As a therapist, you must be familiar with the concept of group therapy activities for adults. You already understand the importance of creating connections and providing a shared space to individuals to help them grow their social skills.
Besides that, these sessions are more engaging and enriching, which helps clients come across new experiences. While it’s beneficial for clients, it also supports therapists in handling their caseloads better by letting them deal with multiple clients in less time.
Rather than having four back-to-back sessions, you can have one session with four clients. It not only saves time but also allows you to take a backseat, and the group becomes the driver of the session.
According to a study published in the European Journal of Psychiatry, group therapy is much more effective than Individual therapy in the long run.
Besides that, the American Psychological Association (APA) concluded that group therapy is more effective for mental conditions such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Their research shows that nearly three out of four individuals benefit from group therapy.
There’s no doubt that group therapy is one of the best ways to provide value to your clients. Now, the question is how you can achieve an effective group therapy session. This article not only touches the surface but dives deep into various methods that are tried and tested by therapists all over the world.
Understanding Group Therapy for Adults
You must already know that a group therapy session is more than just a few people sitting in a shared space. The session needs to be productive for the clients without harming their trust and confidentiality.
Therefore, it’s important to be a reliable host who plays the leadership role and regulates the entire session passively without directly controlling its path.
You must also be able to develop an environment where the patients feel safe and ready to share. Of course, it’ll not happen in the first session itself, but if they are ready to go forward with the next group session, the job’s done well.
According to the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA), therapists have four main functions in group therapy:
- Executive Functions: The therapist sets the meeting, members, time, subject, and boundaries, and holds the complete responsibility of creating a stable environment.
- Monitoring: The client must record how the individuals are performing in the group therapy, note down their responses, highlight important behavioral aspects, and use them in one-on-one sessions to improve the client’s mental health condition.
- Emotional stimulation: The therapist should work as a motivator or catalyst that helps individuals in group therapy to encourage their participation and convey their emotions.
Understanding and Awareness: It’s the therapist’s role to introduce and make their clients familiar with each other and the reason why group therapy is introduced in the first place.
Rules to Set Before Beginning Group Therapy Activities for Adults
Apart from playing the above-mentioned roles, it is essential for therapists to set some ground rules before moving forward to the session. Setting rules will allow you to govern the therapy so that it stays on track and benefits both you and the clients.
- Maintaining Confidentiality: Though therapists are legally bound to maintain confidentiality, clients are not. Therefore, you must request all the clients to maintain confidentiality, and at the same time, don’t let them share any information that’s too sensitive.
- Keeping Relationships Professional: Though it is common for people during group therapy to develop close bonds, you must remind them that the best results can only be achieved by keeping it professional and unbiased.
- Respect and Active Listening: Everyone should actively listen to other members, which develops a supportive environment, ensuring that everyone feels heard and valued.
- No Judging and Criticizing: You must remind everyone to be open to everyone’s opinion and not allow passing any judgemental or criticizing comments. Keeping clients with similar problems will be more helpful.
- Participation and Engagement: You should set the rule that everyone gets an equal opportunity to participate, as it helps in making the session engaging for everyone and nobody feels left out.
- Avoid Distractions: People should be encouraged not to use mobile phones or get distracted from the conversation for the maximum benefit. Though you should not a rigid stop to this, setting it as a rule will make patients aware of what not to do.
- Staying on the topic: You should keep a check that people don’t go off topic and lead to discussions that aren’t fruitful and can lead to conflict.
No Substance Abuse: Needless to say, you should not allow anyone in group therapy who is under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Essential Group Therapy Activities
Now that the basics are set, we’ll let you know about some of the fun group therapy activities for adults that you can conduct during the sessions.
Icebreaker Question
This is an obvious activity that you’d conduct during the first session to create a familiar environment and assist everyone in getting to know each other. Though this activity seems basic, you can make it fun by adding a twist in how you ask questions.
For instance, you can select a theme and ask questions accordingly. You can club it with dice or chits and make it further interesting. The patient will play dice. The number of dice has a respective chit, each having a question written. This is an easy yet playful, engaging, and effective activity.
