Grouped

Why is it that some people can feel so terribly alone even when surrounded by others? What happens to someone who has spent much of their life trying to belong, only to discover that the very relationships they long for become the ones they find most difficult to endure? There are people who become remarkably good at fitting in without ever feeling that they belong. Others find themselves repeatedly disappointed by friendships, marriages, or communities that once promised something different.

Some of the most meaningful experiences I've encountered in group therapy have emerged when the ideals a person holds most dearly are both affirmed and threatened by the presence of others. Justice, hope, and even love are put to the test, not simply as ideas we believe in, but as something we have learned to embody. I wonder whether we can truly encounter ourselves as individuals when the group has become invested in preserving an identity of its own.

Consider a group in which one member has become frustrated with another who rarely speaks. He finally tells her that her silence irritates him. Everyone else seems to be taking risks while she remains protected from revealing anything about herself. Another member comes to her defense, insisting that everyone has a right to participate at their own pace. The man becomes angry, believing he is being criticized for telling the truth. Suddenly the group's ideals of honesty and kindness are working against one another. What does it mean to be welcoming when someone's very presence has become difficult to welcome?

Perhaps the woman finally speaks, telling him that his anger reminds her of her father, with whom she has had no contact for years. The man protests that he is not her father and should not be responsible for what happened to her. He may be right, yet something of that absent relationship has been summoned into the room. Neither person's experience can be settled simply by deciding who is being fair. Our bodies are speaking in these encounters, and they will speak for us even when we have committed ourselves to silence.

Christie Tate's memoir, Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life, offers a deeply personal account of this vulnerability. Despite her achievements in law school, Tate continued to struggle with isolation and intimacy. Group therapy brought her into relationships she could not organize entirely around her preferences or achievements. The strangers became important precisely because they could neither be managed nor made to confirm the person she believed she ought to be.

Wilfred Bion distinguished between the work a group gathers to accomplish and the unconscious arrangements through which it may avoid that work. A group can begin depending upon its leader for certainty, unite against a perceived threat, or imagine that someone else will provide the answer. Richard Billow develops these ideas through the passions of loving, hating, and knowing, considering how the group's search for truth becomes entangled with its need to preserve familiar relationships.

There is no leader and yet we are led. There is no law and yet the demand to follow is ever near. I may be responsible for maintaining the group's frame, but I cannot determine what the group must discover. It may become an exceptionally kind group that cannot tolerate anger, or an unusually honest group that has difficulty hearing tenderness. There is always a threat of breakdown in the insistence on something real. I am interested in whether the group can endure that threat without requiring someone to become responsible for everything that has gone wrong.

My developing account of Imago Psychotherapy concerns the images through which we have learned to recognize ourselves. The peacemaker, the responsible one, the misunderstood outsider, and the person who never needs anyone may each discover how much their familiar position has depended upon recognition from others. What I have begun calling imago dissolution concerns the possibility that these images may lose some of their necessity without requiring us to abandon the qualities we value. Justice may become more durable when we can hear another person's grievance, and kindness more meaningful when it can survive aggression.

I do not imagine this occurs through a sentimentality of niceness. What I have come to value in group therapy is a respect and kindness forged through the difficulty of remaining together. And we feel, and yet we are held. The group may not settle what has become uncertain, but it can make something possible that neither member could have discovered alone. We may leave without resolving everything that brought us there, while finding that something of how we have come to recognize ourselves no longer remains quite the same.