Over the years I’ve tried various forms of group therapy for things like mental health issues, being the family member of a dysfunctional family, al-anon, grief groups, etc.
On TV group therapy groups are presented as these healing groups run by a compassionate, intelligent, socially aware person who wants to help everyone share their story so we can all bond and grow.
In real life they are usually run by dysfunctional, self centered people who view a group as a way to monologue about themselves to a captive audience. Usually its run by people who are just as fucked up if not more fucked up than the other people in the meeting. People who have no sense of social awareness, who obsess over rules like an autistic person on adderall (yet who don’t seem to grasp that those rules actually say things like stay on topic, don’t dominate the conversation, etc. They just like to read line by line and then do the opposite of what the rules actually said to do) or who view a group as an opportunity to talk about themselves or lecture on unimportant platitudes or stupid tangents. Thats assuming the group leader even shows up, I’ve tried to join groups only to find the leader never showed up so we all had to go home.
Last night I went to one for people from dysfunctional families. Whenever one of the women in the group would try to talk about her problems, the leader would interrupt her to talk about something stupid and unrelated (floor tiles, her neighbors pool, idiotic stuff).
I went to one group, the leader spent a good chunk of time talking about an amish B&B that he said served excellent biscuits. How the fuck does that relate to mental health which was the purpose of that group?
I have been to various groups over the years (probably over a dozen), some I stayed with because they were good, but I have only known 2 groups that were any good. One was run by a volunteer, and the one was professional. The professional one was nice because we had to pay to go, and it was run by a trained psychologist who actually wanted to help people get better, not just force people to listen to him talk about his neighbors pool, or talk about himself for an hour. I’d be open to paying to join a group therapy group as long as it is run by a competent professional and not a screw up looking for a group of hostages to listen to them blabber on about irrelevant shit.
One of the best groups I ever did was one where we all wrote down our stories, and shared them. Why can’t more groups be like that? Why do they have to be run by dysfunctional, selfish people who view it as a chance to monologue to people who don’t give a fuck about their pointless stories. How hard is it for a group of traumatized, sad people to get together and share their stories?
For anyone who says ‘why don’t you start one’, because I don’t want to.