🪑#15: Group: How One Therapist And A Circle Of Strangers Saved My Life by Christie Tate - Book Summary & Key Takeaways
Why Group Therapy? What's the big deal about keeping secrets? What happens when we "just try to act normal"? How is progress made?
Hello courageous people! 👋 Welcome to Edition 15.
This week, our featured book is 📚 Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life 🖋 by Christie Tate.
A delicious morsel of a memoir, following Christie’s journey over many years of group therapy and even more problems to work through. While it’s not designed as a text to teach the reader, there are a lot of incredible takeaways.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a messy, real, inspiring story of [loosely guided] self work while trying to build deeper and more meaningful connections with people.
PS. There are spoilers 📣 so if you’re thinking of reading the book I’d advise you to stop reading about halfway through the summary!
Here we go. All text in italics are quotes taken directly from the book.
🔫 What led Christie to Group Therapy in the first place?
We start with Christie sitting in her car in the parking lot of a fruit and vegetable store at eight thirty on a Saturday morning.
She confesses that she has noone to see and nothing to do, even though she is in the middle of a busy law degree at a Chicago University. On the surface you would assume everything was fine, but inside it’s a very different story:
“I wish someone would shoot me in the head.”
A soothing thought with a cool obsidian surface. If I died, I wouldn’t have to fill the remaining forty-eight hours of this weekend or Wednesday’s holiday or the weekend after that.” - page 3
It turns out that even her choice of career to be a lawyer was actually to do with the fact that she could use the long hours as a cover for her completely empty personal life.
Christie describes the surface of her heart as “smooth, slick, and unattached”. In the same way that you have to score the surface of a pottery mug of squishy clay in order to attach the handle securely, she identifies as her heart being thoroughly “unscored” and incapable of allowing it to become so through building genuine relationships.
“Scoring was required for attachment, and my heart lacked the grooves.” - page 6
🫀 The entire purpose of this book and Christie’s motivator for seeking therapy for Christie was to quite literally “score her heart” so that she could finally achieve the sense of deep fulfilment from secure love. (And stop wanting to be dead in the process.)
👬 Why Group Therapy?
Christie didn’t start out her journey specifically in search of Group Therapy, in fact she was completely against the idea when it was suggested by her therapist, Dr Rosen—who is arguably the main character in the book aside from Christie herself.
All she wanted was to keep seeing him for individual sessions, but he was set on group therapy being the answer. Christie asked:
“What’s going to happen to me when I start group?”
Dr Rosen replied,
“You’re going to feel lonelier than you ever have in your life. […] If you’re serious about getting into intimate relationships—becoming a real person, as you said—you need to feel every feeling you’ve been stifling since you were a kid. The loneliness, the anxiety, the anger, the terror.
All your secrets are going to come out.” - page 24-25
Yikes. No wonder she was apprehensive! I don’t think there’s a person on earth whose skin wouldn’t crawl at the thought of all of their secrets being publicly excavated, myself included. 😬
It turns out that the lessons about secrets are some of the most powerful that can be taken away from this book.
🤐 What’s the big deal about keeping secrets?
Christie is in recovery from bulimia, but still eats six or seven apples at night after dinner and feels incredibly guilty about it.
She had been practising keeping secrets ever since she was sixteen years old, for various reasons but a big underlying factor was the pressure from her family, in particular her mother to “not tell other people your business”.
Finally she starts to open up, understanding why it’s so important in the process:
“I released a secret, not caring who in my family might abandon me, because I finally understood that keeping the secret was an act of abandoning myself.” - page 30
By keeping secrets, we keep the parts of ourselves that need the most help hidden and buried. Of course this desire to keep secrets is driven by the belief that we will be rejected if we allow people to see the whole truth, but rejection isn’t the only option.
It is entirely possible that when people see those parts that we usually keep buried, that they may have a different response:
“Christie: “It’s gross—”
Dr Rosen: “Says who?”
Christie: “The self-pity, for one thing—”
Dr Rosen: “I disagree—it’s honest, authentic, and real. It’s yours. And you shared it with me. Thank you.” He rubbed his palm over his heart. “Welcome to your anger, Mamaleh. This is going to help you.”
This was my first praise for the parts of me that were ugly, irrational, petty, reckless, spiteful, and spewing. I’d never heard of such a thing.” - page 94
Praise.
