Stopping Overshopping Group Telephone Coaching Program

This group telephone coaching program is a comprehensive experience that provides you with the skills, tools and strategies to help you stop overshopping.

The program is delivered in two parts, although you are free to sign up for Part I only. Part I is a 5-week section that helps you to take your first important steps toward stopping overshopping. Part II is a 7-week section that introduces entirely new material and builds on the skills, tools, and strategies that you learned in Part I.

This powerful coaching group offers a time-tested combination of peer support, encouragement, and feedback under the guidance of a nationally recognized expert in this problem to help you conquer the urge to overshop. The presence and support of others who share your challenge helps to transform isolation to hope, and offers the encouragement each group member needs to stay motivated and create healthy change. Group coaching also helps break through the wall of denial of this self-destructive behavior, leading to awareness and positive action rather than avoidance. The group fosters hope: members share triumphs and disappointments and grow from both.

During the course of the five weeks of Part I, you begin to take your first important steps to :

• Free yourself to make decisions without the burdens of old baggage by discovering why you overshop and how it all began.
• Successfully resist the impulse to buy things you don't need and won't use by identifying your shopping triggers.
• Protect your resources, your livelihood, and your relationships by looking closely at what your habit is costing you.
• Learn what you truly want and need, and have money available for those things by reducing unnecessary spending.
• Develop the habit of spending on what matters most so that there's money for savings and any emergencies that might arise.
• Make better and more informed choices about using credit so that you enrich yourself, rather than a credit card company.
• Deal effectively with the new opportunities and choices that emerge by learning what to expect as you stop overshopping.

During the course of the seven weeks of Part II, you continue the journey and:

• Hand tailor constructive ways to meet your authentic underlying needs so your life is enhanced, not eroded.
• Discover the specific pulls of major shopping venues and forms of social pressure so that you can more mindfully resist them
• Create an effective way to plan your purchases when you do need to shop so that you stay grounded and in control.
• Become fluent in the language of your body and your heart so you can enlist then effectively when the urge to splurge strikes.
• Recognize your automatic, distorted thinking and learn to restructure it so that you don't think that overshopping is a solution.
• Access your spiritual needs and hungers and formulate a related action plan to reconnect with wonder, hope and gratitude.
• Troubleshoot about lapse, relapse, and upcoming high risk situations so that you can handle them effectively when they occur.

Format

Each session is a 75 minute group telephone call.

Each session will be recorded. If you miss one or want to listen to one again, you'll be able to download that session. Access to recordings will be password protected to ensure privacy and confidentiality.

Structure

Please plan to attend each session and be on the line for the entire call. (If you are unable to be on one of the calls, please notify me in advance.)

This interactive, focused, and supportive group is a weave of new knowledge and new experiences. Each meeting you'll be getting new material to work with and learn from. You'll also be setting a person goal. You may be pleasantly surprised to find out how much you're actually enjoying these supportive assignments and setting your goals!

In preparation for each session, you'll be reading specific materials and completing important written exercises. You'll need to set aside about 30-45 minutes a day in a quiet place to make the most of them.

During each call, we'll begin with a check-in from each group member so that the whole group has a sense of where each member is in his or her process. We'll discuss the reading and the exercises so that you'll reinforce what you've learned and be able to apply it to the critical moment. I'll encourage you to share both your difficulties and your successes, to give your journey of self-discovery a forward thrust and allow others in the group to benefit. Then, I'll introduce the new material for the next session that you're going to receive so you're prepared to get the most out of it and to take your next steps. At the end of the session, you'll set a personal goal to work on until the next session as a way of staying focused on the prize of stopping overshopping.

Registration

Our current group is full. Be the first to be invited to the free preview telegroup and then to be notified when our fall group is offered!

Limited to 6 participants, these groups are led by April Lane Benson, Ph.D., editor of I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self, author of To Buy or Not to Buy:Why We Overshop and How to Stop (forthcoming, December, 2008)