Group Therapy Ideas

• Icebreaking is the process of setting up a proper introduction among the group members. It helps in minimizing the inhibition of people and helps them to share the bitter experiences, with other members.
• Normally, the group gets divided into two parts for the ice breaking process. In these five minutes, people belonging to all the groups need to collect as much information as possible about each other.
• After that, one member from each group introduces the other in an interesting way. Information coming from one person about another can acts as an icebreaker in group therapies.
• There are various other ways to open an icebreaker game. For instance, people are given chits with different cartoon characters name and they need to search the other one in order to make the couple.

Trust Building

• The main intention of group therapy is to build trust between people and make them share bitter experience frankly. If one doesn’t reveal the bitter things that has happened to him/her, his/her hurt mind will not be cured. Therefore, it’s very important to build trust among them. This can be done by including some fun games in the therapy exercises.
• Forming smaller group for people is a good idea to build the trust. One may find some comfort in sharing his/her problem to one or two individuals than to a bigger group.
• It can also be done by introducing games such as ‘no access zone’, as a part of the fun exercises. In this game, one member needs to guide his/her blind folded partner through this zone carefully, giving him/her the verbal clues. 

• The therapy form ‘revelation’ can be called as real therapy. Therapist can start this session, after the trust building stage. This stage provides the participants a sense of high self-awareness and refined insight into their problems.
• Therapist may ask carefully prepared questions about relationships to individuals. These answers may give some insight about psychological aspect of the person’s mind and a way to cure him/her.
• ‘Writing about you own fear’ is another solution to make people gel with each other. In this stage, people write about their fears in a paper and put in an open box. From this box, paper pieces are randomly collected by other people. Later they read it in public and tell their own interpretation about those fears and their solutions.
• Role-playing or psychodrama is a prominent group therapy idea in which each member is supposed to act out a particular episode of his or her life, which affected him or her badly. This may drain the memories of the bitter events out of their mind and the person would feel free.
• This also helps the therapist to analyze the psychological origins of one’s problems and how to solve it.