What Is Interpersonal Group Psychotherapy?

Interpersonal Group Psychotherapy (IGP) is typically practiced as a 90-minute weekly session with a facilitator and 5–12 participants, meeting over 6 to 24 months (on average), and often longer. These are ongoing closed groups, meaning the membership stays consistent over time, allowing for depth, safety, and trust to develop. It is the depth of relationship that makes it possible to heal deep psychological wounds and life-limiting habits and beliefs.

IGP is oriented around a threefold purpose:

• Personal psychological growth – including the healing of attachment wounds and support through life transitions.

• The deepening of interpersonal relationships – cultivating honest, supportive, and transformative connections between participants.

• Being part of a transformational group journey – belonging to a group that moves through developmental stages, where individuals grow and change over time, is itself a profoundly healing and humanising experience.

Participants witness and support one another through major life passages that unfold over months or years. Being part of a group of people who heal, learn and grow together over time is a deeply humanising experience. It's also mammalian. This kind of thing ought to be more common and ordinary, and it can be, with a few more IGP facilitators around.

support groups vs. closed igp

The engine of Interpersonal Group Psychotherapy (IGP) is the group relating in the here-and-now.

In many short-term counselling or support groups—such as bereavement groups, 12-step programs, or diagnosis-specific groups—it’s common for participants to seek cathartic relief by sharing stories about what happened to them in the there-and-then (earlier in the week, in childhood, or at some other time in the past). This is sometimes referred to as ‘content’ and being heard.

While that kind of sharing may also occur in IGP, the facilitator is likely to treat it differently. In IGP, a participant’s reference to past events is typically understood not only for its content, but as ‘process,’ as a relational gesture—an attempt to achieve something interpersonally within the group in the here-and-now. In other words, what’s being said about the past is often less important than why it’s being said now, and how it’s shaping the relational dynamics in the room. This is sometimes referred to a ‘process’ work.

the IGP advantage

While Yalom (2020) and Corey (2017) each list 11 therapeutic factors of IGP, the principal therapeutic factor—the one that sums up the rest—is the group itself. The group relating is the therapy, is the therapeutic factor, is the engine of change. As such, the IGP facilitator is less of a psychotherapist and more a of facilitator. Yalom, Corey, and Conyne list various functions of the facilitator, but chief among them is enabling the group to relate psychotherapeutically.

Very often, the most potent therapeutic interactions happen between group members, while the facilitator simply holds the space open to make it possible. In this respect, the IGP facilitator is the condition of possibility—the one who makes it possible, rather than the one who makes it happen. The group does the therapy. An effective group is the group working.

When the facilitator does step in more actively, they are able to leverage the relational field—drawing on what the group has directly witnessed of a participant’s way of relating, and calling forth the empathy, honesty, or resonance of the group itself. They might even draw on the specific rapport between two participants as a way to open healing dialogue.

This all comes back to a central point: if something is showing up here-and-now in the group, it is very likely also happening there-and-then in the rest of the client’s life. This is the bridge between insight and lived change.

IGP facilitators no longer have to rely solely on reported experiences—they witness and experience relational patterns firsthand, in the immediacy of the group. The degree to which a participant allows the relationships in the room to be real becomes the clearest measure of how fully they allow themselves to be known in the world.

It's often said, "It's all very well to develop insight and practice better ways of relating in therapy, but what difference does it make in your actual relationships?" In group therapy, these are real relationships. The other participants aren't getting paid to be supportive or to tolerate difficult behaviours. If they have a sour reaction, if they offer kind empathic support, or if they yawn in boredom, it is a direct interpersonal relational information. 

A skilled and effective Interpersonal Group Psychotherapy facilitator makes it possible for group participants to become each other’s healers. The facilitator helps transform a group of strangers into a group of psychotherapists. But the psychotherapy of these groups is not administered—it is enacted. The group itself becomes the therapy. The group becomes the principal therapeutic factor, the engine of change. Less by therapising upon each other, and more by being human together - mammals.

secure IGP-base for Life passages

One of IGP's key benefits is providing clients with a supportive group that steadies them through life transitions. The group becomes a secure base where participants can check their reality, experience having their emotional needs met, and use this as an emotional compass to recreate similar relationships in their wider life.

