Group Counseling and Group Work
Types, stages, and factors
Group items test whether you can match leadership behavior to a developmental stage and can name Yalom's therapeutic factors.
Types (ASGW): task/work, psychoeducational, counseling, and psychotherapy groups, differing by goal, member readiness, and leader training.
Stages: forming (orientation, anxiety, dependence on the leader), storming (conflict, control, resistance), norming (cohesion, norms), performing (productive work), and adjourning (termination and transfer of learning). Corey uses parallel language: initial, transition, working, final. Member behaviors - silence, monopolizing, scapegoating, subgrouping - are the raw material for stage-appropriate interventions.
Yalom's therapeutic factors: instillation of hope, universality, imparting information, altruism, corrective recapitulation of the primary family group, development of socializing techniques, imitative behavior, interpersonal learning, group cohesiveness, catharsis, and existential factors.
Ethics and practice: screen members before admission, obtain informed consent that states the leader cannot guarantee other members' confidentiality, arrange co-leader communication, protect members from coercion, and plan termination with adequate notice and evaluation.
Traps: reading early silence as resistance rather than normal initial-stage anxiety; promising absolute confidentiality; admitting an unprepared or unwilling member to a psychotherapy group; confronting before cohesion exists.
Rule of thumb: normalize first, intervene second - early conflict is usually named as a stage phenomenon before it is treated as an individual member's problem.