Group Therapy Can Aid in Anxiety Treatment
Thursday, May 14th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
As psychiatric medication has increased in popularity there has been a growing need for therapeutic anxiety help for the millions of individuals suffering from an anxiety disorder. Group behaviors are often quite unsettling for individuals with acute anxiety disorders. These people often struggle to simply be present, and serene, around other people. What if there was a way to interact with other people in a way that anxiety could be discussed openly rather than hidden from? I believe that group therapy is just the prescription for people who are suffering from an anxiety disorder.
Group therapy is recommended quite often for a variety of reasons. There are several common rationales listed for encouraging a person with an anxiety disorder to enter group therapy, including:
- Group therapy allows individuals to work in a social setting with others who may or may not suffer from the same anxiety symptoms that you do, approximating a natural social interaction.
- Group therapy allows individuals with social anxiety to interact with others in the presence of a trained mediator who can make certain that stimulus levels do not reach overload.
- Group therapy allows individuals to confront their anxiety in a therapeutic setting, working through it and diffusing panic attacks before they begin.
With these things in mind, I’d like to talk at length about why group therapy can be such a rewarding program of action for people who suffer from anxiety, especially a social anxiety disorder. Anxiety can be a crippling affliction, however it is one that gets its power from being in the shadows. Anxiety functions in the same fashion as eating disorders. When anxiety is confronted, and called out into the open, it loses much of its power. Unfortunately, for people who suffer from anxiety, the anxiety symptoms are often very over powering and cause a deep shame since they inhibit normal function so severely. Basically, no one wants to talk about their anxiety issues openly. By using a group an anxiety patient can illuminate their disease, potentially disarming it.
I have seen individuals who are so socially inept that they do not attend any social functions and have no friends come to grips with their social anxiety by facing it in the presence of a group therapist. In what can be the most rewarding element of group therapy, these individuals get a chance to interact with others who they do not know at all. These people often produce great anxiety in the patient However, in time, they become accustomed to interacting with them and are able to do so with less severe anxiety symptoms.
However, while simply interacting socially in a safe environment can have many benefits for people who suffer from social anxiety, the true benefit of group therapy occurs when anxiety comes up for the patient during the session. Because anxiety is so often kept in the shadows, very infrequently do these people ever get the chance to talk about their anxiety while it is happening. However, with group therapy there is the opportunity, with a therapist, to discuss the anxiety symptoms in plain sight of everyone else and to do so in an emotionally safe fashion. Because of this, the anxiety symptoms, through a process that can be difficult to describe, actually diminish greatly. Talking about anxiety has the effect of limiting the power of the anxiety. But, since the stigma associated with anxiety is so potent, individuals rarely get a chance to discuss openly because they simply do not feel comfortable to do so. As a result the anxiety, thriving in the shadows only grows stronger. Therefore, it is the frank discussion of the anxiety in value neutral setting that causes the patient to see a decrease in anxiety symptoms in their outside life.
Technorati Tags: No Tags
Related Tags: No Tags
Possible Related Posts
Curing Anxiety in Group TherapyAnxiety Group Therapy How Effective Is It?Find Group Therapy Helpful for Social Anxiety
