Small Group Counselling and Healthy Group Dynamics Personal Reflection Essay

Reflection Paper is expected to be 5-6 pages typed, APA style, Reference page, and NO ABSTRACT.1 4. Final Reflection Paper 20 points Students are expected to complete and submit a Final Reflection Paper based upon their full small group experience AND appropriate integration of concepts from the course textbook, class materials, and class discussions. Points will be deducted from the paper if there is no evidence of integration of Content (course materials) and Process (small group experience). The Final Reflection Paper is expected to be 5-6 pages typed, APA style, Reference page, and NO ABSTRACT. Final Reflection Paper Grading Criteria Did Not Meet Competency Met Competency Minimally Met Competency Satisfactory Not Clearly Addressed Clearly Addressed, No Evidence of Integration Clear Addressed Evidence of Integration Poor APA Writing (0 points) Fair APA Writing (1 point) Good APA Writing (2 points) 1. In your own words, what insights did you gain about group counseling? 2. Describe the contributing factors of healthy group dynamics during the small group experience? 3. Describe the contributing factors of unhealthy group dynamics during the small group experience? 4. Identify and EXPLAIN the therapeutic factors (Yalom) that were demonstrated by group members during the small group experience? 5. Identify and explain the therapeutic factors (Yalom) that were demonstrated by the group facilitator during the small group experience? Disclaimer: Syllabus is subject to change. Copies of student work may be saved and/or archived in print and/or electronic format by Pillar College for the purpose of institutional academic assessment. 2 6. Describe your willingness to experience and discuss your selfawareness and self-reflection during the small group experience. 7. Describe your willingness to experience and discuss your personal growth during the small group experience. 8. How would you describe your “role” as a group member? What “role” did you take on during the small group experience? 9. Provide thoughts/insights you gained about yourself as a group member during your participation in the small group experience. 10. How can you apply your group membership experience to being a group facilitator/leader? Totals (20 points) Disclaimer: Syllabus is subject to change. Copies of student work may be saved and/or archived in print and/or electronic format by Pillar College for the purpose of institutional academic assessment. How to Make Group Psychotherapy Work New Perspectives on Group Therapy Thomas R. Coleman Copyright © 2015 by Thomas R. Coleman. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015916716 ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-5144-1582-5 Softcover 978-1-5144-1581-8 eBook 978-1-5144-1580-1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only. Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock. Rev. date: 10/14/2015 Xlibris 1-888-795-4274 www.Xlibris.com 720750 Contents Acknowledgments Why I Wrote This Book: Finding My Way Out of the Darkness Introduction Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter 1 Rationale for Change 2 Teaching the Teacher, Healing the Healer 3 Bottle Theory of Emotions 4 What Is Group Therapy? 5 Group Leaders 6 Objectives of Groups 7 Helpful Hints in Running Groups 8 The Journey Starts 9 The Journey Continues 10 Guided Imagery 11 A Secrets Group 12 The Journey Pauses 13 Music and Dance Therapy 14 The Genogram 15 The Keys to Success 16 The Journey Is Yours Bibliography ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all the clients, students, and alumni who have contributed to the betterment of the ideas presented in this book. Special thanks to Professor Roger Cunningham, who helped write several chapters initially and who has helped run these groups. Professor Cunningham is primarily responsible for the chapter on genograms, and helped create the initial first chapters—“Rationale for Change” and “Healing the Healer.” Also, I would like to thank Reverend Dan Shaw who helped with the development of many of the ideas in the chapter on achievement motivation. Finally I would like to thank my wife, Jaynie Coleman, who worked tirelessly many hours on rewriting and editing this book. WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK: FINDING MY WAY OUT OF THE DARKNESS R ight after I was born, my mother was sent to a Psychiatric Hospital in Rochester, New York. I think she was there for a few years, and when she came home she complained that she had been dragged kicking and screaming into a shock treatment room where she was knocked into unconsciousness with jolts of electricity. She was told that this would get rid of her depression. The multitude of shock treatments did also have the effect of damaging her memory. When I remember my childhood I remember it as a living hell. I was sick most the time and my nights were haunted with nightmares from which I would awake screaming and throwing up. I was terrified of going to sleep because an ugly witch would be lurking there. She had sharp fangs and long claws, and she would chase me around Grover Street panting down my back. Being the youngest of my siblings, and with other giants around me, I was convinced that I was an inferior creature. Common sayings in my house were “Children are to be seen and not heard,” and “I will beat the daylights out of you.” Additionally, I had undiagnosed attention deficit disorder and dyslexia. As a frail and sickly child, I was an easy pick for the bullies at Martin Street Elementary School. When I got home, father would hit me with the boxing gloves to “make a man out of me!” But that didn’t work because I simply hid from him and the rest of the hostile world. Yes, I started life sick, anxious, depressed, and terrified of the world. Pastor Krentz and Uncle Albert and Aunt Freda Shrader, from my church, told me that God loved me and would protect me, so I decided that I either wanted to be a minister or a psychologist. I chose to be a psychologist so I could find my way out of darkness and despair. As the years progressed, God and the study of psychology did indeed help me to climb out of the pit. First I found out what worked for me, and made me more spiritually and psychologically healthy. Then I realized I wasn’t alone, and I learned what also worked for others to help them out of the pit of despair. I wouldn’t like to repeat the traumas of my