Unlocking Group Dynamics with Dr. Dennis Kivlighan

In this conversation Dan Has with Dr. Dennis Kivlighan they delve into the complexities of group dynamics, focusing on the actor-partner model, the significance of conflict in group development, and the importance of understanding member variability. Dr. Kivlighan shares insights on how perceptions of engagement influence behavior within groups, the role of consensual validation, and the necessity of addressing conflict as a learning opportunity. The discussion also highlights the challenges faced in group therapy settings and proposes strategies for effective group management.

Special Guest: Dr. Dennis Kivlighan

Additional Resources

Three important clinical processes in individual and group interpersonal psychotherapy sessions

From where is the group? To what is the group?: Contributions of actor−partner interdependence modeling

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:30 Actor-Partner Model: Understanding Group Dynamics
• 10:15 The Power of Group Engagement
• 15:00 The Role of Conflict in Group Therapy
• 22:00 Group Variability and Dispersion: Beyond the Mean
• 30:20 Subgroups and Group Complexity
• 35:00 Real-World Challenges in Running Therapy Groups
• 40:30 Open-Ended Groups vs. Thematic Groups
• 44:30 Future of Group Psychotherapy Research
• 46:00 Closing Thoughts and Recommendations

Transcript

0:00

[Music] Broadcasting from the most beautiful city in the world, I'm your host, Dr. Dan Cox, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia. Welcome to episode number 32 of Psychotherapy and Applied Psychology, where we dive deep with the world's leading applied psychology researchers to uncover practical insights, pull back the curtain, and hopefully have some fun along the way. If you find the show useful, it'd be much appreciated if you shared it with someone else might enjoy it too. Today I couldn't be more excited to welcome back one of the world's authorities on group psychotherapy. My guest is a professor in the Department of Human Development at the University of Maryland. He's been editor of the Journal of Counseling Psychology and the Journal of Group Dynamics through Research and Practice. He's fellow in several divisions of the American Psychological Association, including Division 17, the Society of Counseling Psychology, Division 49, the Society of Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy, and Division 29, the Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. He's also won many prestigious awards, including the Group Psychologist of the Year Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Counseling Psychology, and a Lifetime Mentoring Award. In this conversation, we dig deep into several aspects of Group Psychotherapy, including using actor-partner models to understand group dynamics, the role of engagement and group behavior, the therapeutic value of group conflict, how Dr. Kibblekhan would run groups if he was the all-powerful czar of Group Psychotherapy, and much more. This episode starts with my guest talking about actor-partner models of Group Psychotherapy. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome my very special guest, Dr. Dennis Kibblekhan. So that model, you can think of the actors as the individual influence, and then the partners as the group influence. They are as a group affecting how I interact in that group. So when we look at that, so for instance, and I can't remember exact, oh, that article, I was writing about some of the summary of our research, but so for instance, we might look at how engaged I think the group is as an actor, and then we can look at how engaged my partners think the group is, and then we can compare that. So we can compare that in terms of my intimate behaviors in the group. So if I feel like the group is more engaged, am I going to have more intimate behaviors in the group? If my partners feel like the group is more engaged, and I have more intimate behaviors in the group. And when we look at that, when we do the statistical model, what we find on average is that the partners perception of engagement is six times, about six times more important to predicting my behavior than my own perception of engagement. Can you say that one more time? Slightly differently. I know. So I think the best way to think about it is that the partners represent the group. So thinking about the, if I dan them in the group with you and Jill and a handful of other people, the partner are for Dan, they're you and Jill and the other people. But for you, for Dennis, then for you, the group is Jill Dan and the other people. So the group is different for each member because it doesn't include you and it does include everyone else. Right. Exactly. The group is different for each member because the group is, is acts on you. You are, you can't act, you are acting on yourself as an actor effect. You shouldn't also be part of the partner effect. Right. And the most group research puts, conflates that. The actor is, both has an individual effect, but they're also part of the group effect. And that's that would be like, you know, having a, having a test with, you know, looking at the, an item on a test and then individually, but also including that item, is part of the test. It's, so yeah, yes, how you said is right. So each of us have a, has a different group that we interact with. The partners are different for each of us. And so say the same thing about the six times more important. Okay. So let's think of what that part, what those partners are. So the partners, so we're asking, we're asking, all of us are saying, how engaged do we think the group is? Each of us are filling out a questionnaire or engagement. So my, and so that's just like how much they're, they're like in, they're, they're with us. They're in the moment with us. They're paying attention. They're, they're in the soup with us. