Group psychotherapy

What are the advantages of group therapy?

By working in a group, you can gain valuable experience by interacting with others. You can strengthen your social and emotional skills and gain new interpersonal experiences.

A distinction is made between topic-oriented and open discussion groups.

One example of a topic-oriented group is Hinsch and Pfingsten’s social skills training.

A group can take place with a minimum of three people and a maximum of 8 participants.

Effectiveness of group psychotherapy

According to Irvin Yalom (Yalom, 2019, p.26), the following impact factors exist:

• Instill hope:
  Hope in groups arises from the credibility of the psychotherapist and from the progress that the patient perceives in other group members. This factor is often a prerequisite for other factors to become effective at all.
• Universality of suffering:
  Many patients believe that they alone have stressful or frightening life situations, thoughts, impulses and fantasies. Relativizing this conviction through sharing in the group brings relief and relief and promotes self-acceptance.
• Communication of information:
  By this Yalom means, on the one hand, psychoeducational instruction on mental health and illness by the psychotherapist and, on the other hand, advice that patients give each other.
• Altruism:
  Initially, many patients believe that they have nothing of value to offer the other group members. However, committed comments from group members are soon welcomed and highly valued as particularly credible. The experience of being able to be important to others raises the self-esteem and self-respect of the group members.
• Development of interpersonal skills:
  Social learning in groups can take place explicitly or indirectly. Group therapy patients who participate in groups for longer periods of time have been shown to learn a range of positive social skills when interacting with others. These include conflict resolution techniques, tolerance and empathy for others.
• Imitative behavior:
  Group psychotherapists and also group members with similar problems and good therapy successes serve as models, for example for self-disclosure and for support. New members model their behavior on “older” group members with whom they can identify, or on the psychotherapist.
• Interpersonal learning:
  Yalom sees this factor as particularly important and complex; in his questionnaires, it is divided into “input” (how others see you) and “output” (how you interact with others). Since patients often lack close interpersonal relationships, the group as a social microcosm is an important place for corrective emotional experiences and honest feedback on their social behavior and thus for the development of alternative ways of interacting. This also includes working through relationships with other group members and recognizing transference, whereby he attaches a rather subordinate importance to the concept of “genetic insight” in the sense of early childhood connections.
• Group cohesion:
  Group cohesion or the “we” feeling of a group is just as important as the therapeutic relationship in individual therapy. Psychotherapists invest a lot of energy in building group cohesion because cohesion is a crucial precondition for other therapeutic factors to be effective.
• Catharsis:
  This involves the open expression of intense feelings. Catharsis appears to be necessary and effective for a good therapeutic outcome, especially if the interpersonal context is taken into account and supportive group bonds have been established. Blind expression of feelings, on the other hand, tends to have unfavorable consequences.
• Existential factors:
  groups repeatedly address topics such as life and death, illness and health, loneliness and togetherness, responsibility and being at the mercy of others. Experienced group members consider existential insights to be important for their progress. Existential factors play a particularly important role for patients with life-threatening illnesses or in bereavement groups.
• Corrective recapitulation of the primary family group:
  Most patients have had unsatisfactory experiences in their family, the first and most important group in their lives. For them, overcoming problems in the group is therefore also a way of working through “unfinished business” from their family and past. What is important here is that early family conflicts are not simply repeated, but lived through in a corrective way. This factor only applies to direct processing in psychodynamic groups. Of course, insights into dysfunctional relationship dynamics in the original family can also be gained in other therapeutic groups during the course of group treatment.