4 Ways To Get The Most Out Of Your Process Group Experience

For many people, Process Group Therapy can be challenging to navigate, especially in the beginning. I put together this guide for anyone in a process group to get the most out of your group therapy experience, and to offer you some concrete guideposts for understanding how this mysterious thing called “group therapy” functions.

1. Share Your Associations 

In group, anything someone shares is bound to stimulate thoughts, feelings, images, or memories in you. These are called associations. 

The first principle of consciousness is association: “this reminds me of that.” Associations are the way we store the meanings we carry about ourselves, others, and the world. They are our best in-road to unconscious feelings that determine how we live much of our lives. 

Exploring those internal reactions are the work of group. 

You will not always know why you are having the associations you are having, and it’s OK to not know why! Simply notice what comes up and, to the degree it feels safe, explore them aloud with the group in a spirit of curiosity. 

Sometimes, the association that comes up is not related in content to what came before it. For example, imagine one group member sharing a graphic sexual story with the group. You notice yourself feeling fidgety, and you have an impulse to get up and refill your tea or go to the bathroom. 

While it may not appear related at the surface, the fidgety and tea-seeking impulses may be in some way your body’s associations to a graphic sexual story being brought into the group. You can bring curiosity to it by noting it and holding it as potentially meaningful to be explored in the group. 

What feels small or “random” can open the door to something deeply important and unexpected. As much as you can, stay open to being surprised. 

Why is this important? Most families didn’t have room for the entirety of your internal experience. At the very least, each family has certain thoughts, feelings, and experiences that are taboo. 

Our work as a group over time is to create a group culture in which a wider and deeper range of thoughts, feelings, memories, and images can be accessed and expressed through association. 

2. Expect Anxiety, and Find Ways to Put it into Words 

Everybody starts group wondering: 

“Will I fit in?” 

“Are these guys too much for me?” 

“Am I too much for them?” 

“Will they understand me?” 

These worries aren’t a sign something’s wrong. They are a universal aspect of being in group. 

If you can talk about the anxiety rather than hide it or work around it, it is often possible to move through it faster and more deeply. 

Most people have habitual ways of working around or managing anxiety. Most of us would rather not feel anxiety if we can help it. Throughout your time in group, one of the things we will help you explore are the various ways you and the group defend against feeling anxiety, anger, warmth and tenderness, grief, and any of the multitude of other feelings that are possible in group. 

Carl Jung famously said “until you make the unconscious conscious it will rule your life and you will call it fate.” By tracking your anxieties and/or action impulses and putting words to them you’ll begin to make unconscious processes more conscious and thereby become more free to choose rather than being fated to be ruled by unconscious emotions and patterns. 

Over time, the anxieties associated with group evolve and deepen. Whereas in the beginning of your time in group, you might worry about fitting in or taking up too much space, as time goes on, the concerns may become more about expressing difference, annoyance, aggression, or warm and tender feelings and needs. 

3. Joining Others— Rowing the Boat Together vs. Waving from the Shore 

As we mentioned in point 1, anything that is shared by someone in the group will stimulate thoughts, feelings, or memories for everyone in the group. 

We find that people do their best work in group when they’re not alone. It almost always feels safer to know there is at least one other person in group who relates to your experience, especially when it is something vulnerable to share. 

You may notice as someone shares a story about their experience of feeling emotionally dismissed by their partner, a memory gets evoked of feeling dismissed by your group of friends in Middle School. Though the content differs on the surface, the emotional core is what matters. 

Group members can feel tempted to keep the attention on the first person who shares, but that can lead to something called scapegoating–when the group inadvertently asks one member to carry the weight of a particular issue for the entire group. 

To continue asking questions and empathizing can be a bit like waving to someone in a boat from the shore: it’s nice that you’re waving, but isn’t it nicer yet to be joined in the boat?

To join in with your own associations is like getting into the boat and helping them row. People always do their best work in group when they aren’t rowing the boat alone.

4. The Boundaries: A Place Where Unnamed Emotions Get Expressed 

For our men’s groups, one of the things we ask members to commit to from the beginning is to treat group as a priority. We ask each member to commit to being present, on time, in a confidential space, and to be present for the entire time of each group meeting every week, barring medical emergencies or occasional planned missed sessions. 

In every group, some people inevitably have difficulty managing the high commitment and the boundaries they require to maintain. Our experience tells us that, other than when it’s a medical emergency or rare event, the difficulty in adhering to boundaries is nearly always about the unspoken (and usually unconscious) feelings about being in group. 

Group is hard work so it’s understandable that you won’t always want to be there, and that you may have feelings about your group experience that you aren’t yet aware of, or ready to share, or maybe you don’t feel safe yet to bring them into the group.

When this is the case, it’s not uncommon for the feelings to be enacted by not adhering to the agreements. 

So if we think about what gets enacted around the boundaries as an expression of all that is too difficult to put into words yet, there is plenty to be learned from the difficulties people have with honoring the boundaries!

If you’re in a therapy group, I’d invite you to notice when choices come up in your life that might interfere with treating the group session time as sacred: what thoughts or feelings might be getting expressed in the impulse to prioritize other things over group? 

Over time, as group members bring more curiosity to their relationship to the boundaries, they are better able to explore in words rather than actions the things that are difficult to express in the group space. 

For example, we might imagine the difference between someone scheduling a flight on the same day as group without even realizing it until it’s too late, versus a member being able to come to the group and sharing “I noticed I felt tempted to book my return flight in a way that conflicted with group, and it cued me into recognizing there might be some feelings I’m having about the conflict that’s been happening between myself and Jerry these past few weeks. I think part of me would rather sit it out than face another week of it with you.” 

Almost always, there is a “reality hook” as the reason for not adhering to the group agreements. It’s easy to imagine a group-wide bypass of the meaning of a booked flight if the person him or herself weren’t to explicitly bring in the deeper version of the story.

Our unconscious minds can be incredibly clever at creating a perfectly reasonable explanation for why we need to miss, be late, leave early, etc. Work deadlines, partners in crisis, and inconvenient travel plans are just a few examples of incredibly reasonable and perfectly understandable conscious explanations for missing part or all of group. 

Because they are so “reasonable,” it can be tricky to bring curiosity to them. But as I said, experience tells us that the difficulty in adhering to boundaries is nearly always about the unspoken (and usually unconscious) feelings about being in group.

Sometimes those feelings can be about choosing group (a form of self-care and a form of work) over competing attachments (prioritizing care for others and/or getting a break from the psychological work of group). 

We see this as an opportunity not to be critical, but to be curious about what feelings, thoughts, or memories might be getting evoked and managed through the group boundaries. 

In summary: As best you can - stay deeply curious, open, and conscious to what the unconscious is trying to speak in group!

Conclusion

I hope this list gives you a glimpse into what makes process group the incredibly rich, complex, and dynamic experience that it is. Our primary goals as a group (and individual members) are to associate as freely as we can to what the group is stimulating in us, and to get curious whenever something gets in the way of the free association process. The restraining forces that keep us from sharing our anxiety, aggression, warmth, and tenderness, etc., are often the very same defenses we learned in our families of origin, so there is much to be learned by exploring the defenses themselves. Wishing you the best on your group therapy journey!

We owe the core ideas in this article to our mentor, Paul Kaye, PhD.