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I fill it out myself in that, you know, I have, I bring my own perceptions and biases and, you know, that, so my, my perception of how engaged the group is, has some, we'll be statistical here for a minute. We'll have it, it has some true score in it, and it also has some error in it. Now, my partners, when we average them, just like whenever you make a composite, whenever you make an average, they, they are going to get closer to the reality of how engaged the group is. They're, they're going to, the average of the partner scores is going to have more truth to it and less error than any individual's score is going to have more error and less truth. And so the, so what we're getting when the partners give us, when we look at the partner scores, we're getting an idea of what the group is really like. How engaged is the group, because it's, we'll use the group term, consensual validation. We've got a consensus of what the group is like. And that, that consensus of what the group is like is a better predictor of what I'm going to do than my own perception of what the group is like. So how engaged the group is, how engaged the other group members are is more predictive of what I'm going to do in the group than my own perception of engagement in the group. I know blew my mind. I thought, I thought, you know, I thought, the first time we did this and we found that it was the other, the partner scores were more predictive. It was like, Oh, now this is just an artifact. Something's going on. We did it over and over again. We always found the partners were more predictive. It's like, wow. There's the, there's the power of the group. Right. So part of the way that you make sense of that is that because of in the aggregate, it's just more accurate. There's more true score in there. Are there other less methodological ways that you make sense of that? Oh, yeah. Because the, because that those, it is, it's that whole, the whole notion of the sum is bigger than the sum of the parts. The whole, you know, the whole is bigger than some of the parts. Those that the power of the group is, is, is that coming together, you know, it's not just scores on an inventory. They are, the members of the group are, are consensually validating everything that's happening in the group. I mean, it's, it's, it's, this is just a abstraction of what goes on in good group therapy all the time, which is that we always are seeking consensual validation. We're not just, you know, that's, that's one of the things that really makes groups effective is we, is, is we have that more objective reality that the group can give us that we can't get on our own. And we get it from the measures that we get, but we also get it in the, I mean, the, the measures are just a reflection of what's happening in the actual group. And when you say consensual validation, what do you mean? Consensual validation is, that is the notion that none of us can know reality by ourselves. But if all of us together put the piece of reality that we know together, we can get closer at the truth. So we, we look for a consensus that will give us a validation of what the truth is. The truth may be not, what I'm doing, you know, I think I know what I'm doing, but I may have some blind spots. And if we just have one person saying, oh, this is what you're really doing. Well, this is how you really, I think, they might have some blind spots too. But if we ask that same question of five other people, if, and we work to the place that we get some consensus on what I'm doing, that's going to be closer to the truth than any one of us could have gotten to on our own. Right. And so in one way, therapeutically, that's, that's one of the benefits of group as well, is that you have your, right, you have the mechanism, if you will, to be able to do that, to then to give back to other group members, this, no, no, no, I understand that's what you're thinking, but this is what's actually happening because you're able to get that from the other group members. Yeah, you know, in individual therapy, we hope that we train our the therapist to be able to give, you know, sort of objective feedback to the clients, but it's always, it's never going to be perfect. It's never going to be a consent, it's never going to be the same thing as in the group where we can get a consensus on that feedback. Right. That consensus is always going to be more accurate than any one person's, no matter how well trained, no matter how well they, how self-aware I am as a therapist, it's never going to, I'm never going to be able to reach that same level of understanding that a consensus of people can reach. Right. Right. So you mentioned engagement and so you've done some work looking at how groups develop over time and you've done some work sort of looking at, so there's one project in particular I was sort of dug into a little bit looking at like group engagement and group conflict simultaneously. And you found some maybe for the average listener not intuitive things in terms of the role of these things and how they relate to each other. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Well, it's so, you know, most theories of, if you look at stage theories of group development, is there, there've been, you know, like everybody has their own stage theory of group development. And it's been a long time ago now, but Tuckman looked across a number of different models and came up with that forming, storming, norming, performing notion of how groups move through time and then Tuckman and Jensen re-looked at that again several years later and added a journey. So the consensus model of forming storming, norming, what forming, norming, performing a journey. So there's always been the notion that conflict is an important piece of groups. And the whole notion of group development is not, is that there's important learning that's taking place in those different stages. It's not just, you know, you're not just getting through that, that storming stage, you're