This group is designed for people who notice that they often struggle with strong and distressing emotional reactions, and that these can feel very intense and difficult to manage. You may respond to these feelings in ways that make you and people around you feel bad.

This group will help you to understand and recognise these patterns, feel more confident about letting people know what you need, and help you develop and practice skills for coping with your emotions.

People who have experienced trauma in their lives, or have been harmed by others, may notice that it has affected their self-esteem and their emotions, as well as making it really difficult to trust other people.

You may notice that reminders of your trauma can be very distressing and difficult to deal with, and that you avoid feelings, people or situations that take you back to the past.

This group is aimed at helping you to understand the impact of trauma, and develop strategies to help you to cope and to thrive in the present and the future. You won’t be asked to share any personal information about what has happened to you.

Compassion focused therapy is an approach which encourages people to learn to be compassionate to themselves and others. It was developed to support people who experience high levels of shame and self-criticism.

The group will help you to develop skills such as mindful awareness, tools to recognise and tackle self-criticism and develop a kinder response towards yourself and others.

Each session we will practice compassionate skills together and we will also think of ways to action these tools in your day to day lives.

CBT helps us to make sense of how we are feeling. It helps us to make links between our ways of thinking about ourselves and our relationships, and how we respond to our thoughts and feelings.

CBT helps us to recognise unhelpful patterns that may be keeping us stuck and preventing us from moving forward with our goals and values. It helps us to respond to our thoughts and feelings in a kinder and more effective way, and gives us an opportunity to try out these new ways of responding.

Mentalisation-based therapy (MBT) useful for people who live with long-term difficulties in relationships and who experience intense emotional distress and overwhelming feelings.

Mentalisation is also helpful for people who may be distrustful of other people and have difficulty in understanding other people’s responses or feelings.

This may result in unhelpful behaviours such as self-harm. In MBT we focus on what is going on in both our own minds and in the minds of other people, and use this skill to develop more helpful behaviours. MBT-I groups run over 12 weeks.

These are friendly open access groups led by our Peer Support Workers who have recovered from mental health conditions.