A Group is a Place to Do Healing: Ale DeSilva in conversation with Sid Solomon
“ … it feels like our generation…needs to be convinced that a group is a place to do healing. I think that the pandemic has something to do with that, I think political divisions in the country have something to do with that, religious divisions, but my goodness, group is perfect as a space to deal with all of that, if we can create enough safety, or enough of a container.”
–Ale DeSilva
Introduction
In September, 2025, Ale DeSilva presented a 2-day workshop, “Queering Our Groups: Moving Beyond Inclusion,” for the Group Psychotherapy Association of Los Angeles Annual Conference. I was sad to miss it, but want to say that I was at the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco that weekend—another kind of queer group experience!) As consolation, I reached out to Ale and asked if she might be willing to talk with me for our newsletter. As an emerging clinician with a particular interest in both group work and working with queer and trans clients, I was eager to speak with Ale about her clinical work, her teaching, and her scholarship.
Dr. Ale DeSilva (she/her) is a queer, Latinx psychologist and an assistant professor of clinical psychology at George Washington University. Her research interests include applying psychoanalytic theory to groups and organizations, somatic and experiential approaches to psychotherapy (e.g., AEDP, Somatic Experiencing), and liberation psychology.
In this interview, I chat with Ale about the power of group therapy, bringing identity and privilege into the therapy room, integrating different therapeutic modalities to develop your own personal and authentic style, and more.
—Sid Solomon
Video Transcript
Sid Solomon: Well, hi, Ale, thank you so much for agreeing to do this with me. I'm really excited to talk with you.
Ale DeSilva: Yeah, thanks, Sid. Thanks for the invite.
S: So, yeah, I mentioned that I'm developing a process group for queer folks, at the Alamo. And so, I was really sad to miss your workshop at the GPALA meeting. But I wanted to… I mean, I have so many questions. I guess the first thing that came to mind is: You apply a psychoanalytic or psychodynamic approach to group work, and I was wondering… I was wondering if you could talk about specifically what that means. What does it mean to use a psychoanalytic approach to group therapy?
A: Yeah, absolutely. So, specifically within psychoanalytic approaches, my favorite approach is AEDP, or accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy, which is a mouthful, but basically it brings psychoanalytic theory, I think, into the 21st century by integrating things like attachment theory and Gestalt theory, so here and now approaches, right? So, it's taking that psychoanalytic conceptualization of the patient, so thinking about their past history and how past relates to present. But really, in terms of intervention and technique in the room, or with my groups, in terms of how I am, in terms of self-disclosure, use of self, how I'm connecting people across the group, that's gonna look a lot more active, it's gonna look a lot more experiential and affect-focused, even though my conceptualization clinically is very much so psychoanalytic. Does that make sense?
So it's sort of…when people think psychoanalytic, if they're thinking ego psych or, you know, one of the other old-school approaches, it's not gonna look like my groups. I borrow more from, like, the intersubjective or relational psychoanalytic approaches, so…lots of buzzwords in there, but yeah, basically the contemporary psychoanalytic approaches are the ones that I think are the most useful for groups, because they really look at two-person, or in this case, if I'm looking at a group, like, eight people, and how each individual member of the group, or… and my own interactions of my psychology work with the group. I think that's essential in group work, so that's kind of why a psychoanalytic frame is, it adds depth, it adds relationality, it helps me conceptualize member-to-member interactions, why people might be triggering for one another based on their history, so that's kind of the conceptual, approach.
S: Yeah, that makes sense. And, do you find that group therapy creates unique opportunities, you know, compared to individual therapy? I'm really interested in how that relationality that you're talking about, kind of helps certain dynamics or patterns come to light, and, like, how we've seen group therapy kind of, yeah, just create opportunities for healing for people in ways that maybe are harder to get at or get to in individual therapy.
