Learning from Groups and Learning About Groups: A Counseling Psychology Journey

Groups have been central to my personal development and scholarship. Extending my Leona Tyler Award address, I tell two interdependent stories: what I have learned from groups and what I have learned about groups. Family, mentors, editorial teams, international collaborators, psychotherapy trainees, students, and colleagues taught me about presence, love, possibility, challenge and support, balance, vulnerability, empowerment, and savoring. My research career suggests three phases in understanding counseling groups: viewing groups as treatment settings, understanding groups as systems of mutually influential members, and conceptualizing groups as configurations with emergent properties that cannot be reduced to averages. I illustrate this third phase using distributions of working and resisting group climate and extend the idea to distributions of Real Relationship Inventory item responses. Across these personal and scientific lessons, the central conclusion is that groups transform people through relationships, and understanding those relationships requires attention to interdependence and configuration.