The Marriage Dance Program at Fei Yue Family Service Center

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Introduction
Fei Yue Family Service Centre (FYFSC) strives to effect life transformation through the provision of quality social services by being an excellent establishment in leading people to a truly fulfilling life within an integrated community network. In line with their vision, they identified marriage group work counseling as an emerging need in Singapore.

The conceptualisation of Marriage Dance (MD) programme stems from an assessed need to work with couples facing marital issues, which is prevalent in FYFSC’s casework. Such a treatment group would allow couples to receive help “on a different level of functioning”.

Planning
Marriage Dance is a treatment group designed for couples to work on their marital issues. A rationale for the use of therapeutic group work as an intervention is to help the members understand that they are not the only ones facing such problems, something that individual case work alone cannot achieve. Furthermore, the process of mutual aid takes place during group work when members draw upon their own experiences and deep-seated needs to support their fellow members. It is through this process of “giving” where these members also “receive” and learn from their past experiences (Kurland & Salmon, 1993).

As such group members typically have intensive personal or emotional problems, skilled professional leadership is required. It is due to the intensive nature of the group work that Marriage Dance is a co-led. In fact, according to Gurman, co-led marital therapies fare better than those led by a single therapist (Gurman, 1973).
MD was previously held over 6 weeks but was reformatted as a staycation (three-day-two-night) due to poor attendance. Each run of MD is a closed group comprising of 5-6 couple...

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...ut the issue faced by another couple outside the context of the group work. In addition, with some couples having the history of family violence in the group, the safety of the group might be compromised if a member turns aggressive.

Conclusion
Despite many insights from the group worker, we recognise the limitations of our analysis towards MD due to the subjective nature of our research from the group leader. We were unable to analyse the dynamic interactions amongst members apart from the short excerpts given by the group leader.

Furthermore, our group attempts to use the Garland, Jones and Kolodny model to analyse the stages in which members of MD undergo throughout the group work process. Although the stages are presented in a linear fashion, we recognise that the actual group work process might not strictly follow the individual stages in a sequential manner.

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