A Group Counseling Experiment with

Chronically Obese Students

The following text presents a special instance of group counseling which was first reported in the
Michigan Personnel and Guidance Journal (Fall, 1970, pp. 5-10) and is reprinted here with permission. It

details how a school counselor proceeded with the formation of a special group, one convened
around a single selection criterion, obesity. It is a success story. The group participants all benefitted
from the experience.
Organizing counseling groups on the basis of a common pathology among the members,
however, raises serious questions which are not yet resolved by practitioners. It is questionable, for
example, whether a group composed entirely of drug addicts, nonreaders, truants, pregnant girls,
underachievers, alchoholics, or whatever comprises the most therapeutic combination of individuals.
Individuals who manifest a particular kind of "losing" behavior find support from others who have the
same ingrained losing behavior and frequently succeed in cementing such behavior with new logic
(albeit, neurotic) garnered from members more advanced in the psychological maintenance of the
behavior, often superloaded with personal self-depreciating payoffs. A more heterogeneous group
would contain members who would have incorporated more self-enhancing alternatives to the losing
behavior, perhaps even able to model the more desirable behavior in effective ways.
The question of having special purpose groups composed of members homogeneous in selected
ways needs much research. Perhaps certain kinds of human behaviors are self-enhancingly more
modifiable than others. For example, although it may be unproductive to group hard drug addicts, grouping
pregnant girls may result in productive benefits for each participant. Such was the case in the group
experience which is described in this chapter. But it is noteworthy -that the counselor did not focus on the
remediation of the common "loser" dimension which was the chief criterion for admission to the group.