Description of Group Treatments
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills: This group teaches clients four types of coping skills designed to increase adaptive personal and interpersonal functioning: Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotional Regulation, and Distress Tolerance. The group also provides a supportive environment for clients to practice their new skills.
Mentalization/Reflective Communication: This skillsbased group helps clients develop and enhance the capacity to reflect on their own thoughts, feelings and intentions and to separate them from the same internal processes of others.
Stress Management: The Stress Management group provides the client with tools and techniques for releasing stress and restoring balance to the physiology of the body. The client will have an opportunity to experience various forms of meditative practice, including contemplation, breathing (mindfulness) meditation, visual and sound meditations, guided imagery and visualization, and progressive relaxation.
Anger Management: This group teaches clients various techniques to identify, monitor, and appropriately manage angry feelings. The group has a dual focus: interruption and prevention of inappropriate, excessive verbal and/or physical expression of anger, and the enhancement of adaptive methods of articulating angry reactions.
Assertion Training: In this group, clients learn to distinguish passive, assertive, and aggressive responses to others and develop skills to assert their needs and maintain their interpersonal boundaries.
Eating Disorders Process Group: This group is an integrative approach to evaluating the role of an eating disorder in the client’s life. Interpersonal dialogues in the supportive group context help the client reflect on the way in which eating disorder symptoms may serve to mask anxiety, depression, feelings of inadequacy, social anxiety, and poor self-esteem.
Body Image Discoveries: In this group the influences that shape the development of body image throughout our lives are presented and discussed. Specific gender, familial, cultural, and societal factors that may affect the client’s relationship with his or her body are explored. Correlates of a healthy body image are outlined and exercises are introduced to help the client heal personal body image issues.
Nutrition/Mindful Eating: Nutritional information and body intelligence techniques will be presented in this group, along with experiential exercises, to help the client create a balanced relationship with food. Through the exploration of the relationships among eating, taste, and feelings, the client learns to make eating choices that foster feelings of healthy nourishment.
Bipolar Disorders Group: In this group, clients (and their families if appropriate and available) learn the most up-to-date information about bipolar disorder, discover techniques to manage their stress levels and sleep (which directly impact the frequency and severity of the disorder), and develop social support and other coping mechanisms for living with bipolar illness.
Sexual Abuse Recovery: This group helps clients identify various negative emotional and behavioral effects of sexual abuse (particularly feelings of shame and social isolation) and develop adaptive skills with which to cope with those effects. We offer separate groups for male and female clients.
Addictions Recovery: This group is a processoriented group designed to help clients understand how substance abuse has evolved into a selfdefeating mechanism for avoiding undefined or uncomfortable feelings. Participants learn to identify and voice those emotions in a manner which promotes psychological and physical health.
Coping with Infertility: This group is designed to provide a supportive environment in which participants may share their experiences of the pain and disappointment of an infertility diagnosis, as well as the anxiety associated with the subsequent treatment process. Sharing experiences with others is often the first step towards reducing the stress and fear that can take the excitement out of the journey towards pregnancy and childbirth. We offer separate groups for women, men, and couples.
Postpartum Depression Group for Mothers: Postpartum depression affects 1015‰ of women any time from a month to a year after giving birth. This group provides education and support for those mothers suffering from postpartum depression symptoms including decreased motivation, lack of energy, tearfulness or mood swings, disrupted appetite and sleep, difficulty concentrating, and feelings of loss, guilt, and inadequacy.
The Middle Passage: Crisis in the midlife is often painful due to the gap between the inner sense of self and the "acquired personality"—a reflexive response to the early experiences of life. This group identifies and explores old roles that were adopted in childhood and brings consciousness to creating new patterns and practices that serve the authentic self.
Art Therapy: This group utilizes art expression as a modality for emotional healing and personal development. Through creating art in this group—using modalities of painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture—a creative pathway can be accessed for expressing and resolving past and present emotional issues through a greater awareness of self and others.
Music Therapy: Music therapy sessions use the unique components of rhythm, melody, and harmony to address and explore emotional and behavioral states. Group members participate through listening exercises, imagery, and group improvisational music making.
Creative Pathways: This group facilitates a deeper connection with the full range of an individual’s creativity. Various techniques are used to help the individual recognize and release cognitive, emotional, and sensory barriers to greater artistic and life fulfillment.
Living in Your Body: The focus of this group is to help clients enhance body awareness and wellness by engaging in mindful eating and good nutrition, stress management, and various types of physical activity.
Expanding Horizons: This group is designed to help the individual identify and negotiate new educational, vocational, and special interest paths.