life, but I am glad they happened. I came to believe that if it doesn’t kill you, it can make you stronger. As a psychologist, I compiled a list of methods and techniques that I noticed really worked to help my clients grow emotionally. Some of the methods (e.g., role playing and primal therapy) I learned from others, but others (therapeutic theater and secrets groups) I developed with input from others. I developed groups using these methods. As people became interested in attending to these groups, the groups became much larger than the recommended number of eight to twelve people that the graduate courses and training courses suggested. Necessity often had us attempting to develop techniques that would work with not only thirty or sixty, but hundreds of people. We found that there are thousands of hurting people in society crying out for connection, healing, and recovery, but the cost of therapy and finding the right healing modality was too enormous for the average person to fathom. As a result, Sensitivity Empowerment Workshops (SEW) was established to help larger groups of people. We found that most psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and counseling professionals were comfortable with individuals and possibly groups of up to eight to twelve, but were ill equipped to work with large groups of people. In such cases we noticed that “professionals resorting to lecturing” wasn’t as helpful or as healing as “experiencing.” This book was written to aid the professional in running larger groups in a safe therapeutic manner. INTRODUCTION M ental health professionals are often more comfortable and trained to run individual and small groups, but need training to treat large groups. This book demonstrates how learning to run larger groups can not only be exciting for all, but also highly therapeutic. In the book are numerous testimonies from individuals who have benefited from Sensitivity Empowerment Workshops and examples of individual growth and healing. Below are accounts of a few clients, with names changed to protect confidentiality, who have benefited from the workshops and Sensitivity Groups. Tony was a thirty-five-year-old man who struggled through a series of homosexual relationships until he found another more stable relationship with an older man with whom he lived for several years. One day Tony attended our workshop. In a Secrets Group he anonymously presented his secret. He said this offered tremendous relief, so he participated in a Sensitivity Group. In that group he confronted his father with the deep-seated feelings he had for him and his indifference to Tony. He then thanked his role-playing mother for being there through extreme poverty. Next he got into deep feeling with several men who had sexually abused him as a child. At the end of the group, Tony asked when the next group was, and he began to regularly attend our smaller therapy groups. Over a couple of years, Tony “experimented” with dating females and found that his search in the homosexual community had much to do with finding a father’s love. Tony many years later is happily married and running addiction-recovery groups in his church. Ron was an African American male whose father was a Muslim and a Black Panther. His parents both used drugs. Both parents were authoritarian, and Ron spent most of his time playing basketball. He was on a college basketball team and an excellent player. Ron was very suspicious of white people and very lustful toward females. He came to my office early one morning and looked very groggy and depressed. He said that he had taken a large bottle of sleeping and other pills because his girlfriend had rejected him and he had given up. He said he woke up after two days very sick to his stomach. He confessed that he was also failing in school and was expecting to be expelled in spite of his stellar basketball performance. I worked with Ron individually, and he attended dozens of my therapy groups and sensitivity groups. He became so charismatic with my clients that I also had him help me lead groups. I also helped him with his academics, and his grades went from failing to As. Today Ron is married with children and an extremely successful social worker. Matty came to our groups because she was dragged from an NA meeting where she revealed that she was going to kill herself with an overdose of heroin. She had given up. In the group, I noticed that she became hysterical and had to be held and comforted by her friend and one of our SEW workers. At the end of the group session she disappeared, but every large group session after that I saw her, and with her were others she had brought from her NA meetings. I recognized her in the crowd, but she did not come forward. After at least six groups, I was able to talk to her. She gratefully told me that these sensitivity groups had saved her life. With her charismatic energy, she was helpful to our groups. Matty became a minister and has helped hundreds of people herself. Luke, forty-five years old, came to my group in a drug program and was “skin and bones” from using crack. He couldn’t contain any of his feelings and cried copiously in each session. He was frightfully full of shame and guilt and had suffered an incredible amount of abuse in the streets from the method he had used to get money in the streets. He was truly a battered wreck of a man. He was at the bottom. Luke was what we call “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Usually clients have to be told that if they want to get well, they have to be “totally, completely, and brutally honest.” Luke didn’t need that talk because he wanted so badly to get well that he let it all out. Luke attended all of the sessions that he could, and he learned so much so fast that I would let him take over my group; his testimony and example became so persuasive and compelling. He started to gain weight and confidence and became a counselor in that drug program. He attended college, and when he was available he would show up to a group and electrify the attendees with his testimony and skill. Over the years he earned a master’s degree, and he became an assistant director of a large substance-abuse program. He also taught college courses on evenings. People looked at him as an unbelievable miracle. Often in group he would sing, “His eye is on the sparrow and I know he’s watching over me.” Unfortunately, his years on the street got the better of him, and he died from