Talking therapy groups and courses

Community Living Well NHS Talking Therapies offer a range of groups and courses to help you manage stress, improve your mood and increase activity. We also have groups to help increase self-esteem, manage long-term health conditions, cope after a trauma or bereavement and use mindfulness to manage mood.

Some groups are in-person and some are online.

See all upcoming groups and courses on our Events calendar.

The groups and courses we regularly offer are:

Living with a Long-Term Health Condition

This is a 10-week online group aimed at those with a long term health condition, which we run together with Westminster Talking Therapies.

Drawing on ACT, CBT and CFT concepts, this group aims to support people to improve their self-management and improve their quality of life with their condition.

Content includes:

• Identifying what’s important when our health limits us
• Looking at our pattern of activity as a way of managing health symptoms
• Identifying and addressing unhelpful thinking patterns/ways of relating to our health that make it hard to improve our wellbeing
• Knowing when to problem solve and when to let go of the struggle with our health
• Finding ways to communicate with loved ones and professionals about our health; in order to foster helpful relationships and aid our ability to self-manage
• Managing high levels of emotional distress with our health – learning when to follow what our emotions are telling us about our health and when to move through them
• Managing worries and regrets

Boosting Self-Esteem

The Boosting Self Esteem course is a 10-week online course designed for people who experience low confidence and self-esteem and may feel low, depressed or anxious as a result. It is based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) which is the recommended treatment for building self-esteem. This course can help clients to understand how the problem developed and identify the unhelpful patterns of thinking and behaviour such as avoidance and self-critical thinking that might be stopping them from moving forward in life.

What do you focus on in the 10 sessions? 

Session 1: Understanding low self-esteem (LSE)

Session 2: How does LSE develop and what keeps it going

Session 3: Identifying anxious predictions & safety behaviours

Session 4: Challenging anxious predictions with behavioural experiments

Session 5: Dealing with self-criticism

Session 6: Activation and Assertiveness

Session 7: Adjusting your rules for living

Session 8: Adjusting your core beliefs

Session 9: Accepting yourself – Self Compassion

Session 10: Maintaining Healthy self esteem

Step on Stress – Men’s Health

This is a free NHS, 6-week, in-person group based at St Charles Centre for Health and Wellbeing, that combines Stress Management with physical activity.

The group will be held on Thursdays at 1pm, lasting approximately 2-hours, split between an hour in which you will learn how to better manage stress, worry or frustration, and an hour of physical activities.

The course is made up of 6 sessions, with different types of physical activities that are suitable for men of all abilities, including beginners. Raising awareness of the link between regular physical activity and improved mental and physical health, plus general well-being. You will also go as a group to find out about local places to exercise and community centres where you can continue your wellness journey for either little or no cost.

Who is it for? 

• Adult men aged 18 and over and who are experiencing mild to moderate symptoms of stress, worry or frustration, or anxiety or depression, and want to make a change in their lives.
• This group largely focuses on helping support men to manage stress and become more physically active, and includes some problem-solving and relaxation techniques.

Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)

This is a 9-week online course on Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). MBCT is an evidenced-based treatment for recurrent depression.

What problems can MBCT help with?

Many people find that worrying about the future or ruminating over past events can leave them feeling more anxious, stressed or low. Often this worry and rumination can feel very difficult to control, and may continue despite our best intentions to try to stop it.

MBCT can help us learn ways to reduce the impact of worry and rumination, which can increase our mental wellbeing. MBCT can help by strengthening our ability:

• to notice when we are caught up in unhelpful thoughts;
• to let these thoughts go and bring our attention back to the present moment; and
• to relate to ourselves and our experience with greater gentleness and kindness.

In fact, it may well be that this final point is the most crucial element of MBCT, because if we can learn ways to be kinder to ourselves, it’s likely that we’ll criticize ourselves less and will feel happier as a result.

In terms of the research evidence-base, there is evidence that MBCT, and related mindfulness-based interventions, can help people with depression, some kinds of anxiety, physical pain and some other conditions.

Gardening Group

A 6-week group provided by NHS Talking Therapies.

This in-person group at St Charles Hospital Allotments combines psycho-education and mindfulness techniques, along with outdoor gardening, to help improve wellbeing and build routine.

Psycho-education involves learning about and understanding mental health and wellbeing.

All group members will be given a little plant sprout to take home and grow as the sessions proceed.

Sessions will include: introduction to CBT, benefits of nature, benefits of being active, relaxation and mindfulness, maintaining wellbeing, and more.

Living with Loss

An 8-week online group for people who are struggling with bereavement and grief – focusing on normalising grief, processing grief and loss (by bereavement), unblocking grief process, facilitating mourning, providing emotional support and sharing, helping you in learning to live with loss.

Understanding Trauma

This 4-week online group is to support you in having a better understanding of PTSD and to manage symptoms of PTSD that you may be experiencing. It can be used as either a stand-alone treatment and/or as a pre-treatment intervention to help patients experiencing symptoms of PTSD while on the wait list.

Sessions will include: psychoeducation on PTSD, some grounding techniques and a little on reclaiming life. You will not be asked to speak about your trauma.

Anxiety Management

Join us for this free 6-week online workshop and learn ways to cope and manage anxiety.

The workshop focuses on Anxiety Psycho-education, classifying worries, delaying hypothetical worries and problem solving. We also touch on tolerating uncertainty and general wellbeing.

Mood Boost

This 6-session group which supports you in understanding low mood and how it impacts us on a daily basis. The group aims to support you to better manage and improve your mood through learning of different strategies in an interactive way. You are not expected or encouraged to discuss personal details of your struggles, and evidence shows that learning with your peers has positive effect on your recovery.

Sessions include: psycho education of low mood and breaking the negative cycle of low mood, setting goals, motivation getting activated with different types of activities, negative thinking styles, and tips for well-being.

Boosting Mood and Motivation

How to access groups and courses

These groups and courses are available for people aged 16 and over who are registered with a GP in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, or the Queen’s Park and Paddington areas of Westminster.

To be considered for the groups you must be registered with the Community Living Well Talking Therapies service. To refer yourself for an assessment with Community Living Well, where all therapeutic options offered can be explored, please complete this quick online form. You must complete the form even if you have registered with Talking Therapies in the past.