Monthly Therapy and Support Group with Emphasis on the Individual Mourning, Grief, and Psychic Change Process: Opening Blocks to Love and Creativity.

This group meets on the 1st Saturday of the month, from September through June, 12:00 pm to 4:00 pm, with half hour break at 2:00 pm for refreshments and socializing.

Fee: $200/month.

Please inquire about the waiting list process.

This group meets for an intensive therapy period, once a month for four hours, for ten months of the year (excluding July and August). As one members of this group has previously said, “I have to be able to love in order to create.” By dealing with individual life losses in the support of a group, individual group members are able to navigate past blocks, resistances, and psychic conflicts that have held them back in their life.

With Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler as the group leader, who has a specialty in grief, mourning, and the opening up of blocks to creativity and love, group members can face feeling states that were formerly intolerable to them and move forward to face their anger and their losses, with the result of re-opening capacities to love and to create.

Visualization

Each group meeting begins with a psychic visualization led by Dr. Kavaler-Adler. This allows participants to come in contact with their internal worlds before they enter the external, interpersonal world of the group. Everyone closes their eyes and breathes deeply as Dr. Kavaler-Adler helps the individuals in the group to tune into who they wish to speak to in their inner worlds. Participants conger up mothers, fathers, husbands, past lovers, siblings etc., and begin to speak to them as they visualize them in their minds. They then see if these “others,” who they carry with them in their minds and psyches can respond to what they have to say to them. They listen and wait for a response, while still breathing deeply, with eyes closed.

They then respond back and see what their heart has to say to the person who appears in their minds, as well as what their stomachs might need to express. Over time, the visualization process may lead to a whole evolution of reparative relationship with the “others” who appear to them. Some participants become aware of their anger through the psychic visualizations. Often their anger is followed by sadness, forgiveness and compassion, as consciousness of anger transforms it. Many acknowledge yearnings and regrets that have long been buried during the visualization. The “others” within each individual’s internal world may evolve into people that can be related to, even when they had formerly been alienated. This is often due to the expression of formerly repressed anger.

Sharing

After everyone opens their eyes following the visualization, the floor is open for those who wish to share their visualization experience with the group members. This sharing period opens all kinds of empathic engagements between group members. The individual who shares is deeply listened to and responded to by the others group members. Over time, each group member’s life- long psychological journey is revealed, while the internal others, who have haunted them in the past, are confronted and relinquished. This is a journey of mourning and grief. It includes becoming conscious of rage, anger, sadness, loss and love. Such consciousness frees each individual to move- on to re-own the parts of themselves that have been lost by having been regressively tied to unresolved conflicts and unspoken thoughts. The unresolved conflicts and unspoken thoughts can be resolved and spoken.

Group members can also trigger reactions in each other that relate to significant figures in each participant’s past, those who symbolically inhabit their internal worlds. Each group member can gain insight into their reflexive and self- sabotaging reactions as they see them played out with fellow group members. One person may prompt the reaction in another that relates back to a parent who they still feel engaged with in their minds. As the internal conflict is engaged in in the safe laboratory of the group meeting the hidden agendas of each person and their internal “others” can be brought to light. Insight and conscious awareness then allows the group member to let go of self- sabotaging modes of relationship that hold them back. As old modes of relationship are surrendered, new energies open to allow passion and involvement in the intimacy of the group relationships, which opens energy for intimacy and creativity in their daily lives with important others.

Mourning

Group members become expert mourners, who can process all their feelings and thoughts, so that they need not be stuck and blocked in their life experience. When psychic regrets are faced, unfulfilled aspects of each person’s personality can begin to unfold. When losses are faced, as old modes of relationship are relinquished, regrets can also be faced and learned from. Then new modes of love and creativity naturally and organically arise. The group then profoundly validates and affirms the new potential in each individual as they are born and evolve.

Please call Dr. Kavaler-Adler at (212) 674-5425 or email her at DrKavalerAdler@gmail.com for more information on this group.

Endorsement for this Monthly Mourning group by a long-time member: