An Expansion of the Previous Post

These comments expand on my previous post. I want to be clear that the typical person I described is in a therapy or personal growth group and never volunteers to be a protagonist. However the director asks, "Who in this group needs a psychodrama?" and the group selects the person who has never volunteered. As I stated in my previous post,

                  "I feel this method of selecting a protagonist is cruel."

Sociometrically this is a horrible way to select a protagonist or a person to be the group's focus. It also indicates improper warm-ups that have failed to establish group trust to allow this person to express him/herself.

Additional structured warm-ups are necessary to build sociometry to include this person. Even if this person wants to remain withdrawn or isolated, I believe we should not force him/her to have a psychodrama. Many people learn about themselves by watching others' psychodramas. I am most concerned that this person self-disclose in the sharing and will do all I can to assist in the process.

If people are upset that the person does not want to have a psychodrama, that is grist for group process and may lead some to work on their feelings.

The psychodrama is for the group and trusting the group to make choices is part of the group process. What does it say about the director/group leader who wants to manipulate the group to force a person to work?

[Psychodrama training groups are an exception to the above because it is expected that all trainees work on personal issues. If in training the person's behavior must be confronted and processed.]

You’re It

Note: The following can be applied to a person in a therapy group, training, or class other than psychodrama as can most of my posts.

The psychodrama director asks, “Who in this group needs a psychodrama.” The group then selects the sickest, weirdest, affectless, or most timid person. So that person generates exceptionally high anxiety, loses all aspects of spontaneity, and is dragged to the stage. No one knows the reluctant protagonist’s issue. The reluctant protagonist has no warm-up and may never get one because of the anxiety. It is no surprise if the psychodrama goes nowhere.

I feel this method of selecting a protagonist is cruel.

She Sells Sea Shells Down By the Sea Shore and More.

Even though I have been in many groups, I'm always apprehensive when, at the start of a group, the leader says find a partner. Who do I select? Will I get to that person before they pair with another? Will I be rejected? If that lingers in me, how do people new to groups feel? The following ways of pairing people eliminates the selection process:

Get two halves of a sea shell or two similar shells, enough shells for each person in the group, and put the shells in a bag. Let people draw one shell from the bag and instruct them to find the person with a matching shell. Instruct the pairs do introductions and find out about each other. Give additional instructions that fits the overall group.

You can also use two each of nuts in the shell: hazelnuts, walnuts, chestnuts, peanuts, pecans, soft shell pecans, Brazil nuts (What are they called in Brazil?), macadamia nuts, and pistachios. Two each of the following also work:

Colors or different brands of cellophane-wrapped. or small bags, of candy.

Rocks or marbles of different sizes, shapes, and colors.

Post cards or pictures of different objects, animals, places, or people.

Zodiac signs. Was each person born under the sign that they selected? Is there an important person in his/her life that was born under that sign? Include a fortune with each sign that the pair can discuss.

Different sizes, shapes, and colors of buttons.

For groups with odd numbers of people, use an extra candy, marble, post card, button, etc. so that most of the group members will be in pairs with one three-person grouping.

Don't forget to collect all the items or be prepared to lose them and buy more.

Missing the Protagonist

I know of two times a psychodrama was done when the protagonist was not present and a substitute was used. Huh? Isn’t the protagonist supposed to be there? Isn’t that important? Isn’t the psychodrama about the protagonist’s issue, not about the substitute’s problems?

That would be like doing sit-and-talk therapy with a stand-in client.

This is difficult to explain. At the first instance a therapist portrayed her client (who was not there) as the protagonist in the psychodrama. The therapist was not the protagonist, her portrayal of her client was the protagonist. The second instance: a client portrayed another client as protagonist. Again the portrayed person was not present. How screwed up are these?

In the first instance, if the therapist had problems with the client, then the therapist must be the protagonist.

In the second instance, if the client (A) had problems with another client (B) then (A) should be the protagonist and work on his/her issue when, preferably, (B) is present.

