Training Groups
What is a Training Group?
A Training Group is a unique and highly effective form of personal and professional development. As therapists and mental health providers, our feelings (i.e. countertransference) are our instrument, providing essential information into the unspoken, preverbal life of our clients. Implicit information about their relational traumas and wounds are communicated through the feelings they stimulate within us. The wider the range of feelings we have access to, the more we are able to use them to deepen the therapeutic process.
To use our feelings skillfully, we need to continuously work on ourselves in two important ways. First, we need to fine tune our awareness of feelings as they come up in the moment. And, second, we need to find out more about the one we avoid feeling and sharing. These are often the feelings that were not permitted or allowed to be expressed in our own childhoods. In group, we have the opportunity to refine, revisit, and reclaim our emotional lives. As we do this, we become better able to help our clients do the same – offering them the chance to come alive in new ways.
What is a Training Group?
Beginning with our family, groups impact our sense of self and the world around us in powerful and enduring ways. From these early relationships, we learn which parts of ourselves can and cannot be included in our engagement with others. Without realizing it we often carry these patterns forward, unconsciously curating what we show others as well as ourselves.
Process groups offer a unique therapeutic & educational setting for both uncovering these historical messages and expanding our relational possibilities. As group members engage with each other, security is formed and new opportunities for insight and self-assertion become available.
“Those successful in group are successful in life.”
– Lou Ormont