PS521 Unit 2 Stages of Group Development Paper Example

The Night They Stopped Answering Us: A PS521 Unit 2 Paper Tracing One Intensive Outpatient Group Through the Stages of Development

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS521: Group Counseling

Unit 2 Stages of Group Development Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the program, the group members and every detail of the sessions are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Group

The group is one evening cohort of a hospital-based intensive outpatient program in Pocatello, Idaho. Nine adults started together in September and met for three hours on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings for twelve weeks. Most had alcohol use disorder; three had opioid or methamphetamine use disorders. Two counselors led the group, the program's senior counselor and me, a graduate intern. Membership was closed for the first six weeks and then opened to new members, which turned out to matter.

Tuckman's Stages

Tuckman (1965) read across dozens of small-group studies, many of them therapy groups, and found four phases recurring in the same order. Forming is the polite, testing phase, when people lean on the leader to tell them how to behave. In storming, conflict and resistance arise, often directed at the leader or the task. In norming, the group develops cohesion, shared expectations and a willingness to express personal opinions. In performing, the group's energy goes into its task, and roles become flexible and useful. Tuckman and Jensen (1977) later reviewed research that had tested the model and added a fifth stage, adjourning, for the ending of a group's life.

Forming: Weeks One and Two

The first two weeks fit the forming stage closely. Members addressed nearly every comment to the leaders, asked what the "right" answers were and spoke about their drinking in the past tense, as if the problem were solved. The program's treatment protocol notes that early group sessions in addiction treatment often feature this kind of cautious, leader-centered talk, and recommends clear structure, an explanation of group agreements and attention to safety (Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, 2005). We followed that advice: each night had a predictable check-in, a topic and a closing round, and we went over the group's agreements about confidentiality, attendance, sobriety and phones.

Ty's admission about hidden bottles on the second night, described in Unit 1, was the first moment anyone turned in a chair to talk to another member instead of to us. It was a sign that forming would not last long.

Storming: Week Three

The storm arrived over phones. Our agreement said phones stay in a basket by the door. On the first Monday of week three, Wade, a long-haul trucker, refused to put his phone away because his dispatcher might call. Two other members took his side. When the senior counselor restated the rule, Wade said, "You people don't know what it's like to have a job that doesn't care about your feelings," and several members nodded. For the next forty minutes, the group argued about whether the program understood their lives at all.

Tuckman's description of storming as hostility toward the leader and resistance to the task fit almost word for word. The phone rule was not the real issue. Members were testing whether the leaders could be challenged and whether the group would hold.

The fight about phones was the first time the group treated the program as something it belonged to and could change.

We did not end the conflict by enforcing the rule. Instead, the senior counselor asked the group to propose a version of the rule they could keep. After twenty minutes, the group agreed that phones would stay in the basket, set to ring for one named number per person, such as a dispatcher or a child's school, and that anyone who had to take a call would step into the hall.

Norming: Weeks Four to Six

After the phone agreement, the group changed. Members began to start the session themselves, asking each other about the week before we spoke. Brooke, a nursing student who had barely spoken in three weeks, described a relapse after a clinical rotation and was met with support rather than lectures. When Wade missed a session, two members called him. These are the features Tuckman associated with norming: cohesion, shared norms and members willing to say what they think.

Performing: Weeks Seven to Ten, With an Interruption

By week seven, the group was doing what we had hoped. Members pointed out each other's patterns, such as Ty's habit of turning every conversation to his ranch, and members accepted feedback without leaving. But week seven also brought the first two new members, and the group partly returned to forming. The newcomers addressed the leaders, and older members briefly became guarded. Tuckman's model was built mainly on groups with fixed membership; open groups, like most addiction groups after their first weeks, cycle back through stages each time someone joins.

We responded by asking two longer-standing members to describe the group's agreements to the new members in their own words. Within two sessions, the newcomers were joining in.

Adjourning: Weeks Eleven and Twelve

Tuckman and Jensen's fifth stage became the focus of the last two weeks. Ending a group is hard for members whose relationships have often ended badly. Three members missed sessions in week eleven, and one said she did not see the point of a "graduation." We spent the final sessions reviewing what each member had learned, naming what they would miss, planning how they would stay connected through aftercare and continuing groups, and saying goodbye directly.

What the Model Explained and What It Missed

The stage model helped us read the phone fight as a step forward and helped us plan the ending. It explained less well the return to forming when new members joined and the differences between individual members, some of whom were performing while others were still forming. It also says little about relapse, which in addiction groups can send one member, or the whole group, back to earlier patterns. Stages are a useful map, not a schedule. In practice, the senior counselor and I began ending each session with a two-minute check between ourselves: which stage did tonight look like, and for whom? Writing a word or two in the session note let us see, over twelve weeks, that the group as a whole moved forward even on nights when one member slid back.

Conclusion

The cohort moved through forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning in roughly the order Tuckman and Jensen describe, with the storm over phones as the turning point. The model's main limits for addiction work appeared with open membership and relapse, which call for leaders to watch the group's current stage week by week rather than assume it.

References

Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. (2005). Substance abuse treatment: Group therapy (Treatment Improvement Protocol Series, No. 41; HHS Publication No. SMA 05-3991). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384-399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100

Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. A. C. (1977). Stages of small-group development revisited. Group & Organization Studies, 2(4), 419-427. https://doi.org/10.1177/105960117700200404