A Group Therapist Reflects on Violence in America

Abstract

In this paper, the author draws on his experience as a group therapist, noting parallels between the often intense but well contained dynamics of therapy groups and what they can tell us about violence in America. He examines the tension between bearing and understanding feelings and the desire to act on them, sometimes destructively in therapy groups and in society. He notes the omnipresent desire to find scapegoats rather than bear our own discomforts and notes the same in the abuse through which those in power scapegoat those under their control. Using the ideas of Roche, Volkan, and others, he also notes that current violence emerges from threats to individual or group identities often embedded in unfinished crises in the past, whether in a therapy group or in American society. Unresolved racial tensions reaching into the past is one outstanding example. He concludes noting the important role of reparation and forgiveness in therapy groups and society to slow the forward movement of violence.