learning how to have disagreements with other people and learning ways to, you know, fight fairity to be in conflict and to use conflict to enhance relationships, not hurt them. So it's that storming phase has important learning around the notion of conflict. So we've always had this notion that learning about conflict, but a lot of the research is, doesn't necessarily, or how to say it, a lot of the research suggests that conflict is not good, that conflict is leads to poor group processes to worse outcome. And, and Jennifer Johnson wrote a article where she summarized all a good bit of research looking at looking at conflict. And I think the title was something like Beware of conflict and her, her bottom line taking away, it's a conflict is always bad. And that, that, at least in the research that we've seen is that, that it's related to less helpful outcomes. And I think that that was sort of an art, and as we started to look at the research, we think that it's that there's several problems with that research that would lead you to that. I mean, her conclusion was exactly right. I mean, based on the research she was looking at that, that you would say, let's not have conflict around groups, because, but I think that there were problems with that research, that letter of that conclusion. A lot of the research was done at the individual level rather than the group level. A lot of the research didn't look at, didn't look longitudinally, didn't, you know, it's just a one time snapshot of, of what was going on in the group. And so, I don't think you, the research didn't match the theory, you know, the stage theory. And so, what we were trying to do was to get it, get at, to do our research that was more consistent with the theory. And what we found was that if that, if, if I'm thinking of the right study, I think I know the one you were looking at is we looked at, we looked at, we used a measure that had looked at engagement and conflict. We looked at it three points at time, so it was beginning a middle of the end. And what we found was that if the, if there was conflict that was more than usual. So, it doesn't have to be a lot of conflict. But if you look at the average amount of conflict in the group and compare the group to itself, you know, so some groups might have relatively high conflicts. Some groups might have relatively low. But the key is that during the middle stage, if the conflict is higher than usual, then that pattern of conflict development, C is related to better group member outcome. So, it is both looking at, and we looked at it at the group level. So, it's the conflict in the group as a whole. And then the relative nature, so you compare the group to itself rather than comparing the cross groups. And when you do those two things, then you see that actually conflict can be helpful if it's occurring at the right time. And if it is in the right relative amount. Yeah, I think that relates also back to what you were saying earlier. I'm linking it when you're talking about these trying out new ways of being that having some of that, like within the group having some friction is some of that feedback of this person said this this way or did this this way and it sort of rubbed some of the members of the group the right way. And instead of just being polite and cordial and letting it go, that there was a bit of a pushback, that there was a appropriate amount of conflict that they said that they barked back at the person, or they maybe optimistically said, when you said that, that really hurt me, it really made me feel whatever. And that created tension. And that's where those corrective experiences, at least some of them are. And you know, anger has an important role in life. It can be destructive if it's too big or at inappropriate times. But you know, anger is how we protect ourselves. It's anger is related to boundary crossing. It's like if you cross my boundaries, I'm going to say stop. Don't do that. And so if people will be in big trouble in the real world, they can't do that. They can't protect their boundaries. If they can't tell people to stop, we need them to stop. And so group isn't going to be as effective if they don't going to chance to learn that as much as, you know, learning to be able to say I care about you in an appropriate situation. Those you need the opportunity to learn both how to protect yourself and how to make yourself vulnerable. So one of the other things I want to hit on, I feel like we need to get out of this conversation because of your particular expertise, is talking about group variability, sort of member variability. And so we can go any way you want, but just sort of set you up here and then we can sort of decide the springboard you want to take. So in the same article I quoted from earlier, you also wrote that practitioners should examine measures of dispersion and uniformity to gain a better understanding of the dynamics in their group. And that also sort of comes up to talk about what we're talking about now with group conflict. But I guess whether you want to talk about that specifically or thinking about group variability generally, I'd really love to hear your thoughts. You know, it's so interesting. So, you know, my son is a Counseling Psychologist also. And he studies group therapy like I do. It's kind of, it's kind of been amazing to have. So I've actually published with both of my kids, my daughter who's the older is a school counselor and we've published together and it's my son who's a Counseling Psychologist. We've published together and so we've done this. It's been amazing to be able to share that type of experience. But so when I was first learning this actor partner model, I was, Martin was just in his doctor program. And so, you know, he was pretty young in thinking about both therapy and in thinking about statistics. And I was, you know, going on and on about this actor partner model. So, it's so amazing. And so, you know, you get the actor and