cancer. Luke was an inspiration to all who knew him. These are some of the more dramatic examples of individuals who have benefited from the techniques developed and used over the years. These and many others have helped us find the techniques that heal, and have enabled us to grow in effectiveness. Carefully utilize this book to help you not only heal individual clients, but also heal large groups of clients in a cost-effective manner. If you would like to contact Dr. Coleman, he can be reached at tomcoleman@optonline.net. CHAPTER 1 Rationale for Change S itting around a candle, in a darkened room, with five young men, each under twenty-one years of age, in a youth prison return program, the first youth begins: I was 14, dealing drugs, we went for a deal. Someone gave me a gun. We went into an apartment, but something went wrong. I pulled my gun. It went off. I opened my eyes, and there were gun casings and blood all over. Three people were dead. I don’t know what had happened. The next youth says, I can identify with that. My little brother and I were playing alone in the apartment. He found a gun and showed it to me. I had never seen a gun before. It went off and killed my brother. I will never see him again. As we went around the room, I realized I was sitting with five young men who had killed eight people among them. They had been released from a youth prison, but were now in a holding program, until their parents or guardians were located. We put our arms around each other and sobbed as we sang along to “You are not alone. I am here with you.” These are not the stories that a clinician often hears, but this story is real and the theme is the same. Incarcerated people are tough, hostile, unemotional, and often not able to cry because tears are considered weakness, and in prison, the weak are preyed upon. People not in prison may also be hardened emotionally, and many have difficulty expressing honest feelings and emotions. Clinicians are required to provide services for each type of client. Is the average therapist able to reach this client in a meaningful healing way with the tools received in one’s education and training? Experience has shown us that many are not. Or how about a clinician who is working with a group of unauthentic suburban wives with children who are ready to cast off their families in a quest for a more fulfilling or satisfying scenario? The wife is part of a two-income family and still has to be mother, chef, charity volunteer, chauffeur, and sometimes wife. This wife may have no life of her own. Even though she has access to psychiatrists, psychotherapists, the cutting edge of self-help, nutrition, gyms, masseuses, and tennis lessons, her life seems to lack meaning. One SEW participant was married to a medical professional, had a child, and after an unfulfilling job at a Wall Street firm, decided to return to school to “find herself.” She came extremely distraught to her first workshop, ready to divorce her husband, abandon her child, and just try to make it on her own. She was in her thirties, felt she had married too young, had a child before she wanted, and now felt tied down to a workaholic husband. She was very attractive and believed that she would have no trouble finding another man who would be more receptive to her needs. In the midst of a very teary Secrets Group, another member asked simply, “Whose life are you leading, anyway? Why not take time to explore what you want on a daily basis?” The participant responded with a litany of her responsibilities and the inability to take on one more task. The other member responded, “Is it your life or not?” The participant replied, “Of course it’s my life!” to which the other member said, “Then live it like it is yours!” There was another barrage of tears and the participant said, “Yes, I will take time to do what I want to do in my life.” In a later follow-up with the participant, she began to take a little time for herself every week to explore her desires. While nothing so abrupt occurred as leaving her husband and family, she instead found that as she gave herself permission to do what she wanted, she was better able to do the things necessary for her husband, child, job, school, and life. She has completed not only her two-year degree but also a bachelor’s and master’s, had another child, and has a prestigious job in the field of her choice. This book is a how-to for both the emerging and the seasoned clinician. Therapy must be an interactive experience. Psychology is a contact sport with rules, principles, and techniques where everybody (client and therapist) wins. The challenge for the twenty-first-century therapist is to enable both the toughest of tough client and even the not so rough to grow into emotionally healthy individuals who can move forward with productive and healthy relationships with self and others. Refer out is the panacea for many therapeutic situations. The schools, the courts, and the parents all look for the trained clinician to have the magic wand and to be the fixer to cure society’s problem child. Recently psychology was one of the most popular majors offered at the college level. The need for workers is so great that many students begin working without completing their training. What can they be offered to allow them to relate to their clients? Dr. Coleman and Professor Cunningham have worked thousands of hours of group therapy over the past forty years and were frustrated by many of the techniques learned in graduate school. What looked very fine on paper, when one walked into a room with thirty convicts, each with an average of twenty years in prison hanging around his neck, experience quickly revealed that the traditional nondirective approaches did not work. Therapy sessions became opportunities to complain and to express irritation and hostility and to rationalize behavior, with little effective resolutions and change offered. None of this is very therapeutic. The realities of working in the field of group counseling often dictate parameters that are out of bounds of the traditional guidelines for running groups. For instance, existing counseling books suggest there should be no more than twelve participants in a group; however, the realities of rehabilitation programs may mandate otherwise. Today’s practitioner can conduct groups from ten to four hundred people. Traditionally trained group therapists melt down in such atmospheres. Group therapy needs to be i …