ABSTRACT
Group therapy, with clients of all ages, has a significant focus on community. As part of this community focus, group therapy has the potential to combat one of the greatest human pains: loneliness. Play therapy clients, most often children, “already struggle for autonomy and identity in this world, and can be cruelly oppressed in the midst of trauma and chaos and left feeling unfairly isolated” (Sweeney, 2011, p. 227). In his discussion of loneliness, Moustakas (1974) poignantly wrote, “It is the terror of loneliness, not loneliness itself but loneliness anxiety, the fear of being left alone, of being left out, that represents a dominant crisis in the struggle to become a person” (p. 16).
