Reactive Aggressors | CITYU CARE LAB

Reactive Aggressors Group Intervention (Secondary School)

Introduction

In this section, the details of the reactive aggressor group intervention are presented with real examples and videos. For better understanding, the progress of the group intervention will be divided into six stages over ten sessions: preparation, first meeting, initial stage, early mid-stage, late mid-stage and late stage.

Sessions Plan

Session	Application of CBT	Program Objective
1	Establish trust and rapport.	Reactive aggressors are always suspicious and very sensitive to their surroundings. They also lack self-confidence and have low self-esteem. It is therefore important to establish a positive relationship with reactive aggressors to help them feel secure in the group, reduce their vigilance towards workers and other group members, and increase their sense of belonging within the group.
2	Identify group members’ automatic thoughts and their emotional and behavioural responses.	Reactive aggressors tend to interact with others with hostile attributional biases. They easily become angry, anxious and uncomfortable around their peers and often argue with others. Workers should understand how reactive-aggressor members encode, interpret and respond to events, because this will help workers to make accurate overall evaluation about group members’ irrational beliefs.
3	Educate group members about Ellis’ A-B-C concept.	Use common and emotionally neutral campus situations to facilitate discussion. Workers should help group members to understand that different people will react differently to similar events because they hold different beliefs, thus the outcomes of similar events may vary widely.
4	Detect group members’ irrational beliefs.	Use interpersonal conflicts that are often encountered by reactive aggressors as scenarios for discussion to detect group members’ irrational beliefs.
5	Discriminate group members’ irrational beliefs.	Cognitive distortions often occur in the automatic thoughts of reactive aggressors. These ‘mind traps’ can cause negative behaviours and emotions. The intervention aims to help group members recognise these ‘mind traps’, and thus understand and manage their irrational beliefs.
6 - 7	Debate group members’ irrational beliefs.	Because reactive aggressors have rigid beliefs, they exhibit one-dimensional thinking and seldom see things from others’ perspectives. Therefore, workers should help group members to debate their irrational beliefs by using multi-angled thinking, and help them understand that different people have different beliefs and opinions. Group members are thus encouraged to take others’ beliefs into account, to help them establish their own rational beliefs in the subsequent activities.
8	Formulate a new and effective rational belief with a new set of emotional and behavioural responses.	Through debate, group members learn to express their emotions, strengthen their ability to consider things from different perspectives, open their minds and speculate about different possibilities. They will then be assisted to establish rational beliefs and a new set of emotional and behavioural responses.
9	Behavioural assignment: Social skills and self-expression training.	Reactive aggressors can easily experience interpersonal misunderstanding when interacting with others because they lack appropriate social skills and always feel misunderstood and alienated. This inability to relate to others generates more social problems, thus perpetuating the vicious circle of misunderstanding. Therefore, through ‘I-message’ behaviour-training, group members are encouraged to express their personal feelings and expectations, to reduce misunderstandings and conflicts with others.
10	Termination and relapse prevention.	Review and praise group members on the positive behavioural and mental changes they have made, to consolidate their successful experiences and minimise the probability of relapse.