(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 capacity for connectedness. 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.

Learning Objectives

The attendee will be able to:

  1. Differentiate between Support/Holding, Skills/Learning and Process/Exploratory group frames and appraise which of these orientations is most ethically suited to your client population.

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

  3. 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/Holding, Skills/Learning, and Healing/Exploratory.

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. Explore potential responses within the provided frameworks in service to participants’ building confidence in their unique leadership style.

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

2:00- Close