Group therapy and t-groups - Essay Example

Sometimes clients consider themselves liable for the progress their peers make and therefore the ultimate feeling of being helpful is generated. Quite often after observing the changes in the group, the clients adopt the positive behavior they observe in others and at the same time they manage to learn from each other and therefore the trust can increase their self-confidence and interpersonal skills among members. Clients are more prone to test their new skills in a safe environment before going to normal a little bit hostile social world.

In many case group experience may be therapeutic by offering the clients a chance to reinforce or revise the way in which they relate to their primary families. Purely practical advantage of group therapy is the fact that it is more cost-effective and results in the therapist's time reduction. The therapist's role encompasses facilitating member participation and interaction, focusing conversation, mediating conflicts among members, offering emotional support when needed, facilitating the establishment of group rules, ensuring that the rules are followed and in the case the conflicts are smoothed.

The main disadvantage of group therapy can be the fact that not people are. dvantage of group therapy can be the fact that not people are predisposed to reveal their problems in front of everybody and group therapy can be not as efficient for some personality types. In addition to this, the feedback that group gives is not censored by the therapist up front, and quite often it can be detrimental for the client. Another disadvantage that group can face is the switch from the problem to the other focal points.

There are many different groups that are used in the psychotherapy: Some groups such as alcohol dependence groups, single parents group, and assertiveness training group. Some group can accept new member, meanwhile the other can be completely closed to new members, once the group is formed. Group therapy became very a popular practice after the Second World War and includes numerous methods of psychotherapy, including psychodynamic, behavioral, and phenomenological. In Fritz Perls's application of his Gestalt approach to group work, the therapist tends to work with one group member at a time.

Other approaches, such as J.L. Moreno's psychodrama (role playing) method, stresses the interaction among group members. Psychodrama calls for the group to act out scenes relevant to the situation of a particular member under the therapist's guidance. Influenced by Moreno's approach, new action-based methods were introduced in the 1960s, including encounter groups, sensitivity training, marathon groups, and transactional analysis, whose foremost spokesperson was Eric Berne. Marathon groups, which can last for extended periods of time, are geared toward wearing down the members' defenses to allow for more intense interaction.

In addition to the adaptation of individual psychotherapeutic methods for groups, the popularity of group therapy has also