The ongoing group I led, Outsiders Come Inside, recently concluded after three years. I reflect on this time with fondness and a tender appreciation and admiration for the members of this group. As I move forward and initiate a new group I have begun to appraise how I orient and create meaning, and provide a foundational basis for my groups to flourish. My learning style and living style is to go deeply but take from many sources. In my individual, couple and group work there are distinct corollaries and clear orientations and theoretical consistencies, but this is an ongoing creative process for me, always alive and often interwoven from more than one place. When I was invited to lecture on relationship therapy, this required I bring to consciousness my premise for the choices I made. I refer to a portion of that paper in my posting for 2.23.10.
Now I am confronted again with this self inquiry in regards to my groups. My initial training as a psychotherapist utilized predominantly the experiential group process . In my first clinical position this was the primary mode of treatment. When I began my private practice I continued to offer experiential group work. As the years past I found myself taken up by intensive individual and relationship work and it is not until the last five years that I have resumed group therapy in my practice.This is a fortuitous time to generate out of that storage space within me to explicate what my essential construct is that informs my work . This will lead me backwards ,sideways, inside out, upside down, but eventually I will right myself. In the next few posts I hope to offer some additional insight for other group therapists as well as a window into my group world for those that are considering using this approach in there own therapeutic process.