Support groups extract
Support groups have become extraction mechanisms. What was once mutual aid between people sharing common struggles has been systematized into a value-harvesting operation where vulnerability becomes the raw material for profit.
The vulnerability-to-revenue pipeline
Modern support groups operate on a simple principle: capture people at their most psychologically exposed moment, then maintain that exposure state indefinitely.
The traditional model was temporal. People came together, shared their struggles, developed coping mechanisms, and eventually graduated from needing the group. Recovery had an endpoint.
The contemporary model is subscription-based. Recovery becomes an ongoing process that requires continuous participation, continuous payment, continuous emotional labor from participants.
Vulnerable people don’t just attend support groups anymore. They become content creators for the group’s emotional economy.
Professional facilitation as institutional capture
The shift from peer-led to professionally facilitated groups represents a fundamental restructuring of power dynamics.
Peer-led groups operated on horizontal relationships. Everyone was both helper and helped. Authority emerged organically from experience and wisdom, not credentials.
Professional facilitation introduces vertical hierarchy. The facilitator becomes the expert who validates or invalidates participant experiences. They control the narrative framework through which problems are understood and solutions are pursued.
This creates dependency not just on the group, but on the professional class that manages the group. Healing becomes something that happens to you rather than something you do with others.
Trauma bonding as business model
Support groups increasingly rely on trauma bonding to maintain membership retention.
The group identity becomes centered around shared damage rather than shared growth. Members bond over what was done to them rather than what they’re building together.
This creates a perverse incentive structure. Progress threatens group cohesion. Getting better means losing your primary social identity and support network.
The group needs members to remain damaged enough to need the group, but functional enough to keep paying for it.
Emotional labor redistribution
In traditional mutual aid, emotional labor was distributed equally among participants. Everyone gave and received support in roughly equal measure over time.
Contemporary support groups extract emotional labor from vulnerable participants and redistribute it to professionals, institutions, and platform owners.
Participants pour their stories, strategies, and emotional energy into the group. This content is then packaged, systematized, and resold as therapeutic methodology, workshop curricula, or digital course material.
The people who provided the raw emotional material rarely see compensation for this intellectual property extraction.
Recovery as performance
Support groups have become theaters where recovery is performed rather than experienced.
Members learn the language of progress, the metrics of improvement, the acceptable narratives of growth. They perform these scripts to maintain group standing and facilitator approval.
Real healing often happens in private, between sessions, in ways that don’t translate to group vocabulary. But this invisible progress doesn’t count in the group’s value system.
What gets rewarded is emotional availability, willingness to share, adherence to the group’s therapeutic framework. These behaviors may or may not correlate with actual recovery.
The authenticity premium
Support groups market themselves on authenticity. “Real people sharing real struggles.” This authenticity becomes a premium product that people pay extra to access.
But authenticity under institutional frameworks becomes performed authenticity. There are acceptable ways to be authentic and unacceptable ways.
Members learn to craft their vulnerability to fit the group’s expectations. They become authentic in the specific way the group requires, which is to say they become professionally authentic rather than genuinely authentic.
Dependency masquerading as community
The most sophisticated support groups create dependency while calling it community.
Real community enables independence. People develop skills, relationships, and resources that function outside the group context. Community is a launching pad.
Support group dependency keeps people tethered. Members develop skills that only work within the group framework. Relationships that only function in therapeutic contexts. Resources that require ongoing institutional access.
When leaving the group means losing your primary coping mechanisms, social network, and identity framework, you’re not in a community. You’re in a dependency structure.
The subscription model of healing
Traditional healing was transactional. You had a problem, you found help, you solved the problem, you moved on. The healer’s success was measured by your eventual independence from their services.
Support groups have adopted the subscription model. Success is measured by retention, engagement, and lifetime customer value. The goal is to keep you subscribed to healing, not to actually heal you.
This creates a fundamental misalignment of incentives. Your recovery threatens their revenue. Your independence undermines their business model.
Platform extraction
Digital support groups have added another layer of extraction. Platform owners harvest data from vulnerable populations sharing intimate details of their struggles.
This emotional data gets fed into algorithms for targeting, mood prediction, behavioral modification. Your depression becomes training data for systems designed to exploit other people’s depression.
The platform profits from your vulnerability twice: once from your subscription fees, once from selling your behavioral patterns to advertisers.
Resistance strategies
Individual resistance to support group extraction is difficult because the need for connection and help is genuine.
However, some structural approaches can minimize extraction:
- Time-bounded participation with clear exit criteria
- Peer-led rather than professionally facilitated groups
- Focus on skill-building rather than trauma processing
- Horizontal rather than vertical relationship structures
- Resource sharing rather than resource consumption
The goal is mutual aid that builds independence rather than therapeutic services that maintain dependence.
The commodification of care
Support groups represent the broader commodification of care in late capitalism. Basic human needs like connection, understanding, and mutual aid get packaged into products and services.
This isn’t to say all organized support is extraction. But the institutional forms that dominate the landscape have been optimized for value capture rather than value creation.
Real healing happens in relationships of reciprocity, not relationships of extraction. When vulnerability becomes a commodity rather than a bridge to connection, the fundamental purpose gets corrupted.
The challenge is creating structures for mutual aid that resist institutional capture while still providing genuine support for people in crisis.
Support groups don’t have to extract. But extraction is what they’ve been optimized for.