• A theory can guide you, much as a roadmap or a

navigational instrument
• A set of directions tells you where are you are
starting out, where you hope to end, and the steps
along the way
• Even with a plan, you will need to be flexible in
modifying the way you try to reach your goals
• Developing an integrative approach is a process that
will likely take years and will evolve as you gain
experience
• Consider your own personality, interpersonal strengths,
life experiences, and worldview as you choose the
concepts and techniques that work best with a range of
clients
• There are multiple pathways to achieving integration.
Two of the most common are technical integration and
theoretical integration
• Combining the following three domains is the basis
for a powerful and comprehensive approach to
counseling
• The cognitive domain focuses on the thinking or
thought processes of group members
• The affective domain emphasizes the feelings of
group members
• The behavioral domain entails acting and doing
• Techniques are leader interventions aimed at
facilitating movement within a group
• Virtually anything a group leader does could be
viewed as a technique
• Techniques are most useful when they evolve from
the work of the group participants and are tailored
to the situations that evolve in a particular group
meeting
• In selecting techniques, consider the following
• The purpose and type of group
• The readiness of members to deal with a
personal concern
• The members’ cultural backgrounds and value
systems
• The members’ trust in you as a leader
• The level of cohesion and trust among group
members
• Consider all dimensions of their identity regardless
of your theoretical perspective
• Be aware of the power you possess as a leader
• Recognize that you may symbolize various
institutions of oppression for some members
• Validate any experiences they have had with
discrimination and oppression
• Psychodynamic approaches stress insight in therapy
• Experiential and relationship-oriented approaches
stress feelings and subjective experiencing
• Cognitive behavioral approaches stress the role of
thinking and doing and tend to be action-oriented
• Postmodern approaches stress understanding the
subjective world of the client and tap existing
resources for change within the individual
• Psychoanalytic Therapy
• Emphasizes insight, unconscious motivation, and
reconstruction of the personality
• Group therapy often consists of a lengthy process of
analyzing inner conflicts that are rooted in the past
(first 6 years of life )
• Primary goals include making the unconscious
conscious and the restructuring of personality
• Psychoanalytic Therapy
• In contrast to the classical model of the impersonal
and detached analyst, the contemporary formulation
emphasizes the therapeutic alliance
• Major techniques include maintaining the analytic
framework, free association, interpretation, dream
analysis, analysis of resistance, and analysis of
transference
• Two key features of psychodynamic group therapy
are ways that transference and countertransference
are played out in the context of the current group
situation
• Adlerian Therapy
• Focuses on the unity of the person, understanding
the individual’s subjective perspective, and the
importance of life goals that direct behavior
• Inherent feelings of inferiority initiate a natural
striving toward achieving a higher level of mastery
and competence in life
• The style of life consists of our views about others,
the world, and ourselves; these views lead to
distinctive behaviors that we adopt in pursuit of our
life goals
• Adlerian Therapy
• Adlerians place emphasis on the family constellation
as a key factor in influencing one’s style of life
• A key goal of an Adlerian group is fostering social
interest
• The Adlerian leader creates a democratic climate
within the group and does not screen members for
groups because it is inconsistent with the spirit of
democracy
• Adlerian therapy has a psychoeducational focus, a
present- and future orientation, and is a brief or
time-limited approach
• Adlerian Therapy
• The therapeutic relationship is based on
cooperation, mutual trust, respect, confidence,
collaboration, and alignment of goals
• Adlerians are not bound to follow a specific set of
procedures
• Techniques often employed include gathering life-
history data, lifestyle analysis, interpretation of
experiences within the family and early recollections,
offering encouragement, and homework
assignments
• The Existential Perspective
• We have the capacity for self-awareness
• Because we are basically free beings, we
must accept the responsibility that
accompanies our freedom
• We have a concern to preserve our
uniqueness and identity; we come to know
ourselves in relation to knowing and
interacting with others
• The Existential Perspective
• The significance of our existence and the
meaning of our life are never fixed once and
for all; instead, we re-create ourselves
through our projects
• Anxiety is part of the human condition
• Death is also a basic human condition, and
the reality of our mortality heightens our
sense of ultimate aloneness
• The Existential Perspective
• The main goal of therapy is to assist participants
in recognizing and accepting their freedom to
become the authors of their own lives
• The therapeutic relationship is of paramount
importance. The quality of the I-Thou encounter
offers a context for change
• Existential therapy reacts against the tendency
to view therapy as a system of well-defined
techniques
• Person-Centered Approach
• Therapy rests on the assumption that we have the
capacity to understand our problems and that we
have the resources within us to resolve them
• This approach emphasizes fully experiencing the
present moment, learning to accept oneself, and
deciding on ways to change
• A major goal is to provide a climate of safety and