Both of the missing protagonist examples were dismal failures. These so-called psychodramas cannot be supported by any theory. Remember that the psychodrama is a learning experience for the group and the group could not get emotionally involved with these messes. Only frustration and anger were the results. I bet you don’t want those feelings in any group.

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Group Questions #1-5 and All Answers #1-5. Finis Groups for Now.

I can only guess that my repetition of the questions have irritated some of you, but my object was to give new people joining the blog an opportunity to think about all of the questions. For you that have suffered, I'm giving the questions and answers in reverse order.

Question #5: Select the correct answer.

Moreno identified:
     1. Three group stages.

     2. Four group stages.
     3. Five group stages.
     4. Seven group stages.
     5. No group stages.

(Justify your answer by telling where you found it. Did he name them? That question may be a trick if he named no group stages.)

A gold star for the correct answer.

Scroll down for the answer.

Answer #5. Four stages.

When a psychodramatist thinks of a psychodrama, the phases of Warm-Up, Action, and Sharing come to mind. But Moreno defined group (called audience) stages in Psychodrama First Volume (1946: 327) as: 

     1.  The amorphous stage.

     2.  The stage of acquaintance.

     3.  The action stage.

     4.  The stage of mutual relations. 

These stages fit nicely into: Warm-Up (amorphous stage and stage of acquaintance), Action (action stage), and Sharing (the stage of mutual relations.) Sharing has always included the termination of the group.

Now compare the dates of publications of Moreno, Yalom, Tuckman and Jensen, and Corey. Moreno is the unaccredited forerunner by 29 years.

Everybody who writes a book on group counseling has to add stages and/or rename them, to avoid appearing as a plagiarist.

Many group counseling courses use both Yalom’s and Corey’s texts. And students suffer the confusion. Most have never heard of Sociometry.

Question #4: True or False:

Moreno said there must be at least five people to have a group. Where did you find this answer?

Answer #4.  Five people make a group.

I apologize for not knowing where I got this answer. My notes indicate Moreno wrote that the minimum group size is five. Did that include the group leader? Where is this information found? Test yourself and try to find where the answers are. Your help will be greatly appreciated.


Question #3: True or False:

Tuckman and Jensen in Group and Organizational Studies (1977) named group stages using the following terms: forming, norming, storming, preforming, and adjourning. (Answer next time.)

Answer #3. True.

Originally Tuckman and Jensen named the first four stages and later revised their writing to five stages. (Bet you didn’t know who used those names for the stages. Neither did I.) Other authors’ usage dropped the adjourning stage. Many licensing and course exams do not include the fifth stage in their questions and most people have never heard of the adjourning stage. Many people attribute Tuckman and Jensen's naming of group stages to either Yalom or Corey.


Question #2: True or False:

Gerald Corey wrote a textbook used widely in group counseling, college courses. He defined four stages in Theory and Practice of Group Counseling (1981,1985,1990 and 1995.)

Answer #2. False, maybe True based on your interpretation.

Accidental semi-trick question. Corey didn’t call two elements, stages. A beginning element was called Pregroup Meeting or Initial Session, and the final element was called the Follow-Up Session. To me they are stages. Corey also named four stages:

     1. Initial Stage—Orientation and Exploration.
     2. Transition Stage—Dealing with Resistance.
     3. Working Stage—Cohesion and Productivity.
     4. Final Stage—Consolidation and Termination.

It’s interesting that Corey named the stages and then indicated what was in each stage followed by an “m” dash (the long dash — ) like Yalom did.


Question #1: True or False:

Irvin D. Yalom in The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (1975) said that there were four stages to a group’s process later named by others as forming, norming, storming, and preforming.



Answer #1: False

Yalom did research studies that resulted in an informative and well-read book. This led him to define “Three Formative Stages of Groups” as follow:

     1. The Initial Stage—Orientation, Hesitant Participation, Search for
          Meaning.
     2. Second Stage—Conflict, Dominance, Rebellion.
     3. Development of Cohesiveness.

Canonize Ideas

“Ideas are not something you have. Ideas are something you do.” —Hugh McLeod from his blog, www.gapingvoid.com. His blog is interesting and fun. And he is always trying to sell something. Maybe I should too.

