In my masters program, I had a class on group counseling. It was one of the most interesting classes I’ve ever taken.
A tiny slice that I remember: in talking about group therapy, you can put depressed people together and they don’t amplify each other’s depression. You can put anxious people together, and they don’t amplify each other’s anxiety. But if you put aggressive people together, they amplify each other’s aggression.
This is churning through my brain lately on several levels.
Micro:
We have some aggressive kids at school. If there are, for example, five aggressive kids in 4th grade and there are three fourth grade homerooms, what do we do? We can’t separate them all. If these types of kids (people) don’t function in a therapeutic environment together, how can they function (or thrive) in an academic environment? How is a teacher, who is not a trained psychotherapist, supposed to manage them?
Macro:
We have some aggressive people out and about. It’s more and more seemingly acceptable to be aggressive, and to meet aggression in kind. How are we supposed to make America great again [sic] if we’re just escalating the fighting? Compounded by aggression being considered valuable or desirable in many circles…
I tagged this post under cancer because aggression is spreading like one, and killing us like one as well…
