Introductions

You'll introduce yourself to the community twice: a short one right after you arrive, and a longer one a few days in. Here's what each involves so neither one catches you off guard. As always, your binder and staff are the authority — this is just a heads-up from someone who's done both.

The short intro

Quick and painless. It happens when you first join a Community Therapy Group, and it's just the basics:

• Name, age, and profession.
• Where you're from.
• What you're here working on.

That's the whole thing. You'll go last while the room introduces themselves to you first.

The long introduction

This is the bigger one, and I'll be straight with you: most people find it the hardest thing they do that first week. That's exactly why it usually waits until you've been here a couple of days and found your feet a little. It gets added to the agenda and done later in the week. You'll take about 10 minutes during Community to walk the group through your story.

Aim to cover, roughly in this order:

• Growing up — parents, siblings, and any early issues.
• School and your teen years — including any major struggles along the way.
• Adulthood — relationships, and early addiction or disruptive behavior, if that was part of your path.
• How you got here — the thing that brought you to PEP. Caught at work, a patient complaint, affairs or sexually acting out — whatever it was, this is where you name it.

A word of reassurance, because you'll need it: saying all of this out loud, in front of a room, maybe for the first time in your life, is a lot. It's normal to dread it and normal to stumble through it. You don't have to perform it perfectly or have it all figured out. Take your ten minutes, tell the truth, and let the group meet the real you — that's the entire point, and getting through it is its own small turn in the road.

Then comes the feedback

Here's the part nobody warns you about: your long introduction is also your first taste of community feedback, and for a lot of people the listening is harder than the talking. When the group responds, the rule is simple — you just listen. You don't explain, defend, or correct anyone's read of what you shared. You said what you said; let it land.

That's the whole stance in a sentence, but it's worth getting right, so see the full Receiving Feedback rundown on the Presentations page for how to do it well.