Helping Groups Heal

Leading Groups in the Process of Transformation

Jan Paul Hook, Joshua N. Hook, Don E. Davis

• Publisher: Templeton Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781599474854
• eBook ISBN: 9781599474861
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Life with others is messy. The bonds we form are often the source that drives us to helping professionals like therapists and pastors in the first place. And yet, it is from these relation­ships that our greatest moments of healing spring. Recogniz­ing the value of relationships, pastors and therapists have been leading small therapeutic groups for years. Yet few lead­ers have a specific, easy-to-follow, and researched framework to structure their groups.
Helping Groups Heal presents "The Healing Cycle," a grace-based model that facilitates healing and growth in groups. It has been tested with a variety of settings, and can be adapted to nearly any small group, from sex addiction therapy to marriage therapy to Bible studies.
The basic components of "The Healing Cycle" are grace, safety, vulnerability, truth, ownership, and confession. Helping Groups Heal guides the reader through these elements, offering case studies and practical advice from the voices of researchers and practitioners. Each chapter shows how "The Healing Cycle" moves its members to share their truth, own it, and make positive change in their lives. Each step of the process allows participants to move past surface issues and find depth in their understanding of their pain.
Whether you have been leading small groups for years or are about to lead your first session, Helping Groups Heal is an accessible, easy-to-follow guide through "The Healing Cycle" that will give each group member what's needed to grow, relate, and heal. 
 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

LEADING SMALL GROUPS is difficult work. There is great potential for small groups to be a context for group members to experience healing and growth, but leading a small group isn’t easy. To make matters worse, sometimes group leaders step into their role without much knowledge or training for how to be an effective leader. Without a baseline set of skills and tools, small group leaders often struggle.

This book is designed to help small group leaders develop basic and advanced skills to create a group context in which members can experience healing and growth. The fact that you are reading this book probably means you are already involved in running small groups. Maybe you volunteer at your church and lead a Bible study or discipleship group. Perhaps you are involved in leading support groups, such as helping people grow in their marriages, recover from a divorce, or gain freedom from an addiction. Maybe you are a mental health counselor or psychologist, leading therapy groups as part of your work. Perhaps you even are a graduate student, just beginning your training in leading groups. Whatever type of group you lead, and whatever amount of experience you have, I hope this book helps you to improve your skills in creating and maintaining a group culture that provides authentic, compassionate, and gracious relationships that bring life and growth.

This book walks through a model for group work called The Healing Cycle (Hook & Hook, 2010), which describes how small groups can promote healing and growth in six steps: grace, safety, vulnerability, truth, ownership, and repentance. First and foremost, a healing small group involves a culture of grace. In the chapter on grace, you will reflect on your own stories of brokenness, grace, and healing in order to promote a heart of grace as a leader. Out of this stance, you will learn how to offer a heart of grace to your group members.

Grace leads to the second step, safety. A culture of grace in a group allows members to feel safe with you and each other. In the chapter on safety, you will learn how to create and maintain safety in your small group. You will learn to set boundaries (e.g., setting up ground rules such as confidentiality and consistent attendance) and address boundary violations (e.g., what to do when one group member harshly criticizes another member).

Grace and safety allow for vulnerable sharing, the focus of chapter 4. Healing and growth occur in proportion to members’ willingness to open up and share vulnerably. Sometimes group members stay on the surface and shrink back, because they are afraid to expose their true selves. In this chapter, you will learn techniques to promote greater vulnerability, including self-disclosure, listening, validating, and linking.

Vulnerable sharing leads to truth: group members can see themselves and their situation more clearly and honestly. In the chapter on truth, you will learn techniques to balance honesty with love so that people can see and accept the truth about themselves: their strengths and limitations. I like to call these areas for growth and change “growth edges,” because it normalizes the idea that none of us is perfect—each group member has areas in their life in which they can experience healing and growth. You will also learn to teach group members similar skills in how they interact with each other and in their relationships.