A: Yeah, for sure, I'm thinking of an example that came up in the video that I showed in the workshop. So, I learned AEDP as an individual therapy model, of course, because that's how it's taught, and one of the things that they emphasize in AEDP, or Diana Fosha’s model, is privileging positive emotions, which I think is another helpful kind of update of psychoanalytic theory. It's like, when pride is in the room, let's stay with it. When joy, or kind of, elation is in the room, let's celebrate it. So in a group context, I'm thinking of a session where a member comes in and says, I never thought in a million years I would get an art director job, and I just got it. And the whole group is really excited for her, right? They have seen her deal with depression, and you know, some difficult family stuff, and to have this big win, to have it be celebrated at the group level. We certainly could have celebrated it in individual therapy, and I'm sure did, right? But something about having seven other nervous systems reflecting back your joy, reflecting back your positive emotion, I just think it deepens it, and I also reflected after the session that I showed in the workshop that it really felt like a kind of ideal family experience. Like, my member did not get that kind of, like, elation when she would succeed, you know, when she was 10, 11, 12, growing up, right? So, that whole idea of corrective emotional experience that we talk about, you know, it's sort of a therapist buzz phrase. In group, you really have it in a way that's not planned. I certainly didn't say, like, okay, group, let's be excited for member X. No, it just sort of organically developed as she came in and shared, and so, you're asking, how does the group present unique opportunities? I think that, like, opportunity for a corrective family experience is a little different than individual therapy. We can do it with imagination in individual therapy. But in group, it tends to just happen organically. Now, that's a really high-functioning group, of course. Doesn't always go that way.
S: Yeah, I also imagine that, because there are multiple nervous systems in the room, there is just by design, more opportunities to work with transference and countertransference, and to kind of, yeah, just more opportunities to kind of, like you said, identify what's happening in the here and now and explore that, rather than just two people having that intersubjective experience.
A: I think that's right. So, Louis Ormont, who's a famous modern analytic group therapist, talked about bridging, which is using a member who's not engaged in a dynamic to tell the group therapist or the rest of the group kind of what's going on. So, two members are fighting, and you look to the member who's not engaged, and you say, what do you think is going on between these two? Right? That just provides a really nice way to diffuse tension, and sort of get other members involved, and to avoid bystander effect, which is a really important thing in groups. You don't want to have two members play out all the conflict in the group, for example, right? Because the idea is everyone has some purchase on the conflict, so why these two? Especially if you find that it's always those two, right, that are kind of ending up in conflict. So, yeah, I like to bridge, that's sort of one thing I'm thinking about always, and it's a way to, if I'm involved in some kind of hot moment, maybe the group can kind of diffuse tension by involving another vantage point, and that's almost always helpful, so, those are resources, for sure.
The other thing I tell my trainees in group is, what you're pointing to also creates a lot of complexity. There's always, like, ten options of where you can take the group, right? So, choosing which intervention, which thread to pull, is something of an art. There's some guesswork involved, I like to tell folks. And for trainees who are really focused on having the right thing to say in the right moment, it can be really frustrating, because in group, there almost never is one right answer. It's, you know, five different possibilities or more.
S: Which I think is a good way to approach the work of therapy in general. You know, it's not always about having the correct interpretation, it's kind of working organically and dynamically with what's happening in the dynamic.
A: Yeah, I like to say my groups are really good supervisors for me, right? Because if I, you know, I'm coming at something from the wrong vantage point, or maybe I'm… my own feelings, maybe I got frustrated and I'm projecting, the group's going to tell me immediately, right? My intervention's not going to land, or they're going to tell me I'm off, or… and I do advocate, like, we gotta listen when our groups are giving us that feedback. It can be humbling, but I think the longer you're a group leader, the more you see it as, like, trust, right? If the group can be that honest with each other and with the leader, that's how you know you have a well-functioning group, including the critical feedback, right? Or the stuff that's hard to hear.
S: Right. Your workshop title is “Moving Beyond Inclusion,” and I wanted to ask you kind of how you conceptualize inclusion and what it means to move beyond, kind of the, you know, basic inclusion.
