Effective Group Therapy Interventions For Interpersonal Process Groups
Running a process group for the first time feels nothing like individual therapy. Group therapy interventions are a specific set of facilitation skills designed to harness the relational energy of the group itself, not just the therapist's insight, warmth, or clinical training.
What Are Group Therapy Interventions For Process Groups?
The interventions you need for a process group are therapeutic skills and techniques to facilitate meaningful conversations. Before we dive into those, lets get clear on what a process group actually is.
Think of group therapy on a spectrum. At one end you have a hiking group: therapeutic in its way, but no clinician involved. Move along the spectrum and you reach AA meetings, peer-led and structured around shared experience. Further still sit psychoeducational groups, DBT skills training, CBT groups, curriculum-driven sessions where learning is the point.
At the far end sits the interpersonal process group. Six to eight members, no curriculum, no homework. They meet to work on how they relate: to themselves, to each other, to people outside the room. In theory this sounds manageable. In practice it is one of the hardest clinical environments to work in
