This is a group course. It’s very informal and held in a calm, friendly and welcoming atmosphere. The aim of the course is to teach you how to overcome or cope with particular personal difficulties.
Do ice-breaker exercises, so you won’t have to tell everyone your name, find out about the person sitting next to you or say something interesting about yourself.
Ask people to share their experiences. While we welcome people sharing and try to encourage discussion, no-one will be forced to participate or say anything.
Do group therapy. These are psycho-educational courses, so our aim is to teach people how to overcome or cope with particular emotional difficulties.
Respect that everyone will be attending for different reasons and will have their own knowledge and experiences and we ask that people show that same respect to others.
Acknowledge that coming to these courses can be difficult. For many people. This will be their first experience of anything like this. At the start of each course we go through group guidelines to alleviate some of the fears people might have.
Try our best to answer any questions you may have and if we cannot, then we will try to find out the following session, but we hope that the course content will answer many questions that people have.
Encourage people to try some of the things we suggest on the courses at home, as this enables people to try things and then address any difficulties at the next session. But this is not compulsory and we won’t ask anyone why they didn’t try something as we recognise that not all the techniques will be suitable for everyone.
Problems with stress are incredibly common. This session looks at what stress is and how it can affect people differently, placing particular emphasis on the two main problems of stress; anxiety and depression. The first class also introduces CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), the theory that how feeling bad, thinking negatively, and unhelpful behaviour all connect to form a vicious cycle leading to stress.
Anxiety and low mood has a huge impact upon us physically. This session looks at the effect that stress, anxiety and the depression have on the body and teaches some strategies to reduce and cope with these often distressing symptoms.
How we think about ourselves and our lives has a massive effect on how we feel. This session uses cognitive techniques from CBT to look at balancing and changing the way we think about things.
What we feel and how we think often leads to us behaving in certain ways. This final session looks at positive actions that can reduce stress, looking at further interventions for breaking the vicious cycle of feeling bad, negative thinking and unhelpful behaviours.