Seeing themselves honestly provides group members with an opportunity for ownership, the focus of chapter 6. Ownership involves taking the right amount of responsibility for causing and maintaining one’s problems. This step may involve owning that one has taken too little responsibility for a problem, or it may involve admitting that one’s contribution to a problem may have been taking too much responsibility. In this way, we almost always have room to own our problems more accurately and effectively, on a strong foundation of grace, safety, vulnerability, and truth. Change rarely occurs until people own that they are in some way involved in maintaining their problems. This is not blaming the victim; this is empowering group members to accurately see what they can and cannot do, sometimes in seemingly impossible situations. This step is called “owning your truth,” which includes understanding one’s stories and ways these stories can be transformed. You will learn specific skills for helping group members own their truth, including teaching group members to own the stories they make up, laddering to access core stories and beliefs, working with group members’ projections, confronting unhealthy patterns, and dealing with conflict.

Accurate ownership naturally leads to repentance, which is the next step in The Healing Cycle. In this chapter, you will learn how to help members repent, which involves turning away from one’s problematic behaviors and walking a new path. This step is crucial to The Healing Cycle. Christians believe that they are healed from broken relational patterns through honestly acknowledging sin and brokenness and asking for forgiveness and healing. Group members carry shame from relationships and want to experience a greater sense of integrity. You will develop skills to help group members work toward healing through confession, receiving forgiveness, and commitment to behavior change and accountability.

In the final chapter, you will be introduced to the cyclical nature of The Healing Cycle. Repentance allows members to have a deep experience of grace. Instead of just head knowledge about grace, grace becomes real, as members pair ownership of their truth and awareness of personal brokenness into the grace culture of the group. Group members learn they can be fully known and loved. They do not have to hide their brokenness but can bring it into relationship with others, confess, and make lasting changes. True repentance leads to joy, as group members celebrate each other’s victories and accomplishments and continue to encourage and support each other in their struggles and failures. This process repeats until people experience a growing degree of wholeness and integrity.

Let me tell you a bit about myself and my background writing this book. My name is Jan Paul Hook. The Healing Cycle is a small group model I helped develop and refine over the past twenty years. I was trained as a professional counselor at Trinity International University. After graduating, I directed the counseling center at Trinity. Running groups and supervising other counselors-in-training were central parts of my role. Next, I worked at Willow Creek Community Church, one of the first large churches to popularize small groups as an avenue for doing ministry. As a leader in their community care ministries, I trained and supervised many lay small group leaders who facilitated groups on a variety of themes, including marital restoration and divorce recovery. Currently, I am a partner in a private practice, where I lead two weekly small groups for men struggling with sexual addiction (Hook, Hook, & Hines, 2008). I train small group leaders in various settings, such as for churches and the American Association of Christian Counselors (Hook & Hook, 2015). I have also applied this model to leading Bible studies. So, in a variety of personal and professional settings, I have consistently worked on my role as a group leader.

Throughout this book, I share my own experiences from leading small groups. Many of these examples illustrate how to use the training and skills presented in this book. I give examples of dialogue that you can take and adapt to suit your needs. In addition, I share examples of times when I have struggled to implement the principles described in this book. Leading small groups can be a difficult undertaking, especially for beginning leaders, and I want to show how such struggle is common. For example, I still remember one of my first times leading a small group—a marriage group at my church—and I was excited and scared as I prepared. It was going to be different from a typical church small group because these couples really wanted to work on their marriages. I didn’t want to just teach from the front of the room. I wanted the couples in the group to engage with the material and each other and apply it to their lives and marriages. I was hopeful about the healing and growth that could occur not only in their marriages but in their families as well.

The plan for the study was to work through a book about how to have a healthy marriage. Each week we would cover a particular topic (communication, parenting, etc.), and then discuss how the topic applied to each of our marriage relationships. I was excited about the possibility for this group, but I was also nervous. Could I do this? Did I know enough about marriages to be helpful? Did I know enough about running small groups to be an effective leader? I wasn’t sure, but I was going to try it anyway. I probably overprepared.

That first Sunday, the kickoff weekend of the marriage group, had been advertised at our church for several weeks. Five or six couples had expressed interest, which seemed like a fine number—not too big, not too small. I got to the church early and set up the room. Then I waited. And waited. And waited.

No one showed up. Well, one couple showed up about twenty minutes late, but that was it. It wasn’t much of a group. I felt discouraged and frustrated. I tried to think about what went wrong. Maybe the day and time of the meeting were bad. Perhaps people weren’t ready to commit to a group where they would have to talk about their marriage problems. Maybe the marriage group was a low priority; people might come if their marriage was on the verge of divorce, but otherwise it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Maybe it was me. That thought stung the most. I wasn’t some kind of fancy marriage guru. I had only been married myself for about five years and had recently finished graduate school and started working as a full-time counselor. Maybe I didn’t have enough experience. Maybe I wasn’t a good enough leader. A big part of me wanted to quit that first day.

