Courses and groups
Currently all of our courses and group treatments are being offered digitally.
Courses
Our educational courses 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 6 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.
Sessions
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
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
Session 1: Introduction and goals
- IBS symptoms
- Introduction to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
- Goal setting
Session 2: Activity
- Low mood
- Activity management
Session 3: Sleep, relaxation and thinking
- Sleep and self-care
- Relaxation
- Identifying negative thoughts
Session 4: Challenging thoughts and identifying worry
- CBT strategies to manage negative thoughts
- Identifying worry
Session 5: Managing worry
- CBT strategies for managing worry
Session 6: Review
- Review of strategies
- Goal setting
- Planning for the future
Session 1
- What is CBT
Session 2
- Dealing with panic
Session 3
- Thinking about your thinking
Session 4
- Putting it all together
Session 1
- Understanding CBT
- Understanding anxiety
- Dealing with worry
- Goal setting
Session 2
- Worry management
- Progressive muscle relaxation
Session 3
- Coping with panic attacks
- Panic and anxiety with a long term health condition
Session 4
- Thought challenging
Session 5
- Sleep and relaxation
- Physical activity and pacing
- Diet and lifestyle
- Support network
Session 6
- Maintaining wellbeing
- Technique recap
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.
- 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.
- 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 practice these skills and strategies in between weekly sessions and then review them in the group.
- 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.
- 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.
- Understand the nature of your anxiety.
- Develop an understanding of the interactions between our thoughts, behaviours and feelings.
- Develop strategies such as problem solving in order to cope with triggers that may cause you to become anxious.
- How to actively notice what you feel physically when you are anxious and what you do or avoid doing as a consequence.
- You will be encouraged to practice these skills and strategies in between the weekly sessions and then review them in the group.
- 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.
- 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.*
- 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.
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 don’t hear from you, and you don’t attend group/course sessions we will write to you to see if you would still like treatment. If we don’t hear from you, we will assume that you no longer want therapy and will refer you back to the care of your GP.
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.
Locations
If our courses and groups are face to face they will take place at venues across Oxfordshire. See our How to find us page for details.
Get in touch with us
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