I Don't Want the Shortcut
On group therapy, and the work of becoming real in relationship
I don’t want the shortcut. Even if this essay takes time, I would rather write it myself than have AI write it for you. I’d rather listen to the stillness of my own mind and trust that what is needed will rise, and that I’ll be able to communicate some essential quality of who I am as a therapist. After all, isn’t that the point? That the words I share with you are congruent with the experience you have in the room with me? The last thing I want is a performance, or a promise, or a sales email disguised as connection, or an idealised dream of being human (in fact I’m sick of it) so I’m going to trust that you might be interested in another way. Or at least that something in us still resonates with the basic act of another person showing up, just as they are.
We live in an age of suspended growth, where the dominant culture wants us chasing pleasure and success and answers. Peter Pan–like in our commitment to the shiny next best thing, increasingly unable to tolerate boredom, limitation, and our inherent ordinariness, and dependent on someone else to do the hard labour.
Mature growth (into the kind of elder who’s present, joyful, wise and able to be still) takes time and attention and patience and courage and responsibility. So no, I don’t want the shortcut that gives me the false flush of pride at an essay I didn’t author. And no, I don’t want a helpful PDF telling me the secret to building a huge mailing list or how to break free of wellness trends. I want the time it takes to be me, just as I am, and I want the space to find the words without knowing what comes next. There is relief in my body as I do this. Honestly, I’m sitting here breathing deep, low, and steady. I have a cold and I didn’t sleep great, but it no longer matters. I don’t need to be clever. I’m just allowing some kind of play. You’ll have your own version of ‘I don’t need to be X’. Maybe it’s: important, valuable, or safe. The kind of not-enoughness that drains so much energy out of everything.
Caveat. We don’t get to these bids for liberation alone. Because we can’t see the context we’re living in and from (for example, I’m not safe) we can only see what that context gives us to see. And then we call that experience reality, blind to the unconscious filter that is shaping our entire world.
Thought creates the world and then says, “I didn’t do it.”
—David Bohm
In precise enough ontological enquiry or committed contemplative practice, a good teacher (or the silence of meditation) will begin to reveal the context we’ve been living from. I’ve recently been supported to fully witness the dependent child in me, who although scared of death, is actually frightened of living. That context creates a way of being predicated upon control, and multiple structures that keep me small, even though I’m longing to break out of the trap and live a big life. It’s a loop that self-perpetuates, and we all have them. I was working with a client just this morning who has to be the provider for everyone, but then never gets his needs met. And because his needs are never met, he has to be the provider. And on and on in an endless loop. It’s a paradox. And we can’t solve a paradox, we can only dissolve it, by seeing it.
Group therapy offers a particular way of revealing context.
Someone speaks, perhaps not even saying very much. Another person shifts in their chair. A man who has been quiet for weeks suddenly says exactly what was needed. A feeling that seemed to belong to one person turns out to be moving through the whole room. Irritation appears where there had been politeness. The nervous laughter that covers fear falls away. Silence is possible. A person used to disappearing realises, with some shock, that their absence has an effect. Another who has spent a lifetime holding everything together begins to feel how exhausting that role has become. Something hidden comes into view, because the group, like a hall of mirrors, allows it to be seen.
The group becomes the stage upon which inner dramas are enacted.
—Jerome Gans
This is one of the reasons I trust group therapy. The room itself is the catalyst and our relational dynamics reveal far more than we can theorise about alone. What is unsaid speaks so loudly, and what one member stirs in another reveals exactly what has been hidden. In a culture that is organised around the individual, group therapy offers an alternative truth. Our difficulties do not reside inside us as private pathology, they originate and endure between us. In the ways we learned to belong or to retreat, and in the many ways we now anticipate harm, avoid conflict, reach for control, resist intimacy or project our vulnerability onto others.
We are social beings through and through. Long before we know ourselves, we are shaped by contact, absence, tenderness, fear, pressure, tone, subtext, and response. We come into being inside a field of interdependent human beings, and our family field and cultural conditioning does not disappear simply because we grow up and become more articulate. It continues to live on in us, mostly outside our conscious awareness, organising how we meet others and what we expect to find.
Group therapy is a place where these primary patterns surface in real time. Someone who fears intrusion may experience an ordinary question as an attack. The person who learned to survive by becoming useful will find themselves mediating without even realising what they’re up to. Someone else will flood the space with a long, rambling story before anyone can get close enough to touch what’s underneath. These are not failures, they are adaptations. Highly intelligent ones that once helped us to survive the circumstances of our childhood. Then we find ourselves all grown up, but stuck in repeating loops that create restriction and disconnection. Our hard won protection has now become a direct block to the aliveness we say we long for. In the group these unconscious strategies come out for all to see, and because they become visible, they can be met, and begin to loosen.
What I see, again and again, is that people arrive doubting that a group will work for them, but group members are consistently surprised by the depth of recognition that comes when other people are present, and the lasting changes that result. It’s one thing to talk in the abstract about feeling left out, overlooked, overwhelmed, or misunderstood. It is another to feel those states arise in the room, in survivable and speakable ways, and to stay long enough to discover what they are made of. Group therapy makes this possible through its honesty. It gives us the chance to encounter ourselves as we are with others, rather than as we imagine ourselves to be. A bitter pill to swallow, but the medicine we actually need.
