Group Services
ThinkWell CBT offers a number of psychotherapeutic and skills-training groups to address a variety of needs. The following groups are currently planned for the upcoming year:
General Group Information
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All of our groups are designed to be completed in 4 to 6 sessions, although it's important that participants commit to attending all scheduled sessions because the material builds from week-to-week and make up sessions are not available.
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To maximize their benefits, participants of all groups are encouraged to spend 2 to 3 hours between sessions practising the skills they learned in session.
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Groups range in size from 4 to 10 participants, with group sizes determined based on the amount of individual feedback that participants are anticipated to need from the facilitator to benefit from the material. Groups with more participants cost less than groups with fewer participants.
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We recommend that you participate in an intake assessment before enrolling in any group to ensure that your specific needs can be addressed in the group context; however, except where otherwise indicated, these recommended intake assessments are not required if you prefer to enrol directly in one of our groups.
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When expressing interest in a group, you will be asked about your availability (e.g., daytime, evening, weekend). When the required number of people have expressed interest for a given group, you will be contacted with the specific session dates and times and asked to confirm your interest in participating.
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Upon your confirmation of intent to enrol, you will be contacted to complete the informed consent process, complete any pre-treatment questionnaires, and discuss payment options.
Understanding Your Emotions
Key Details
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4 weeks x 2 hrs
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4-5 participants
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$600
Who can benefit?
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Anyone who experiences their emotions as confusing, coming out of nowhere, or an obstacle to achieving their goals.
Why participate?
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Emotions can be confusing, and they get even more confusing when we beat ourselves up for having them. The goal of this group is to understand what emotions are, how they show up in your life, and why they’re helpful. Some participants find that simply being able to name and describe their emotions is all they need to get on living their lives with more self-awareness and self-compassion. Other participants find that understanding their emotional patterns gives them the background and motivation to take the next step towards their treatment goals.
What to expect?
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This group will provide you with an organized model for understanding the different parts of your emotional experiences, including your triggers, interpretations, body sensations, urges, behaviours, and after-effects. You’ll be shown how this model applies to the most common painful emotions that people experience, and you’ll practise observing and describing your own emotions using this model, both during and between sessions. Towards the end of the group, you’ll be guided to look back across the individual emotional experiences you’ve described to summarize the patterns you see in your emotions.
ThinkWell 101
Key Details
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6 weeks x 2.5 hrs
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6-8 participants
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$750
Who can benefit?
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Pretty much anyone, but particularly people who (a) think their emotions are more intense than other people’s emotions are in similar situations or (b) notice patterns in their thinking, where they think the same negative things about themselves, other people, or their circumstances in many different situations.
Why participate?
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CBT is based on the idea that our reactions always make sense when we understand what we’re thinking. The goals of this group are to notice the things you’re saying to yourself when painful emotions show up in your life, learn strategies for evaluating whether those ways of thinking are accurate and helpful, and learn how to update any thoughts that are leading you astray. Some participants find that being able to look at their stressors from a more balanced outside perspective decreases the intensity of their emotions to the point that they don’t have to make further changes in their lives. Other participants find that looking at their thoughts in this way gives them the more objective information that they need to work towards accepting or addressing the problems in their lives, either on their own or through further services.
What to expect?
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In this group, you’ll learn to use changes in your emotions as a cue to pay attention to what you’re saying to yourself, and you’ll learn about the most common unhelpful thinking habits that people tend to be using when these emotions show up. You’ll come up with a plan for monitoring these thoughts, whether you prefer writing them down on paper or logging them with an app on your phone. The bulk of session time will be spent learning questions that you can ask yourself to evaluate (in a curious way, not a judgmental way) whether your thoughts are accurate or helpful to you. Finally, you’ll learn how to integrate the new information you’ve discovered into thoughts that are more balanced and helpful to you moving forward.
Behavioural Plans for Overcoming Anxiety & Depression
Key Details
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5 weeks x 2.5 hrs
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5-6 participants
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$700
Who can benefit?
