1.I am in crisis right now, or I have been having thoughts of ending my life.
2.The same thing keeps happening in my relationships, and I cannot see why.
3.I am lonely, and it has not changed by trying harder.
4.I often feel that what is wrong with me is uniquely mine and would be strange to anyone else.
5.Nobody in my life tells me honestly how I come across.
6.I understand my patterns well and nothing changes.
7.Being around people I do not know well is itself one of the hardest things for me.
8.I hold back with people because I do not want to be a burden.
9.Mostly I want to learn specific skills — coping, emotion regulation, structure.
10.I need a specific treatment: exposure and response prevention, trauma processing, or something similar.
11.The idea of not getting the whole hour to myself is the main thing putting me off.
12.I do not want to listen to other people talk about their problems.
Why some questions are about the objections
Because the reasons people give for declining a group are frequently accurate descriptions of the thing they came to work on.
Not wanting the hour split. Not wanting to listen to anyone else. Not wanting to take up space. Each of those is a legitimate preference and each is also a pattern — about attention, about other people’s needs, about whether you’re entitled to anything.
That isn’t an argument that everyone belongs in a group. There are real cases for individual work, and a specific protocol is the clearest one. It’s an argument for noticing which of those sentences is yours before you use it to decide.
What this can’t tell you
Whether a particular group is any good, which matters more than the format. Finding one is its own problem, and the screening conversation is where you actually find out.