Group

For about three months I have been in group counseling.   The therapist I have been seeing over the past few years has a group he facilitates with his wife,  also a therapist.   The group has four men (including me)  and three women,  in addition to the two facilitators,  both of them licensed social workers.   We meet once a week for two hours.   

The group has been very helpful for me so far.   I had stopped the individual counseling last spring and expressed interest in group work.   The reason I stopped is that I felt like I wasn't moving forward in my recovery work and the sessions are expensive.   I told my therapist that "I wanted to rub the stone from another direction."   The issues that I am working with are embedded very deeply.   They are about some very basic themes in how I imprinted on this world as a child.      

The group therapy allows me to process my own issues while also witnessing and assisting in the process of others.   We are each trying to allow our essential self to take hold of the "stories" we tell ourselves.   The stories are related to our early experiences and are ways that we shoot ourselves in the foot over and over (and over).   We each try to reach through our pain and suffering into our higher self while seeing and encouraging each other in striving to achieve the same thing.   

The witness in ourselves,  the being which is us,  and which is much higher than any of the worldly stories,  is always there.   It is always us.   But we get buried.   Buried in our experiences of shame,  pain,  anger,   confusion,  feeling unloved,  feeling unlovable,  feelings of deep loss and sadness.     And these stories do everything in their power to make us believe that they represent what we are essentially.     They are very, very wrong but can be awfully convincing.   

The idea about the group I am in has to do with experiencing the extremely unpleasant emotions which we carry quietly around with us and which try to torpedo our well-being at every turn.   If we can experience the deep feelings of shame and anger inside of us in a supportive group,  the witness who is us is strengthened.   Our pain is rendered less powerful in our experience.   We experience our growth.   So far I have experienced this as a gradual process.   The members of the group, me included,  make gradual progress and build on it over time.   After a year or so one can,  I imagine,   see significant growth among each of the group members.

We are going to have a retreat in a month or so.   We'll spend a weekend a few hours drive away.   The theme of the workshop is "What are the stories we are telling ourselves?"   We are supposed to think about stories which come out of our survival mechanisms,   the mental structures we developed as children in order to survive traumatic events.     Some of the structures we created back then,   now hold us back in becoming the person we want to be.   

So my homework is to decide which part of my mask,  my lower-self,  my double,  my doppelganger,  I wish to bring to the group.   There are some very painful and shameful aspects of my lower self which readily come to mind.   The group feels safe to me.   I think I am ready to share.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly,  Ben