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Group Counseling : An Ideal Vehicle For Moving Past The Social, Sexual, And Status Games

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Group counseling is an ideal vehicle for moving past the “social, sexual, and status games” often played in interpersonal relationships (Yalom & Leszcz, 2005, p. 47). This form of therapy allows members to authentically experience real-life situations with other people and to discern fact from distortion in their interpersonal interactions (p. 47). In this session, I acted as a group member and two of my fellow students, Joe and Mary, acted as the co-leaders. In the following descriptions, I use aliases to refer to group members and the co-leaders.
My Reactions to the Group Process
A discussion about an interaction from the first session came up, and a member, Kathy, added her insights. Then, another member, Eliza, pointed out that Kathy always seems to avoid talking about her feelings in the group. The co-leader, Mary, asked Kathy to talk about what she had been feeling in the initial interaction that happened three weeks ago. Kathy’s apparent discomfort in this moment might have been caused by her inability to remember how she had felt weeks before. Corey, Corey, and Corey (2014) stated: “Interventions that direct members to gain awareness of what they are experiencing in the here and now tend to intensify the emotional quality of interactions” (p. 176). If Mary’s intention was to elicit a genuine feeling expression from Kathy, she might have focused on the present moment instead of the past.
The co-leader, Joe, invited the rest of the group to share their reactions.
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