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Therapy Groups at Shoreline
Since every client is different, the treatment team at Shoreline uses various treatment methods based on each client’s individual needs. Provided below are the therapy groups that we offer.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Group
In our ACT Group, clients learn mindfulness skills to help them live and behave in ways that are consistent with their personal values while developing psychological flexibility. Clients learn to recognize ways in which their attempts to suppress, manage, and control emotional experiences create challenges. Clients also learn how to accept things as they come, without evaluating or attempting to change them; how to accept their emotional experience with a kind and open perspective; how to have psychological flexibility; and how to explore their values and define what’s most important to them and how it relates to their eating disorders.
Assignment Share Group
In this group, clients can share the group assignments they’ve been working on and completing in treatment with their peers. Each client has a weekly assignment from their therapist as well as their registered dietician. Clients can also provide feedback to their peers and are provided support on their assignments.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Group
In our CBT group, clients learn how their thoughts (cognitions), emotions, and behaviors all interact together. Each client identifies maladaptive thought patterns that negatively influence their behaviors and emotions as well as their eating disorder. Clients also learn to focus on changing the automatic negative thoughts that can contribute to and worsen emotional difficulties, depression, and anxiety, and replace those thoughts with more objective, realistic thoughts. Clients identify thought patterns to help overcome such thoughts through journaling, role-playing, relaxation techniques, and mental distractions.
Cooking Skills Group
In this group, clients cook in the kitchen with our dietary team and learn new skills to help facilitate their recovery. Key components of this group include exposure to food and the joy of cooking as well as teaching clients how to care for themselves in their recovery.
If you’re struggling with an eating disorder, we’re here for you. Call us at (562) 434-6007 or fill out our contact form.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Group
In our DBT Group, clients address their thoughts and behaviors while incorporating strategies that include core mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. These tools are designed to specifically help clients better manage their behaviors, emotions, and thoughts. Clients learn how to identify and label their emotions, identify obstacles to change their emotions, increase mindfulness to manage their emotions, and apply distress tolerance techniques. We also teach clients about how thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are related to their eating disorders.
Embody Group
In this group, clients learn about and explore the topic of body image and how it relates to their eating disorder recovery. Clients learn how to stop focusing on their perceived imperfections and learn how to feel more confident by focusing on other aspects of themselves. Clients learn about our culture’s obsession with physical appearance and how to challenge the idea that happiness, health, and the ability to be loved are not dependent on how we look. Clients are also provided the opportunity to face their feelings of body shame and embarrassment and focus on their personal growth and recovery.
Expressive Arts Group
In our Expressive Arts Group, clients learn how to pay more attention to their feelings rather than the events, memories, objects, or people through creativity. Through art expression, clients can process events and make connections with these experiences by cognitively challenging them. In this group, clients incorporate painting and art to explore their responses, reactions, and insights to experiences to help process and make sense of their past, present, and future in recovery from their eating disorders.
Expressive Writing Group
In this group, clients learn specific skills through writing related to their recovery from their eating disorders, including:
- How to apply motivation, patience, and hope to heal from an eating disorder
- How their healthy self can heal their eating disorder self
- Identifying underlying issues to bring insight and awareness to their eating disorders
- Their responses to food: rigid, chaotic, or both – how to balance their life by identifying food rules and changing their relationship with food
- Identifying and changing specific eating disorder behaviors through identifying and challenging their thoughts and emotions
- How to reach out to people rather than the eating disorder
- How to find meaning and purpose in life
Food and Feelings Group
In our Food and Feelings Group, clients learn about the connection that exists between feelings and food. Clients are guided in understanding emotions that affect dysregulated eaters – guilt, shame, helplessness, anxiety, disappointment, confusion, and loneliness. Clients are also shown how to embrace and learn from their feelings. Clients learn how to identify a specific emotion, the function of that emotion, and how the emotion interacts with food and eating behaviors. During this group, clients learn through experiential exercises and questionnaires. Clients also learn strategies for regulating feelings, discovering their emotional triggers, and using their feelings to guide them in getting what they want out of life.
Goals Group
In this group, clients identify, create, and discuss goals in different categories. Clients learn how to make SMART goals and identify specific ways they can obtain their goals for the week by identifying their specific plan to accomplish the goal, identifying the obstacles, and identifying how the goal aligns with their values. This group helps each client process their goals and supports each client in reaching those goals. Additionally, group members provide support and feedback on one another’s goals for the week.