A: Yeah, thanks for that. So, what I'm really after with that title is I want my cis and straight ally therapists to know, kind of, what they're signing up for. That this is not just learning about, you know, frankly, like, a special population, kind of like zoo animals is the approach that I talk about, right? That I'm contrasting. I'm not doing that. I am not going to teach about LGBTQ people as if they're a special topic. Instead, you know, I teach it as we all have a gender, we all have a sexuality, everyone who comes to the workshop, so what you're being invited to do by attending with me is kind of like exploring, well, what does that have to do with who I am as a therapist? Maybe those journeys, in terms of exploring those two areas of your life have been easy, right? Maybe they have been privilege-filled. But for many of us, there's been some kind of pain, marginalization, difficulty, introspection around gender and sexuality at some point in our lives. And so the invitation is, well, my goodness, we are going to need to explore that if we're going to take our patients anywhere meaningful with respect to those topics, right?
So I'm trying to create a container, a shared container, that's safe enough. I don't promise total safety, because you can't with these topics. But safe enough to move beyond inclusion, right? Like, how do we not project onto queer people all of the stuff about sex, or all of the stuff about gender? Because, again, we all have something to do with those questions, right? So I find that people don't quite, even if they kind of see that in the title, they don't quite know that that's the invitation. They get to the workshop, and there is a bit of a process of, well, how deep am I really going to go?
And something about the small groups provides a little bit more of a container, I think, right? Like, with 5 or 6 other people, it's easier to go a little deeper, come back to the large group, and reflect in a different way, so I try to funnel the workshop from a little bit easier entry points to more emotionally raw content as the weekend proceeds as a way of recognizing that it's, you know, it's activating to ask people to do that kind of exploration. But yeah, long-winded answer to what moving beyond inclusion means.
S: Yeah, it makes me think about, I mean, first of all, it's an interesting and, like, modern psychoanalytic idea to bring, as a clinician, to bring your identity markers and your kind of social location into the room, and kind of reflect on that, and it also makes me think about, you know, like, cis, straight, white identity as being kind of seen as, like, neutral, or, like, not something to be interrogated. And so I guess, I don't know exactly what my question is, but I think a lot about clinicians who share identities with their patients. And, you know, whether, let's say, like, a queer clinician is uniquely situated to treat a queer patient. And, you know, I don't necessarily think that, I think a clinician can do good work with a patient, even if they don't share those identities, but I'm wondering if you have ideas about how a clinician can work effectively and minimize the harm they're doing when working with a patient with whom they don't share one or more identities.
A: Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think there's a couple questions in there, but I'll just take the analytic neutrality piece first, right? I think you're right, that neutrality only works for some of us. As a queer, trans, Latina therapist, there's no way that just even my visible identities, right, like the nails, the piercings, that there's no way that I could sort of pretend that there's no, stimulus value, response in the room, and then I need to be open to that, and vice versa, that my client needs to be open to those conversations, right? That, like, actually there's something that's safety providing for both of us about being able to kind of talk about identity. So that's a disagreement I have with just classical analytic, like I said, intervention, right? Not analytic theory about transference and countertransference, but in terms of psychoanalytic technique and intervention, the kind of neutrality stance was never really neutral, I would argue.
And so I feel indebted to people like Mitchell and Greenberg, the kind of relational turn, but especially, Stolorow and Orange, right, who were intersubjective theorists, in the late 90s. Talk about cis, straight, white, they are both all of those things, but they're writing deeply about working with gay men, working with populations that were thought of as, like, not analyzable by traditional psychoanalytic approaches, so you know, I don't feel like I'm thinking brand new thoughts about how to, I'm really borrowing from Stolorow and Orange when I'm thinking, and others, when I'm thinking about, you know, involving my identities, but I really do, with my groups, have folks disclose whatever social identities are important to them early on, I share mine. I think that that's in the room. I think it has to be talked about. I think we need to be, you can see that in the workshop's invitation for straight and cis therapists to, like, work on their identities, that to hide behind the mask of neutrality is to avoid some important work, I think, about kind of leveling the power playing field in the room, and knowing how to do that. You can't just think about it. You have to actually do the emotion and heart work to level the playing field, to work on privilege.
S: Right.
A: Doing psychoanalytic work with Black clients is another context for me where I'm looking at, like, I can think I've done the work on erasing that neutrality, but perhaps there are still ways in which my white passing privilege, right, is kind of in the room, or is being projected onto, so my workshop's on gender and sexuality, but I definitely think you can't do those two without doing race as well.
