Inspiring Connections Through Collage

The Inspiring Connections Through Collage group therapy sessions are focused on supporting your personal growth, healing, and/or self-nourishment within the guidance, safeness, and support of a welcoming group therapy setting. 

This group utilizes collage-making and reflective practices, group discussion and sharing, and skills in mindfulness and self-compassion as its structure. This group has a therapy emphasis on practicing and learning to bring kind curiosity to your feelings and experiences, and to honour your being and experiences in a befriending, compassionate kind of way. 

Who Is This Group For?

Individuals participate in this group for a variety of meaningful, personal reasons that relate to wanting to support personal growth, healing, and/or self-nourishment within the guidance, safeness, and support of a welcoming and creative group therapy setting. 

In this group, there is a skillful and on-going focus on the creative use of images and imagination to support personal work, which for some/many participants provides “another way in” to self-expression, self-discovery, and to accessing one’s own inner knowing and wisdom. 

Although taught less formally and systematically in this group (compared, for example, to the Mindful Compassion Group Therapy Program), this group also has a fundamental emphasis on you, as a participant, cultivating the skills of befriending yourself—cultivating the skills of meeting yourself and all that is there (all that is here) in ways that are honouring, that reflect friendship, kindness, caring, and that reflect whatever and all that is helpful. 

Individuals who participate in this group often do so with the desire to seek intentional refuge from the regular day-to-day things, to carve out regular time and space to really tune into and listen to themselves in a kind, curious, befriending way, and to also connect with other caring individuals who also desire these same kinds of things.

Requirements

To participate in these sessions, individuals need to have at least a moderate ability to safely tolerate challenging emotions and/or life experiences that may arise, as well as to have at least a moderate ability via social skills and level of functioning to contribute to creating a supportive environment for themselves and for other participants. 

Participants also have to want to participate in the group. To help support an engaged, positive individual and group process, the group therapy program has to be something that is truly speaking to participants at this time in their lives and be something that they earnestly want to participate in.

It is also preferable that individuals have in place support for themselves outside of the group. Although not required, this could include a therapist they may talk to in individual therapy to process more extensively any reflections that come up. 

Collages by Tracy Riley.