Group Therapy for Therapists : Counselors: Professionals find a safe place among peers to reveal their inadequacies and feelings.

Each Tuesday at noon in a book-lined Sherman Oaks office, a therapy group of four women and a man reveal naked feelings about each other.

As sirens and noisy cars from Ventura Boulevard break the calm of a room filled with muted earth tones, group members also discuss feelings of inadequacy about their work.

Efforts to understand feelings and communicate honestly are central to therapy groups, but this meeting is unusual because the members are therapists.

And this group is not alone. As mental health practitioners strive to understand themselves and become better counselors, small groups of six to eight therapists have begun meeting throughout the state. In addition to single groups in the San Fernando Valley, Santa Ana and Sacramento, there are at least two meeting in Orange and three in San Francisco.

Psychologist George Lough, who started the Sherman Oaks group in September, said counselors feel more comfortable talking with their peers because they can shed the mask they wear as therapists.

“If the therapist is angry or upset,” Lough said, “they can say so in a direct way. That is real different than when you are working with a client and required to wear the persona of calm and wisdom and being at peace with yourself.”

Lough said, for example, that a therapist arriving late for his group jokingly blamed her tardiness on his office’s lack of parking. Lough perceived the supposedly offhand remark as an attack on his abilities. When he confronted the woman, she realized her anger stemmed from eating a hamburger before the meeting and breaking her diet.

“She would have had a hard time learning that in a group of non-therapists,” Lough said. “Elsewhere she might feel she had to wear her therapist’s mask, as the wise leader who has it all together. Here she can be herself and admit weaknesses.”

In addition, therapists can share burdens they carry from continually listening to people’s problems.

“Listening all day to tragedies, therapists take in a lot of psychic poison, you might say. And the therapist needs to detoxify. You can get the feelings out and share with others,” Lough said.

If therapists are better off among peers, other groups may be better off without them.

“I did groups where I included therapists, and it was threatening to other clients. They thought the therapists knew more,” said Nancy Morris Struben, who organized a therapists’ group in Sacramento.

“It’s like doctors. People put them on a pedestal. Like when you see your teacher at the market as a kid, you cannot believe that they actually go to the grocery store.”

Lough conceived the idea for his group while teaching communication styles to a graduate class in counseling at Cal State Northridge.

“I discovered that these people were learning a great deal that would help them as therapists.” he said.

Even though they had individual counseling, the group provided the setting in which they could explore their feelings, he said.

His idea crystallized when he practiced in a four-story building containing more than 30 therapists.

“I asked myself how I could possibly compete with all those counselors?” he said. “And then the bright light came on: Counsel the counselors.”

He initially felt intimidated as the leader. “I felt they would be analyzing, judging my style of leading,” he said. “I had to change my style. . . . Sometimes I had to be more direct. . . . It’s broadened my own abilities.”

While the group helps Lough, it also aids local therapists who pay $25 for the 90-minute sessions.

“The group provides a place where I can let my feelings be known and I’m working with peers so I also get objective feedback on my work as a therapist,” said Encino psychotherapist Michele Schaffer.

“It’s one of those rare opportunities to be with more than one person at a time and be completely honest,” said Sherman Oaks psychotherapist Dana Dovitch.

“In our families if there is someone we don’t get along with, we may just shut up. In group, we’re not going to do that.”

Lough says the group benefits from members’ individual therapy.

“They are aware of their family history and have explored their feelings,” he said. “Their blind side isn’t as big as people who haven’t been through that experience. You see people reaching a level of intimacy beyond what you see in many therapeutic settings. They are really getting down to who they are.”

“There are two stereotypes about therapists that make our lives very difficult,” said Karen Jenkins, who has started two therapists’ groups in Orange. “One is that we are people who really have it made. We have perfected ourselves.

“And the other is that we are all nuts. You can see that in some of the situation comedies which portray psychotherapists.

“The truth is we’re human beings and we’re somewhere in the middle. This is just a safe place for therapists to come to work on themselves where they will not have to be judged.”