How Group Therapy Helps Individual Healing

Group therapy is a beautiful journey that multiple people can contribute to. By participating in therapy in a safe space, it can allow insights to come to the individual that they may not have realized beforehand and receive feedback that is vital to their overall healing. 

Receiving validation and support from our peers is an important step in our recovery and mental health. Although group therapy is clearly very beneficial, many questions still arise. Why group therapy and individual therapy? What are the benefits? What is it like? We’re here to help put the anxieties you may have at ease and clear up any confusion about group therapy!

Who Benefits From Group Therapy?

Everyone! When facilitated correctly and effectively, group therapy can be beneficial to all participants who feel they are ready to share their thoughts and feelings with others. It’s important to remember that not everyone will feel ready to join a group setting. It’s imperative to slow down the therapy session to truly make sure everyone feels heard. 

Peer to peer empathy and validation is important to someone’s individual healing. To hear someone else’s insight who is going through the same thing as you can be incredibly powerful and empowering. At Eva Carlston Academy, we know just how important it is to have that social interaction with others on a similar path. This is why our houses have multiple girls who live there and work together as a unit. 

It opens the conversation for them to be vulnerable with each other and be more comfortable with sharing their experiences with depression, anxiety, relationships and boundaries, body image problems, women’s issues, general processing and more. 

What Is Group Therapy Like?

Group therapy is different for every individual, as are most things in therapy. Sometimes a group session may not go as planned but that’s all part of the process! It’s important that in these situations, to know that you cannot control how another person may feel or react. As one of our incredible therapists, Caitlin Tharaldson says, “it’s necessary to roll with the resistance and messiness, and to understand that incredible learning can come from it.” And we couldn’t agree more!

Although group therapy can get “messy” at times, at Eva Carlston, we understand that the overall sharing between peers with like circumstances is a critical benefit to the individual healing of the student.