trust so that the client, by using the therapeutic
relationship for self-exploration, can become
aware of blocks to growth
• Person-Centered Approach
• The facilitator must convey genuineness,
nonpossessive warmth, accurate empathy,
unconditional acceptance of and respect for the
client, and caring
• Person-centered group facilitators use themselves
as instruments of change in a group. The
therapeutic process is relationship-centered rather
than technique-centered
• Person-centered expressive arts therapy uses
various artistic forms toward the end of growth,
healing, and self-discovery
• Gestalt Therapy
• This approach emphasizes the here-and-now,
direct experiencing, awareness, and bringing
unfinished business into the present and dealing
with it
• The primary goal of Gestalt therapy is attaining
awareness and greater choice
• Factors that are emphasized include the
therapist’s presence, authentic dialogue,
gentleness, direct self-expression by the therapist,
and a greater trust in the client’s experiencing
• Gestalt Therapy
• Gestalt group leaders think more in terms of
experiments than techniques
• Experiments are the cornerstone of experiential
learning. Gestalt therapy utilizes the experiment
to move group members from talk to action and
experience
• Feelings, thoughts, body sensations, and
actions are all used as pathways to understand
what is central for the client in each moment
• Psychodrama
• Members explore problems through role playing,
enacting situations using dramatic devices to gain
insight, discover their own creativity, and develop
behavioral skills
• Members act out past, present, or anticipated life
situations and roles to gain deeper understanding,
explore feelings and achieve emotional release, and
develop new ways of coping
• By replaying a past event “as if” it were happening in
the present, the individual is able to assign new
meaning to it
• Psychodrama
• Psychodrama aims at fostering creativity in the
individual, the group, and ultimately in the culture.
Other goals include promoting catharsis and
insight
• Those who employ psychodramatic methods
assume an active and directive role
• Psychodrama uses a number of specific
techniques designed to intensify feelings, clarify
implicit beliefs, increase self-awareness, and
practice new behaviors
• Behavior Therapy
• The cornerstone of this approach is the identification
of specific goals at the outset of therapy, which
serves as a way to monitor and measure the
progress of members
• This systematic approach begins with a
comprehensive assessment of each individual
• Empirically supported techniques are selected (once
goals are set) to deal with specific problems
• Behavior Therapy
• The members and therapist collaboratively specify
treatment goals in concrete, measurable, and objective
terms
• Leaders tend to be active and directive and to function
as consultants and problem solvers
• Behavioral interventions are individually tailored to
specific problems experienced by different group
members
• Some techniques are relaxation methods, behavioral
rehearsal, coaching, guided practice, mindfulness
skills, cognitive restructuring, and systematic
desensitization
• Cognitive Therapy
• Cognitive therapy assumes that people are prone to
learning erroneous, self-defeating thoughts but that
they are capable of unlearning them
• The group leader assists members in forming
hypotheses and testing their assumptions, which is
known as collaborative empiricism
• The goal is to change the way clients think by
identifying their automatic thoughts and introduce
the idea of cognitive restructuring
• Cognitive Therapy
• Group leaders combine empathy and sensitivity with
technical competence in establishing their
relationship with members
• This approach is present-centered,
psychoeducational, and time-limited
• Cognitive behavioral practitioners function as
teachers
• The cognitive strategies of Socratic questioning and
guided discovery are central to cognitive therapy
• Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
• REBT holds that self-defeating thinking leads to
emotional and behavioral disorders
• People incorporate dysfunctional beliefs from
external sources and then continue to indoctrinate
themselves with this faulty thinking
• Goals of REBT are to eliminate a self-defeating
outlook on life, to reduce unhealthy emotional
responses, and to acquire a more rational and
tolerant philosophy
• Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
• REBT practitioners strive to unconditionally accept
the members of their groups and teach them to
unconditionally accept others and themselves
• REBT utilizes a wide range of cognitive, emotive,
and behavioral methods
• Techniques are designed to induce clients to
critically examine their present beliefs and behavior
• Choice Theory/Reality Therapy
• Choice theory is the underlying philosophy of the
practice of reality therapy
• A key concept of reality therapy and choice theory is
that no matter how dire our circumstances may be,
we always have a choice
• Human beings are motivated to change:
• When they determine that their current behavior is
not getting them what they want
• When they believe they can choose other
behaviors that will get them closer to what they
want
• Reality Therapy
• The overall goal of this approach is to help people find
better ways to meet their needs for survival, love and
belonging, power, freedom, and fun
• Both involvement with and concern for group members
are demonstrated by the leader throughout the life of a
group
• The cycle of counseling consists of two major
components
• The counseling environment
• Specific procedures that lead to change in behavior
(WDEP)
• Solution-Focused Brief Therapy
• SFBT involves a shift from talking about problems to
talking about exceptions to problems and creating
solutions
• SFBT emphasizes the role of participants
establishing their own goals and preferences.
