What Is a Training Group? A Guide for Mental Health Professionals

A training group is a small group of mental health professionals who meet regularly with a trained facilitator to grow both clinically and personally. Unlike traditional continuing education or supervision, a training group is experiential — the learning happens through what's occurring between the members in real time. Training groups are one of the most effective and underutilized forms of professional development available to therapists, counselors, social workers, psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and psychiatrists. It's also a model of ongoing professional and personal development that many clinicians have never encountered — not in their master's programs, not in their doctoral training, and often not until years into practice.

How a Training Group Works

What makes training groups different from consultation groups or supervision groups is that the group itself becomes the laboratory for learning. Members don't just discuss clinical work from the outside — they participate in a live group process and study what happens.

Elliot Zeisel has called the training group an "everything bagel" — and the comparison is apt. Just as an everything bagel combines all the toppings into one, a training group brings together multiple ingredients that are usually kept separate:

• Experiential process — Members relate to each other authentically, noticing and sharing their feelings toward one another, making the unspoken speakable
• Countertransference exploration — One of the primary purposes of a training group is studying your own countertransference in the here and now, which directly strengthens your clinical work
• Case consultation — Bring your clinical challenges and questions to colleagues who understand the work
• Personal and professional reflection — Share memories, goals, achievements, and struggles that shape who you are as a clinician and as a person

All of these happen in the same training group, in the same session. That's what makes training groups so rich — they're not compartmentalized. Your personal reactions to a colleague in the group might illuminate something about your countertransference with a client. A case you bring might reveal something about your own history. Everything informs everything else.

Training Groups vs. Supervision and Consultation

In traditional supervision, you present cases and receive feedback from someone with more experience. In a consultation group, colleagues share clinical challenges and brainstorm together. Both are valuable — but both keep the focus outside the room, on clients and clinical situations that aren't present.

A training group turns the lens inward. You don't just talk about your countertransference — you experience it, in real time, with real people. You don't just discuss relational dynamics — you live them, and then you study what happens.

This is why clinicians who participate in training groups often say the experience changed their clinical work more than any workshop or book. It's one thing to understand countertransference intellectually. It's another to feel it in your body, name it out loud, and have your group, with a skilled leader, help you make sense of it.

Who Are Training Groups For?

Training groups are designed for mental health professionals at any stage of their career:

• Early-career clinicians who want to develop their relational and group facilitation skills from the ground up
• Experienced therapists who want to deepen their self-awareness and sharpen their clinical instincts
• Clinicians interested in running groups who want to experience skilled group facilitation from the inside before or while leading their own groups
• Anyone in the helping professions who wants a place to grow both personally and professionally alongside peers who understand the work

You don't need to be a group therapist to benefit from a training group. The skills you develop — attunement, self-awareness, comfort with difficult feelings, the ability to name what's happening in a relationship — make you better at everything you do clinically.

A Training Group Is Not Therapy — But It Can Be Deeply Therapeutic

This is an important distinction. A training group is professional development, not treatment. Members aren't patients. The facilitator isn't your therapist. The purpose of the training group is growth as a clinician and as a person — not diagnosis or treatment of a mental health condition.

But the process is deeply therapeutic. When you practice putting into words your feelings toward your peers, when you study your own reactions in real time, when you let yourself be known by a group of peers — that changes you. Not just professionally, but personally.

This distinction also has a practical benefit: because a training group is professional development rather than treatment, it can be used as a business expense for tax purposes.

What I've Learned in My Own Training Group

I write about this not just as someone who leads a training group, but as someone who has been a member of one. It changed and changes my clinical work and my life — and in ways I could not predict.

I knew my role in my family of origin. I'd explored it in individual therapy and in graduate school. But it wasn't until I was in a training group that I could see how that role was showing up in real time — in the way I was relating to my peers in the room. They pointed it out. And I could see how it was blocking the connections I wanted with others. It is one thing to know about a pattern and another thing to watch it happen live.

I worked on sexual countertransference and sexual shame — feelings that many clinicians carry silently and may not bring to supervision. After doing that work in the group, something remarkable happened: my clients began spontaneously talking more openly about their own sexual struggles. I hadn't changed my technique. I had changed myself — and they could feel it. I became more effective at helping people with their sexual shame because I was dealing with my own.

I learned to have difficult feelings toward my group leader — not just gratitude and respect, but frustration, anger, even the wish to pull away. Working through those feelings, rather than hiding them, allowed me to later get closer to her. I discovered that I could push back against someone who was letting me down and the relationship could survive — and could actually deepen because of it. That changed something inside of me that I get to carry forward with me.

I developed healthier aggression — the ability to assert myself, with peers and authority figures, to protect myself, to say what I needed rather than being silent. I got closer to my own desire for closeness with others and am able to share it. And I learned to identify shame as it was happening, rather than being silent and not knowing about it.

None of this came from intellectual understanding alone, although I did get to work through it intellectually too. It came from being in a room with peers who were doing the same work, week after week, with a well trained and experienced group leader who could help us make sense of what was happening between us.

Is a Training Group Right for You?

If you're a clinician who is curious about what a training group could do for your work and your life, see our current offerings or reach out to us.

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Paul Callister, PhD, CMHC, CGP is a licensed clinical mental health counselor and certified group psychotherapist. He founded the Utah Group Therapy Center to offer interpersonal process groups in Utah.