Does this fit in J. L. Moreno’s Canon of Creativity*, a process that moves from warm-up to spontaneity, to creativity, to cultural conserve? Beginning with a warm-up, a point is reached where spontaneity occurs and the idea gels. An interaction between spontaneity and creativity takes place and the two work together to produce a cultural conserve. A conserve is something other people can experience with at least one of their five senses, such as, a book, art, music, poetry, software, new teaching method, child raising, culinary delight, a new perfume, and the like.

You have probably met people who were going to write the world's great novel or paint a work of art. They may have had an idea, but the novel or painting was never produced. What good is an idea if it does not become a thing done? If you consider Moreno’s theory, McLeod has short-cut the process. Even though we can understand what McLeod was thinking in his statements, an idea is just that, a thought; it does not produce anything. According to Moreno, an idea is not something you do.

*Found in Who Shall Survive?, page 46. This, Moreno's greatest cultural conserve, can be found online at: www.ASGPP.org Click on [Library] and it will appear as the first listing on the next page.

La-La Land: Groups Automatically Form and Move to a Deep Level

If you don’t know sociometry, you don’t know groups. Insulting isn’t it? The short test for group knowledge is to ask, “Can you specifically explain how individuals, unknown to each other and from different walks of life are formed into a group?” How's that for a challenge?

Can you find that information in any group counseling textbook?

Near the end of a recent workshop, a trainee said, "No wonder it was a good group, several members knew each other."

What was not understood was that: Members may know each other, but don't disclose very personal information unless all in the group have reached a certain trust level. "...all in the group" includes people who knew each other and those who knew no one. 

Bringing any group to a trusting level is done because of attention to sociometry.

Starting Over: A Love Story

There will be occasions when you are so confused, the protagonist (or client) is suffering or dumfounded, and you just want to stop the action and begin again or move to a different scene. Trust your intuition (that's your best director/therapist tool.)....... Do it!

You Probably Won't Want to Read This

My computer has an associated dictionary that showed words that I’ve never heard or read before. I was writing, “…warm-ups for interpersonal, occupational, and educational environments” and realized I needed to add the therapeutic environment. Since all the other words ended with “al” I looked in the thesaurus for another “al” word meaning therapeutic that would fit with the other words. Here are the words:

therapeutical      adjective

therapeutically   |-ik(ə)lē| adverb

therapeutist        |-tist| noun ( archaic)

When I say them, they sound weird. Maybe it’s just my brain. Of the three I like the archaic “therapeutist” the best and reminds me of John Wayne as the “Shootist.” Is there a correlation?

Stream of consciousness is fun.

Spontaneity and PBFs

In my last blog, I left you with the following words:

   As anxiety increases, spontaneity has a propensity to decrease.
           The reverse is not true.
           As spontaneity increases, anxiety does not necessarily decrease.

That leads to the question, "How do you increase spontaneity?" So few therapies know the answer.

Moreno gave us the answer early in his career: movement. Essentially; when we sit down our spontaneity goes down. We need to do warm-ups that get people up and moving; to get their precious bodily fluids (PBFs) moving.

In Moreno's Canon of Creativity a person continues a warm-up until that spark, spontaneity, happens. Spontaneity then interacts with creativity until something, called the cultural conserve, is produced. The cultural conserve must be tangible to one or more of the five senses and could be items such as a: book, poem, dance, perfume, painting, home, successful therapy session, or exciting class.

At the beginning of the Canon process is the warm-up and this is where we must provide exercises to build trust and include everyone. Warm-up exercises provide a structure that allows spontaneity to evolve. Hopefully, the structure also provides "comfort" to help lower anxiety.

Think of your sessions with clients, do you visualize people sitting and talking. I hope not. Even in individual therapy, we can have people get out of their chairs and move.

        If something goes wrong in the action, the cause can 

        be traced back to an inadequate or incorrect warm-up.

Movement taps into the pre- and sub-conscious. To get to core issues remember what Moreno said:

       "The body remembers what the mind forgets."