Participants in ongoing long-term groups (6–24 months) accompany each other through substantial life transitions such as:

• Career changes or returning to study

• Entering or leaving relationships

• Becoming a parent

• Embracing authentic sexual expression

• Healing attachment wounds and patterns

• Shifting family relationship dynamics

These changes occur through both healing and life transition lenses. Unmet emotional needs from early developmental years often prevent us from navigating subsequent life passages, or make transitions deeply distressing when we do attempt them. Healing attachment wounds creates the foundation for successful life transitions by shifting relational patterns and creating new possibilities. The transition itself, which begins in the group, becomes tangible evidence of deep internal change, which can then be effected in the clients wider life beyond the group.

Economic, Therapeutic and Social benefits of IGP

1. Cost-Effective Evidence-Based Practice

Group therapy offers better economic advantages than individual therapy for both clients and therapists, as well as an enormous evidence-base gathered over decades both in terms of research evidence and practice-based evidence from pre-eminent scholar-practitioners such as Irvin Yalom, Gerald Corey, Robert Conyne and others.

2. A More Robust Therapeutic Container

Seven group members provide more lived experience, therapeutic wisdom, and diverse perspectives than any single therapist, no matter how skilled, educated or experienced. A well facilitated IGP is a strong container, capable of both healing as well as landing therapeutic gains into real relationships; and capable of a deeper rupture and repair than an individual therapeutic dyad can tolerate. For while a client may be in rupture with the facilitator, the other members of the group can hold them both within the greater supportive cohesive web of the group. Inaddition, clients learn not only from their own therapeutic process but also from witnessing how others navigate challenges, creating rich opportunities for vicarious learning and modelling.

3. Address Social Isolation and Systemic Patterns

We are living through an epidemic of loneliness in a culture fixated on individual resilience. Group therapy directly addresses isolation by creating multi-layered interpersonal belonging. IGP attends to the social and relational patterns that generate mental illness in the first place. As Jiddu Krishnamurti said, "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." If chronic individualism is the social sickness, then individual therapy may be inadvertently reinforcing the problem by ‘adjusting’ us to it. Or, as Audre Lorde put it, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

IGP normalises a very human and natural and mammalian discontentment with the prevailing dislocation, disenfranchisement, disconnection and alienation from culture, meaningful work, natural ecologies, ancestral ways, ancestral lands, neighbours, local community and kinship that thousands of Australians are experiencing. We are right to feel off about it, and to feel ill about it, or mentally unwell about it. In this respect, IGP is not for the treatment of individual illness, but for the treatment of social illness, whose symptoms manifests in otherwise healthy individuals and are exaggerated in those with pre-existing vulnerabilities.

join the Cultural Revolution

If individuals feel lonely, isolated, and disconnected—cut off from culture, ecology, and a sense of belonging—perhaps they are not unwell at all. Perhaps they are the canaries in the coal mine, alerting us to something toxic in the air. The problem isn’t the canary; it’s the air.

It serves an individualist culture—one that profits from overachievement, self-reliance, and isolation—to promote services that never question individualism itself. I am by no means opposed to individual therapy or counselling. Seeking a confidante, an elder, or a mentor is as old as the hills. We must continue to seek wisdom and guidance from those who have gone before us—from mentors, healers, shamans, medicine people, and those who offer care in quiet corners, away from prying ears.

But any serious and ethically minded mental health practitioner must ask: are their clients unwell for individual reasons, or because the system itself is making them sick—forcing isolation and disconnection?

A major Harvard study, now over 80 years in the making, affirms that the single most reliable predictor of health and longevity is not diet or exercise or wealth—it’s relationships. We are mammals, after all. And we are wired for connection.

So, individual therapy, while valuable, is not enough.

Interpersonal Group Psychotherapy recognises that healing and human maturation happen not only within the self, but between selves. The true engine of group therapy is the group itself—learning to relate in deeper, healthier, and more authentic ways.