then you get the mean of the partner scores. And you look at that and he said, he said, "Dad, why the mean? Why are you doing the mean?" And I was like, "Shut up, what do you know?" You questioning me. And it was, it took me a little bit to appreciate his wisdom. But, yeah, we're fascinated with the mean. I mean, you know, we give a test. We get the mean of the items. We, you know, we get the partner scores. We get the mean of the partner scores. But, you know, if you go back to just basic, basic, basic statistics, you know, you learn that there, I think there are four moments of a distribution. There's a mean, a standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis. Well, if you wanted to, if you wanted to describe a distribution, you really need to think about all four of those things, right? So, why have we just gotten fixated on the mean and not, not, I'm not saying that the mean is not important. It is important. But, why are we throwing away this other information or ignoring this other information that we can get from a set of scores? And so, that's what I was trying to say in that article was that you've got a lot more information there if you've got a partner effect, for instance, or if you've got information about the group, you've got a lot more information than just the average level. And, you know, if a group, if everybody is saying that the group is really engaged, if you go high mean and a narrow standard deviation, that's really different than if you've got a large, if you mean, you know, you could have, you could have a mean, for instance, you could have two groups with a mean of four in terms of the level of engagement. And, one of them could have a standard deviation of point one, and one could have a standard deviation of two. Now, are those two means telling you the same thing? No, no, they're not telling you the same thing. And to, you know, plug them into your arstetistics as if those were equivalent, if those two means were equivalent pieces of information is really misleading. And so, we've got to get beyond, you know, from a statistical point, we've got to get beyond just our obsession with the mean. But if you're looking at, if you give a, if you're a practitioner and you're giving a group climate measure to you group or any type of measure, you know, any type of feedback and form therapy, is don't just, don't just add it up and get a mean, or don't just sum it and get a look at, look at the distribution of scores, look at why and try to understand, you know, why is what's going on for it? And I'm going to keep it to the group right now. What's going on is a group that everybody is saying the same thing versus a group where you're getting a mean because everybody is saying something different. Those, those are telling you something really different about your group and where the group is. And I mean, and it's not necessarily good or bad. I mean, you could have a lot of consensus and it could be good, or you could have a lot of consensus and it could be bad, you know, they could be, you know, collusion to, to, in a not, not want to do the hard things or, or, you know, sort of like a pseudo engagement rather than a real engagement. So it doesn't necessarily mean that consensus is good, but consensus is telling you something that, you think that is important to know in addition to the mean, whether it's high. And I'm thinking that while we're talking about like models and sort of statistical models and things like that, I'm also thinking about how, how, the models are almost reflected, reflective of sort of the point of view of the group leader, the group therapist that like, you know, so for example, when I teach, right, I kind of tend to, yeah, I pay attention to the individuals, of course, but, you know, now the semester's over, I sort of think about like the group as a whole, you know, oh, that was a really great group. They were super engaged or versatile, or, you know, other times where it's like, yeah, that group, they were just really, every time I came in, they were sort of lethargic, they didn't have a lot of energy, they weren't into it, right? So I sort of think in some ways, not always, but there is sort of this tendency to think like, like the mean, right? That's the mean. And, but that like, rather than that to think about, you know, thinking about the very, and so think about that as a group leader, thinking about the variability in your group and trying to conceptualize it that way, but then also getting back to the actor partner models, thinking about, okay, what is it like for Julie? Like, how does Julie experience this group? Because I as leader, I mean, right, we all have a first person point of view. So I see the group as the average of these people, but she sees the group as the average of us, and he sees the group as the average of us. So I think, and I hadn't really thought about it before, that these kind of your methodological approaches that that is, there can be value in the therapist trying to take those points of view, the same points of view as your methods are taking to get a better sense of the group, the dispersion, the variability within the group, and then also the perspective of each member of the group. Yes, I really love what you're saying, because I think, you know, I think that we limited if we only think of methods as helping us to answer questions, because methods can also tell us what questions to ask. And if we don't know the, we don't know the method, we can't ask the question. And so I think that they play a much larger role than they're often given credit for because it's, because they help us think about what's going on in different ways than we may have. And the example you brought up is a great one, you know, if we only think about the mean, if our, if the method that we have in our mind is just the average, that's going to limit us in terms of really understanding what's going on in our group. Then if we sort of have the