Questions and Answers

I’ve taken part at group psychotherapy for six months. There is an issue I think might be essential about me and I’d like to talk about, but I feel extremely shy, 1st) because I can’t be totally comfortable with other people 2nd) because I live in a country where abortion is crime (I’ve had an abortion performed in a very traumatic way and then for about ten years I got pregnant nine more times and I just stopped that when I decided to carry on my last pregnancy). I wouldn’t want to have problems with police (I trust my psychotherapist but not the other members of the group), besides that I think they (the other members of the group) might be judgmental or even indiscreet about that. There’s great prejudice about abortion here in Brazil. I feel awful having to talk about that, do you think its really important to tell that to my psychotherapist.   You have no reason to talk about anything in psychotherapy unless you are open to change. But, even more than that, you have no reason to be in psychotherapy unless you are willing to submit everything about your life to examination and are willing for every perversion of your life to change. This means that you have to face all your mistakes with honest scrutiny and that it is a grave psychological error to “kill off” anything that seems too unpleasant or too inconvenient for you—whether it be a part of your personality, your parents, your friends, your children, or your children in the womb. The fact is, abortion is a crime against humanity, for it reduces a human being to a piece of garbage. And that cold process of reduction becomes a psychological crime resulting in profound trauma that most medical and psychological organizations prefer to ignore. Now, if you have stopped having abortions because you have realized what a crime it is, then you can talk about your past abortions from a place of sorrow. And that can be a profound motive for scrutiny and psychological change in other areas of your life. Group psychotherapy, however, as you point out, poses a real problem with confidentiality. The whole point of a psychotherapy group is to engage in honest interactions with others so that you can recognize defensive patterns of social interaction as they occur in the moment, right in the group, and change those patterns as necessary. But if you believe that confidentially cannot be guaranteed, then you cannot interact with others honestly; in that case it would be best if you continued your treatment individually. Just be careful that you don’t use this problem with group psychotherapy as an excuse to kill off the full potential of your treatment altogether.    Back to the list of questions

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