ABSTRACT
Dear Consultant: I have finally been able to collect enough members for a group, having been working at it for more than 6 months. I’ve had a few dropouts along the way, even before the first group meeting, because some people either didn’t want to wait or lost confidence in me because I hadn’t been able to get the group mobilized. I was beginning to lose confidence myself, so I actually did something that may have been a mistake. To ensure that I had enough group members to start, I persuaded some of my own individual patients to join. I now have a seven person group with four members who are in individual therapy with me and three who have other individual therapists. In the early sessions of the group, this differential became clear when group members discussed their treatment histories. Unfortunately, I had failed to inform everyone prior to the group’s start that some of them were in treatment with me, and I had also not focused sufficiently with my own patients on how I would treat material that came from their individual sessions. They have been unclear about whether I would ever allude to information from individual sessions, or under what circumstances.
