Get innovative ideas and effective interventions for your group therapy
Group work requires facilitators to use different skills than they would use in individual or family therapy. The Group Therapist’s Notebook: Homework, Handouts, and Activities for Use in Psychotherapy offers facilitators effective strategies to gather individuals who have their own unique needs together to form a group where each member feels comfortable exploring personal—and often painful—topics. This resource provides creative handouts, homework, and activities along with practical ideas and interventions appropriate for a variety of problems and population types. Each chapter gives detailed easy-to-follow instructions, activity contraindications, and suggestions for tracking the intervention in successive meetings. Every intervention is backed by a theoretical or practical rationale for use, and many chapters feature a helpful illustrative clinical vignette.
Group work has several benefits, including the ability to treat a greater number of clients with fewer resources. Group therapy work also relies on various theories that may seem to be difficult to apply to clinical practice. The Group Therapist’s Notebook is a practical guide that builds a bridge between theory and practice with ease. The text provides help for psychotherapists who are either beginning group practice or already utilizing groups as part of their practice and need a fresh set of ideas. The workbook framework allows group specialists to generate approaches and modify exercises to fit the varying needs of their clients. This guide offers a wide variety of valid approaches that effectively address client concerns. The book provides therapists with tips and ideas for starting and facilitating a group, assists them through sets of interventions, activities, and assignments, then showcases a variety of interventions for needs-specific populations or problems. Special sections are included with interventions for teens, young adults, couples, and family groups.
Interventions in The Group Therapist’s Notebook include:
- anger management skills
- ease feelings of shame and guilt
- substance use and abuse
- grief and loss
- positive body image
- guidance through change
- independence and belonging
- interpersonal skills
- coping skills
- crisis intervention strategies
- much, much more!
The Group Therapist’s Notebook is an essential resource for both novice and more experienced practitioners working in the mental health field, including counselor educators, social workers, guidance counselors, prevention educators, and other group facilitators. Every nonprofit agency, counseling center, private practice, school, hospital, treatment facility, or training center that organizes and implements therapy groups of any type should have this guide in their library.
Dawn Viers, PhD, is an assessment specialist/outpatient clinician with New River Valley Community Services in Blacksburg, Virginia. Her areas of specialization include foster care and adoption, attachment disorders, and trauma- informed practice. She is the editor of The Group Therapist‘s Notebook: Homework, Handouts, and Activities in Psychotherapy (Routledge, 2007) and co-editor, with Katherine M. Hertlein, PhD, of The Couple and Family Therapist’s Notebook: Homework, Handouts, and Activities for Use in Psychotherapy (Routledge, 2005).