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Anyone currently avoiding engaging in meaningful life activities due to recurrent feelings of depression or anxiety. In order to benefit, participants must have an understanding that their anxious or depressive thoughts aren’t always 100% true or helpful, as well as a willingness to experiment with new ways of acting when these thoughts show up. This suitability can be established from any of the following: an intake assessment plus 1 or more individual therapy sessions; the results of a psychodiagnostic assessment; prior participation in either the Understanding Your Emotions or the ThinkWell 101 groups; or a specific recommendation from a previous mental health care provider.
Why participate?
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Instead of waiting until you feel better to make changes in your life, an alternative strategy is to make the changes you want for yourself and then let your thoughts and feelings play catch-up. The goal of participating is to start re-engaging in the meaningful life activities that you've been avoiding due to anxiety or depression. By re-engaging in your life, you’ll gather new evidence to consider the next time those anxious or depressive thoughts show up, which will create the mindset to keep building on your behavioural changes to further improve your mood.
What to expect?
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In the first session, you'll develop a list of meaningful life activities that you’ve been avoiding. To reduce depression, this list will include a variety of activities that give you a sense of pleasure, accomplishment, or social connection. To work through anxiety, this list will include the different situations where your fear is out of proportion to the realistic level of danger. You'll list these activities or situations in order from easiest to hardest, and then sessions will focus on making plans for you to start re-engaging in items on your to-do list. Before you leave the session, we’ll anticipate any of the barriers that might get in the way of carrying out your to-do list so that we can solve them ahead of time. When you return the next session, we’ll evaluate the outcomes of your new activities to fine-tune your plans for the following week and summarize any of the lessons you’ve learned so you can take them with you. As your behavioural repertoire expands, you’ll have more opportunities to experience positive emotions and to see that you can face your fears without disaster.
Assertiveness for the Win
Key Details
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4 weeks x 2.5 hrs
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6-8 participants
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$425
Who can benefit?
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Anyone who has trouble asking for what they want or saying no to requests.
Why participate?
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People who have a hard time communicating their needs tend to see their problems get worse and to have more triggers for negative emotions, which makes it all the more difficult for them to assert themselves the next time. To break this cycle, participants of this group will learn to find the assertive middle ground instead of passively ignoring their needs or aggressively demanding their own way. Not only can improved assertive communication get you what you want more often, but even when you don’t get your way, you can stop adding salt to the wound by wondering whether things would be better for you “if only” you had communicated more effectively.
What to expect?
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You’ll learn the key ingredients to include in assertive communication to increase the chances that your requests will be granted. You’ll hear lots of examples of what assertive communication can sound like in real-life situations, and you’ll start planning ahead to use assertiveness in your own life by writing out scripts that you’ll practise delivering to other participants. You’ll learn that assertiveness isn’t all-or-nothing by learning what factors to consider when deciding what level of assertiveness to use in a given situation. You’ll also learn how to anticipate and respond to the roadblocks that may pop up as you start using more assertiveness in your life.
Introduction to Mindfulness
Who can benefit?
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Anyone who gets caught up from time to time ruminating about the past, worrying about the future, or mindlessly watching their present pass them by.
Why participate?
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The world and our minds are busy places. The goal of this group is to build your awareness of the present moment so that you can attend to it without getting attached to it or judging it. People who practise mindfulness find that they feel more connected to the world and people around them, less reactive to emotional stressors, and better able to concentrate and direct their attention. Mindfulness has also been associated with greater feelings of well-being through stress reduction, improved sleep, and relief from chronic pain.
What to expect?
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The first session will give you a crash course on all the whats, whys, and hows of mindfulness practice. However, because mindfulness is just that—a practice—subsequent weeks will be focused on guiding you through different exercises that you’ll be able to apply in your day-to-day life immediately to help you connect to the present moment. To help make sure that you take your mindfulness practice with you, you’ll receive some worksheets to keep track of what you notice during your practice. Your observations will be discussed briefly at the next session to fine-tune your practice.
