I. Introduction
In our Church today we experience the active involvement and participation of the laity especially in the existing organizations in our parishes. They provide valuable help in the pastoral and ministerial needs of the parish. Through this collaboration, the image of the Church as a community is visible and in a certain way functional. Moreover, the local church in the Philippines is aiming at the development of the Basic Ecclesial Communities in which each member of the church can identify his immediate group where Christian life is nurtured.
Our church then is experiencing this phenomenon where some people formed as small groups have their activity geared towards Christian growth and eventually the growth of the parish. They come together during seminars, assemblies, and meetings. These are of course opportunities for spiritual and organizational formation. But if we think about integral human formation, we must not only concentrate on the spiritual aspects. What can the local church do to cater to the human and emotional development needs of these active workers in the Church? One instrument for this aspect is pastoral counseling in which we use spiritual resources and psychological understanding for growth and healing. Group counseling, in particular, can become one of the means to equip God’s people for work in his service and through which laymen perform their priesthood as members of the Body of Christ. The doctrine of church and ministry reveal the depth nature of a counseling group, and a counseling group can become a means of grace whereby the church is enabled to be the church.
This paper, in this case, utilizes the book of Joseph W. Knowles entitled “Group Counseling” in order to gain information about the features of group counseling. It is desired that this may give a sketch towards the application of group counseling in the local church not just for a therapeutic purpose but more importantly for the building up of relationships within the Christian community.
II. Book Summary
Group Counseling In The Context Of The Church And Its Ministry
Group counseling takes into account the communal aspects of man’s nature and the healing potential within the experiences of community. A person does not become a human being except in the context of community (i.e. family, neighborhood, church) where he discovers his identity and fulfills his potential. The developing person absorbs within himself the feelings, attitudes, and values of other persons significant to him. Members of a family or church at times relate, and are related to, in such a way as to call forth unloving and alienating responses from each other. At this point, they need counseling in order to discover the nature of their personal and relational brokenness and to discover “a more perfect way” of seeing and hearing and communicating and responding.
The group approach to counseling enables the church to serve more persons in less time or to serve a few over a longer period of time. Aside from this quantitative value, in a group counseling, one is given a complex of relationships in which members act out their problems in relation to each other. They experience, help each other to become aware of, and together seek to alter patterns of behavior that are defeating them and others.
The counseling group is different from other social groups. It has a unique climate, covenant, and purpose that distinguish it from other social situations. The climate of acceptance and freedom allows each member to drop his guardedness and censoring of what he feels and thinks. Freedom to be spontaneous comes only as members come to trust each other. Members make a formal covenant to feel confidences; what comes out in the sessions is the “property of the group.” There is also healing of the conflict and guilt within the person and the brokenness and alienation in his relationships with others, including God.
In the individual counseling, the pastor is the only counselor in the situation. In a group, there are as many counselors as there are members, plus the leader. Group members listen, accept, support, clarify, confront and interpret. These are counselor functions. The dependency relationship that is often formed with the pastor in individual counseling is thus transferred from the pastor to the group. Furthermore, other transference reactions toward the counselor are activated. Members tend to express their hostile, angry, ambivalent, jealous, hurt, loving, and appreciative feelings toward one another. To a certain extent, each member is an authority and also gets his share of transference reactions from his peers.
The doctrine of the church provides a model for group counseling; such a process thus become a means by which the nature and being of the church are actualized. The church as a body of the forgiven should be able to mediate love and healing in a purposeful way.
Preparation Of The Church For Counseling Groups
The first stage in launching group counseling may call for a re-examination of the healing mission of the church. Group counseling cannot be successfully conducted unless it is structured as such and unless persons involved are selected and prepared for this procedure. One stumbling block is the fear of exposure to those with whom one has social relationships. They may fear that group confidences will become gossip as well as wonder if they can reveal their true selves to persons. These fears disappear as members learn to trust the covenant with each other
When forming a new group, the pastor may determine group composition and choose persons who will do each other good. This is accomplished primarily through an initial exploratory and screening interview with each potential group member. The counselor begins with immediate concerns of the counselee. These feelings and ideas, when looked into, linked the person with his total life experience – past, present, and anticipated future. The personal history helps identify the style of life, needs and goals, patterns of relationship, models, concept of self.
Suitable candidates:
Shy person. The group gives him a permissive situation in which he cautiously begins to venture forth and gradually to gain confidence and competence in social relating.
The dependent person. In a group, dependency needs are met by one or two members and the person thus undergirded can move more affirmatively toward other members.
The extremely deprived. Group counseling helps to meet needs for attention, recognition, and love, but faces him with the reality that no one person can gratify all his needs.
