Rooted and Wild: Group Therapy as a Living System
In Walking Each Other Home, I introduced the interpersonal terrain of group therapy — the slow emergence of group culture, the paradox of the therapist’s role, and the quiet power of presence. This piece goes deeper. It moves into the forest floor, the root systems, the unseen networks that pulse beneath and between us.
Group culture might begin as a shared tone or nervous system, but over time something wilder stirs. Not just a culture, but a system — alive, unpredictable, and intelligent in ways we cannot manage or manufacture. To enter a group is to step inside a living organism. And like all organisms, it moves to its own rhythm.
Group therapy disrupts the fantasy of a linear, individual story. It shows us that healing is rarely a straight path. In group, the self isn’t isolated or fixed — it’s shaped in real time within a polyphonic ecosystem of relationships.
A group mirrors both the broader culture and the deeper patterns of our own minds. It moves like mycelium: branching, weaving, generating new pathways. Patterns emerge the way birds flock or coral blooms — unpredictable, yet guided by an intelligence that arises from relationship. Healing becomes less a goal and more the moment when dissonance shifts into coherence — when many voices briefly harmonise.
Group therapy isn’t structured self-improvement or a quest for a cure. It’s an invitation into an ancient, participatory relationship with the wildness of the psyche. It behaves like a living entity — part nurturer, part trickster, part wanderer. It resists being pinned down, unfolding organically, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in tension, always alive.
Where modern life is hyper-controlled, group therapy reawakens something primal. It moves like a tangle of vines, an underground web, a chorus of overlapping voices — spontaneous, adaptive, alive.
A healthy group mutates and reforms, responding intelligently to the moment. It echoes resilience ecology — adapting to disruption, fostering balance rather than enforcing solutions. Like a forest regenerating after fire, a group creates conditions for renewal without dictating how that renewal must look.
Much like an immune system, a group doesn’t impose order from above. It facilitates balance from within. Its emergent intelligence helps us become more flexible, more relationally attuned, more able to navigate life’s shifting terrain. Our stories grow more spacious, able to bend without breaking. We hear ourselves differently through others, tuning to the ongoing chorus of human experience.
The effects of group therapy reach beyond psychology into the sensory, metabolic, and ecological dimensions of being human. It calms our nervous systems, supports neuroplasticity, and invites embodied restoration. Like a thriving ecosystem — or like music — it makes room for tension, rest, variation, and return. It helps us stay attuned to the seasons within us.
Life demands responsiveness. Different conditions call for different movements. Different environments stir different stories from our mycelial depths. Group therapy teaches us how to re-fruit — how to rise again with renewed vitality, deeper insight, and greater capacity to weather storms while staying rooted.
Let us rediscover the fungal flexibility to play — to experiment with creative, relational, and spiritual expression. Let us step away from rigid, patriarchal narratives of control and certainty, and move toward interdependence. To adapt is to survive. To stay responsive is to thrive.
A healthy group isn’t static; it’s a celebration. A humming hive. A murmuring forest. A polyphonic swell of difference that sometimes resolves into harmony. A magician. A compost heap. A tangle of hands and voices. Life itself — wild, evolving, deeply human.
Group therapy, like all living systems, is not about fixed outcomes. It’s a dynamic, relational process — a living conversation with the mind, as complex and untameable as the ecosystems around us.
Acknowledgement
This post is deeply inspired by Sophie Strand’s ecological imagination, especially Chapter 7 of The Flowering Wand.