Group Therapy
Elena Ryabtseva, MS, LMHC, CGT
Psychotherapist, Educator, Independent Scholar
Why Group
Do you have a soul community? A community you can bring yourself to fully, your breakthroughs and struggles, your joy and darkness – all that you encounter on your journey of individuation? Therapy group is a safe and contained community space to explore yourself, your ways of relating to others, and your ways of relating to yourself in the presence of others.
The group is also a place to receive so much needed compassionate mirroring and discover your blind spots. Once group participants have established safety with each other, the group process tends to go deeper, and that’s when powerful feelings may emerge between you and other group members. Such moments are invitations to metabolize – with support – personal, cultural, and collective wounds and traumas that exist in all of us.
My Approach
We are not separate, and what feels misaligned and dysfunctional in our personal lives often has roots that reach beyond the individual into the culture and the collective. In each meeting, as group process unfolds in the here-and-now of the presenting situation, I pay special attention to the emergence of shared themes amongst the participants. The group is structured as an interpersonal process group, which allows for exploration of individual material on intrapersonal, dyadic, and subgroup levels.
A group meets for 1.5 hours.
Prospective participants will meet with me for a free consultation to explore their needs and fitness for a group process.
Participants are required to be in ongoing individual therapy or to recently have completed a course of long-term therapy (at least 3 years)
Ongoing therapy groups do not have a predetermined point of termination. Participants choose their length of stay based on their individual needs. Some people choose to stay in a group indefinitely, as their ongoing relational and/or spiritual practice, while others leave when they feel that they have received sufficient benefit.
Group process takes time, continuity, and commitment to showing up. To give a group a fruitful chance and maintain a sense of continuity and coherence for all participants, I ask group participants to commit to a minimum of six months of group participation.
Psychedelic Integration Therapy group
Psychedelic experience may bring a powerful shift in perspective, but this shift is only the beginning of a long journey of transformation. Effective work in psychedelic medicine consists of three parts: a “peak experience” or insight during the journey, extended process of integration, and support of the community.
Feeling with more intensity, letting go of outdated beliefs and deepening one's sense of self, finding a new relationship with spirit and the numinous, showing up in new ways in important relationships, including a relationship with one’s own body, can be a trying time.
As your inner landscape is shifting, Psychedelic Integration Therapy group can become a safe and contained space for you to address patterns, themes, and issues in your life that require change - all while being witnessed and supported by a community of open-hearted humans, each walking their own path of transformation.
For more information about my approach to psychedelic integration, please visit Psychedelic Therapy & Integration page. Psychedelic Integration Therapy group can be particularly helpful:
During and after a course of psilocybin microdosing
Before and after psilocybin journeys
Before and after ayahuasca journeys
Following ayahuasca master teacher plant dieta
During and after a course of Ketamine Assisted Therapy
After MDMA journeys
When interacting with other varieties of psychedelic and plant medicine
As an ongoing process of integration
Women’s Therapy group
This is a place to see yourself reflected by other women, experience supportive holding of the all-women container, and explore your relational dynamics and trauma imprints evoked in the presence of the feminine and in relationships with women.
With the intention of co-creating a coherent and safe container for embodied relatedness, every group session will open with a guided embodied presence exercise. It is from this grounded and resourced place that we will begin to check-in and work with themes emerging in the group field by means of individual material that each member brings. Through individual and interpersonal processing, moments of mutual aliveness, spontaneity and synchronicity, group dialogue, movement, dreamwork, and active imagination, we create an environment of caring, connection, and belonging. The group is kept intentionally small to ensure intimacy of the container and sufficient time for individual and interpersonal processing. The group meets in person and is open to all individuals identifying as women.
In the course of the group, participants will be able to identify some shared cultural and collective belief programs that result in women’s internalized shame, disempowerment, incoherent body image, lack of fulfillment, and difficulty living in alignment with her own inner knowing. Group process is an alchemical container that makes experiences of mutuality, belonging and wholeness possible, while transforming outdated beliefs, attitudes, and relational patterns. It is through these experiences we find the new internal ground to stand on amidst all that the life of womanhood brings.
“The next Buddha will not take the form of a person. The next Buddha will rather take the shape of a community, a community that practices understanding and loving kindness, a community that practices a way of conscious living. This may be the most important thing for earth’s survival.”