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Group Therapy Worksheets for Adults (PDF)

Download free Group Therapy Worksheets for Adults (PDF), designed by a Certified Group Psychotherapist to help groups improve emotional communication and understand the clinical concept of the here and now. I've been running groups for ten years, as well as teaching group process to graduate students, and I find this activity genuinely transformative — particularly for groups that have settled into storytelling and need a way back into live relational contact.

TL;DR: Download a free group therapy worksheet and experiential activity to help your group learn about emotional communication in the here and now.

Grab Your Copy Here. Free.

What Is A Process Group -Group Therapy Worksheets for Adults (PDF)

A process group usually consists of 5- 8 people who meet with a therapist regularly, the work may use a curriculum or a worksheet but usually the focus is on the live relationships unfolding between members in the room.

Instead of teaching you about your patterns, it lets them show up in real time with other people, so you can feel them, name them, and try something different while everyone watches and helps. The room becomes a kind of social mirror: what you do here is almost always what you're doing out there. You can read more about group therapy techniques here

 

What Are Group Therapy Worksheets for Adults

Group therapy worksheets for adults are structured written tools that therapists use to support the work of a therapy group by helping members articulate feelings, track their internal experience, reflect on patterns, and engage more deliberately with the people in the room.

In my experience the best group therapy worksheets combine a moment of self reflection, followed by some processing around the activity or answers that the worksheet generated. 

Free Printable Group Therapy Worksheets (PDF)

The worksheets on this page are free to download, print, and use in clinical practice and are available as a PDF, formatted and designed to be handed directly to group members without any additional preparation.
 
The current free download is 'The Here and Now Exercise' — a complete, twelve-page group therapy worksheet package built around the clinical concept of immediacy. It includes two sets of printable question cards (cut along the dashed lines), a tracker sheet for members to complete after each round, a structured debrief guide, and a section on holding the therapeutic frame when resistance appears. It runs in thirty-five to forty-five minutes and requires nothing beyond printing and a pen for each member.
 
To download the free PDF, use the button below.
 
Additional free printable group therapy worksheets covering emotional regulation, coping skills, CBT and DBT-based exercises, communication, and interpersonal process will be added to this page on an ongoing basis. If you are looking for a specific topic or clinical application and do not see it here yet, check back — or get in touch and let us know what you need.
Get Your Free PDF Here

What The "Here and Now" Means in Group  Counseling

 

Every group therapist knows the here and now is where the work happens. The concept appears in training, in supervision, in every major text on group process from Yalom forward. And yet most process groups spend the majority of their time somewhere else entirely — in members' childhoods, in conflicts with partners who are not in the room, in hypothetical futures where things will eventually be different.

This is not a failure of skill. It is the natural state of groups. Nobody walks into a room full of strangers and spontaneously wants to say what they are actually feeling toward the person sitting across from them. So they talk about their boss. They talk about last week. They offer each other thoughtful observations in a slightly clinical tone. The group feels warm and connected, and the relational patterns that brought people into therapy do not change.
 
The here and now, properly understood, is not simply about emotion. A member crying about a painful childhood experience has real feelings present — but those feelings are not in contact with anyone in the room. The group becomes an audience to something they cannot quite join. Immediacy is different. It is relational. It lives between two people. It is the moment someone says, "I have been furious at you for the last twenty minutes and I did not know how to say it."
 
When that happens, the room changes. Nobody is looking at their watch. Something is at stake. The challenge for group therapists is that you cannot explain this distinction into existence. You can describe it in a pre-group orientation, you can name it in supervision, you can point to it when it briefly appears — but members only truly understand what immediacy feels like after they have felt it. That is the clinical problem this worksheet solves.
 

Download the Free Group Therapy Worksheet & Experiential Activity.

This free group therapy worksheet PDF is a complete, ready-to-run exercise package for process groups of six to ten adult members.
 