Those who are out of touch or unaware of emotions and those who tend to repress anger and hostility. The group gives priority to spontaneous expressions of feelings. Members learn it is safe and acceptable to experience and communicate genuine feelings.
Individuals with psychosomatic complaints. They are highly resistive to relinquishing the “beloved symptom” as the explanation of emotional difficulty. They are less threatened by group than by individual counseling.
A person may come into group counseling with the following potential strengths: some capacity to reveal oneself to a group of peers; potential ability to express aggression and tolerate hostility; neither great extreme of dependency or rejection in relation to authority.
At least average intelligence.
Unsuitable candidates:
Those with insufficient contact with reality. A psychosis interferes both with reality orientation and with processes of communication meaningful to others.
Persons whose behavior deviates from the group norm require a group of their own and the services of a specialist.
Sociopathic personalities and those with criminal behavior. They are impulsive, exploitative, seductive, bent on immediate gratifications of their own needs and lacking in usual social restraints and courtesies.
The incessant talker. Members grow hostile and spend their time listening to or resisting the chronic monopolist.
Those with suicidal, homicidal, or infanticidal impulses.
The person in a catastrophic stress situation requires individual counseling or referral because his attention is focused on what is happening to him or within him. He cannot get out of himself enough to relate and be aware of the group situation.
Dynamics and Process Of Counseling Groups
The term process that is used here means the act of proceeding; progress; advance. The counselor can observe the following process:
Socializing and search for an emotionally significant theme or topic—the warm-up.
Rallying around a theme: group direction.
Theme exploration: group interaction.
Theme exhaustion: group satiety.
Search for a new theme.
Like an individual, a group goes through several developmental stages such as:
Getting started: anticipatory anxiety, leader dependency, and goal orientation.
Sharing of information: getting acquainted and testing others.
Sharing feelings: experiencing acceptance and trust.
Confrontation and emotional encounter: emotionally corrective events.
Member autonomy and group interdependence: selfhood-in-community.
The term dynamics refers to forces that are active in a group to facilitate or impede its progress. There are three major categories under which significant dynamism are subsumed. These include the following:
Emotional factors include acceptance, altruism, and transference. Transference is the identification with each other through the common attachment to the leader.
Intellectual factors. Spectator therapy is experiencing vicariously in, through, and with experiences of others. Universalization is the dynamic at work when a person suddenly finds he is not the only person with a problem or that problems of others are very similar to one’s own. Intellectualization gives one an opportunity to rethink or re-evaluate concepts.
Action factors. Reality testing in which a person can test his defenses, relive old family conflicts, live out ego frustrations, and find outlets for aggression. Ventilation provides release of suppressed and repressed emotions, needs, and drives. Interaction facilitates therapy.
The process of termination depends upon whether the group is an “open” group or one where the “end” is predetermined from its beginning. Open groups are those that have no terminal date; periodically one leaves and is replaced by a new member. Decision and responsibility for “setting an end” is left to each person. A member must announce in one session his intention to leave. An example Groups lose members because of geographical mobility: a participant leaves for college or is transferred by his firm to another city. A sudden departure can leave a group with feelings of hostility and/or guilt. Attendance at the next meeting allows for reexamination of the reasons for leaving and readiness to leave.
The termination process is different when the end of sessions for all members is predetermined from the onset. Here, all members are terminated at the same time. Near termination time, counselor exploration unearths feelings of bereavement when groups have existed for six to nine months. Members work through a sense of loss as they express appreciation to one another, comment on positive values they have experienced, and voice regret over disbanding.
III. Personal Reflection
In our Church today we experience the active involvement and participation of the laity especially in the existing organizations in our parishes. They provide valuable help in the pastoral and ministerial needs of the parish. Through this collaboration, the image of the Church as a community is visible and in a certain way functional. Moreover, the local church in the Philippines is aiming at the development of the Basic Ecclesial Communities in which each member of the church can identify his immediate group where Christian life is nurtured.
Our church then is experiencing this phenomenon where some people formed as small groups have their activity geared towards Christian growth and eventually the growth of the parish. They come together during seminars, assemblies, and meetings. These are of course opportunities for spiritual and organizational formation. But if we think about integral human formation, we must not only concentrate on the spiritual aspects. What can the local church do to cater to the human and emotional development needs of these active workers in the Church? One instrument for this aspect is pastoral counseling in which we use spiritual resources and psychological understanding for growth and healing. Group counseling, in particular, can become one of the means to equip God’s people for work in his service and through which laymen perform their priesthood as members of the Body of Christ. The doctrine of church and ministry reveal the depth nature of a counseling group, and a counseling group can become a means of grace whereby the church is enabled to be the church.
This paper, in this case, utilizes the book of Joseph W. Knowles entitled “Group Counseling” in order to gain information about the features of group counseling. It is desired that this may give a sketch towards the application of group counseling in the local church not just for a therapeutic purpose but more importantly for the building up of relationships within the Christian community.