S: Right.
A: Yeah, so that's kind of my approach, or the way I think about it, but I know that that's not, you're right, that's not the classical analytic way of thinking about self-disclosure and things like that.
S: I know that you pull from different kinds of modalities, like liberation psychology, somatic experiencing, psychoanalysis. And I'm really interested in what it looks like to bring together what, I don't know, I guess I have maybe a misconception that these fields or these modalities are, like, disparate, and it's hard to integrate them, and so I was wondering I guess just, like, what that looks like in your practice to pull from these different kind of spaces.
A: Yeah, thanks for the question. So, I mean, I can trace a little bit of my history of how I got there, which I think helps to explain how I integrate. So, I think of my psychoanalytic training and my doctoral program as very much my education in the classics, right? Kind of like understanding basics of psychoanalytic conceptualization, and how to work on one's countertransference. I feel really indebted to that education for that. And then I discovered AEDP, so I really trained with Diana Fosha’s Institute, and kind of got used to a much more, like I said, here and now, and kind of experiential way of working.
Since becoming an academic five years ago, I've had the benefit of developing this elective that I love, that I'm actually teaching this semester as well, called Somatic and Experiential Techniques. And so I cover four modules in the course over the course of the semester. I start with somatic experiencing, because I think Peter Levine really educates us about the nervous system, how the nervous system works. Now, my critique of Levine is that he talks about nervous systems as if they're universal, as if there's just one nervous system and it works one way, and we know that culture influences the way the nervous system shows up, so somatic experiencing is first, but it's sort of like a foundation, but not complete, I think. Then I teach IFS, because I think you need Internal Family Systems to understand parts, and how parts show up. You can think, see how that shows up in my group work, because I think our parts are all over the place in group, and are going to be needing to be worked on, so my group work focuses on that. Like, members even communicate with each other's parts. So that's Module 2 of my course. Module 3 is AEDP, which is, again, my kind of home theory. And then Module 4 is ISTDP, Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy.
So in teaching those 4 modules of this course about 3 or 4 times, it really helps with integration, right? Because you're really teaching different intervention approaches. In the class, I teach, like, an hour of lecture, and then I have them do experiential practice, and I rotate through, and I practice with folks as well, where we play mock clients, and kind of you know, have fun with it, or try to. So, it makes me a more flexible clinician to teach the different modalities.
And what I sort of rely on most to determine, if this is part of the question, level of fit with a particular group or a particular individual client, is really, you know, it has to be a match for my personality, right? I think we can't parrot how other people practice any of these modalities. We have to find a theoretical model that matches who we are as people, and I tell my trainees all the time, the gap between who I am outside of the room and in the room has decreased a lot in my 10 years as a clinician, right? I'm hitting 10 years as a licensed psychologist in a few months, and so, I just think about, over that arc, I've gotten a lot less jargony, a lot less of a persona, I think, in the room, and a lot more myself. So perhaps all those four modules are really just about ways of sharpening my ability to be my authentic self in the room.
S: Yeah, sounds like a great class.
A: Thanks, yeah, it's fun. They teach me a lot.
S: You mentioned some thinkers that influence you or inspire you. I have been thinking recently a lot about, some scholars and thinkers that are really exciting to me right now, who are kind of, like, queering psychoanalysis, like Avgi Saketopoulou and Anne Pellegrini and Griffin Hansbury, and I was wondering if there are other psychoanalysts or thinkers who are really exciting to you right now, or whose work you recommend?
A: Yeah, so I'm president of the Mid-Atlantic Group Psychotherapy Society. We just had our fall conference, and Paul LePhuoc is a psychoanalyst in Houston, Texas. He's a queer Asian psychologist, and he's a professor at Baylor College of Medicine. He mentioned two thinkers that I either had maybe heard of, but didn't know as much about, and he really featured in his talk. So, Hortense Spillers is one of them, and the other is, [Julia] Kristeva. Kristeva talks about the abject, which is a concept that I hadn't thought about much, but he really applied it to working with queer clients, the sort of experience that many queer people have of being the abject, you know, in certain contexts in their life. Abject meaning hated, hateable, the thing that people can't stand, people are disgusted by. But that's an experience that many queer populations have encountered, and that Kristeva writes beautifully about kind of the psychoanalytic dynamics of that, of being hated, of being the object of disgust, and perhaps by understanding it analytically, how to heal from it as well, right? How to correct it.
