Our educational courses and therapy groups are an opportunity for you to learn some helpful skills to improve how you feel.

These sessions will help you learn techniques to overcome low mood, anxiety and worry.

You will receive a free workbook to use throughout the sessions.

The sessions often provide opportunities to meet others who may share similar feelings to you.

You will not be asked to share your personal experiences with others.

What to expect

Courses last 4 to 8 weeks and each session is two hours long.

If you are unable to attend the first session of Improve Your Mood or Manage your Anxiety, we recommend talking to us to find an alternative start date as you will receive the most benefit from attending all sessions.

Courses

Improve your mood course

Session 1

  • What is CBT
  • Reactivating yourself

Session 2

  • Reactivating yourself
  • Pros and cons of change

Session 3

  • Thinking about your thinking
  • Dealing with worry

Session 4

  • Putting it all together
Long Term Conditions - Improve your mood course

Session 1

  • Reactivating yourself
  • Goal setting

Session 2 

  • Reactivating yourself
  • Pacing
  • Pros and cons of change

Session 3

  • Sleep & relaxation
  • Physical activity
  • Nutrition
  • Support network

Session 4

  • Worry management
  • Progressive muscle relaxation

Session 5

  • Thought challenging

Session 6 

  • Maintaining wellbeing
  • Technique recap
Manage your anxiety

Session 1

  • What is CBT

Session 2

  • Dealing with panic

Session 3

  • Thinking about your thinking

Session 4

  • Putting it all together
Long COVID course

Session 1

  • Post COVID symptoms
  • Goal setting

Session 2

  • Worry
  • CBT strategies for managing worry

Session 3

  • Breathlessness
  • Breathing & relaxation

Session 4

  • Fatigue
  • Energy and Activity management

Session 5

  • Low mood
  • Activity management
  • Thinking styles

Session 6

  • Identifying negative thoughts

Session 7

  • CBT strategies for challenging negative thoughts

Session 8

  • Technique recap
  • Maintaining wellbeing
  • Signposting and other support services

Groups

As well as our courses we also run a number of cognitive therapy groups that last up to 12 weeks and focus on a number of difficulties.

CBT for carers of people with dementia
  • You will understand more about dementia and how it affects your relative.
  • Understand more about managing stress and low mood that can occur as a result of being a carer.
  • Understand how to respond when your relative is distressed and how to cope with the behaviours you find most difficult.
Mindfulness for depression
  • Recommended after routine treatment to help prevent low mood returning.
  • A way of becoming more aware of the ways in which our minds and bodies interact.
  • Developed in class and at home through a range of practices including movement, eating and sitting meditations.
  • Simply a way of paying attention in different ways to patterns of thinking and doing.
  • Offered as an 8 week group programme (2 hours a week).

*Mindfulness is not helpful to everyone and finding out whether it would be helpful to you would form part of any assessment.

Mindfulness for long term health conditions
  • Recommended after routine treatment to help prevent low mood returning.
  • A way of becoming more aware of the ways in which our minds and bodies interact.
  • Developed in class and at home through a range of practices including movement, eating and sitting meditations.
  • Simply a way of paying attention in different ways to  patterns of thinking and doing.
  • Offered as an 8 week group programme (2 hours a week).
  • A unique opportunity of sharing your experiences and ideas with others who understand the stress caused by health problems.
Overcoming GAD (generalised anxiety and worry)
  • Understand the nature of your worries.
  • Develop an understanding of the interactions between your thoughts, behaviours and feelings.
  • Exploring beliefs about worries.
  • Improving problem solving skills.
  • Building confidence to face things that you may have avoided.
  • You will be encouraged to practise these skills and strategies in between weekly sessions and then review them in the group.
Overcoming low mood
  • Understand the nature of your depression.
  • Develop an understanding of the interactions between our thoughts, behaviours and feelings.
  • Develop strategies to cope with triggers that may cause you to become depressed again such as problem solving and challenging unhelpful thinking.
  • You will be encouraged to practice these skills and strategies in between the weekly sessions and then review them in the group.
Overcoming low self-esteem
  • Understand the development of negative views of ourselves, how self-criticism affects our emotions and thoughts, and influences how we lead our lives.
  • We will look at common patterns of interactions with others as a result of low self esteem.
  • Understand what keeps low self-esteem going.
  • Build experience and confidence in situations which you find difficult and which trigger self-critical or anxious thoughts.
  • Develop a more positive and accepting attitude towards yourself.
  • Plan for managing future difficulties and challenges.
Overcoming obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
  • You will learn about intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviours and how these fit together in OCD.
  • Understand how believing our thoughts can cause them to become more troubling and result in us doing things to make us feel less anxious.
  • Develop strategies to cope with triggers (thoughts/life events), and use experiments and learn how to test our OCD thoughts.

Expectations

What to expect from us:

  • Having therapy in a group or a course offers you advantages over one to one support and we will discuss this with you when making a treatment plan.
  • Our team are supervised and trained in the therapies offered to ensure you receive the highest quality of care.
  • We work alongside you and are committed to keeping you and others safe. There may be occasions when we need to share some information with other services to do this.
  • To help you in the best way we can, we keep information about your care on a secure and confidential computer system.

What we expect from you:

  • To commit to attending the group/course sessions and be willing to consider the idea of making changes to get the most from therapy.
  • Tell us as soon as possible if you are unable to attend a session. If we do not hear from you, and you do not attend group/course sessions we will write to you to see if you would still like treatment. If we do not hear from you, we will assume that you no longer want therapy and will refer you back to the care of your GP.

Locations

Currently our courses and groups are run digitally via Microsoft Teams.

What if I am outside of the UK?

If you are outside of the UK (holidaying, studying or working) at any time, we are unable to offer you care.

Our clinicians will routinely ask about your whereabouts as part of checking you are in a confidential and safe place to be able to proceed with the appointment, if not you will be offered the opportunity to rebook for when you are back in Oxfordshire.

Page last reviewed: 9 September, 2024