“If This Is Week Three, We Must Be Doing ‘Feelings’”: An Essay on the Importance of Client-Paced Group Work

ABSTRACT

This essay elaborates a primary assumption about client-paced group work: that if a treatment group operates as a microcosm of the relationship responsibilities in the real world, then the ownership of the treatment process through client-paced assimilation of treatment goals can be seen as a more appropriate reflection of and role model for healthy relationships. Whether a treatment group follows an open or closed format, the notion that all clients are expected to accomplish specified goals in a given amount of time may provoke client, therapist, and contextual resistance. This essay uses the McGill Domestic Violence Clinic's treatment group for men who batter as a model to illuminate the concepts of client responsibility and strong intra-group relatedness through client-paced treatment and emergent theme discussion.

KEYWORDS:

• Treatment groups
• group work theory
• domestic violence
• group process