Tag Archives: Groups

Group counseling, Group therapy, Happiness

Group Counseling: Psychoeducation, More or Less

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Yesterday I kicked off the MOLLI class on “Evidence-Based Happiness Practices” with a psychoeducational lecture. It was standard information about positive psychology, including Seligman’s 1998 inaugural Presidential speech in San Francisco (I was there!), the three-step emotional change trick, three good things, sleep hygiene, savoring, gratitude, forgiveness, and positive distractions. We started and ended with music, and had five-minutes of very small group interactive discussion in the middle. All-in-all, I thought it was a solid start.

This kick-off reminded me of the complex relationship between structured psychoeducation and less-structured or guided interpersonal interactions. In traditional psychoeducational groups (or classes), the emphasis is on information delivery and participant learning. Psychoeducational groups are especially important when participants can benefit from useful information. Most psychoeducational group leaders, also try to integrate some form of interactive or experiential learning into group sessions.  

For me, despite the fact that I often (but not always) like listening to myself and believe I have good information to share, the MOLLI class highlight (during the whole 90 minutes) emerged right after the very small group discussions. I had given a prompt like, “I know it’s awkward to talk about your strengths, but I’d like you to share a nice story about how your own skills or talents usually come out in your relationships with others.” Participants in the room seemed engaged, but the class was hybrid, and so I wasn’t sure of the overall interaction quality. Rather than quickly moving on, I asked if one or two of the participants would share a highlight from their conversation. Silence followed. I waited through it, and finally, an online participant broke the silence with,

“At first we weren’t sure how to start, but by the end, I thought to myself, I want to be friends with these people.”  

These words broke the ice in the room, and several similarly positive comments followed. What I loved about these reactions to their “talk-time” was that participants were responding in exactly the ways I had hoped, they were connecting with each other.   

The balance of psychoeducational content with interpersonal connection is very cool. Sometimes—as in yesterday’s kick-off lecture—we do more psychoeducation and have less interpersonal activity. Other times, we do a five-minute lecture and follow it with 85 minutes of conversation.

One of my takeaways yesterday is to not underestimate the power of psychoeducation to stimulate conversation. Obviously, we use psychoeducation to teach. But when we use it to direct and focus subsequent conversations, we’re also using it to help people to learn from each other.

And here’s a pdf of the ppt from yesterday:

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Group counseling, Group therapy

Group Leadership: Talking More and Talking Less

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Teaching Group: Talking More and Talking Less

Lately, when presenting, I find myself naturally saying, “I’m a university professor. That means I can talk all day long.”

But because I know that me talking too much is a bad idea, I complement my university professor disclosure with, “I’d rather have a conversation, so please interrupt me with comments, questions, and reactions.” I also try to offer an experiential learning or reflection activity.

In group class, I have so many stories to tell that I can feel my already prodigious talking urges escalate. I could unleash my breathless wordy-self for three straight hours. The students would leave having been entertained (I am funny), and with a bit of knowledge, but without skills for running counseling groups.

All this circles back to my plan to make the course as experiential as possible. I want students to feel the feelings of being in the group facilitator chair. Some of those feelings will be nerves, but it’s better for students to feel more nerves in group class, and fewer nerves when they’re leading real groups.

We recently hit Day 1 of the transformative experiential chaos.  

I know from the takeaways that students write me every week that there were nerves. In a fishbowl group, I asked members to share one positive interpersonal quality. As a second and optional prompt, I suggested they could also share one less positive interpersonal quality.

My goal was for us to briefly look at and talk about Yalom’s concept of interpersonal learning.

I shared first (to demo leader self-disclosure and modeling); I intentionally described a positive and less positive interpersonal quality. The first student to disclose felt instant awareness of the past, present, and future. Afterward, she described feeling a burden to follow my lead, anxiety in the moment, along with instant recognition that she was about to become a role model. She shared both (a positive and less positive interpersonal quality). Everyone followed her lead. Some members felt more anxiety when sharing the positive qualities; for others, it was the opposite.

One takeaway involved the speed and power of norm-setting. I’m reminded of the social psych compliance research. More or less, people consciously or less consciously feel the “norm” and comply. The corollary takeaway is that when leaders set the norm, we need to do so carefully so as to not imply everyone needs to fall in line.

Jumping ahead, the next week I discussed Kelman’s theory of group cohesion. Although I absolutely love Yalom’s definition (“Cohesion is the attraction of the group for its members”), Kelman’s theory is complementary, and was introduced to my be my 1975 Mount Hood Community College football coach. Kelman (and my coach) identified three phases: Compliance, Identification, and Internalization. After talking about Kelman’s theory, several students reflected in their email takeaways about the nature of cult groups. . . and how compliance can become leader-driven. Wow. So good.

In response to one student’s takeaway, part of my email included the following:

“For groups to be safe, IMHO, that also means freedom; freedom to have dissenting beliefs and different experiences and different values. The “internalization” shouldn’t be too tight, or it does feel like a cult. I’m not sure I have great answers about safeguards to the abuse of group processes, and so you’ve given me things to chew on as well.”

Maybe the right recipe is for there to be leader-guided modeling, combined with clear rules and norms that support independent thinking and personal freedom. This is a VERY tricky balance. It’s easy for leaders (including me) to get too enamored with the sound of our own voices and the rightness of our own values.

This brings me back to reflecting on how much leaders should talk and how much leaders should listen. Of course, this depends on the type of group: psychoeducational groups involve more group leader talking. In contrast, counseling groups—even discussion-based groups or support groups—benefit from the group talking more and the leader talking less. This has been a repeated epiphany for students and for me: being aware of the need to balance leader-talk and leader modeling with group member talk and group member modeling.

For the next class, I gave everyone an electronic copy of a long list of 23 group counseling skills to integrate into one of their experiential groups. Here’s the list:

basic-group-counseling-responses-2024Download