ABSTRACT
This study examines the rhetoric of community support groups from the perspective of a group facilitator. I draw from my subjective experiences as a scholar of mental health rhetoric and gender studies who has facilitated nearly 170 hours of support groups for survivors of domestic violence at an agency in the southeastern United States. Combining textual analysis of support group literature—specifically, a facilitator training manual—with autoethnographic inquiry, I argue that the paratherapeutic rhetoric of support groups can serve an essential function in clarifying members’ mental health needs. By paratherapeutic rhetoric, I mean communication that looks like therapy, sounds like therapy, has therapeutic aims and/or effects, yet is categorically not therapy. Through rhetorical practices I call creating space, offering words, and paying forward, group facilitators affirm the rhetoricity of individuals whose communications were previously discredited by abusers while also relieving acute, if not necessarily clinically significant, psychic pain.