idea, oh, that what's affected is the average and the state of deviation. And actually, there's some research that says that skewness and ketosis also matter, that it not only matters what the dispersion is, but what the dispersion looks like, that they can give you a, you can get some information, for instance, about subgrouping from, from measures of skewness and ketosis, that whether or not you have subgroups within your groups. By some groups, you mean, well, like, you know, like, that groups that sort of have developed sort of their own way of seeing things or doing things. And, you know, they sort of fall together. So like, you could have a subgroup of people who are more, more, I mean, you could have like a subgroup that's more pro, pro therapy, a group that's, you know, more anti therapy, you know, that are sort of trying to block things from happening. So a group that's pro, for being taking risks in a group that's anti taking risks, and you can sort of identify who's in those two groups. And you can identify if those groups exist. And if they do, then you can identify who's in those groups. And then, right. Yeah, that really, sorry, go ahead. No, it just gives you some more power in terms of trying to intervene in your group. Right. And I was thinking that that really, like, at the beginning of this conversation, when you talked about how these, how the methods are allowing us to see these incredibly complex phenomena. Right. And that in group, obviously, that is going to happen sometimes, maybe often, where you are going to get clusters of people that are going to be really pushing things forward. And other people are going to be, you know, that, you know, you could have like, it could be everybody but one person, or it could be a couple of groups of two or three or whatever, and how that, and for those of us who have, you know, been in groups or in any number of roles, like that obviously happens. And so being able to model that. So one of the questions, so I think that one of the criticisms of group, largely speaking, or broadly speaking, is that kind of the impracticality of it or the challenges of it. And I guess, and you know, I mean, having been at various places working clinically that you see that, you know, that you see people who are motivated, oh yeah, let's get a group going, let's get a group going. And then, you know, a few weeks into it, they have two people or three people or whatever it happens to be. And so it's challenging. So I was wondering if you could speak to that, speak to, you know, your thoughts about that and even any strategies or approaches that you've seen that are effective or sort of dealing with some of those real world challenges. Well, you know, I think actually the world is getting familiar to group in many ways. You know, if you look at council centers, many council centers nowadays, they're getting really very short term treatment models, you know, you know, six sessions, four sessions. You know, they've become in many ways just referral, you know, assessing referral and therapy or treatment is sort of going out the window. But, you know, I think that many of them actually, they don't have the same time limits on group. So in some ways, group can become your primary treatment modality that if someone does need more extensive therapy that they should prefer to group. And I think, I think I think council centers have made a huge mistake in sort of going all in with the, I don't know what to call them, these group models where they're doing these theme oriented groups. You know, if I was if I was in charge of the world, there would be open-ended groups. There'd be that, you know, that basically that individual therapy would be either for short, very short term, stable-asim or forest, or for some people that's plenty of treatment. That's all they need is, you know, six sessions. That's fine. But if someone needs more than six sessions, they should be going into an ongoing therapy group. And if you have open-ended ongoing therapy groups, the hardest work in doing group therapy is getting the group off the ground and setting the norms. Absolutely. Once you get the norm set, and the group, the group runs itself in many ways. Why are you restarting the group every semester? And having to do that hard work again, just to open-ended groups. And the group members will train each other in the culture. They don't carry that. So just so like, so we have our Tuesday from one o'clock to two-thirty group. And it just runs every week except for the four weeks in August when the center is closed. I'm making that up. But you know, whatever. And the we're always going to have between six and eight clients. Does that sound a reasonable number? My superstitious number seven. Okay, okay. There we go. There you go. So if there could be a wait list for it or whatever, and that when somebody, you know, I don't want to say drops out. It could be terminates, right? But that there's an end, right? For any number of reasons that the person, the next person pops in to get that, you know, to try to get that magic seven or whatever. And that it just runs in perpetuity and that this semester you and I are leading it. But next semester, I have another thing. So another co-therapist comes in and you and she lead it. And it just keeps going. And so I didn't expect you to say this, which is your that you would have, you would not have special topics groups. I don't know what you want to call them. Can you just, because I think that I think the majority groups are like if we would do like this. Yeah, okay. And so can you just, I have an intuition, but can you say just a little more about that? Because I think that people who are listening, that that's not what you said is very antagonistic to what they typically do in experience. And I think it's worth taking a moment. Yeah, I think so too. It's certainly outside of the zeitgeist of the current zeitgeist is what I'm advocating. I think the reason that