I would love to run a therapy group for celebrities. Call me grandiose, if you like, I’m okay with that; but in my professional daydreams, I have selected famous people from the headlines for my celebrity treatment group. In my biased opinion, one of the major drawbacks of being a celebrity, is that they will never have the opportunity to experience the potential healing effects of a secure boundary group psychotherapy milieu; more to the point, they can’t be in treatment with me. I’m serious. As good as individual therapy can be, when it comes to resolving relationship issues, group therapy is better; and everyone can profit from that, as long as members are anonymous to each other. The closest that I’ve ever come to treating a celebrity in group was the actor who played an animal, in costume, on a children’s TV show. He hated the work and felt like a loser but it ‘paid the rent’. After he lost his job for coming drunk to work, he wryly told the group something that I will never forget. He said;” There’s always room at the bottom!”
As soon as my reverie about running a celebrity group begins, reality catches up with me almost immediately. How could it possibly work? As an expert on boundaries, I know that a psychotherapy group of celebrities would be a nightmare. For one thing, there would be no confidentiality. How could there be? If I placed a celebrity in a group with the general population of members, the others might be star-struck, unable to see the famous member as a person rather than as an object. Besides, who in a therapy group with Robert Redford, let’s say, wouldn’t want to tell the world about it? If it were me, I would want to tell everyone . Perhaps, the group might work if it consisted only of celebrities but one fight and their identities would be blown; the gory details of the fight would be posted on twitter, or worse. Is there any one in the professional community running such a group? I wonder. I would like to know about their experience with the challenges of leading a celebrity group–no names please!