One thing that kept me going was my commitment to addressing the need. I knew that folks in the church were struggling in their marriages but didn’t have a place to talk about it. I knew this from talking with couples who were struggling but felt alone, like they were the only ones with a problem. My sense of calling to address this need made me confident that if I could somehow provide a context for people to give and receive help in small groups, they would experience healing and growth in their relationship and build the kind of marriage they really wanted.

So I kept going. That first day, I worked with the one couple who showed up. It wasn’t much of a group—just me, my wife, and one other couple. But I kept going. I was committed to exploring the vision I had in my heart for couples at our church. Along the way, I learned a few things about doing groups—mostly by trial and error.

And then people started coming. People began supporting and helping one another in their struggles. Healing, growth, and restoration happened. The small group became a place for couples to talk about what was happening in their marriages. Couples were able to connect, support one another, seek help in parenting their children, and work through their struggles and conflicts together.

Through this experience I decided that small groups were something I wanted to focus on in my personal and professional life, so I began to lead therapy groups at my workplace and then in my private practice. For a time, I worked on the staff of a large church and trained small group leaders in a variety of different ministries, including ministries that helped distressed marriages, individuals recovering from divorce, and people struggling with addictions. Over the years, I have seen many people experience change, healing, and growth in small groups. Small groups can really work.

When I lead small groups now, I feel more at ease and confident. However, I still remember how difficult leading small groups can be, especially when you are just starting out. I am writing this book to help small group leaders who want to be good at creating groups that are safe and life-giving. I realized over time that leaders can develop certain foundational skills to help their groups run well. So much of what I had to learn through trial and error could be picked up less painfully.

In addition to my own experiences, I draw on the experiences of two coauthors. It is especially rewarding to be able to write this book with my son Josh. Josh earned his PhD in counseling psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University, and he currently works as a professor at the University of North Texas. He has published papers focused on small groups and the intersection of religion, spirituality, and counseling. He is also a licensed clinical psychologist in the state of Texas, and he teaches a multicultural counseling course that uses many of the principles of this book. Josh met Don Davis in graduate school. They worked with the same mentor and have continued to write together over the years. Don is a professor at Georgia State University, and he teaches group counseling to students training to be professional counselors. Josh and Don both have experience leading various forms of therapy groups, as well as leading and being a part of church small groups. To make it easier for the reader, the book is written from my voice, but the information presented throughout the chapters reflects our combined experiences.

WHY SMALL GROUPS?

I have devoted so much of my life and ministry to small groups because I believe they provide one of the best settings for people to experience healing and growth. As a counselor, even though I regularly refer clients to a variety of treatment modalities (e.g., individual counseling, support groups, self-help books, and church involvement), I like small groups the most.

I’m not alone. There is a long history of using groups in the counseling and psychology professions. Irvin Yalom (1970), one of the most influential figures behind the development of group therapy, was a psychiatrist who developed a group therapy focused on the interpersonal process. The main idea is that people develop problems within relationships and then perpetuate some of these interpersonal behaviors because they lack accurate feedback. They naturally bring these behaviors to group, as do others, which gives everyone a chance to work and grow. The leader’s job is to help promote norms in which group members honestly but respectfully share their moment-to-moment emotional experiences with each other, based on what is happening in the group. For the first time, people have a combination of accurate feedback and emotional support to effectively use that feedback to experiment with making changes in how they relate to others. Based on his work, Yalom described eleven therapeutic factors representing the most important ways that small groups can help people change (see table 1.1). Many of these factors show up throughout the pages of this book.

Table 1: Yalom’s Therapeutic Factors

THERAPEUTIC FACTOR	DESCRIPTION
Installation of hope	People often show up for small groups feeling hopeless about their situation and future. But seeing other people working and making progress can provide hope that change is possible.
Universality	When people attend a small group, they realize that they are not alone in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Grace
• Chapter 3: Safety
• Chapter 4: Vulnerability
• Chapter 5: Truth
• Chapter 6: Ownership
• Chapter 7: Repentance
• Chapter 8: Back to Grace
• References
• About the Authors
• Index