In my mid thirties, my friendships had quietly thinned out. People had families, moved cities, moved jobs, and without really noticing it happening, my social world had narrowed down to my job. Then I was made redundant, and the thing that had been holding all of that up disappeared overnight. I was left properly lonely, in a way that caught me off guard.
I joined a group carrying a lot of fear about it, some of it old, some of it new. I didn't know what it meant to be in a room with people I hadn't chosen, watching me, hearing me. That fear is common, and I'm not going to pretend it wasn't there for me too.
What surprised me wasn't the talking. It was the listening.
There's something that shifts in you when you hear someone else wrestle honestly with their own life, their struggles, the things they're ashamed of or scared of. It's not sympathy exactly. It's closer to recognition. Sitting there, listening to people find their own strength in real time, I found myself thinking, if they've got that in them, maybe I have too.
That's what a group gives you that a lonely period in your life can't. Not advice, not company for the sake of it, but a room where being properly heard, and properly hearing someone else, does something that scrolling through your phone or forcing small talk never will. It chips away at the specific shame that comes from feeling like you're the only one struggling.
I came out of that period differently. Not fixed, that's not really how it works, but less alone in carrying what I was carrying. That's the case for group work I keep coming back to. It's not a replacement for individual therapy. It's a different kind of medicine, and for me, at the point I needed it most, it worked.
This is the first in a short series on group therapy, what it is, what it isn't, and what I've learned facilitating it and sitting in it myself.
