Here is a list of group therapies and courses which we provide:
- Overcoming low mood group
This is an 8 week group with each session lasting two hours. It aims to help you to understand depression and how to manage your symptoms. Each session will focus on the following topics:
- Understanding depression and introduction to therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy and behavioural activation.
- Goal setting
- Impact of behaviour on how you feel
- Helpful and unhelpful behaviour (looking at avoidance patterns in depression and exploring alternative coping strategies)
- Dealing with poor motivation and reviewing therapies to best suit you
- Repetitive unhelpful thinking (also known as rumination) and problem solving
- Letting unhelpful thoughts go
- Preventing relapse
- Overcoming worry group
This group runs for 7 weeks with each session lasting two hours. It provides you with practical help to manage your symptoms of anxiety and excessive worry. Group sessions cover the following topics:
- Worry awareness training
- Coping with uncertainty
- Re-evaluating the usefulness of worry
- Improving problem solving
- Overcoming barriers and providing strategies to overcome anxiety
- Making sense of parenthood group
Having a baby can bring a lot of excitement, joy and happiness but we also know that it can be a time of great changes to your life and responsibilities and that lots of mums and dads struggle with their own emotional well-being and relationships during this time.
You may feel that you are the only one feeling as you do, but it’s common to experience emotional difficulty at some point (but most don’t feel they can tell anyone else). We know that by looking after your own emotional wellbeing it will give your baby the best start in life and help you to enjoy this precious time with your new baby.
The group aims to help parents improve their understanding and develop techniques to work through some of these problems as well as helping to build a support network with other parents experiencing similar difficulties.
What does it involve?
The group therapy consists of 8 sessions and each meeting lasts two hours. The group is most suitable for parents during pregnancy or who have a child under the age of 18 months and experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) group
What is ACT?
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a relatively new form of cognitive behavioural therapy which helps you relate differently to your anxiety, feeling depressed, worrying, self-defeating behaviours, and/or anything else that causes you problems. The aim of ACT is to limit the ways these run your life.
What can I expect in the group?
ACT is an 8 session group for people who experience depression and anxiety. It aims to help you view depression and anxiety differently, and pursue a full and meaningful life.
It is a confidential, interactive group therapy which is made up of education and lots of group discussions and practical exercises. All of us can think about the idea of acceptance, but it’s hard to put it into practice. That’s why sharing your experiences is an important part of the group.
We use mindfulness strategies as our main tool for relating to depression and anxiety. Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non -judgmentally. It’s a bit like meditation.
You’ll be asked to practice some skills at home and do some brief reading between meetings.
- Making sense of trauma group
This is a 4 week group which aims to help you assess and understand the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and helps you to normalise symptoms. The group also helps patients prepare for individual trauma therapy and learn to tolerate some of the distressing symptoms using a variety of techniques (dealing with flashbacks, breathing exercises, container exercise and mindful breathing).
Sessions are two hours long and cover the following topics:
- What is post-traumatic stress disorder
- Managing symptoms
- Treatment options: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy /Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing
- Dealing with avoidance and managing symptoms
- Compassion based interventions
All sessions are delivered in a lecture style format so you do not have to talk about individual traumas.
- Bereavement support group
Everyone experiences grief differently and there is no ‘normal’ or ‘right’ way to grieve. Many people find that being with others, hearing about their thoughts and feelings, as well as how they are coping, helps to normalise and to accept their own experience. During grieving we can feel very lonely, as though we are the only one’s suffering. Bereavement Groups can be a powerful way of feeling connected with each other and through connection find a sense of meaning and purpose.
We offer a six session Bereavement Support Group. It’s facilitated by qualified counsellors and each session lasts 1 ½ hours. Each week we cover a different aspect of the bereavement process and highlight top tips and techniques to help to dealing with the different aspects of loss.
- Wellbeing course
A four week course helping you learn how to manage the symptoms of anxiety, depression, stress and low mood, and understand the links between activity, unhelpful thinking and mood, to increase wellbeing.
Each session lasts 1 1/2hours.
- Living well with a long term physical health condition course
A 5 week course offering information around managing stress, anxiety, depression as well as support with sleeping better and healthy lifestyle choices.
- Living well with persistent pain and fatigue course
A 5 week course offering information on managing pain, stress, anxiety or depression. It aims to help people to be more active, sleep and live well with their condition.