Why a Group
The development of the therapist is inseparable from the development of the person.
Knowing about relationship is not the same as discovering yourself in relationship.
Graduate school, professional training, and clinical experience give us the first. The five capacities grow from the second, and they share a root: where our sense of worth comes from. When it depends on a client liking us, or getting better, her anger lands as a verdict, being genuine feels too risky, and doubting our work becomes unbearable.
Irvin Yalom
You already know his work on groups. A group is a social microcosm. Given time, each of us relates there the way we relate everywhere, and the others can see it and say so, here and now.
The group has the experience, and then it looks at what just happened. That second step is what turns an experience into learning.
What we learn is how we come across. Clients rarely tell us, and supervisors hear only our own account. In a group, several people tell us at once.
In training therapists to lead groups, he stresses the importance of a personal group experience, and notes that most programs provide it through an encounter group.
What happens when the therapists are the members?
Carl Rogers
You already know his work on therapy. Fewer of us know what he did with groups. He took the conditions he described for therapy into them: no agenda, no exercises, and a climate safe enough for people to drop their roles.
He watched the same process unfold again and again: caution, then the first honest feelings, then façades giving way until people meet without their roles. He called that the basic encounter.
The members became the source of understanding for one another, more than the facilitator.
He also held that we become more accepting of others as we come to accept ourselves.
The group is not the subject of the learning. The group is where the learning happens.
In 1968 a film crew recorded one of his groups. Most therapists have never seen it.