantages of group psychotherapy

Group psychotherapy may not be one of the first options when someone thinks of starting a therapeutic process. Perhaps one of the reasons is the ignorance of its advantages. Some of the most prominent are the following:

• The group potential. As we have seen previously, a group is not only a sum of people. The group is a network with its own entity that has its own particular dynamics and healing factors. The relationships and therapeutic processes in this context do not occur in the same way in individual therapy.
• The effect of the auditorium. When a person explains their problems in the presence of a group, a commitment is formed among its members and generates a support network, and listens to the person.
• Giving to the group means receiving. Sometimes, it can be wrong to think that you are wasting your time listening to the problems of others, instead of attending to your own. This thinking is far from the reality of group psychotherapy. When someone participates in any way in this psychotherapy, they also intervene in their own internal contents. In fact, this work from the perspective of helping others can be, precisely, the key to helping oneself.

• Closer to extrapolating progress to daily life. In individual psychotherapy processes, sometimes, you can have the feeling of having the theory clear, but not being able to apply it to everyday reality. As the therapeutic group is a micro space of this real life, it may be easier to bring all these changes into action.
• Solidarity and altruism in their purest form. The commitment that develops in the therapeutic group allows the person to get out of their pathological loop to help the other, something that in itself has an enormous healing effect.

There is always a reason for everything, and there is always a reason for choosing group psychotherapy. Hopefully, this article can be useful. Thank you for reading!

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