Storytelling Circle
Many therapist use this activity to bring out the hidden emotions in their patients. In this activity, one person starts the story, or you can do that. Then, the next person adds a line to it. The way the story develops is interesting and brings out the perspective of each individual. It shows whether the emotions are negative or positive, what attracts the person, and a lot more, just by knowing the line added.
Mindfulness Meditation
Not all activities require individuals to interact with each other. Sometimes, they can perform the activities individually in an environment where they feel they belong. Once they get familiar with each other, you can conduct a guided meditation activity for them. It will be more effective than the one-on-one meditation or regular session as they’ll be in a safer environment, knowing that their group members are performing the same activity.
Role-Playing Scenarios
This is one of the most effective ways to leverage group sessions and bring out the insights that stay hidden during one-on-one sessions. You can give different scenarios to individuals and see how they react to them. The scenario can have one or multiple individuals playing their roles and others all stay spectators.
You can make it even further by making it theme-based and clubbing it with other activities such as dancing or questioning. It will help you understand how a person reacts during different situations and improve his self-awareness during one-on-one sessions.
Letter Writing Therapy
This is one of the most powerful therapy techniques to bring our suppressed emotions and improve an individual’s mental health. You can ask people to write letters addressing people who are not with them now and then read them aloud after everyone is done with the task.
However, this is a sensitive activity and if you believe not all individuals are ready for it, then you can ditch it. A less sensitive version is to ask them to write a letter to their younger self or you can have similar scenarios or hypothetical people to whom patients can address their letters.
Group Feedback Session
This is an important step in taking the group’s bonding to the next level. You can ask every individual to give their feedback to other individuals in a constructive way and not in a critical aspect. During such a session, you must keep strong governance over what individuals are speaking and make sure it doesn’t hurt the other patient’s emotions. If you find something negative or judgmental, you must jump into the conversation to keep it positive.
Specialized Group Therapy Techniques
There are several group therapy techniques developed in recent years. However, some of them are found to be more effective than others, and these are the ones we’ll discuss in this section.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Group Techniques
A study published on the Effectiveness of cognitive behavioral group therapy for depression in routine practice in BMC Psychiatry showed a significant reduction in depression who received group CBT.
The technique aims to identify behavioral patterns and regulate emotions. During the group sessions, members identify distorted or negative thinking patterns and replace them with more balanced and realistic thoughts. During the session, your role is to facilitate conversation, track down the thoughts, and share relevant insights with each patient.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Skills Training
This therapy technique is effective when you have to teach patients how to handle difficult situations, develop tolerance, and improve relationships.
During DBT group therapy sessions, you can introduce mindfulness practices to increase self-awareness, such as focusing on breath or body sensations. Group members can also practice techniques like distraction, self-soothing, or radical acceptance to manage overwhelming emotions.
Psychodrama
This technique is best implemented in group therapy sessions as it focuses on trauma healing and role reversal.
While exercising the Psychodrama technique, you ask individuals to play various roles in different situations from another person’s perspective, which helps them understand other people’s emotions and behaviors.
You can also introduce other role-playing group therapy activities for adults such as improvisational drama and acting out real-life key moments of their lives to express feelings and interact with others in novel ways, facilitating emotional release and growth.
Gestalt Group Therapy
Gestalt group therapy gives a way to self-acceptance and allows individuals to accept who they are. It helps to integrate the thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Under this, participants can perform activities such as the empty chair technique, where they talk to an empty chair that symbolizes a person who is not present there. It helps to get over unfinished business. It’s best done in group therapy technique where patients get external support from other members.
Managing Your Group Therapy for Adults with DENmaar
DENmaar offers tools exclusively created for managing group therapy sessions. With our application, you can easily schedule group therapy sessions for different participants. Besides that, it’s also built to reduce no-shows by sending personalized reminders and managing client relationships.
It helps you improve your therapy sessions by directly requesting feedback and sending follow-up messages, allowing you to consider the patient’s perspective as well.
Rest assured that the application follows HIPAA, state-specific, and payer-specific compliance and rules. Overall, DENmaar is your go-to solution to take your group therapy sessions to the next level.
