How to facilitate a group therapy session online
FOR THERAPISTS – How to Set Up Your Group
Timecodes:
welcome to my channel the binge eating
therapist
this video is my fellow counselors and
therapists about
running your groups i am a big advocate
of group work i think group work is
incredibly powerful
and can reach parts and processes that
are really difficult
to do in individual work i often speak
to therapists and counselors who
like the idea of running a group but
they have certain anxieties about
finding people about whether they are
qualified enough to run a group so i
wanted to address some of those things
in
this video one of the things i do always
strongly recommend
to anyone looking to set up a group is
that you have a very clear theme
about who the group is for i know some
people like the idea of running a
general therapy group where
anyone can bring anything but it's quite
a tough one to find people who are
willing to do that
because there's so much anxiety around
coming to a group groups
really stir us up and stir up those
projections
so i think if you want to do a general
therapy group you're better off
opening it up to other counselors and
therapists or trainees people who are
already quite therapeutically minded
are more likely to join a general
process group
but on the whole i mean it's probably
pretty evident my groups are about binge
eating
and it wasn't until i started training
other therapists and setting up groups
that i started to hear all these
incredible ideas for therapy groups
so one therapist has set up a group for
women who are online dating someone else
has set up a group for low mood
somebody ran a group for nhs frontline
workers during covid
there's another guy who's looking at
setting up a group for men
who are abusing steroids someone else is
looking at a group
for bereavement like all these kinds of
subjects some of them i would never have
even thought of
and it's a real opportunity i think as a
practitioner to work with an
area that you're really passionate about
and a lot of the time therapists will
choose
subjects that they have some lived
experience about
now that's not necessary but i find for
me
one of the reasons why clients come to
me
is because i'm quite open about the fact
that i've struggled with binge eating
so they think okay there's someone
who'll get it and hopefully there's
going to be other people in the group
that get it as well
and that helps to override the
ambivalence that a lot of people feel
about groups
so it doesn't mean that you have to be
this
specialist in a subject just the fact
that you are interested in a subject or
you have some
personal knowledge or even if you know
people who have gone through it there's
so much
life experience that you bring in on top
of your
therapeutic skills that can be
enormously helpful to running a group
and then of course people often think
well it's got to be a therapy group
we don't even have to call it a therapy
group it doesn't have to be a therapy
group there's so many different types of
groups you can run from sort of
psycho-education or therapy or
a combination of the two someone else is
running a therapeutic book club
for survivors of domestic abuse so
there are all these different structures
and ways that we can use this so i run
at the moment
i'm running four different types of
groups i've got
an eight week binge eating therapy group
so that's just a
set a period of time i've got three
groups that have binge eating therapy
groups that are
open-ended so people could come for as
long as they want
i actually think open-ended groups are a
really good way to start up groups
because
with a closed group you may lose a
couple of people in the first couple of
weeks you may end up with a smaller
group
and you can't keep bringing people in
when there's only a couple of weeks left
with the group
whereas with an ongoing group it's now
at the point where all my ongoing
ongoing groups are full so when someone
leaves someone on the waiting list takes
their place so the groups just
constantly keep
evolving and changing into new groups as
people come and go
i also do another group which i call the
connect and recover group
and i do these once a month and it's
three hours
where eight people meet with me on zoom
and we spend
three hours exploring our relationship
with food and the structure of this is
really simple
i will ask some self-reflective
questions people come with a notepad and
pen
they think and they write down and then
they share and it turns into a
discussion
and then i throw another question out
and then i throw in a bit of
psycho-education
and so it's this kind of gentle
structure which every group for me looks
quite different because sometimes the
groups will go off in different
directions
but i have a loose structure that i tend
to work through with those
so there's a real opportunity of
offering therapeutic support
there isn't necessarily this weekly
commitment that some people just cannot
do
and it isn't necessarily this one-to-one
therapy either
the last group i did is do is a support
group once a month
so that's a lot more like as a drop-in
thing so that will change every week
with different people coming along
who just want to get some support and be
around people who
are also struggling with binge eating
so one thing i think is important to say
is that i truly do believe that demand
is out there for this
i think people are longing to connect
especially since
covid people are much more open to
groups and online working too so
you can be really quite specific and
niche with your group subject because in
theory
you could have anybody in the country or
internationally if you feel like you can
hold that in the group to come
and find your group and meet together
it's made everything so much more
accessible
and of course groups are more affordable
generally than one-to-one
help as well so it's a real way to make
it accessible
and affordable for people and it could
also be pretty financially rewarding
as a therapist as well so it feels like
the best of both worlds
and so then people are worried about how
do i find people for my group you know
how do i let people know about
it and therapists might say to me it's
okay for you you've got a social media
platform
but the first group that i set up i
didn't i didn't have any social media
presence
um i think i had a couple of hundred
followers on instagram and that was it
and i filled that group up mainly by
posters in the local area it was an
in-person group at the time
just so in that first week there was
someone who'd come from
the poster in tesco and someone who'd
come from the poster in morrison
you can also promote posts on social
media so getting a good image
and writing some text kind of explaining
really clearly who this group is for and
who you are as well
because people need to trust you in
order to
come to your group so how you
communicate your group
is so important and that's something
that i help therapists to do and
i run a online community of therapists
who are looking to set up groups
and we support each other with that we
share each other's posts
and also when people are writing out
their posts they'll share them in the
group and get feedback
from other people which helps us kind of
get our language clearer
so that people can understand what it is
we're offering and the potential value
for them
so then in terms of being qualified
enough or having the skills
you know generally i think that
therapists and counselors underestimate
the skills that they have you know um
there's so much information out there
there are so many great books i mean
yalum who doesn't love yalum he writes
about groups you know you can dip into
that
get yourself a supervisor who's got some
experience in running groups
my first group i ran was on a placement
and i hadn't had any extra training in
running groups
but my supervisor was a group analyst
and i learned more from running that
group and having supervision with him
then i think any course cpd weekend or
something like that could have given me
and you started seeing clients before
you were a fully qualified therapist or
counselor
i think it can be the same with groups i
think sometimes we can start
doing the groups and then when we're
learning while we're doing
wasn't that the time when all the theory
started to make sense when you started
your clinical work when you're on
placement
suddenly the stuff you're learning about
in class makes all the sense in the
world
you can go on a week-long course and
you're only going to retain about
i don't know what what they say it is
something like five percent of the
information that you actually hear
so i think we want to feel ready and we
want to feel like we
know everything like we know enough and
you're never going to feel like you know
enough
i am going to pop some resources below
some courses and books that i like as
well if you want to delve into that
i also run training for therapists about
how to get your group
set up so that takes you all the way up
through to that first session
from finding people to assessments and
contracting
how to manage and structure that first
session to get you all set up in your
groups
and to support you along the way because
if it's something you are interested in
i just want to give you the
encouragement that it's doable
and the world needs it
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