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Health Group
In our Health Group, clients are educated on different health and wellness topics that explore the recovery process and how it relates to our physical bodies including the circulatory, digestive, endocrine, exocrine, immune, muscular, nervous, renal, reproductive, respiratory, and skeletal systems.
Inner Child Group
In this group, each client is provided an opportunity to heal their inner child through reparenting their inner child within and healing their shame, anger, and feelings of abandonment. Clients process and heal through written and verbal exercises, guided imagery, journaling, and drawing so they can reflect on the experience of their past. Clients are also guided through the seven stages of childhood: the infant self, the toddler self, the young inner child, the grade-school child, the young teen, the adolescent, and the young inner adult. In this group, clients learn about the essential steps needed to progress through a series of developmental stages. Clients also learn how these inner child parts of ourselves can be trapped in that stage of growth and how we can heal our old wounds by reparenting our inner child through empathy, curiosity, and non-judgment.
Intuitive Eating Group
In our Intuitive Eating Group, clients learn how to embrace body positivity and how to reconnect with their internal wisdom about eating. Clients learn how to unlearn what they were taught about calorie-counting and other aspects of diet culture and learn about the harm of weight stigma. In this group, clients learn how to bult a trusting relationship with food, fight against diet culture and reject diet mentality, find satisfaction in their food choices, learn food freedom, exercise kindness toward their feelings, their bodies, and themselves, prevent or heal the wounds of their eating disorders, and respect their bodies and make peace with food.
Nutrition Group
In this group, clients are provided psychoeducation on nutrition and how the goals of nutrition therapy are an essential component in the treatment of eating disorders. Clients learn about how many health conditions worsen from not getting the right nutrients; how to recognize when they’re hungry, satisfied, and full during their recovery; and about digestion and nutrient absorption. Clients also learn about the connection between their physical healing through nutrition and feeling better.
Process Group
In our Process Group, each client is provided a safe, and non-judgmental space to process a topic of their choice. Clients receive multiple perspectives, support, encouragement, and feedback from their peers. Clients can also discuss how their week in recovery has been and address any topics/concerns. In this group, clients learn how to navigate social networks and stress, practice listening skills, and learn how to give and receive feedback and support.
Relapse Prevention Group
In this group, clients are provided psychoeducation about relapse prevention and how it occurs in the following stages: emotional relapse, mental relapse, and then physical relapse. Clients discuss their feelings, thoughts, and actions that may lead to a relapse in eating disordered behaviors. Clients also complete relapse prevention worksheets and are invited to share and provide one another feedback. In this group, clients are encouraged to begin thinking of ways to avoid acting on the red flags that signal the eating disorder urges and to create a plan for how to resist by utilizing healthy coping skills.
Shame and Resiliency Group
In our Shame and Resiliency Group, clients learn how to recognize, name, and understand shame triggers, develop critical awareness about their own shame and triggers, and learn how to reach out to others instead of hiding and isolate in eating disorder behaviors. Clients learn how shame is a universal emotion that can inhibit recovery and how the role of shame is connected to mental health issues including self-esteem, depression, addiction, eating disorders, suicide, self-harm, and violence. In this group, clients also learn how to reach feelings of empathy, connection, power, freedom, and authenticity and how it relates to their healing journey.
Skills Review Group
In this group, clients are given the opportunity to educate their peers about a skill or topic they learned during the week. Each client advises their peers on the skills they recently learned including whether they used the given skills in relation to their recovery from eating disorders and what they would like to learn more about related to the topic. Clients can improve their communication skills, become more confident, and improve their leadership skills. In this group, clients can gain a better understanding and knowledge retention of the skills they learned in relation to their recovery from eating disordered behavior.
Spirituality and Values Group
In our Spirituality and Values Group, clients learn about the holistic view of the human being as a unity of body, soul, and spirit. Clients process the physical dimension, the soul dimension, and the spiritual dimension of themselves and how it relates to their eating disorder recovery. In this group, clients are given the opportunity to connect with their own definition of meaning and value in their lives through discussion, journaling, and processing. Each client identifies their own uniqueness and how to connect to their core selves and embrace who they are.