I would also mention Kathleen White. Kathleen Pogue White is one of the founders of Black Psychoanalysts Speak, which is a great series that I recommend for every one of my students, and Kathleen White wrote this amazing article in 2002 that I put on every one of my syllabi, if I can find a way to squeeze it in there, called “On Being Hated,” right? And she talks about the experience, analytically, of being a Black woman in an era in the 80s when she was one of maybe two. So, and she's, you know, she's in her 80s, and she's still just, like, very feisty and very fun. So she's, I'm lucky to call her a friend. But yeah, Kathy's “On Being Hated” article, which is in, I think, Contemporary Psychoanalysis is the journal, 2002. I think it's one of the best things I've ever read. (Editor’s note: The article by Kathleen Pogue White is, “Surviving Hating And Being Hated: Some Personal Thoughts About Racism From A Psychoanalytic Perspective.” Full citation: White, K.P. (2002). Surviving Hating and Being Hated: Some Personal Thoughts about Racism from a Psychoanalytic Perspective. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 38(3), 401-422.)
S: Cool. Anything else that is coming up for you as we wrap up?
A: Just a more global plug for group therapy. Why? Because it feels like our generation, Sid, right, needs to be convinced that a group is a place to do healing. I think that the pandemic has something to do with that, I think political divisions in the country have something to do with that, religious divisions, but my goodness, group is perfect as a space to deal with all of that, if we can create enough safety, or enough of a container. You know, to get folks through the door. And I think that's the other thing, is like, for the clinician, it's a big lift. It's a big lift logistically, it feels a little scary to start a group, but I can't tell folks enough what a benefit it's been to my career, and my, you know, just enjoyment of the work. My groups are the thing I look forward to the most every week, and so, I don't know, I want to involve you and others in the conversation about how do we get more people into groups, because I'm a big acolyte for it, but I find that I'm also in a little bubble where, you know, other group therapists and I are talking all the time about how great it is, and that there's a gap between us and the rest of the population, so I don't know if you have any thoughts about that.
S: Yeah, I mean, a couple things are coming to mind. One is we live in a culture that is so deeply individualistic, and even, you know, the field of psychoanalysis is historically, has focused on the intrapsychic and less on the kind of communal, you know, societal, I mean you know, I think that is changing.
A: But you're right—it's newer, right? That was not the focus.
S: Right, and you know, I think for a lot of people, when they think about healing work and doing therapy, they think about, it’s like something that they need to do kind of on their own with the help of a professional, but I think part of the sell of group therapy is that you're playing out these relational dynamics with many people, which, again, like we said before, creates all of these opportunities for these, like, relational patterns and wounds and attachment stuff to play out, rather than just, and the other thing I think about is, I think, this is true for me, I think it's true for a lot of people, people want to be good at therapy, and they want to maintain a stable relationship with their therapist, and so it can be scary or difficult to push back on your therapist or criticize your therapist, and I think group therapy makes it easier to do that towards the clinician, but also to the other group members. I think it just empowers people to say what's happening.
A: I think that's absolutely true, the last part, right? That, like, I regularly have people migrate from individual therapy to group therapy, and they're like, oh, wow, like, I see other members challenge you or disagree with you, and now I can do that, too. And it's like, well, of course, and you could have the whole time, but something about that modeling of seeing a peer do it, right? It really does help. So, okay, I guess you and I will continue to kind of sell group therapy to the masses, but just thanks again for this invite, and let me know, moving forward, how I can support. I think Michelle and I are going to chat about ways that I might be part of a training program at Alamo, or do a talk, or something like that, so I'm excited about that.
S: Thank you so much for doing this, and it was really nice to meet you, and our paths will cross again, I'm sure.
A: Yeah, absolutely. Alright, take care, Sid.
S: Take care. Bye.