Spring 2011
Welcoming Love and Hate: Expanding the Emotional Range of Your Groups
As group therapists, we are in the wonderful position of getting to know our clients through their interactions with group members and with us. We also regularly experience the joys and heartbreaks of human connection and disconnection in the groups that we lead. An important aim of our work is to facilitate the constructive expression of the full range of human emotion.
In this workshop participants will examine how the leader’s emotional receptivity affects the group. Of special significance is the leaders’ openness to all emotions experienced as countertransference – including love, hate, liking and disliking our clients. Additionally, we will also consider the clinical value of leader imperfections and self-acceptance.
Through didactic and experiential learning, we will examine how the culture of the group and its operating principles can contribute to building an environment where all feelings are welcome and available for exploration. This includes learning to invite and explore positive and negative transferences with interest and freedom.
Objectives:
1. Identify emotions that you may discourage in your groups
2. Define countertransference resistance and develop a greater appreciation for its role in group leadership
3. Distinguish between objective and subjective countertransference reactions
4. List guidelines for working effectively with anger and conflict in group
5. Identify ways a group therapist can develop emotional insulation
Pre-Conference Training Group:
Jeff will lead a 90-minute consultation group on the evening prior to the conference on May 19th from 7:00pm-9:30pm. This experiential training and consultation group will provide a confidential setting for therapists to explore all aspects of their work with individual, couples, and group clients. We will also focus on helping members to deepen their professional and personal self-awareness and explore issues related to the development of one’s professional ego. Examples include beginning and maintaining private practice groups, building fee-for-service practices, increasing one’s professional visibility, and all matters relating to creating a vital psychotherapy practice.
Thursday night’s group is limited to 25 participants. Pre-registration required.
Presentor:
Jeffrey S. Hudson, M.Ed., LPC, CGP, FAGPA
Jeff Hudson’s group leadership is guided by a belief that our clients unconsciously know what we are open to experiencing emotionally and what we are reluctant to experience. He is a strong proponent of group membership as an essential component of an effective group therapist’s professional and personal development. Jeff is a member of an ongoing, weekly psychotherapy group that he joined in 1988. Additionally, he has been a member of a Modern Analytic training group for the past 11 years.
Jeff is a group psychotherapist in private practice in Austin, Texas. He is a former President of the Austin Group Psychotherapy Society and has served two terms on its Board of Directors.
Jeff is currently in his second term as a Board Member of the Group Psychotherapy Foundation and is a Fellow of the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA). For the 2007 AGPA Annual Meeting in Austin, Jeff served as chair of the local program committee and founded AGPA’s first local scholarship committee.
A frequent presenter on group treatment at the local and national level, Jeff maintains an active group practice that includes both solo and co-leadership of therapy and training groups. He especially enjoys training and consulting with therapists who are interested in exploring transference and countertransference phenomenon, developing fluency with their own emotional experience, and building fee-for-service practices.
