Goodbyes in Group Therapy

Often our parents couldn’t teach these intimacy skills because their parents didn’t have the skills; they couldn’t teach what they didn’t get from their parents.  Lacking experience, safety and​

good support, people usually avoid feeling and saying these things in everyday life​ because the depth of intimacy and vulnerability are so unfamiliar and scary.

So most people have​ little or no experience​fully feeling & saying the heartfelt things that would be said and need to be said for genuine intimacy.  It’s also true that all important goodbyes are connected through the similarity of the feelings – love, sadness, anger and scare.  Past important goodbyes​, both said and especially unsaid, come naturally to unconscious awareness, further complicating and intensifying goodbyes in Group.

Unfortunately o​ur culture tends to avoid deeply experiencing and talking about important feelings in relationships.​  Practicing feeling and actually putting these very human feelings into words in Group therapy greatly facilitates deeper,more satisfying and sustaining intimacy in future relationships. Goodbyes​ in Group to each other member and to me are a kind of final therapeutic exercise, an opportunity                    to put into practice all the therapeutic experiences which have led to “graduating”  from  Group Therapy.