ABSTRACT
A woman in the group speaks blandly, looking at no one. The group is generally pretty good about not giving advice, but this time people bombarded him. Group therapists could study philosophy. Riskier is group therapy – eight people, ten people, a dozen people. The biggest risk is walking through the door; showing up in the first place; showing up as themself, as someone who sees what they see and knows what they know and hurts where they hurt. The house painter doesn’t yet have a reliable method to name the sensations he feels, to place them, and let them go. Years of his life have been lost to amorphous states that are the curdled residue of other people’s emotions, sensations he picks up unknowingly and then gets lost in. It can happen to therapists too: the wheelbarrows and the chickens and the rain add up, crowding our internal experience.
