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Tough Customers: Is It Them or Us?
By Rich Simon As therapists, many of us practice in two different worlds. In the first, we see polite, well-behaved, articulate clients with solid values. They engage fully in therapy, talk cogently about their problems, listen attentively to our responses, make reasonably good-faith efforts to follow our suggestions, and sooner or later get better. No wonder we genuinely like these people! Does This Kid Need Medication? with Ron Taffel
Meds: Myths and Realities: NP0035 – Session 3
Do you feel like you could be a more effective therapist with your younger clients? Do you find it hard to determine when interventions--psychological and pharmacological--might be needed? Join Ron Taffel and learn to identify key diagnostic signs that indicate medications could be helpful when dealing with depression, anxiety, AD/HD, and affective disorders. After the session, please let us know what you think. If you ever have any technical questions or issues, please feel free to email support@psychotherapynetworker.org.In Consultation
Peer Supervision Groups that Work
By Eleanor Counselman
Three steps that make a difference
Q: I’d like to organize a peer supervision group, but I’ve heard their failure rate is high. What do you recommend? A: Peer supervision groups provide a welcome respite from the isolation of private practice and an informal, nonevaluative setting after years of formal supervision, particularly for young therapists. They offer valuable guidance on difficult cases and tough ethical dilemmas to therapists at any level of experience. And they’re free! However, as you note, many of them fail. In my experience, careful attention to the initial contract and the ongoing group process can make a huge difference in helping them sustain their membership and thrive. Though they’re often called peer supervision groups, it would be more accurate to call them peer consultation groups. Members don’t have direct supervisory responsibility for one another’s cases: they simply offer suggestions, which members can accept or reject. They typically have four to six members who have approximately the same level of professional experience or share a specific area of interest. Members meet on a regular, usually biweekly, basis. Group consultation, with or without a leader, offers advantages over individual consultation. It includes the possibility of multiple perspectives on the same problem and the reduction of clinicians’ shame about confusions and mistakes as they share similar stories about their struggles with difficult cases. Another benefit is peer interaction, which develops one’s professional sense of self. The hall-of-mirrors effect—seeing yourself as others see you—which is so potent in therapy groups, is a major component of the supervision group experience. Nevertheless, despite the many benefits, it’s challenging to start and maintain a consultation group, particularly if it’s a leaderless one. They can fail to thrive or suffer from “task drift,” moving them away from discussing clinical material and into a form of therapy. It can be difficult to integrate new members and maintain clarity about the group’s own process. Presenting cases in supervision in any format poses obvious risks to one’s self-esteem, and group dynamics add additional risks: issues of power, competition, exposure, and shame can lead members to drop out. It’s especially challenging to manage group dynamics in leaderless groups, as it’s usually the leader’s role to remain aware of what’s happening within the group, and without a leader in charge, shame or fear of being judged may silence members. The most successful leaderless groups seem to be those in which the group members find a balance between a focus on cognitive and emotional issues—talking about cases and about the feelings that arise when seeing clients—while consciously managing the functions that a designated leader would serve. These include protecting the group contract, setting and maintaining appropriate norms, and handling gatekeeping matters, such as bringing in new members. A crucial component of maintaining an atmosphere of group safety is regular, dependable member attendance. Without this, a group will never feel like a place to take risks. Members need to be willing to bring up concerns about irregular attendance because, just as in a therapy group, member lateness and absences can indicate issues that need exploring. Chronic irregular attendance can be demoralizing and cause a group to fail. When it comes to group safety and cohesion, Woody Allen was right: 90 percent of supervision group success is about showing up. A significant issue in any supervision group is shame and the reluctance to expose oneself. To make supervision groups feel safer, therapist David Altfeld developed a model of group consultation in which all group members simply share their emotional reactions and associations to a situation being discussed, instead of one person presenting a specific case issue and everyone else giving advice as resident “experts.” This procedure levels the playing field by not allowing members to compete for the best case analysis. It leaves room for highlighting emotional issues, countertransference reactions, and parallel process. Making everyone vulnerable in this manner avoids opportunities for excessive criticism (or its counterpart, excessive niceness) and encourages emotional sharing. Another group consultation model, developed by Irish therapist Bobby Moore, focuses only on minimal case information, such as a patient’s age, length of time in therapy, and perhaps a little demographic information. Then the presenter talks about his or her thoughts, fantasies, feelings, and associations about the patient and the therapy. Group members then share their associations. Following that, the initial presenter is invited to share any further associations. Only at this point does the presenter give the facts of the case and the clinical dilemma. Finally, the group thinks together about what’s been discussed and what it indicates about the case. For those interested in the power of the collective unconscious, this is a fascinating process to experience. To succeed, a consultation group must feel safe and useful to its members. Here are a few simple principles to follow: Clarify the group structure. The group needs to agree on the frequency and length of meetings, which is best accomplished with a predictable schedule. The group needs to agree on its task and focus: is this group for any clinical issue or just for couples, or trauma, or group therapy? How much time will the group spend on “schmoozing,” and will there be one or more than one case presented each time? What will be the presentation format? While most groups use verbal presentation, some groups are now using videoclips—which makes the discussion much livelier. Agree on membership issues. How many members will the group have, and how will new members be integrated? Once a group has formed, I believe that decisions about adding more members should be a group decision. While it may be tempting to accept a request from someone who wants to join the group, a total of six members seems to be the maximum number for each member to have enough opportunities for presentations. Attend to the group process and dynamics. While groups should build in a “schmooze” or “check-in” time, there needs to be an agreed-upon limit to the socializing, so that the group doesn’t become a therapy group or a coffee klatch. Without a leader, the members themselves must monitor the group’s procedures and raise any important issues. Some groups do this ad hoc; others schedule a regular review meeting to evaluate how things are going. Leaderless peer supervision groups can help clinicians at any stage further clinical learning and combat professional isolation. They’re likeliest to succeed when the group members have a clear working agreement, maintain regular attendance, and create an environment in which both emotional and cognitive learning occurs. Eleanor Counselman, Ed.D., is a past president of the Northeastern Society for Group Psychotherapy and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She’s published numerous articles on psychotherapy and has a private practice in Belmont, Massachusetts.
