Group+1

= **John and Laura ** = = = John and Laura have been dating for a little over a month. While the relationship started out great, things have taken a turn for the worse over the course of the last two weeks. John has become increasingly controlling, calling Laura’s cell phone repeatedly throughout the day, and when he’s not calling her, he’s constantly texting her to find out what she’s up to. If Laura doesn’t respond immediately, John leaves threatening and insulting voice messages, insisting that she is cheating and will be sorry unless she calls him back immediately. Once, when Laura called him back to say that she was out with friends and didn’t hear her phone, John became furious and told her that if she loved him then she would have called to tell him her plans. She left her friends to rush to John’s house in order to keep him from making any rash decisions. When she arrived, he continued to blame her for keeping him waiting, despite not having planned to meet him that day in the first place. Laura asked him why he has been acting this way, which only makes him angrier. John is so angry at this point that he picks up a lamp and hurls it against one of the walls in his house. Laura shrieks and backs away because she’d never seen him get this angry before. She doesn’t want to leave him because she is worried it will make him angrier.

As the next two weeks go by, Laura has been spending less and less time with her friends and family, with both of whom she used to be close. She is rarely, if ever, seen in public without John at her side. When her friends do see her, she is very quiet and withdrawn-she doesn’t even seem to stand up straight anymore. Her friends want to help her, but aren’t sure what to do…

//If you were Laura’s group of friends, what should you do? //