Your Personal Journey Matters: The Formed Self as an Instrument of Healing in Group Therapy

Before Dr. Philip Scrofani ran his first therapy group, he had already spent a childhood learning to read people. Growing up in a Little Italy tenement where, as he puts it, "life was an opera," he learned to tell what was happening inside people by watching how they treated one another. Decades later, after a Ph.D. at Catholic University and fifty years at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, he could look back on more than a hundred and twenty therapy groups and name the conviction that had guided all of them: in group work, the therapist's own formed self is the instrument of healing.

This one-lesson course invites counselors and pastoral care professionals into that conviction. Dr. Scrofani tells his own story and, along the way, makes the claim that first startled his colleagues in the 1970s — that Yalom's curative factors of group psychotherapy look a great deal like the classical virtues. Grounded in Divine Mercy University's Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, the course shows how a group leader's history, character, and faith shape the hope, honesty, and cohesion a group can reach. You will leave with a clearer sense of how your own journey has been forming you as a healer, and a framework for putting the therapeutic use of self to work with integrity.