We offer courses, groups and workshops to help you understand your problems and learn practical skills to cope with them.
For some people, working through problems with other people who understand what they’re going through can really help.
Group therapy gives you the opportunity to hear from others who are struggling with similar issues to you. You get to see that other people are having similar experiences to you. This can help you gain an understanding of your own problems.
No pressure
Therapists will spend time talking to you about planned topics each week. Group members are encouraged to talk about how they feel too. But you will not be ‘put on the spot’ or forced to share your thoughts and experiences.
The therapists are there to make sure everyone gets the best out of the experience.
About sessions
We normally have 2 people running each group and between 8 and 12 participants
Sessions can last between 1 and 2 hours, depending on the workshop or work.
They are held weekly and online, using Microsoft Teams.
This 6-week course aims to give you strategies and techniques to help you improve your overall wellbeing. It can be a good place to start learning a wide range of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) techniques you can apply to your everyday life.
It can also help you refresh CBT skills you’ve learnt before.
The course aims to help you:
- Improve your understanding of CBT
- Understand anxiety and depression
- Notice and challenge unhelpful thought patterns and behaviours
- Learn how to re-activate your life
- Learn how to manage anxiety, panic, worry, stress or depression
- Improve sleep difficulties
- Develop a ‘staying well plan’ for the future.
The team running the course will recommend useful exercises to help you develop your skills in managing symptoms of depression.
They will also provide a range of resources to support the teaching on the course. This includes user-friendly workbooks written by CBT experts and practitioners.
This 6-week course aims to give you strategies and techniques to manage excessive or overwhelming worry.
Sessions last 1 hour 30 minutes.
The course is based on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) principles. It aims to empower you to be in control of your wellbeing. We will explore how ‘thoughts’ and ‘behaviours’ can maintain distress and uncomfortable feelings. You can learn specific skills, including relaxation techniques, to improve how you management of worry.
The course aims to help you:
- Learn what CBT is and how it can help to better manage worry
- Understand the cycle of anxiety and worry and how it impacts our emotions and behaviours
- Develop a worry management toolbox including strategies for managing worried thoughts
- Reduce the impact of worrying on your sleep
- Improve problem solving and assertiveness skills
- Develop relaxation skills
- Plan for the future and moving forward.
This 10-week programme is here to help if you suffer from intense fear, excessive worrying, panic, or social anxiety.
It will help you understand how fear and anxiety have become a problem for you and what keeps them going. We then support you to develop and learn strategies to overcome these difficulties.
This course could be for you if you are overwhelmed by some or all of the following thoughts:
- What if people think badly of me?
- What if I embarrass myself in some way?
- What if I go mad or have a heart attack?
- What if something bad happens (to do with work, family, finances, relationships)?
There will be plenty of time in the sessions to work on your specific difficulties.
There is strong evidence to show that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can help you cope with depression.
Research has found that people find symptoms of depression easier to manage as they learn and practice new and effective ways to cope with these difficulties.
This course will look at:
- How we can identify low mood in our daily lives
- How to identify unhelpful thinking patterns and change our relationship with them so they stop getting us down
- How to take action in changing behaviour and lifestyle habits to become more effective in managing depression
- How to address and solve practical problems that can stop us from achieving our goals.
This 10-week programme aims to help you understand how low self-confidence can develop and why it maintains.
We then teach you techniques to help improve your self-confidence and self-esteem.
The programme focuses on how anxiety and low mood maintain our low self-confidence.
You will learn:
- Skills to overcome anxious and self-critical thoughts
- Additional skills such as assertiveness.
You will be expected to complete or practice skills between sessions, so you need to commit some time and effort.
Advised reading
To get the most out of the course, we recommend you buy ‘Overcoming Low Self-Esteem Self-Help Course - 3 Parts’ by Melanie Fennell.
You can find new and used copies of the book to buy online by Googling the title.
This 8 week programme aims to help you manage the psychological impact of living with a long term health condition
Feelings of anxiety, frustration, low mood and isolation can be common experiences when living with a long term condition; this course explores ways in which you can live a valued and meaningful life despite your long term condition.
The programme encourages you to develop skills to manage your life to the best of your ability by focusing on areas such as:
- Your values and what is meaningful to you
- Acceptance
- Difficulties communicating with family, friends and colleagues
- Managing unhelpful thoughts, emotions and behaviours.
We offer a range of options specific to breathlessness, diabetes and heart conditions.