people started doing the Morian groups, it's sort of easy to get people into them. It's, you know, is as a, if I know that there's a grief group, if I know there's a depression group, if I know there's an eating disorder group, when I'm doing intake, I just have to listen for, oh, this is person having eaten disorder. Oh, I kind of, you know, it's, it's easy to get into. The, uh, in all, all, all theme groups, those, all the, all the theme groups typically tend to be, you know, fairly short term, fairly, they don't often take advantage of the group dynamics. I mean, some of them do, some of them are really good, but many of them are psychoeducational rather than more process oriented, more here and now oriented. And I, I, in this is my bias, I'm just a big believer in the power of, uh, of that here in our experience in terms of transforming people's lives. And so I think that I would rather see group time devoted to having, though, giving people those type of experiences rather than doing more psychoeducation in groups. And if you're not trying to do psychoeducation in groups, trying to do a short term process oriented theme group, where you, it, like I said, all the work is upfront, where you're setting norms. Uh, and then to, to lose all that work at the end of the semester is just, to me silly, uh, you know, why start over next semester and do all that work again. Yeah. And I think in the context of university counseling centers, I mean, what you're saying, I mean, it couldn't be more correct based on my personal experience, which is, you know, you start the semester and it's not until, you know, a couple of weeks into the semester, the group actually gets started, but then do you have enough referrals to even get it started? And it's like, it's like, you know, it's kind of like pushing, pushing a big rock that's not completely round. It's really hard. And, you know, at some point, you might just hit a flat spot and just like forget it. We're done. Like this isn't going to work. And it often feels like the majority of them just, I mean, and it's nothing. And there's not a criticism in any way of the therapist who have been doing it. It's just that it's just how it's set up. So this, you know, I mean, I haven't thought about it very much, but what you're saying actually kind of, it feels right intuitively without having thought about it very much. And it's a real, I think it's, yeah, some, yeah, that you sort of make it a thing. Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah. So broadly speaking, and I ask this of everyone, which is, have you gotten any pushback for your work? I'm just, I'm just always amazed when someone actually reads my work. You know, I don't, I don't think I've gotten any pushback. I mean, you know, I love it when someone takes, takes some of the conclusions that we've made in, in, you know, try to, try to say that, you know, that, you know, I feel like I'd do that a lot. I'd say that, well, I don't think you really got the right answer because you didn't, because of the way you looked at it. And I would love it if someone, you know, did that with the things that we were doing. And, you know, I would learn so much from that. If, you know, someone comes along and says, well, you know, they're asking the important question, but there's a better way to do it or the they're asking the important question, but I don't think they really got at it with the way they did it. The honest answer to that is there's not enough, there's heart, there's not a much group research happening. There's not, there's not enough of that. You know, I think that that, if you look at individual therapy and all the studies they've been done on the working alliance and how people have, you know, sort of made arguments about, about the alliance and what it is or isn't about the alliance. That's important. You know, I think that's been great for the research. I think it's been great for practice to get different, different perspectives on what, what, how we really should be thinking about the alliance and how we should be measuring it. If, you know, I wish, I wish we had more of that in group therapy. I wish that there were enough group researchers out there doing that, that would be pushing back on on each other. I think that would make our research better. There just isn't enough. Enough of us out there doing it. It's hard to do. I mean, it's hard to get, you know, it's hard to get a, get a sufficient sample sizing groups. What do you think really did that? And then the last thing is, for people who are listening who would, who would want to learn more about your work or some of your, are there one or two resources that you would point people to? And I'll, I'll link the couple of articles that we've talked about. It's not specifically about group therapy, but it's, it's my favorite article that I've ever written. Mark Hilsenrock, when he was editing psychotherapy, he asked a number of different people to write articles about, I don't remember exactly what it was, it was about three things that they wanted to happen in each session. And I wrote mine is, I don't, I don't make much distinction between individual and group therapy. I actually think I'm doing inter-partial therapy in, in individual and group therapy. I'm doing the same thing. It's just easier to do with the group because I help. But the three things that I want to happen in every session is the same in individual therapy and group therapy. Those are the things that I think make a difference. And so that, that's probably the one article that I, and it's more practice oriented. It's not, you know, it's more, right? Sort of this is, this is given the research that I've done in my years of practice, this is sort of what I've come up with. That's a wrap on our conversation about group psychotherapy. As I noted at the top, I'd be much appreciated if you could spread the word to anyone else who you think might enjoy the show. Until next time.[Music]