It takes approximately thirty-five to forty-five minutes to run, requires no materials beyond printing, and produces a clinical reference point that the group can return to for the rest of its life.
 

What Is Inside this Group Therapy Worksheet Download:

Round 1 — "There and Then" is a set of printable question cards that pull members into the past, outside the room, or into hypothetical futures. Questions like "My favourite holiday as a kid was..." or "A teacher who left a mark on me was..." generate real content, real warmth, and real affect — but the feelings do not land on anyone in the room. This round establishes the baseline.
 
Round 2 — "Here and Now" is a second set of cards that name people in the room directly and ask members to speak toward them. Questions like "The person here whose opinion of me I care about most is..." or "The feeling I would be most unwilling to express in this group is..." are a different register entirely. Resistance is expected and is itself clinical material.
 
The Tracker Sheet gives each member a structured way to record what they noticed in each round — their feelings, their observations of the group, where their attention was (past, present, or future), and what they wished had been said. Members complete one tracker per round, then place both in front of them for the debrief.
 
The Debrief is where the exercise earns its keep. The therapist guides members through a comparison of their two trackers. The contrast between what members felt in Round 1 and what they felt in Round 2 is the curriculum. It does not need to be explained. It has already been felt.
 
Holding the Frame is a section of facilitator guidance covering the three forms of resistance this exercise reliably produces — reluctance to
name specific members, thoughts offered in the grammar of feelings, and Round 1 answers given to Round 2 cards — with specific language for managing each without rescuing members from the discomfort that is doing the work.
The worksheet can be used early in a group's life as an orientation to the here and now, or later as a clinical diagnostic when affective material has gone flat and the group needs a reset. Download the PDF below.
Get Your Copy Here Free

Written By A Group Therapist

Hi! I'm Oliver Drakeford, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in West Hollywood California.

I'm a Certified Group Psychotherapist and have been practicing for over a decade. I occaisonally moonlight as an Adjunct Professor, teaching Group Process and prior to being in Private Practice full time, I was the Clinical Director of a residential treatment program for adolescents in Malibu, CA.

I started a YouTube Channel to share some of the things I was teaching in my Group Process class and to share some of the things that I was saying to my treatment team and the people I supervise. The videos have been viewed nearly a million times (which totally blows my mind) with my Group Therapy Playlist being the most popular. 

Most Group Therapy Worksheets for Adults Keep the Conversation in the Past.

This One Doesn't.

Most group therapy worksheets for adults are well-designed, clinically sound, and almost entirely useless for the thing that makes group therapy different from every other modality. They ask members to reflect on their anxiety, map their coping strategies, or write down what they are grateful for. All of that has value. But it happens in the past tense, at a safe distance from the people sitting in the room.
 
They ask members to reflect on their anxiety, map their coping strategies, or write down what they are grateful for. All of that has value. But it happens in the past tense, at a safe distance from the people sitting in the room. Members fill in the blanks, share their answers, and the group nods along. The session feels productive. The relational patterns that brought people into therapy in the first place do not move.
The reason group therapy works — when it works — is not the content of what people say. It is the contact. A member saying "I feel small when you speak over me" to someone sitting three feet away is doing something categorically different from a member describing how their father made them feel small thirty years ago. Both are real. Only one is group therapy.
 
This worksheet was built around that distinction. It is a structured, two-round experiential exercise that produces a felt contrast between talking about feelings and having feelings in contact with another person. Most members cannot articulate the difference between the here and now and the there and then until they have experienced both in the same session. This exercise creates that experience in under forty-five minutes.

Sign up for my free weekly group therapy newsletter for more group therapy tips and activities. Click here or the image above.

How Does Group Therapy Help?

Group therapy is  an excellent way for clients to improve their relationships and gain a deeper understanding of self and interpersonal dynamics, the best part is that it can supplement work done in individual therapy, and act as a stand-alone format of treatment.. 