The ability to be open and honest allowed Christie to give light to those secret parts and secret desires that she had. And only when we do that, and we admit them out loud can we begin to start on the journey towards satisfying or resolving those things.
Group therapy provided:
“A place to come where everything is speakable, and you are not asked to hold any secrets for anyone. Ever.” - page 32
🏝 It sounds like a type of haven. Hard work, but a haven.
Another revelation was that it is not just our own secrets which are toxic, but those that we keep for others are as well:
“Dr. Rosen assured me that I didn’t have to tell Brandon’s secret, but he wanted to be sure I understood how secrets work. “When you agree to keep someone’s secret, you hold their shame.” - page 234
Other people’s secrets can be just as painful, just as lonely and just as shameful as our own.
😀 What happens when we “just try to act normal”?
The pressure of “trying to act normal” is something that can be pushed on us by our families, our friends and/or by society at large.
Christie went away on vacation to Hawaii when she was a teenager with her friend’s family. Christie, her friend, friend’s brother and friend’s Dad, David, went for a drive on the Big Island one day to swim at a secluded beach.
David drowned and was taken away from the beach in a black body bag swinging underneath a helicopter. After Christie returned home from this devastating vacation, her parents were trying to be supportive, but were at a loss for what to say or do:
“Can you try to act normal? Just try it. For us. Would you try to act normal? All this moping around, it’s not good for you—”
“Okay.”
I knew what she meant. Since Hawaii, I’d been drained of energy. There was the extra sleeping and the disinterest in all the new opportunities arising with the start of high school. All of it was passing me by. To them, my listlessness looked like childish “moping” that I could—and should—snap out of before I lost a whole year of my life.
My parents firmly believed that I could make up my mind to be happy. I understand now that they were offering me the tools they relied on: willpower, optimism, and self-reliance. But those tools kept slipping out of my grasp, so I reached for the more reliable bingeing and purging to tamp down the emotions trying to surface.” - page 78-79
This request had an unintentional, but very clear and damaging subtext:
“Don’t think about it, or you’ll get upset. Don’t get upset, or you’ll fall behind on the important work of being a normal teenage girl. Don’t talk about it, or you’ll upset yourself. Don’t talk about it, or you’ll upset me.” - page 79
😔 Sometimes the very people we need to see our pain and hold space for us the most, aren’t able to do so for many different reasons. This is understandably disappointing and painful to experience, and precisely highlights why we all need people—whether they are family, friends, online support groups or paid professionals—who are equipped to give us more than an expectation to “just act normal”.
👣 How is progress made?
This is a common thread in every single psychology book (or trauma or healing or any kind of self development). That every little teeny tiny little step counts.
For Christie, all she craved and desired was to find love. After many years of therapy and a lot of practice with some disastrous and some not-so-disastrous outcomes she understood:
“So this was how it happened. This was how you built an intimate relationship. Word by word. Story by story. Revelation by revelation.” - page 174
And she had finally “scored” her heart enough to achieve the pottery-like attachment:
“I visualized my heart and saw slashes from each group session I showed up for, from each man I dated, from each squabble with Dr. Rosen or with a group mate.
Each “fuck you” to Dr. Rosen was a nick. Each screechy voice mail, each temper tantrum during a session, each dramatic hair pull and broken dish.
Nicks, gashes, hash marks, chips, gouges, striations. My heart, a messy, pulpy thing, was scored from each attempt, each near miss, each lunge toward other people, those who loved me back and those who didn’t.” - page 248
So there we have it. Showing up. Trying. Being vulnerable. Being honest. Letting people in. Seeing the good, the bad and the ugly. Small gains over many years. Admitting what we want. Working for it. Getting help. Showing up.
These are the ultimate life lessons that we will all inevitably visit again, and again, and again.
(I’m still kind of hoping it’s going to get easier at some point, but there isn’t one book so far that has told me what I want to hear … I’ll just have to keep reading I guess 😉)
Until next week,
❤️🙏 Eleanor
🧠 Resources & Links
🖥 Psychology Today directory for finding group therapy options near you
🐥 Follow Christie Tate on Twitter - 3k followers
📕 Next week’s book
Coming out next Friday 13th (ooh … spooky 👻) May 2022 is edition #16 featuring:
📚 The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
🖋 by Sonya Renee Taylor
If you’re not already, subscribe now to get the next edition straight to your inbox! 📬