Therapeutic Groups
Groups represent a powerful mechanism for growth and change. Our highly competitive culture encourages the development of a "persona", a kind of façade or false self. An individual who is considered successful by their peer group too often strives to protect the "public self", while swallowing doubts and uncertainties. This process is an isolating and crippling one, since it diminishes communication with others and ultimately limits self-reflection. Over time, the "successful" individual comes to believe in the reality of the facade and attempts through unconscious means to ward off internal and external attacks on self-image. Considerable energy is invested in maintaining intra- and interpersonal separations, energy which might otherwise have been used in the service of self-actualization, creativity and self-knowledge.

Therapeutic growth and change in group is a complex and effective process occurring through an intricate interplay of various guided human experiences, including psychoeducation, as well as "curative factors", for which there are eleven primary categories (Yalom, 1975):

• Installation of hope
  
• Universality
  
• Imparting of information
  
• Altruism
  
• The corrective recapitulation of the primary family group
  
• Socialization
  
• Imitative behavior
  
• Interpersonal learning
  
• Group cohesiveness
  
• Catharsis
  
• Existential factors
  
  

Dr. Sherri Edelman (biography, resume), who is a Clinical Psychologist and PA Licensed Counselor with dual Master’s degrees in Group Psychotherapy and Group Process leads the groups at TRIUINE.

Please call us at 215-627-6279 for a current listing of group offerings.