![]() While individual therapy is incredibly important and invaluable, the group experience truly offers us unique therapeutic experiences that we cannot get in individual therapy. He explains that the therapy group functions as a social microcosm. This serves as a unique opportunity for us a group members to examine how we interact with others and fix possibly dysfunctional relational habits that we have developed over time. Irvin Yalom, an accomplished existential psychotherapist and author, often writes. When we interact with group members, we eventually behave in similarly dysfunctional ways that we would in everyday life. Essentially this means that the group acts like a practice-run for real life. Lots of times another person who has felt they way we have can speak much clearer to us than a therapist who might not have experiences such feelings or events. Many find they can relate to someone else in the group on these matters and process what that is like for them. In the group setting however, most people find that what they are struggling with is actually similar to others in the group. Yalom describes parataxic distortion as an interpersonal situation when one person relates to another. Yalom, described certain therapeutic factors which come into place within the here-and-now context of the group and studied the group process. We all have our most personal issues that we think no one else experiences. how therapy groups evolve into a social microcosm. The publication of Irvin Yalom’s Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy in 1970 was a major contribution towards a scientific approach. This term that Yalom uses essentially means that the group experience normalizes life’s struggles. We get encouragement from others and hope that while life might be hard now, it will only improve. When we sit in a room with others struggling with similar things and hear what has worked for them, we get a picture of how our lives will be in the future. ![]() First and foremost of the unique factors that one gets from the group experience is the experience of hope we get when we hear others’ stories and experiences that show us that life is going to get better. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |