Stopping Overshopping Group Telephone Coaching Program
Our next coaching group program begins on March 18, 2010. It's a comprehensive experience that provides you with the skills, tools and strategies to help you stop overshopping.
This powerful 12-week 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.
Several years of daily internet shopping had me feeling distressed and out of control. Finding April and completing her telephone support group quickly got me off the hook. The systematic and comprehensive approach really "gets" the overshopping compulsion. It also—and very helpfully—tracks the stages in the struggle to overcome that compulsion. The writing and exercises addressed my habit at every level: emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual.
It's now two years since I started my work with you. I still can't believe what a difference it's made in my life! I remember how much resistance I felt to giving up shopping online every day and also how hopeless I felt about getting a grip on it. Not only do I feel over that, and in control on the internet, but I feel happier with all aspects of my life. Again, I can't thank you enough for taking shopping compulsion seriously and developing such spot-on methods to overcome it.
J. E., Los Angeles
During the course of the first five weeks, 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 last seven weeks, 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 have access to the playback for that session.
I have really benefited from the course. It was the push I needed to quit the insanity . I truly am not overshopping and have returned to my real self or getting there, anyway. It's a process. I had my cleaning lady help clean out all my closets and cupboards etc, my fiance (yes, I am now engaged!) helped me sell all my "insane -buying" junk jewelry (what I call it) to three different jewelers, the garage got cleaned out of more of the "crap" I bought, and I do mean crap. I feel clean and new. I want to thank you and the entire group for everything.
C.A.
Culver City, California
Structure
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 personal 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. If you can't commit to taking the time to doing the reading and the written work, it's better to wait to join the group until you have the time you need to devote to it.
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. If you can't commit to taking the time to doing the reading and the written work, it's better to wait to join the group until you have the time you need to devote to it.
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. We'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.
Date and Time
Our group sessions are 75 minutes long and are scheduled for 9:00 p.m. EDT on Thursday evenings beginning March 18. All sessions will be recorded so that if you need to miss one, you'll have access to the playback.
The dates are:
- March 18, 25
- April 1, 8, 15, 22, 29
- May 6, 13, 20, 27
- June 3
Course Fee
The course fee includes the 12 sessions, one copy of To Buy or Not to Buy: Why We Overshop and How to Stop and one copy of the Shopping Journals. If you already own the book, use coupon code "book." If you already own book and the Journals, use coupon code "bookjournals" and your course fee will be adjusted accordingly. You must press the "apply" button in order for the discount to take effect.
Course Fee: $1250.00
Registration
Once you've registered for the group, you will receive via email a short Personal History Questionnaire, a demographic data form, a Memorandum of Understanding, two brief compulsive buying assessments, and a 2-week purchasing recall. When you've completed them and submitted them, Dr. Benson or Dr. Weinberger-Litman will contact you to set up a 15-minute individual intake telephone call.
This group is 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 and Sarah Weinberger-Litman, Ph.D. Dr. Weinberger-Litman has done a multi-site study of compulsive buying, compulsive eating, and meaning in life and is part of the research team that will be testing the efficacy of the Stopping Overshopping model.
Everything is going well. The shopping for me is definitely better than it has ever been. I still think about making small goals and adhering to them. I also think about the amount of time in between my shopping trips. Now I know how to identify an urge when it strikes. Before I never even contemplated my urges, I just went for it, in the past. I continually remind myself that things do not make me happy nor do they serve a whole lot of purpose other than keeping me from saving money.
S.G.
Houston, Texas
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