Yalom Group Roles

The primary roles that were incorporated into group were defined by the leaders of group. Those leaders included the social workers and group psychologists, as well as students when appropriate. The leaders focused on task and maintenance roles, such as; coordinator, elaborator, evaluator, information seeker, initiator/contributor, opinion giver, procedural technician, encourager, gatekeeper, harmonizer, and standard setter. The individual roles was primarily the dominator. Due to the dominator portion of group, it changed the atmosphere and will be discussed later.

There are many ways to communicate and incorporate therapeutic aspects into dealing with any patient, but this also applies to group therapy as well. Yalom’s therapeutic

factors focus on positives in the patients’ lives, primarily focusing on the outcomes. The therapeutic factors seen within group include; instillation of hope, altruism, imparting of information, corrective recapitulation of primary family group, interpersonal learning, existential factors, and catharsis. Catharsis was the primary therapeutic factor that was noticed throughout all group therapy sessions, this is because allow emotions to take place verbally is a safe way of expressing hardships and frustrations. It is also important to say that while these aspects of Yalom’s factors were the primary ones of note, not all of these factors were in every group experience.
Therapeutic factors and communication is very important no matter the circumstance. However, when the primary focus in mental health is communication and understanding from client/patient to medical personnel, acquiring good therapeutic communication techniques is key. Throughout the mental health rotations, therapeutic communication was everywhere, and was applied very well. The only negative technique that was worth noting was stated in roles, which was the dominator. The dominator tended to cut patients off frequently when it wasn’t exactly where the conversation was wanted to go, this also, in one group session, caused immense turmoil and disruption within the group itself. There are two sides to a story, in one hand this technique could be identified as therapeutic given the right circumstance, during this group experience however it was perceived as non-therapeutic and disrupted trust.