I was afraid of group therapy. The fear ran me. Then I ran a group.

I’m not exactly the friend people go to for “Advice”. Lots cite this as one of the reasons they became a therapist. Not me. Friends come to me for advice usually for two reasons, 1) They want someone to be very blunt and finally very honest 2) They know I’m a bit impulsive. You have no savings and are planning a vacation in another country?

Yeah sure, go. YOLO as us millennials say. It’s okay if you just cringed.

When I started individual therapy (1:1 therapy) and realized therapy has nothing to do with advice except for like 1% of the time at best, I was immensely fucking relieved.

I was relieved I didn’t have the burden of advice giving.

That gave me room to be worried about what I was actually worried about. It is a trait of mine that has improved over time but is…well, there. I’m high-key kindaaaaaaa, okay honestly more like… moderately, kinda abrasive.

Most clients perceived my abrasiveness to just be a straight-forwardness and found it refreshing. A trait I was insecure about was sort of a huge strength of mine in sessions. (I have found this to be true for almost 100 % of all therapists, usually the traits we’re harnessing insecurities about turn out to be our therapeutic superpower)

But group therapy?

I was like…. this is it. I have somehow managed to conduct individual therapy successfully, but my abrasiveness, my social gaps will soon be revealed in this group format. I will be revealed. I will be vulnerable. It was a very deep fear of mine, sort of compounded in grad school where group therapy somehow became a debate simulator, and my group debated the issue of Universal Healthcare. I found that intolerable, duh we should have healthcare. My takeaway from this class? I’m never conducting group therapy! It’s hilarious to think about the kind of therapist I thought I’d be then and the therapist I am now just in general. I’m sure that is ever-changing.

My abrasiveness can’t be understood in singularity. I am this way for several reasons. I am a fourth generation New Yorker- with the influx of transplants and the New Yorker’s leaving because they can’t afford NYC, we see less and less people speak New York, which makes me therefore more and more abrasive. I code switch between sounding super New York abrasive or academic or plainly abrasive with ease. It’s almost like I speak multiple languages.

To add to the scaffolding of my abrasiveness I am from an Italian American and Puerto Rican background. My family pronounces “Ricotta” the same way they do in The Sopranos, “Ri-gut”. My aunt made homemade Pizzelles and sold them around the neighborhood and was featured in the Astoria Gazette. Fish only on Christmas Eve, our version of the Seven Fishes. We eat lentils on New Years. The Puerto Rican side of my family is from both The Bronx and Florida. My dad shouts in decibel breaking volumes on the phone in BX Puerto Rican Spanish. Sometimes, he will drop off Guava Spread- and you will feel like you are being yelled at to eat it, my mother does the same thing with sauce she proudly makes from tomatoes. But it’s like, a nice thing? The cultural similarities between Puerto Ricans and Italian New Yorkers are immense- you can make an interesting Venn-diagram, probably.

There are other reasons I’ve developed an abrasive communicative quality but I feel limited in my ability to describe all of that publicly.

I had many ideas for what I should conduct group therapy for and still have not executed on all of them. I struggled with my ethnic and racial identity as a bicultural person for a long time, less so now, but it’s still there. I check my emails, groups for racial trauma, groups for this, groups for that, and never saw a group for people who were “Mixed” explicitly. I practice at Triska Psychotherapy, where among other things, we specialize in Anxiety and like… Avoidance.

What the hell was I doing running away from group therapy? I was more scared than the average prospective client of group therapy. Most people have a bit of social anxiety about it. I realized that wasn’t cool. I was avoiding group therapy. Like a plague.

I had to try. I guess a part of me did want to fill the void with a therapy that I needed desperately and never had. I emailed that I had an idea for group therapy and then let anxiety set in. I purposefully set the start date out like, two to three months later to give myself time to mentally prepare for it. I read Yalom’s group therapy in one day to give myself a false sense of confidence.

Clients expressed enthusiasm about this group therapy that was starting and my stomach just churned with anxiety, performative and somewhat emphatically saying stuff like “Yeah…………it’s gonna be great”

Anyway, I recruited a group of individuals and we completed 8 weeks of group therapy. Multiple group members re-enrolled. Most if not all members called it helpful, or at least marginally helpful. I was fucking floored.

I created a loose structure of topics for each week and community agreements were made. The cool thing about group therapy is when the group kind of starts running itself with some help from the facilitator who sort of helps volley the “ball” in the air so to speak. I learned how to do interventions, in a mostly psycho-dynamic group at one point we implemented some DBT. Wait a second….. I thought to myself… Is this working?? Group members even informed me of topics they wanted to discuss (I think 2-3 weeks of the planned material I had changed based on how the group evolved.)

Good therapy is “alive”.

Group members got close to each other. Week after week they cited jokes made from other sessions including language, and when they re-enrolled they continued to use those jokes and phrases, some of these things becoming inside jokes. “Weird Math” “putting your self-esteem in the hands of the randoms”

Mixed people randomly get asked “So….What are you?” by random people. Or they can just tell a person is dying to ask it. This can kind of make or break your day depending on how they clock you. Let me rephrase- it can be traumatic, and even inter-personally “violent” sometimes or even fetishizing. The list goes on. Many members of the group were also trans or non-binary and had experienced this pain with gender before, and sometimes doubly- with ethnicity simultaneously.

Being labeled unsolicited by people in the group was frequently and unsurprisingly stated as a traumatic experience. Nevertheless, we somehow as a group collectively named this “Putting your self-esteem in the hands of the randoms’' In the second iteration of the group, someone tells a story and then says “Yeah, so I guess you could say that…I was putting my self-esteem in the hands of the randoms”

The group couldn’t contain its laughter. Something so painful, traumatic, and morose is now hilarious. The reaction instead….laughter. It’s not to say that this isn’t still painful. But, what has occurred, is that a new way to experience or “think” about something awful has opened up in the presence and community of others who have suffered it similarly. It’s an immediate and stark contrast from when these stories are told and reacted to in other sessions.

The medicine is apparent and it is obvious.

The verdict was already out but let me re-iterate it: Group therapy rocks.

I forget that in addition to the abrasive trait I have I’ll probably be working on all my life and also sort of embracing, clients also laugh a lot in my sessions- and I’ve been told to try my hand at stand up comedy. Sounds terrifying. Avoidance is at it again, I guess.

Leading up to group therapy, all I could think about were my worst traits.

A few cool things happened, I love remembering therapy is not about me!
I remember this frequently and it is awesome.

It’s also cool to remember I have positive traits. Why was I thinking about a single trait I was worried about?

In addition, group therapy became a refreshing juxtaposition to my 1:1 settings, it was sort of Socratic and it was rewarding to watch members grow so much quickly with community support in a way you don’t see in 1:1 sessions for obvious reasons.

I ran over 18 weeks of group therapy so far, with two iterations of the group. I plan to run it again, but probably have to begin my marketing effort in a different way.

I was recently asked something like: Michele, when are you running group again, when does it start back up again?

Umm yeah, you bet that made me feel validated.

Therapists struggle to acknowledge when they do good sometimes, let’s do that more?

Yeah so I guess the moral of this story is avoidance is bad? I wish I was tying this up neater.

I can’t therapize myself. I know that. I may not be the friend people always go to first for advice, but maybe YOLO isn’t such bad advice after all.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be so terrifying to take my own advice.

— Also kinda interesting to think about how this abrasive trait was born due partially to a bicultural background- and then running a group on culture. Full circle moment?