by Lisa Copen
After planning for your support group for weeks, or even months, it’s time for your first meeting. You feel rather organized. You’ve prepared a proposal to start up a support group which was approved by an organization or church. You’ve put together a welcome folder for new members and you have scheduled your topic or speakers for coming months.
So, you’re meeting is sure to run perfectly, Right? Unfortunately, all the plans in the world cannot cancel out a few unforeseen situations. Below are four of the aggravations you may experience during those first few meetings. Knowing what hurdles you may encounter can help you be prepared in advance.
(1) Only a couple of people come.
How it feels: Disheartening. After putting in so much of your personal time (despite your own illness), it can be very disappointing to feel like dozens of people aren’t benefiting from all of your hard work and passion. Recognize that a low turnout is typical and not something to be taken personally. It can be extremely difficult to organize people who are ill to show up at the same place at the same time. One obvious reason is that when they feel ill, they are less likely to leave their home and go socialize with others. Just talking can be physically draining. And when they feel well, the last thing they may want to do is sit around and talk about the days they are in physical pain.
What to do: A good motto to remember is, “Hope for the best and prepare for the few.” The founder of HopeKeepers, which is a Christian support group program for the chronically ill, agrees. “It can be such a disappointment when you feel God leading you to start a group and then only one person shows up. But from personal experience I can say that God knows what He is doing and may have planned it that way! The first time I had only one woman come to a HopeKeepers meeting, we ended up having an amazing conversation. Later she disclosed that she was extremely leery about attending and probably wouldn’t have spoken at all if other people had been there.”
Also, keep an outline of your lesson, and even include what kinds of topics people shared. This way you can easily “repeat” the meeting with little preparation as a follow up. You may want to call people and, without pressuring them, ask if there is anything that you can do to make it easier for them to attend. Do they need a ride? What is typically a good time of day for a meeting?
(2) Your lesson plan is completely ignored.
How it feels: You may be quick to assume that your ideas are just not interesting or helpful enough for people’s circumstances. You may even feel a touch of anger that people don’t appreciate the time you spent preparing.
What to do: Allow some flexibility at first and then add in more structure as the group meets. The truth is that most people are probably excited and even relieved to have other people who understand what they are going through. Simply gathering people together in one room and can open the floodgates of emotions that people have held back for years. It’s hard to hold up a book and a lesson plan and force people to remain focused when a member is in tears over the ending of her marriage, for which she blames her illness. This situation can occur at any meeting, but may be more frequent during the first month.
Talk openly with the group about your desire to have plenty of time available for people to share, but that you also want everyone to leave the meeting feeling refreshed. Regardless of what occurs during the meeting, you will be ending the time together with an inspiring article, scripture, poem, prayer, devotional, etc.
(3) Everyone complains! About relationships, medical professionals, their illness-everything!
How it feels: Like you are expected to fix the entire world in an hour or at least listen to every complaint they may have. You will find that people have years of emotions buried in their hearts that have wounded them deeply. Hearing cruel words, having wounded feelings, facing unjust consequences, and even coping with severe medical errors are all normal parts of living with illness. For the group leader you can be left wondering what to do if you can’t fix the problem. You want to show compassion, but need to keep this group on the path of encouragement and support, and not a downward spiral.
What to do: Set up some basic guidelines before your first meeting if possible, and include the “venting guidelines.” Read “10 Ways to Make Your Illness Support Group Uplifting.” Set a timer and allow everyone to have 60 seconds to share their most frustrating experience of the week. Start a contest with a prize for who handled their situation the best or most creatively. Or be silly and give an award for someone to take home for the week, like “Aggravated the Alligator Award” (a rubber alligator)
Group members should have a sense of freedom in sharing their concerns and annoyances, but be sure to include others in the conversation. If Jane can’t seem to let go of a situation, add, “Jane, I know some of us can identify with what you are sharing. Can someone else tell us how she or he has dealt with the emotions that accompany a situation that was similar?” If you are doing a study you can say, “Since we want to have plenty of time at the end to share something uplifting, let’s move on to question five. Jane, would it be okay if people could offer their encouragement after the meeting or maybe later this week with a phone call or email?”
(4) One person dominates the conversation and seems to take over the meetings, disregarding any plans you have or other’s need to talk.
How it feels: Aggravating! You’ve spent a lot of time preparing for this special time and to have someone come in and take on an overbearing leadership role can be exasperating. When you can see the person leading your group down a path of negativity, you may also be worried about how many people she is scaring away. Will others think this is what your group is all about?
What to do: Set boundaries at the beginning. It’s important that people in the group are allowed to share their frustrations, but they also need to respect the others in the group. They must watch their language, the amount of time they dominate a conversation, and how they talk about other people’s treatments or decisions.
One of the best ways to approach this is to include guidelines about how the group will function that are given to all new members. If the person who dominates the conversations doesn’t understand your simple comments of “Let’s see how other people feel” then talk to her one-on-one. Politely go over the guidelines. You may want to put her in charge of a part of the meeting where she can have a leadership role. Having the guidelines to refer to will make it feel less of a personal attack than if you are simply correcting her behavior.
Lastly, don’t be too hard on yourself. You will learn as you go. Facilitating a support group is often assumed to be a simple undertaking. It’s a myth that all one does is announce a meeting, lots of people attend, everyone shares and supports one another, and not personality conflicts arrive. That is impossible.
It takes a special person who can communicate with others effectively. One who can gently guide people in the direction you wish them to go, so that the group grows rather than becomes a complaint session. A leader must be able to offer compassion, but also set boundaries and even diffuse anger. As situations arise, talk to other leaders for ideas and support. Keep in mind that no leader ever feels one-hundred percent capable. A willingness to learn and listen is at the top of the list of leadership qualities.