II. Book Summary
Group Counseling In The Context Of The Church And Its Ministry
Group counseling takes into account the communal aspects of man’s nature and the healing potential within the experiences of community. A person does not become a human being except in the context of community (i.e. family, neighborhood, church) where he discovers his identity and fulfills his potential. The developing person absorbs within himself the feelings, attitudes, and values of other persons significant to him. Members of a family or church at times relate, and are related to, in such a way as to call forth unloving and alienating responses from each other. At this point, they need counseling in order to discover the nature of their personal and relational brokenness and to discover “a more perfect way” of seeing and hearing and communicating and responding.
The group approach to counseling enables the church to serve more persons in less time or to serve a few over a longer period of time. Aside from this quantitative value, in a group counseling, one is given a complex of relationships in which members act out their problems in relation to each other. They experience, help each other to become aware of, and together seek to alter patterns of behavior that are defeating them and others.
The counseling group is different from other social groups. It has a unique climate, covenant, and purpose that distinguish it from other social situations. The climate of acceptance and freedom allows each member to drop his guardedness and censoring of what he feels and thinks. Freedom to be spontaneous comes only as members come to trust each other. Members make a formal covenant to feel confidences; what comes out in the sessions is the “property of the group.” There is also healing of the conflict and guilt within the person and the brokenness and alienation in his relationships with others, including God.
In the individual counseling, the pastor is the only counselor in the situation. In a group, there are as many counselors as there are members, plus the leader. Group members listen, accept, support, clarify, confront and interpret. These are counselor functions. The dependency relationship that is often formed with the pastor in individual counseling is thus transferred from the pastor to the group. Furthermore, other transference reactions toward the counselor are activated. Members tend to express their hostile, angry, ambivalent, jealous, hurt, loving, and appreciative feelings toward one another. To a certain extent, each member is an authority and also gets his share of transference reactions from his peers.
The doctrine of the church provides a model for group counseling; such a process thus become a means by which the nature and being of the church are actualized. The church as a body of the forgiven should be able to mediate love and healing in a purposeful way.
Preparation Of The Church For Counseling Groups
The first stage in launching group counseling may call for a re-examination of the healing mission of the church. Group counseling cannot be successfully conducted unless it is structured as such and unless persons involved are selected and prepared for this procedure. One stumbling block is the fear of exposure to those with whom one has social relationships. They may fear that group confidences will become gossip as well as wonder if they can reveal their true selves to persons. These fears disappear as members learn to trust the covenant with each other
When forming a new group, the pastor may determine group composition and choose persons who will do each other good. This is accomplished primarily through an initial exploratory and screening interview with each potential group member. The counselor begins with immediate concerns of the counselee. These feelings and ideas, when looked into, linked the person with his total life experience – past, present, and anticipated future. The personal history helps identify the style of life, needs and goals, patterns of relationship, models, concept of self.
Suitable candidates:
Shy person. The group gives him a permissive situation in which he cautiously begins to venture forth and gradually to gain confidence and competence in social relating.
The dependent person. In a group, dependency needs are met by one or two members and the person thus undergirded can move more affirmatively toward other members.
The extremely deprived. Group counseling helps to meet needs for attention, recognition, and love, but faces him with the reality that no one person can gratify all his needs.
Those who are out of touch or unaware of emotions and those who tend to repress anger and hostility. The group gives priority to spontaneous expressions of feelings. Members learn it is safe and acceptable to experience and communicate genuine feelings.
Individuals with psychosomatic complaints. They are highly resistive to relinquishing the “beloved symptom” as the explanation of emotional difficulty. They are less threatened by group than by individual counseling.
A person may come into group counseling with the following potential strengths: some capacity to reveal oneself to a group of peers; potential ability to express aggression and tolerate hostility; neither great extreme of dependency or rejection in relation to authority.
At least average intelligence.
Unsuitable candidates:
Those with insufficient contact with reality. A psychosis interferes both with reality orientation and with processes of communication meaningful to others.
Persons whose behavior deviates from the group norm require a group of their own and the services of a specialist.
Sociopathic personalities and those with criminal behavior. They are impulsive, exploitative, seductive, bent on immediate gratifications of their own needs and lacking in usual social restraints and courtesies.
The incessant talker. Members grow hostile and spend their time listening to or resisting the chronic monopolist.
Those with suicidal, homicidal, or infanticidal impulses.
The person in a catastrophic stress situation requires individual counseling or referral because his attention is focused on what is happening to him or within him. He cannot get out of himself enough to relate and be aware of the group situation.
