(Un)Training Circle for Group Leaders and Aspiring Group Leaders

The Group Container

To ensure your group work is ethically sound, It is essential to match your group frame to your clients needs. With relational neuroscience as a grounding framework, we’ll explore the basic forms a group container can take, identify simple ways to distinguish amongst them and assess their appropriateness for your client population. Topics will include: matching group agreements to your frame, holding supportive boundaries with clients in distress and assessing client progress.

Learning Objectives

The attendee will be able to:

  1. Distinguish amongst Support/Grounding, Skills/Learning and Healing/Discovery orientations in your work and appraise which of these orientations is most ethically suited to your client population.

  2. Apply key neuroscience frameworks in service to being with client needs in an attentive, responsible and empowering manner.

  3. Explore experiential signals during a session that may call upon you to shift to a more containing versus exploratory stance.

  4. Identify countertransference problem areas that come up for you with particular clients or in particular moments during your group leadership.

Agenda

0:00- Orientation to the educational experience, introductions and embodiment practices to support participants to bring nonjudgmental awareness to today’s material.

0:15- Introduction to the three basic group forms: Support/Grounding, Skills/Learning, and Healing/Discovery.

0:30- Consultation/Interactive discussion: application of these orientations to three participants’ groups.

1:00- Model, utilizing the content members have shared, presence based sharing of concepts of neuroception (Steven Porges) and left/right hemisphere engagement (Ian McGilchrist) to support a non-shaming/welcoming therapy environment.

1:20- Discuss implicit memory as the substrate of countertransference challenges. Differentiate risks and benefits of processing (using experiential methods) versus containing (offering psychoeducation) to empower self-determination in clients.

1:40- Review material, question and answer period, reflective practice.

2:00- Close