Crisis Survival
Key Details
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4 weeks x 1.5 hrs
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8-10 participants
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$225
Who can benefit?
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Anyone who experiences negative emotions when they have problems that they can’t solve right away, particularly if they have a tendency to respond to these crises in a way that makes their problems worse.
Why participate?
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Sometimes life hands us lemons and there’s nothing we can do about it right away. In these situations, where emotions are high and there’s a sense of urgency to act, we can sometimes make things worse for ourselves. The goal of this group is to learn concrete strategies for tolerating distress when you’re in a crisis that, for whatever reason, you can’t solve right away. These crisis survival skills can replace any destructive habits you may have developed that help you blow off steam in the short-term, but that make things worse for you in the long-term. When you have strategies for surviving a crisis that don’t add to your problems, it’ll be much easier to solve the original problem when the time is right, for example, when you are calmer, have more information, or have more support to help you through it.
What to expect?
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Each week, you’ll learn two different distress tolerance skills. Some of these skills will be for temporarily distracting yourself from the crisis, and others will be for temporarily improving the moment through relaxation or self-soothing exercises. For each skill introduced, you’ll learn the rationale for how it works and the details on how to use it most effectively, and you’ll have an opportunity to practise the skill in session and plan ahead for integrating the skill in your daily life. The next week, you’ll have a chance to talk about what went well when you used the skills, problem-solve any barriers that got in the way of practising, come up with ideas for fine-tuning and personalizing the skills, and then learn two more skills to add to your repertoire.
CBT for Insomnia
Key Details
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1 hr individual
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6 weeks x 1.5 hrs
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4-6 participants
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$750
Who can benefit?
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Anyone experiencing distress or difficulty functioning throughout the day due to chronic (3+ months) difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking up too early. To benefit, your sleep difficulties shouldn’t be accounted for by insufficient time in bed, another sleep disorder (e.g., sleep apnea), substance use, or a medical condition.
Why participate?
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Once you’ve developed insomnia, you can develop a lot of negative beliefs and habits around sleep that keep you stuck in your sleep problems. This group will improve your quality and quantity of sleep by helping you identify and replace any unhelpful thoughts and behaviours with ones that are proven to promote sound sleep. Improved sleep is associated with a variety of wellness benefits, including improved mood, higher productivity, weight loss, lower risk of heart disease, and better immune functioning.
What to expect?
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In your initial treatment suitability assessment, you'll be asked a variety of questions to ensure that you're experiencing a primary issue of insomnia and that you're not experiencing any of the issues that would suggest an alternative course of treatment. At this initial appointment, you'll receive instructions on keeping a detailed sleep diary for the two weeks before the first group session. This diary will track the times that you go to bed, fall asleep, spend in bed, and wake up.
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There are two key behavioural changes you’ll be learning in treatment. First, you’ll unlearn the association you’ve developed between your bed and wakefulness by committing to getting out of bed anytime you don't fall asleep within about 15 minutes. You’ll learn to go to another room, do a quiet activity, and return to bed only when you’re very sleepy (and to repeat as many times as is necessary). Second, you’ll start by restricting your sleep (yes, you read that right!), where you delay your bedtime to cause partial sleep deprivation and make yourself more tired the next night. This sleep deprivation will give you a stronger sleep drive so that a greater proportion of the time you’re in bed will be spent sleeping. As this proportion of time asleep in bed increases, you’ll gradually move your bedtime earlier towards your goal. You’ll be monitoring your progress through your ongoing sleep diary.
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There will also be a lot of psychoeducation throughout treatment. You’ll learn about the mechanisms behind healthy sleep and problematic sleep, which will keep you motivated to stick with the sleep restriction procedures. You’ll also learn a variety of other strategies to promote sleep by changing your lifestyle and sleep environment and by quieting your mind and body before sleep through relaxation.
Learn about our other services by clicking on the links below.