Groups

I’ve done a LOT of group therapy in my life. Of course there were the endless hours of groups that came with every inpatient and partial hospitalization. There were various outpatient DBT groups, various AA meetings and even one outpatient CBT group. But nothing – nothing held a candle to the group my friends and I created on our own.

We all met in a PHP program run by a local hospital. It was a pretty good program, as these things go. There was the usual drama. A girl that no one liked killed herself. The damned “movement therapy” people forced us into sing-a-longs (with tambourines) in the middle of a day that bruised our self-esteem. There were insurance battles. The DBT therapist had a newborn and was so sleep-deprived that she couldn’t run a group to save her life. One of the social workers looked like a hobbit. We tried not to look enviously at the other outpatient programs for medical issues that looked better funded and frankly, cleaner.

Eventually though, the program ran out for all of us (did I mention the insurance battles) and we tentatively agreed to try and keep meeting. Maybe every couple of weeks, we said? A potluck at one woman’s house? We did it and it went WELL. Then one night, at the last minute, we couldn’t get in touch with our host. She was busy trying to kill herself we later learned. When she got out of the coma we started meeting again but now on a weekly basis.

Every Friday in Alameda we sat for hours and hours and listened patiently to each other. There were 8 of us. I was actually the youngest at 31. Everyone else was somewhere between 40-60. But it didn’t matter. We all had some variety of depression. Others had some axis II stuff going on and maybe some substance abuse thrown in for fun. But we all had something in common: at one point, all of us had wanted to kill ourselves and we just wanted to keep each other ALIVE. It became a support group for people addicted to the idea that suicide was an answer.

I’m going to stage a reunion in May when we go back for a visit. It’ll have been almost 4 years since we were all together. I’ve missed them all so much.

All of them.

All of us are still alive.

All of us.