Communication Skills 

  • Members learn effective communication.
  • Group helps you speak up constructively.
  • In group you learn to handle interpersonal conflict and tension with increasing ease. 

Emotion Regulation

  • Group helps understand and express feelings.
  • You develop a capacity to observe and withstand uncomfortable feelings.

Healthy Relationships & Boundaries

  • You will develop an increased ability to recognize others as different from oneself.
  • You explore and tolerate others having different thoughts feelings and drives, and learn to maintain relationships with them. 
  • You will create meaningful interactions with others in group and in every day life. 

Insight & Self Awareness

  • Group helps you gain insight into how you operate internally and in relation to others.
  • You can try new ways of being with others

5 Group Therapy Myth Busters

 

 Group therapy has a strange number of myths and false rumors about it, here's some of the top myths I hear about group therapy and why they're wrong.

 

Group cohesion is the goal for group

A groups structural cohesion is a frequent feature in both the clinical and research literature. However, There is no consensually agreed-upon operational definition of the term, which makes clear analysis and studying difficult. In some research, cohesion has not been shown to reliably affect client outcome, and in 2009 it was suggested that it was appropriate to drop cohesion as a focus of scientific investigation. 

Group Is Only Effective For Some Diagnosis

Overall, the general trend has been that group therapy has been shown to be an effective form of therapy for many types of diagnosis, including depression, anxiety, mood disorders, schizophrenia, PTSD and addiction.

This is not to say that any group will work, as studies are emerging that suggest certain types of groups benefit different diagnosis more than other.

Anyone can run a process group

Unfortunately for group therapists we need more studies that address the complex relationship between training and treatment outcomes. However, we do know that group therapy is most effective when group leaders take advantage of the unique interactive properties of groups and incorporate group process principles into treatment. This requires a deeper level of training than offered in most schools.

Group conflict is a sign of something bad 

Group conflict can be a source of anxiety and stress for both members and the group therapist. This does not mean however that it should be avoided. In fact, research  found that “cycles of interpersonal exploring followed by retreating to safety” were positively related to outcome. This makes more sense when relationship dynamics are considered more broadly, the nature of relationships involves both rupture and repair. 

Individual therapy is more effective than group

Research conducted over 25 years is actually suggesting that in fact group therapy is just as effective as individual therapy. Recent meta-analyses of a quarter century of writing have found not found any differences between effectiveness of the two modalities, although more studies should be done to explore 'types' of group therapy to give us more information on this. 

 

Other Types Of Group Therapy Worksheets Coming Soon.

Emotional Regulation Worksheets for Group Therapy

Emotional regulation is one of the most searched-for topics in group therapy, and for good reason — it sits at the intersection of almost every clinical presentation that brings adults into group work. Whether the group is focused on anxiety, depression, trauma, interpersonal difficulties, or general process work, the capacity to tolerate, name, and stay in contact with feeling is foundational. Emotional regulation worksheets for group therapy help members identify what they are feeling in real time, understand the difference between a feeling and a thought, and practise staying present with emotional material rather than moving away from it through abstraction, intellectualization, or silence.
 
More emotional regulation worksheets for group therapy are coming soon.

CBT and DBT Group Therapy Worksheets for Adults

CBT and DBT are the two most widely used evidence-based frameworks in adult group therapy, and I’ve found to be very popular in residential treatment. Their worksheet traditions reflect very different theories of change which makes them worth understanding separately before deciding which one belongs in a given session. I also find a lot of eye-rolling and boredom in some groups.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of 23 studies found group CBT produced a significant effect over usual care for depression immediately post-treatment (SMD = −0.55, 95% CI: −0.78 to −0.32), with benefits maintained at medium- to long-term follow-up.

Coping Skills & Coping Strategies Worksheets

 

 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

This is a great activity that accomplishes several things - it shows group members how to communicate emotions, introduces the concept of the here and now, and allows the group to have a lived experience of group process.