5 min read
May 4, 2025
5 Activities for a Support Group That Has Stalled
Group lost its energy after a few months? Five activities built for people who already know each other, and how to run each one.
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This is not a list of icebreakers. Icebreakers are for strangers, and a group that has stalled is the opposite problem: people know each other well enough that the conversation has settled into a groove, and the groove has become a rut.
Five activities for that specific situation, each with what it is for, how to run it, and how it fails.
Ask: What did you believe when this first happened that you do not believe now? Then wait.
This works because it gives long-standing members something genuinely new to say: their own trajectory, which they have never been asked to describe. It also does something valuable for newer members, who hear that the thing they are in the middle of does change.
If the group is under two or three months old, nobody has a month one to look back at yet and it produces polite generalities. Wait.
Ask: What is the piece of advice everyone gives you that is completely useless? Then: What would actually have helped?
The first question is a shared complaint, which is safe and produces immediate energy. The second converts that energy into something real. Groups that have gone flat tend to come alive here, because the frustration is genuine and nobody normally lets them voice it.
It can tip into a long collective vent. Move to the second question after eight or ten minutes, deliberately.
Split into pairs: rotate, so people who never talk to each other are paired. Give them one question and six minutes. Bring them back and ask each pair what they found, not what each person said.
Two people talking is a different social task from eight, and the reporting-back format means the quiet member is describing a shared conclusion rather than making a personal disclosure to the whole room. That distinction is the whole reason this works.
Odd numbers leave someone with you, which is fine occasionally and bad as a pattern. And do not use it in a session where someone arrived in obvious distress, being sent into a breakout room alone with one person is the wrong place for that.
Members submit questions anonymously: a form, a message to you, a folded piece of paper. You read them out one at a time and the group answers.
Anonymity removes the two barriers that keep the most useful questions unasked: looking foolish, and revealing something about yourself by what you need to know. The questions that come out of a question box are often the most useful conversations a group has.
If you get one question, do not run it. Collect over two weeks. And read every question you receive. Skipping one visibly teaches the group that the box is not really anonymous.
Ask three questions, in order: What do you come here for now? What do we spend time on that is not that? What would you change?
Most groups drift from their founding purpose, which is not a failure. The members' needs have changed. The problem is only that nobody has said so, and the format is still serving the group that existed in month one.
Then act on at least one thing they say, visibly, in the next session. If you ask and change nothing, you have taught them that asking is decorative.
Do not run this when attendance is already shaky. A group that is wobbling reads "what should we change" as "this is not working", and it accelerates the drift.
And keep the ordinary structure around them. The check-in and the close should stay exactly as they always are. Novelty works because it sits inside something predictable; change both and the group has nothing to hold on to.
Less often than you would think. A group that does something structured every week loses the open conversation that is the point of it, and members start to experience the activity as the thing they have to get through before they can talk. Once a month, or whenever the room has genuinely settled into a rut, is enough for most groups.
The exception is a group that has just lost several members or just gained several. Both disrupt the pattern enough that a couple of structured sessions in a row help people find their footing again.
All five work on video. Pairs run through breakout rooms, and the question box is easier online than in person because submitting anonymously takes one click rather than a folded piece of paper nobody wants to be seen writing.
Two adjustments. Leave longer silences than feel natural, because a pause reads as a technical fault on video and people fill it before anyone has thought. And say the order out loud before you start a round, since the small cues that signal whose turn it is do not survive a gallery of faces.
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