What Is Group Therapy?
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), group therapy is a type of therapy in which a group of 6 to 12 clients meets regularly with one or two clinicians. In group therapy, your clinicians will teach and guide you through a wide variety of therapeutic modalities as you form deep bonds with your fellow group members.
What Can You Learn in Group Therapy?
- Recovery strategies
- Coping skills
- Interpersonal skills
- Building support networks in the group
The purposes and goals of group therapy can be tailored to the different stages of your recovery journey, also incorporating specific topics and demographic needs.
Different Focuses:
- Purposes and goals
- Early recovery
- Relapse prevention
- Topics
- Consequences of substance use disorder (SUD)
- Impact of SUD on families
- How to use support networks
- Co-occurring disorders and health conditions
- Mental health disorders
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Health issues
- Cancer
- HIV/AIDS
- Mental health disorders
- Demographics
- Gender-specific
- Age-specific
- LGBTQ+
- Veterans
- Criminal justice clients
5 Types of Group Therapy
The Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) Series, No. 41, states that there are five models of SUD group therapy used to support clients with specific types of problems. These include:
- Psychoeducational groups
- Expand clients’ awareness of the psychological, behavioral, and medical consequences of SUD
- Help clients in early recovery
- Inform how disorders work
- Recognize roadblocks to recovery
- Discover what an individual’s path to recovery could look like
- Help family and friends understand SUD behavior
- Support health changes for family and friends
- Expand clients’ awareness of the psychological, behavioral, and medical consequences of SUD
- Skills development groups
- Teach clients coping skills to maintain abstinence and manage co-occurring conditions
- Manage emotions
- Improve refusal skills
- Develop relaxation strategies
- Teach clients coping skills to maintain abstinence and manage co-occurring conditions
- Cognitive-behavioral and problem-solving groups
- Support clients in learning to change unhealthy beliefs, perceptions, behaviors, and thinking patterns
- Develop short and long-term goals
- Focus on immediate problems
- Build problem-solving skills
- Track feelings and behaviors related to SUD
- Deepen understanding of destructive behavior and thinking
- Support clients in learning to change unhealthy beliefs, perceptions, behaviors, and thinking patterns
- Support groups
- Help clients learn to manage day-to-day living and foster interpersonal skills
- Improve self-esteem and self-confidence
- Support each other with current life issues
- Allow group feedback
- Hold each other accountable
- Help clients learn to manage day-to-day living and foster interpersonal skills
- Interpersonal process groups
- Focus on using knowledge of human behavior to heal and change clients’ relationships with themselves and others
- Search for patterns that contribute to SUD
- Focus on using knowledge of human behavior to heal and change clients’ relationships with themselves and others
Other Specialized Groups:
- Relapse prevention groups
- Support clients in maintaining abstinence or recovering from a relapse
- Activities
- Problem-solving
- Skill building
- Support clients in maintaining abstinence or recovering from a relapse
- Communal and culturally specific treatment groups
- Focus on restoring cultural ties and a sense of cultural belonging
- Culturally specific wellness activities
- Specific culture-based healing practices
- Therapy based on cultural values
- Building personal relationships between clients and clinicians
- Culturally specific wellness activities
- Focus on restoring cultural ties and a sense of cultural belonging
- Expressive groups
- Use a wide range of therapeutic activities to help clients express conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings
- Art therapy
- Dance
- Music
- Play
- Games
- Poetry
- Free movement
- Psychodrama
- Use a wide range of therapeutic activities to help clients express conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings
How Can Group Therapy Help Me?
While recovery is a multi-phase process, participating in therapy is an essential feature of long-term recovery. Therefore, many approaches can be taken to support you on your recovery journey, including group therapy. Sometimes people shy away from sharing their struggles within a group setting, but group therapy has proven itself as a useful resource for SUD and co-occurring conditions. According to TIP, group therapy reduces feelings of isolation and allows you to actively witness the recovery of people going through similar experiences. Through group therapy, you can find support, insight, trust, and accountability in your fellow members as you walk together on your journeys to recovery.
Benefits of Group Therapy for SUD Abstinence:
- Positive peer support and pressure to remain abstinent
- Reduced feelings of isolation from SUD and co-occurring conditions
- Power in witnessing the recovery of others
- Helping each other learn coping strategies
- Sharing experience and knowledge
- Providing helpful feedback
- Family-friendly experience
- Opportunities to support, encourage, and coach each other through difficult tasks
- Developing or rebuilding social skills
- Helpful structure and discipline for daily life
- Forming bonds and support networks beyond the group setting
Community in Therapy
As noted in an article from The American Journal on Addiction, women prefer women-only group therapy settings for enhanced comfort, support, empathy, care relevance, and safety. While there is a stigma around SUD, many women feel and experience additional stigmas for being a woman with SUD.
In addition, there is a history of beliefs about being a woman that has contributed to stigmas about womanhood and motherhood, coupled with ideals of women as the foundation of comfort and stability in our lives. These old beliefs about how women exist in the world leave little to no space for women to not be okay. In women-only programs like group therapy, you can find fellowship and form deep bonds with women who can understand what it means to be a woman in recovery.
To learn more about our women-only programs at Emerge Recovery TX, visit our Home page.
Group Therapy at Emerge Recovery TX
At Emerge Recovery TX, we are dedicated to providing group therapy to support you on your journey to long-term recovery. Our women-only group therapy uses evidence-based therapeutic modalities to provide a group curriculum that can support the specific needs of the group members. Moreover, we provide a wide range of types of group therapy to support you as you work with your fellow group members to form lifelong bonds on your recovery journey.
More Group Therapy Options at Emerge Recovery TX:
- Experiential groups
- Art therapy
- Psychodrama
To learn more about group therapy at Emerge Recovery TX, visit our Group Therapy and Process Groups page.
Group therapy can help you build a healthier you and form lifelong bonds with other women in recovery. At Emerge Recovery TX, you can find a community of women to walk with you on your journey to recovery. Call (737) 237-9663 today to learn how group therapy can support you.