Advantages.
Group therapy has many advantages over individual. A few include:
- Altruism (Giving of oneself to help others)
- Catharsis (Relieves emotions by expressing one's feelings)
- Universality (Recognizing shared feelings & that one's problems are not unique)
- Existential factors (Accepts the fact that responsibility for change comes from within oneself)
- Self-understanding (Discovering & accepting unknown parts of oneself)
- Family reenactment (Understanding what it was like growing up in one's family through a group experience)
- Guidance (Accepting advice from other group members)
- Identification (Benefiting from the imitation of positive behaviors of other group members)
- Instillation of hope (Experiencing optimism through observation of improvement of others in group)
- Interpersonal learning (Receiving feedback from group members regarding one's behavior [input])
- Interpersonal learning (learning successful ways of relating to group members)
What we do.
At Epiphany!, we offer a coping skills training group that runs once weekly. In this group, we reach and reinforce:
- Mindfulness: How to stay present rather than focusing too far back (creating guilt, anger, resentment) or ahead (creating fear or apathy)
- Emotion Regulation: How to practice extreme self-care
- Distress Tolerance: How to reduce the intensity of emotions so as to avoid doing something we’ll regret
- Interpersonal Effectiveness: How to build and maintain relationships and how to communicate effectively
Why we do it.
This group is derived from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), which was originally designed for those with Borderline Personality Disorder. At Epiphany! (and in research), we have found these skills to be basic life coping skills, which results in lasting change.
