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Group Therapy Paper

1001 Words5 Pages

Ryan Giltner
PSY 3211
2/5/2016

Weekly Paper #1

Group therapy is an integral part of psychology and like couple, family, or individual therapy there are many moving parts that allow the machine to work. Group therapy can be extremely helpful for many different populations of people like recovering alcoholics or veterans. Group therapy allows people to share their stories and engage with others who have similar experiences. When my grandmother died, I spent a lot time talking with my parents and other family members about her life and how she affected mine. Having the opportunity to share my grief with my family, allowed me to reflect on her life and move forward.
Chaos theory can be used to describe …show more content…

Most group therapy centers around a general topic, for example veterans with schizophrenia may meet monthly to learn social skills or discuss problems. Even though group therapy has general topics, each session may cover many different topics within and certain comments from group members or leader may stick stronger than others. This phenomenon of a comment or topic oscillating is known as an attractor. It could take a few sessions or months of sessions for that one topic to be finally put to rest. After my grandmother passed away, her life and memories of her were brought up many more times during family gatherings, because she was an important woman in all of our lives. This topic oscillated for many years and can still come up on occasion. Just like there are different kinds of dynamics, there are different kinds of attractors. There can be a fixed-point attractor that keeps a group on a specific topic or person for a longtime or there can be periodic attractors that can command attention for short periods of time before moving back to a neutral level. There are also linear, non-linear, and strange attractors within …show more content…

Even though groups are not the same, first order change is something that is seen across all groups. Groups will go around and around in a very predictable manner. As groups develop a deeper level of conversation and trust they go through second order change. This allows group members to form relationships and connections with other group members, which may aid in their grief process. During the beginning of a group project, students are getting to know each other and spending time learning about the project. As time progresses, students know more about each other and tend to feel more comfortable bouncing ideas off of each other to form a cohesive group project. Second order change can be seen through the deeper relationship between group members.

John Bonner’s slime mold video is a great representation of self-organization. The slime groups together and even when it is separated, they pull themselves back into a group, self-organizing themselves. Self-organizing is another important aspect within groups. John Bonners slime mold relates more heavily to group work in college. For example, groups will often meet up and organize but at the end of the meeting they will separate for a period of time and then reorganize again when

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