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Tag: Dan Siegel  Parenting with the Brain in Mind with Dan SiegelParenting Skills: Session 7 – NP0019Explore with renowned clinician Dan Siegel how applying the latest advances in the neuroscience of child development to clinical practice can have practical implications for parents and families. You’ll discover how therapists can help parents raise calmer, happier children by teaching kids to think and listen before reacting, shifting their emotional states through physical activities, and paying attention to their left brain story-telling. After you hear this presentation, please take a few minutes to comment about what you found most interesting or relevant, to ask any questions you have of the presenter or your colleagues, or to share any experiences. As always, if you ever have any technical questions, please feel free to email support@psychotherapynetworker.org and our Support Team will help you. Comments NP0016, Attachment, Session 3, Dan SiegelHow can attunement enhance brain integration and self-regulation? In this third session of The Great Attachment Debate, Dan Siegel, one of the leading proponents of integrating brain science and psychotherapy, will explore the practical applications of Attachment Theory in clinical practice, and explain the role of attunement in integration. Siegel, a prominent researcher, will shed light on interpersonal neurobiology. After participating in this session, please take a few minutes to review and engage in the Comment Board. What did you learn in this session that was new or surprising? What was most interesting or relevant to you? What questions do you have now for the presenter or other participants? Please feel free to share your thoughts, and we invite you to include your name and hometown along with your comment. If you ever have any technical questions or concerns, contact support@psychotherapynetworker.org, and someone from our Support Team will respond as soon as possible. Comments What Are You Looking Forward To In 2012?Especially during this time of year, in which many of us pause to reflect on the past year and think forward to the year ahead, we tend to consider what we’d like to strive to do less of and what we’d like to do more of. Common resolutions may include cutting back on calories and hitting the gym more often; spending more time with friends and family and less working overtime hours; spending less money on cute shoes and more on…well, nothing! Today, many of us work to spend less and less money and save more of it for the future. At the Networker, this is the time of year in which we’re really looking forward to the upcoming annual Symposium in March. We’ve sent out the Symposium program and posted details on our website—and this year, for the first time, we’ve even produced a digital edition of the Symposium program, which you can see on our Symposium 2012 page. Nearly every day, no matter what time of the year, I find myself enthusiastically talking (more like gushing) about the Symposium in some capacity—to some poor subscriber who calls to ask a magazine-related question, to a webcast participant who emails to ask about CE credits, to friends who are social work students, to a family member who’s a health nut (“Did you know Andrew Weil is coming to our conference next year?! And Jane Fonda?!”), and more. Those poor souls who have to hear me go on and on about much they’d love the conference and how it’s worth attending…. But for those of you who’ve never been to a Symposium—or for those of you who’ve been in the past—I wanted to let you know just a few reasons I think you should consider registering for Symposium 2012: If you’ve attended the Symposium in the past, it’s likely you’ve got your own list of reasons to attend this year. What do you think is the absolute best reason to join us in Washington, DC this March 22-25, 2012? Comments NP008, Attachment, Session 3, Dan SiegelHow can attunement enhance brain integration and self-regulation? In this third session of the Great Attachment Debate, Dan Siegel, one of the leading proponents of integrating brain science and psychotherapy, will explore the practical applications of Attachment Theory in clinical practice, and explain the role of attunement in integration. Siegel, a prominent researcher, will shed light on interpersonal neurobiology. After participating in this session, please take a few minutes to review and engage in the Comment Board. What did you learn in this session that was new or surprising? What was most interesting or felt most relevant to you? What questions do you have now for the presenter or other participants? Please feel free to share what you thought, and we invite you to include your name and hometown along with your comment. If you ever have any technical questions or concerns, contact support@psychotherapynetworker.org, and someone from our Support Team will respond as soon as possible. Comments P004, Attachment, Session 3, Dan SiegelWelcome to “The Attuned Therapist: Attachment Theory in Action,” with Dan Siegel—the third session in our newest webinar course, “The Great Attachment Debate.” As you probably know by now—if you attended the 2010 Symposium, read our March/April 2010 issue on attachment, or heard from Networker Editor Rich Simon in this webinar—a “great debate” on attachment occurred live—spontaneously—at last year’s conference. At one of Jerome Kagan’s workshops, his comments regarding attachment theory prompted Attachment Theory advocate Dan Siegel, M.D., to unexpectedly get up in front of the crowd and respond on the spot. This heated debate between two respected minds in the field sparked much discussion at the conference and afterward. In this webinar session, Siegel will discuss how Attachment Theory is integrated into his clinical approach. He’ll talk about how to use the Adult Attachment Interview in assessing clients, applying brain science in the consulting room, brain integration and how it can enhance self-regulation, and much more. Please take a few moments to comment on what you felt was most striking, most relevant, or to ask any questions you may have. We encourage you, as always, to include your name and hometown with your comments. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with this community. Comments |
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