Dynamics and Process Of Counseling Groups
The term process that is used here means the act of proceeding; progress; advance. The counselor can observe the following process:
Socializing and search for an emotionally significant theme or topic—the warm-up.
Rallying around a theme: group direction.
Theme exploration: group interaction.
Theme exhaustion: group satiety.
Search for a new theme.
Like an individual, a group goes through several developmental stages such as:
Getting started: anticipatory anxiety, leader dependency, and goal orientation.
Sharing of information: getting acquainted and testing others.
Sharing feelings: experiencing acceptance and trust.
Confrontation and emotional encounter: emotionally corrective events.
Member autonomy and group interdependence: selfhood-in-community.
The term dynamics refers to forces that are active in a group to facilitate or impede its progress. There are three major categories under which significant dynamism are subsumed. These include the following:
Emotional factors include acceptance, altruism, and transference. Transference is the identification with each other through the common attachment to the leader.
Intellectual factors. Spectator therapy is experiencing vicariously in, through, and with experiences of others. Universalization is the dynamic at work when a person suddenly finds he is not the only person with a problem or that problems of others are very similar to one’s own. Intellectualization gives one an opportunity to rethink or re-evaluate concepts.
Action factors. Reality testing in which a person can test his defenses, relive old family conflicts, live out ego frustrations, and find outlets for aggression. Ventilation provides release of suppressed and repressed emotions, needs, and drives. Interaction facilitates therapy.
The process of termination depends upon whether the group is an “open” group or one where the “end” is predetermined from its beginning. Open groups are those that have no terminal date; periodically one leaves and is replaced by a new member. Decision and responsibility for “setting an end” is left to each person. A member must announce in one session his intention to leave. An example Groups lose members because of geographical mobility: a participant leaves for college or is transferred by his firm to another city. A sudden departure can leave a group with feelings of hostility and/or guilt. Attendance at the next meeting allows for reexamination of the reasons for leaving and readiness to leave.
The termination process is different when the end of sessions for all members is predetermined from the onset. Here, all members are terminated at the same time. Near termination time, counselor exploration unearths feelings of bereavement when groups have existed for six to nine months. Members work through a sense of loss as they express appreciation to one another, comment on positive values they have experienced, and voice regret over disbanding.
III. Personal Reflection
Pastoral group counseling is useful in the formation of a person in such a way that it will help him or her develop the ability to relate with others. I have a glimpse of this method when I have undergone the CPE program. One of the benefits of group counseling that I have experienced is the learning to communicate more comfortably and effectively. Bearing in mind my personality as that of an introvert, I had at first the difficulty to open up myself to others. But as the series of sessions progresses, I was able to overcome my introversion because I was able to trust the group. Aside from overcoming my weakness in relating, the group has helped me identify my prevalent feelings in the circumstances that I shared with them. There was an ambience to freely explore my inner feelings. This was facilitated by listening to the various feedbacks from the group. And it placed me in a condition of carefully paying attention to my fellow members in the group. In return I have also learned to give my own feedback to each of them willingly and honestly. With this atmosphere existing in the group, sensitivity has developed within me. I noticed that I have become more perceptive to the ways people communicate. Moreover, it was not only during my turn to be attended that I have gained the benefit of counseling but also when listening to the experiences of others and their complexes. The length of time that we spent for interactions has given us an opportunity to become closer to each other. I was able to understand them, accept them as they are, and eventually consider them as my brothers.
IV. Application
The benefits that I have learned through reading and through my personal experience made me posit to suggest an application of group counseling for some groups that exist in the parish. These could be the formation team of BECs, the core group of renewal movements, or a particular group of parish workers. What I have observed, especially in the parish where I belong, is that these groups have already established bonding between themselves. But even if how committed they are in their apostolate, there still exists a certain shortcoming when it comes to personality or emotional development. Thus, I suggest to employ the method of pastoral group counseling. This scheme can be initiated and be facilitated by the pastor himself or by another person competent in this area can be tapped.
It is important to note that group counseling is conducted not just to address problematic issues but also to enhance the relationship within a group thereby improving the efficiency of every group endeavor. Identifying the prospective participants can be the starting point in organizing a counseling group. Then the group can agree as to the frequency of sessions that are to be conducted. Since the members are already acquainted with each other, the initial goal is to assure acceptance and confidentiality. They will be exploring a new dimension in which they have not yet probably paid attention.
I have been present in a meeting conducted by the BEC formation team in my pastoral area. In that meeting, or in any other similar meetings I suppose, the members speak primarily on the head level that would only address matters impersonally. After the adjournment, there would be a few exchange of pleasantries then each would go back to their respective homes. They have not gone to the heart level of understanding one another at the instance when one of them raised the tone of one’s voice during an intense discussion. If they had only been given the chance to have explored themselves on that level, then the group would function more smoothly.
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