Why Four-Week Group Therapy Might Be the Best Fit For You
“Group therapy can cut through social stigma…you realize that you are not alone in what you’re going through.”
Here at Well we are interested in designing therapy best suited to your treatment needs, and are excited to offer group telehealth group therapy broken into four-week sessions to help focus on specific areas for treatment.
Why is group therapy a good idea?
We believe that group therapy can be a great way to work on specific skills or strive for particular treatment outcomes in a space that simultaneously builds relationships and acceptance. Though individual therapy is great, group therapy is also proven to be effective treatment, and offers some things that individual therapy simply does not.
Often working through something with a therapist individually can lead to feelings of isolation or shame, as you can feel alone even as our therapist aims to help you. By working through things with a group, however, you can build community and see how other people process and cope with similar experience, even if that looks different for every person.
By observing and engaging with how other people process similar traumas, experiences, diagnoses, and therapies, you not just feel less alone: you will also be able to see first-hand that there is no one right method or speed in gaining new skills and coping mechanisms through therapy. Furthermore, group therapy can cut through social stigma: by joining a group targeted around specific concerns, you will likely feel less shame as you realize that you are not alone in what you’re going through.
Group therapy can also help you develop interpersonal skills by allowing you to engage openly with other people who share something with you. Having other people around you can help build community, and this community support can help facilitate positive outcomes, as you are able to grow and learn with others rather than on your own.
Okay, I like the sound of group therapy—but why is Well’s four-week group therapy a good idea?
Our four-week model one option of what therapists call Brief Group Therapy (BGT), and, as its name suggests, this mode of group therapy is limited in duration, usually taking place for between two to three months, involving between eight and 12 monthly sessions (though frequency varies).
BGT allows patients to know the beginning and end date of a given group session prior to joining, which can be beneficial for a number of reasons.
In the most basic sense, this shorter-term therapy is less intimidating than long-term groups: when you join a longer-term group you may feel that you are committing to something that doesn’t seem to end because there is no concluding date attached. You may also feel intimidated if you’re joining a group that has already formed, which is often the case for long-term groups. Well believes that Brief Group Therapy is the answer to these and other issues.
It can be easier to commit to something that takes place over four weeks over something that is open-ended, because something that does not have a set date range can feel overwhelming. By providing a short-term therapy option, you can easily conceptualize what your therapy roadmap will look like, and see it as a cohesive part of your schedule over a period of weeks, rather than an open-ended commitment that you opt into (or out of) at any time.
There are additional positives for the relative ease of commitment as well: we believe that shorter-erm group therapies facilitate stronger bonds because it can be easier to commit and maintain attendance if you have a set of dates, rather than the uncertainty of longer-term therapies. This is good news for other group members, as it means their friends are more likely to stick around.
Furthermore, BGT’s defined start and end points allow for more targeted and goal-oriented therapies. While long-term groups are open-ended in their concentration within a particular diagnosis or common experience, dealing with any number of things that come up within this broad umbrella, shorter groups can focus on specific goals or desired outcomes. For example, you could opt to join a group focused on coping with anxiety confident that this skill will be at the center of each session, developed over the course of the “coping with anxiety” four-week group.
But what if you want more than four-weeks of group therapy?
That’s great! We don’t see our groups as something that you complete in four weeks and then, once the four weeks are up, you leave Well forever. Instead, four-week groups are intended to break things down into chunks, allowing you to focus on one skill or concentration at a time, which will both help limit stress (we can work together to choose the best one for you, that best suits your needs and immediate goals) and put you in a group full of members similarly engaged with a specific goal. By designing our group therapy as four-week, focused chunks, we hope that you can better find the support you need and feel more confident about your choice to try group therapy.
