Group Therapy à la Harley-Davidson

In 2003, the Harley-Davidson Corporation used the catch-phrase, “Group Therapy” to advertise their organized motorcycle rides, implying that it was emotionally healthy to band together with your fellow bikers and hit the open road together.

They also make a shirt that says, “You never see a bike parked outside a psychiatrists’ office,” again, insinuating that the cure for most mental illness is to simply ride a motorcycle.

Well, how ridiculous!  Right?

Hold on just a moment.  To get together with 2 or 3 friends, hop on your scoots’ (motorcycles), and take some twisty, turny roads in the early morning hours, riding 50 miles to have breakfast where the owners make the best apple pancakes on the planet most certainly can be therapeutic.

To register for a charity event which will direct you all over the countryside, from meeting place to meeting place, to pause for a few moments rest, some refreshment and jovial conversation, collecting one playing card at each stop until you reach your final destination and compare the 5-card poker hand you’ve accumulated to the other participants on the ‘poker run,’ is a lot of fun and, again, can be a great cure for the blues, especially when you consider that the proceeds will help out those in need.

How about the notion that you can be riding down the street and when someone else approaches on a similar ‘ride,’ the tradition is that you each wave to each other – total strangers, connected for a moment in time across 3-4 lanes of traffic on an otherwise cruel highway?  Also, quite healing and soothing.

Finally, what about the ability to recognize ‘your own’ by their costume?  Bikers clad in black leather and denim, sporting bandanas and gloves, goggles, and helmets, patches, and pins, tattoos and hair ties, they are all unique, but yet, they all share ‘the look,’ and that look unites them no mater from what continent or country or city they hail.

And, that, my friends, is about as therapeutic as it gets, to feel a connection with one’s fellow man, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion, or language.

I have to say that I agree with Harley-Davidson, they provide some of the best group therapy around!

Marlo Archer, Ph.D.
Down to Earth Enterprises
1250 E. Baseline Rd., Suite 102
Tempe, AZ 85283
(480) 705-5007