Female Identifying CPTSD Survivors Group
This is a long-term process Support Group for women. CPTSD comes in many forms, including emotional, physical, sexual and psychological trauma. The effects on emotion regulation, interpersonal relationships, and self worth will be addressed. This group will allow survivors to share their trauma history and recovery experiences and provide support for their recovery process. It will also allow individuals to try new and more adaptive coping skills.
Female Identifying Sexual Abuse Survivors Group (currently full)
This is a long-term process Support Group for women. This group will allow survivors to share their trauma history and recovery experiences and provide support for their recovery process. It will also allow individuals to try new and more adaptive coping skills. This group is targeted for sexual abuse, incest, assault, and rape issues.
Male Identifying Sexual Abuse Survivors Group (currently full)
This is a long-term support group for men. This group will allow survivors to share their trauma stories and recovery experiences and provide support for their recovery process. It will also allow individuals to try new and more adaptive coping skills. This group is targeted for sexual abuse, incest, assault, and rape issues.
Benefits of Group:
- Creating a Community- you are not alone! A sense of belonging.
- Providing Hope, providing catharsis
- Learning other ways to cope with challenging situations (i.e. communication skills, social anxiety, managing triggers, etc.).
- Interpersonal input/feedback
- Corrective experiences
- A way to lessen the shame that survivors carry
- Restore trust in others
- Being exposed to other perspectives
- Being able to help support others can improve self-esteem, as well as the survivors, own abilities to be better able to cope with their own trauma.
Potential Group Goals:
- Sharing and working through the sexual abuse trauma. Survivors telling their stories and being witnessed is an incredibly powerful experience.
- Having each group member feel understood, seen, heard, and believed.
- Each member will have unique personal, behavioral, emotional, and spiritual goals in relation to trauma recovery.
- Survivor is able to mourn what was lost.
- Survivor is no longer keeping secrets.
- Survivor can find ways to help calm their nervous system down.
- Survivor is able to feel like the past is in the past.
- Survivor is able to stay in their Window of Tolerance when something from the past gets triggered.
- Survivor is able to live in the present moment and engage in life with people around them.
- Survivor is able to be more present in their body.
- Survivor is able to look at reparenting the younger parts of themselves with compassion.
- Survivor is able to set healthy boundaries.
Group Rules:
- Must have a tone of respect and tolerance for different perspectives.
- Every member is allowed to attend 2-3 groups to see if it is a good fit. Once the potential group member decides the group is a good fit and wants to continue, we ask each member to make a commitment to attend the therapy group for a minimum of 6 months. We ask for a 6-month commitment because it takes time to build trust and rapport.
- Consistency in a trauma group is imperative. If the group member is committing to the group, we ask that they try to be there as often as possible. We know that things happen once in a while (i.e. being sick or taking a vacation), but being committed to a trauma group is a crucial part of doing their part to making the group succeed. Some of our groups meet weekly, some meet every other week. Each group is 80 minutes.
- Importance of confidentiality. What is said in group must remain in the group. Therefore, we ask that all members maintain confidentiality of identifying information of the other group members.
- We do not force anyone to talk about the sexual abuse details. Our therapists are more than equipped to deal with that if they are comfortable. However, the group is more about how the sexual abuse history has impacted their adult life now (i.e. trust issues, triggers with sex, relationship with the perpetrator, etc.).
- Understanding that the group is closed once we have 5 members. If a member graduates and leaves the group for whatever reason, we bring in a new member. We allow time for the group to grieve the member who left and then prepare them for a new person to join the group.
