Group Counseling and Group Work
What this domain tests
Group types, stages of group development, Yalom's therapeutic factors, and the leader decisions that protect members and move the group forward.
Core content
- ASGW group types: psychoeducational, counseling, psychotherapy, and task/work groups.
- Tuckman's stages: forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning. Leaders anticipate resistance and conflict during storming rather than treating it as failure.
- Yalom's therapeutic factors: instillation of hope, universality, imparting information, altruism, corrective recapitulation of the primary family, development of socializing techniques, imitative behavior, interpersonal learning, group cohesiveness, catharsis, existential factors.
- ACA Code A.9: screen prospective members, explain that confidentiality cannot be guaranteed in groups, and protect members from harm. Screening is an ethical requirement, not an optional courtesy.
- Design variables: closed vs open membership, homogeneous vs heterogeneous composition, co-leading (adds observers and modeling but requires role negotiation), and the difference between voluntary and mandated members.
- Common member roles: monopolist, silent member, scapegoat, gatekeeper, resistor. Prefer here-and-now process comments over lecturing.
Worked example
One member has spoken for ten minutes while another has said nothing. Reasoning: an early norm-setting statement plus a process intervention ("I notice we've heard a lot from one person; I'd like to widen the circle") protects both; a private check-in with the silent member follows. Confrontation in group work means gentle pointing-out, not attack.
Traps that cost marks
- Promising or implying confidentiality will be kept.
- Skipping screening and informed consent.
- Treating mandated members with the same assumptions as volunteers.
- Naming a stage or factor without matching it to the described behavior.