Title: Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life
Author: Christie Tate
Date Read: December 27, 2020
One and a half snaps.
It is a trope in several films you have likely seen. Pan by the long table with donuts and black tar coffee poured from a large silver urn into small white styrofoam cups; move toward the middle of a large, nondescript room– an abandoned classroom or a large hall in the basement of a church… land on a circle of chairs in the middle. This is group therapy. It is also the central setting of Christie Tate’s memoir: Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life.
Tate’s invitation to her own personal experiences with years of group therapy, under the direction of Chicago’s Joseph Rosen, is unadulterated and unashamedly honest. Tate was a top-of-her-class lawyer and workaholic that just could not seem to get her personal life in order. Dr. Rosen promises healing from several hours of weekly group meetings. Christie is skeptical, insisting that that she is defective, beyond cure. But Dr. Rosen issues a nine-word prescription that will change everything: “You don’t need a cure. You need a witness.” She has witnesses in the circle, but each reader adds to those who will attest to her unravelling and the miraculous arc of her healing journey.
We do bear witness to Chrsitie’s bulimia, her childhood sexual trauma, her relationship disasters, and sex that makes her feel bereft and dirty. The group has no rules around disclosure or fraternizing with others from group. Indeed, we find out that Tate had an affair with a married man from group– a relationship she subsequently points to as evidence that Dr. Rosen is not helping her as he promised. But Rosen’s aloofness, his quirky prescriptions, and the weight of the group puts Christie right again.
Christie Tate is a writer and essayist. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Pithead Chapel, McSweeney’s, Motherwell, Entropy Magazine, A Perfect Wedding, Together.com, Brain, Child and others. Now married and a mother of two (see Epilogue in Group), she wrote a viral essay about her daughter asking her to stop writing about her on the internet. Read it here.