It’s the opposite of a shortcut. It’s the real route through the wilderness of our internal world, and an dit does take work and commitment, but when you stick with it, it opens into an entirely different way of being, and with it, new choices and possibilities.
Sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there.
— Rebecca Solnit
We human beings impact one another far more than we realise. We evoke memories, identifications, longings and defences wherever we go. We can wound and repair, close down and open up, burden and support. Part of the value of a therapy group is that this reality does not have to remain unconscious, or be spiritually bypassed. A person begins to discover not only what they feel, and how they can take responsibility for those feelings, but how they are felt by others. A good facilitator will support this process in a way that clarifies rather than shames. Over time, groups have the power to deepen accountability, tenderness, and freedom. A person who has felt helpless in the face of their patterns, or grandiose in their certainty, may begin to experience growth as the natural result of awareness, rather than any more doing, fixing, or improving.
This is also why group therapy is not a diluted version of individual work, as it is sometimes imagined to be. It is its own modality, with its own depth, demands, and intelligence. A good group requires presence, patience, the willingness to be affected, and to allow that others are affected by us. It asks us to bear not being the only one. To discover that our distress, however singular it feels, has social and relational dimensions, and to move beyond the fantasy that we can heal while staying untouched by other minds.
In my own decade of group therapy as a client I went through chapters of uncomfortable truths followed by big waves of relief. The things that felt uniquely shameful to me, were in fact recognisable to others. I remember someone else enacting the very defence I lived inside for years, and suddenly I understood it differently, and with deep compassion. I discovered that conflict does not have to mean annihilation, that silence can be safe, that misunderstanding can be survived, that dependency is part of being human, that anger can contain pain, and that closeness and difference can exist in the same room. These are not small things. They are developmental experiences that empower us to mature in ways that will benefit future generations far beyond our comprehension. It’s relational activism.
At the heart of group analysis is the idea that the distress of mental instability is not as personal as it appears. S.H. Foulkes used the phrase the location of disturbance to describe the work of discovering where meaning actually sits in the life of any group. A struggle may seem to belong to one person, but on closer attention it may be located in a conflict between two members, in a shared anxiety moving through the room, or in something ancestral the whole group is struggling to bear. In other words, the symptom is not always the location.
This way of thinking marked a profound shift in psychotherapy. Rather than seeing distress as something sealed inside the problematic individual, Foulkes understood human beings as part of a living network, shaped by and responsive to one another, and the systems we are part of. The therapist’s task is to listen for the wider pattern, to sense the configuration that is trying to come into view, and to help the group recognise what it is unconsciously speaking about. In that process, disturbance moves beyond a problem to be managed, and becomes a source of understanding, through which the individual is freed from the burden of blame.
This matters not only clinically, but ethically. We are living in a time that intensifies loneliness while pretending to connect us, a time that places the weight of distress and ecological disaster onto the individual while refusing to look at the conditions that shape the state of our world. Group therapy pushes firmly against that narrowing. It reminds us that a person’s suffering is not created in a vacuum, and does not resolve there either. It restores context. It reveals the hidden social life of the psyche (and when I say psyche, I mean soul). It gives us a place to feel, in a living way, that we belong to one another and are shaped by one another, whether or not we admit it.
And yet for all its depth, group therapy is not abstract. It’s ordinary work in the best sense. A room. A weekly rhythm. People arriving from their lives with their disappointments, hopes, habits, resistances, and stories. Someone speaks. Someone cannot. Someone gets frustrated that another person is late. Someone realises they have spent their whole life scanning for danger. Someone notices that whenever things deepen, they suddenly want to leave. Someone else begins, perhaps for the first time, to stay. This is how the work happens. Through commitment, contact, and the gradual building of trust. The group becomes a place where life can be observed and appreciated as it is being lived.
I think this is why, when a group begins to work, it can feel so beautiful. Not because it ever becomes easy or consistently harmonious, but because it becomes more truthful. People begin to risk being less managed. They discover that they do not have to perform. The complexity of being human is given full bandwidth. A person can be defended and longing. Angry and loving. Avoidant and in need. Mature in one part of life and frozen in another. The group can hold all of that more easily than the individual mind can. And in doing so, it supports a different relationship to oneself: one that is less punitive, less isolated, and more humane.
This year I am opening a new group in that spirit.
It will be a weekly psychotherapy group, meeting in a hybrid format: three sessions online each month, and one in person at Camden Therapy, in London. We will meet on Wednesday evenings for 90-minute sessions. The group will be small, with eight places, and a monthly fee of £333. Rooted in Group-Analytic Psychotherapy, it offers a steady, creative space for those who want to recognise the past patterns organising the present, and discover a new way of being.
If, as you read, you find yourself drawn to this work, you are very welcome to apply. And if someone comes to mind who might be looking for a genuinely thoughtful therapy space to join, please do share the application with them ↓
The group will start in September 2026. Joining is a considered process, beginning with individual preparatory sessions (monthly), offering the chance to meet 1:1, think together, and lay the ground for the work ahead.
Applications are now open.
I am a UKCP-registered Psychotherapist, Group Analyst, BodyMind Maturation guide, and Elemental Chi Kung teacher exploring non-dual wisdom, the intelligence of dreams, altered states and the relational field of human experience.