0739 - Beyond the Basics: Advanced Group Facilitation in Addiction and Mental Health

Course Description

Hours: 12

This two-day training is designed for experienced addiction and mental health practitioners who already lead clinical treatment and psychoeducational groups and are looking to sharpen their facilitation craft, deepen their understanding of group process and build confidence navigating the complex dynamics that arise in real-world practice.

Moving beyond foundational skills, participants will focus on what actually happens in the room: reading group process in real time, working with the here-and-now, holding space for conflict and rupture, and intervening at the level of the group-as-a-whole. A central thread throughout is the idea that challenging behaviour in groups is information – advanced facilitators move from asking "how do I stop this?" to "what is this behaviour communicating, and what is the group asking me to respond to?"

The training is organized around four advanced competencies:

1. See the process -- read group dynamics in real time, recognize patterns beneath the content and understand the function of behaviour rather than labelling it.
2. Intervene skillfully -- use linking, strategic redirection, process comments, immediacy, deepening questions and purposeful silence.
3. Navigate complexity – work with conflict, rupture and repair, resistance and ambivalence, trauma responses, and competing recovery perspectives.
4. Use yourself well -- develop self-awareness, recognize countertransference and strengthen clinical judgment about when to intervene and when to hold back.

Participants will also explore how facilitation shifts across ongoing closed groups, open and drop-in groups, psychoeducational groups and single-session interventions, with a trauma-informed and harm-reduction lens integrated throughout. Addiction-specific scenarios are woven in -- mandated attendance, intoxication concerns, relapse disclosures, shame and stigma and tensions between abstinence and harm-reduction perspectives.

The training is highly experiential, built around case discussions, facilitator demonstrations, fishbowl exercises, role plays and a case consultation lab where participants bring their own anonymized challenging situations for formulation and practice.

Participants will leave with a wider repertoire of interventions, practical frameworks they can apply immediately and a reflective understanding of their own facilitation style, strengths and growth edges.

Notes

Time Zone: All listed class times are held in ET (Ontario, Canada)

For more information contact the Faculty of Social Work Professional Development office:

Email: fswprofessionaldevelopment@wlu.ca
Phone: 548-889-4967

Cancellations and Transfers
Be sure to carefully review our cancellation and transfer information before registering.

Website: wlu.ca/fswpd
 

Applies Towards the Following Certificates

• Addictions Certificate : Addictions Certificate
• Counselling Techniques Certificate : Counselling Techniques