Group Therapy in Brooklyn Park and Minneapolis
Almost everyone who walks into a therapy group for the first time believes they are the odd one out. Within a session or two that belief starts to come apart, and that moment is doing real clinical work. Being told you are not alone changes very little. Sitting in a room while a stranger describes your own experience back to you changes a great deal.
Authentic Roots Therapy is a mental health clinic in Brooklyn Park serving the Minneapolis metro. Our licensed therapists run groups for adults and teenagers, in person at our Northland Circle office and by telehealth anywhere in Minnesota.
What is group therapy?
Group therapy is talk therapy delivered to several people at once by a licensed therapist. A small number of members meet at the same time each week, usually for sixty to ninety minutes, and work together on something they have in common. The therapist is not a moderator keeping order. They are running a treatment, choosing what to pursue, what to slow down, and when to name something happening in the room.
Everything said in the group stays in the group. Members agree to that at the start, and it is taken as seriously as the confidentiality between you and an individual therapist, though it rests on the members as well as the clinician.
​What group therapy helps with
Our clinicians see group work used for anxiety, depression, grief and loss, trauma recovery, anger, stress and burnout, difficulty with relationships, low confidence, life transitions such as divorce or a move, and the kind of persistent loneliness that is hard to name and harder to admit.
It also suits teenagers particularly well. Young people frequently take more from peers their own age than from any adult in the room, and a group gives them somewhere to be understood without having to explain themselves from the beginning.
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How it is different from a support group?
People use the two terms interchangeably and they are not the same thing. A support group is usually peer led, often open to anyone who turns up, and built around sharing experience and encouragement. That has real value and many people are helped by it.
Group therapy is a clinical treatment. The group is formed deliberately, members are screened for fit beforehand, a licensed clinician leads it, and the work follows a therapeutic method rather than a conversation. The difference shows most clearly when something difficult happens in the room. In a support group it tends to get smoothed over. In group therapy it becomes the material.
Does group therapy actually work?
This is the question most people want answered first, usually because they assume group therapy is the cheaper, lesser option. The research does not support that assumption. Decades of studies comparing the two have found group therapy to be about as effective as individual therapy for many common concerns, including depression, anxiety, grief and trauma recovery.
For some things it is the better treatment rather than the compromise. Anything that shows up in relationships, social anxiety, isolation, patterns that repeat with partner after partner or job after job, tends to respond to group work in a way that talking about it one to one cannot easily match.
​What a session is like
Groups meet at the same time each week in the same room, which matters more than it sounds. Numbers are kept small on purpose, so that everyone has room and nobody can disappear.
​Most new members spend the first couple of sessions listening and are surprised by how quickly they want to say something. The therapist shapes the session, sometimes by introducing a theme, sometimes by following whatever the group has brought that week, and sometimes by pointing at something happening in the room that everyone has noticed and nobody has mentioned.
Most people notice something shifting after several sessions rather than after the first one. The first two or three weeks are usually the hardest, because the room is unfamiliar and you are deciding how much to say. What changes after that is not only how you feel but how you behave in the room, and that is generally the clearer sign of progress.
Group therapy alongside individual therapy
The two work well together and a great many people do both. Individual sessions give you somewhere to take what the group stirred up. The group gives you somewhere to practise what individual therapy helped you see. Because we offer individual, couples, family and group therapy in the same practice, this can be coordinated between clinicians rather than split across two places that never speak to each other.
Our clinicians also work in somatic therapy and trauma therapy, and either can run alongside a group.
Schedule an Appointment with Authentic Roots Therapy
Being unsure is the ordinary starting point, not a reason to wait. Get in touch and we will talk through which group fits, or whether individual work makes more sense first. In person in Brooklyn Park, or online anywhere in Minnesota.
Groups also run by telehealth for anyone in Minnesota. For a weekly commitment that matters more than it does for individual sessions, since the thing most likely to end a group membership is the drive. We regularly see clients from Brooklyn Park, Minneapolis, New Hope, Coon Rapids, Fridley, Maple Grove and Plymouth.