Members are asked to think about their future and
what they want to be different in their lives
• SFBT is a collaborative venture
• Solution-Focused Brief Therapy
• The concepts of care, interest, respectful curiosity,
openness, empathy, contact, and even fascination
are seen as relational necessities
• Because SFBT is brief, the leader aims to keep
group members on a solution track rather than a
problem track
• Techniques include pre-therapy change, exception
questions, the miracle question, scaling questions,
homework, and summary feedback
• Narrative Therapy
• This approach is based partly on examining the
stories that people tell and understanding the
meaning of their stories
• The therapist attempts to separate clients from their
problems (through externalizing conversations) so
that they do not adopt a fixed view of their identity
• Group members are invited to view their stories from
different perspectives and eventually co-create an
alternative life story
• Narrative Therapy
• Members are invited to describe their experience in
fresh language and identify how societal standards are
internalized in ways that constrain them
• Narrative therapy’s most distinctive feature is captured
by the statement, “The person is not the problem, but
the problem is the problem”
• Therapists ask questions from a not-knowing position
• Members learn that they are not cemented to their
problem-saturated stories and can develop alternative
and more constructive stories
• Motivational Interviewing
• Rooted in the philosophy of person-centered
therapy, but is deliberately directive, yet stays within
the client’s frame of reference
• The major goals are to explore an individual’s
ambivalence, to minimize this ambivalence, and to
build intrinsic motivation
• Emphasizes being purposeful and getting to the
point to guide group members toward positive
change and to decide whether they want to make
certain changes
• Motivational Interviewing
• Practitioners emphasize the relational context of
therapy, known as the “MI spirit,” establishing
collaborative partnerships with members and draws on
their ideas and resources rather than assuming a role
as the expert
• A phenomenological approach in which the counselor
attempts to see life from the client’s perspective
• This perspective makes this approach suitable for
working with clients from diverse cultural backgrounds
• Feminist Therapy
• This approach focuses on issues of diversity, the
complexity of sexism, and the centrality of social
context in understanding gender issues
• Group counseling has the task of bringing to
awareness how gender-role socialization is deeply
ingrained in adult personality
• Problematic symptoms can be viewed as coping or
survival strategies rather than as evidence of
pathology
• The major goal of feminist therapy is empowerment
• Feminist Therapy
• Feminist therapists work in an egalitarian manner
and use empowerment strategies tailored to each
client
• The leader works to demystify the therapeutic
process and include each member as an active
partner in the treatment process
• Some techniques include gender-role analysis and
intervention, power analysis and intervention, and
social action
• No single theory is comprehensive enough to account
for the complexities of human behavior
• Each theory has strengths and weaknesses and is, by
definition, different from the others
• Functioning exclusively within the parameters of one
theory may not provide you with the therapeutic
flexibility that you need to deal creatively with the
complexities associated with diversity
• It is important to have a theoretical rationale to help you
make sense of what occurs in a group. Take the time to
understand several theoretical orientations, and then
select concepts from each to form your own personal
style of working.
• A general theoretical framework helps you make sense
of the many facets of group process, provides you with
a map that allows you to intervene in a creative and
effective manner, and provides a basis for evaluating
the results of your interventions.
• Multiple Choice and essay
question
• Will open on Sunday, March
31st, and close on
Wednesday, April 3rd
• Due TODAY!!!!!
• By 12:30 PM EST
• Quiz on Chapter 4
• Multiple Choice
• Read Chapter 6

• We will not cover Chapter 5- Read on

• Journal Entry for Chapter 6 will be