The Stopping Overshopping Group Program

The Stopping Overshopping Group Program is a comprehensive 12-week experience designed to teach specific skills, tools, and strategies to help you eliminate overshopping. Group coaching offers a powerful, time-tested combination of peer support, encouragement, and feedback under the guidance of a trained professional. The presence of others with the same addiction helps members bear their isolation, failure, guilt, and pain, and greatly reduces their fears of judgment and humiliation. Further, group coaching helps break through the denial of the destructive behavior, leading to awareness rather than avoidance of the problem. The group fosters hope: members share triumphs and disappointments and grow from both. Highly supportive, the group has educational and experiential components and includes homework and goal setting each week.

We offer the Stopping Overshopping Group Program in two formats: telecoaching for people that don’t live in the New York metropolitan area and in-person group therapy for people that do live in the New York metropolitan area.

12-Week Stopping Overshopping Telecoaching Group

The 12-week Stopping Overshopping Telecoaching Group Coaching meets once a week for 12 weeks for 75 minutes on the telephone. The focus is on changing problematic buying behavior, and the program employs a wide array of techniques to achieve this goal. Group members discover triggers, cues, and consequences of their overbuying, learn specific tools, strategies, and techniques to break the cycle of overspending, gain control, and develop mindfulness and increased capacity to use their “wise mind” in making decisions.

Each group member receives a copy of To Buy or Not to Buy: Why We Overshop and How to Stop and the companion Shopping Journals. One of the Journals is for more narrative writing and the other is for on the spot writing and reference. Over the course of the twelve weeks, you track your spending and the relative necessity of each expenditure. You also be writing a money and shopping memoir and constructing a money dialog to help you better understand the roots of the problem and the way those roots manifest themselves in your current behavior.

An important part of the process is formulating specific, achievable, and measurable weekly goals. You also find and utilize the help of a Shopping Support Buddy,  someone from either inside or outside of the group whom you select to be an advocate for you as you work toward changing your buying behavior. Didactic material related to compulsive buying, paper and pencil exercises, and experiential exercises are part of each group session. We address the role of culture, and develop media literacy. Each group member learns how to identify and restructure dysfunctional thoughts, manage stress, resolve conflict and social pressure assertively, and deal with the inevitable lapses and relapses that are a part of recovery.

The group is in email contact during the week in between sessions and after each group meeting, the group gets a debriefing email from Dr. Benson recapping how each group member did with his or her goal, reviewing the most important points that came up during the group,  and previewing the work for the next week.

To be notified when the next telecoaching group is forming, click here.

12-week Stopping Overshopping In-Person Group

The 12-week Stopping Overshopping In-Person Group meets in Manhattan once a week for 12 weeks for 100 minutes. The focus is on changing problematic buying behavior, and the program employs a wide array of techniques to achieve this goal. Group members discover triggers, cues, and consequences of their overbuying, learn specific tools, strategies, and techniques to break the cycle of overspending, gain control, and develop mindfulness and increased capacity to use their “wise mind” in making decisions.

Each group member receives a copy of To Buy or Not to Buy: Why We Overshop and How to Stop and the companion Shopping Journals. One of the Journals is for more narrative writing and the other is for on the spot writing and reference. Over the course of the twelve weeks, you track your spending and the relative necessity of each expenditure. You also be writing a money and shopping memoir and constructing a money dialog to help you better understand the roots of the problem and the way those roots manifest themselves in your current behavior.

An important part of the process is formulating specific, achievable, and measurable weekly goals. You also find and utilize the help of a Shopping Support Buddy, someone from either inside or outside of the group whom you select to be an advocate for you as you work toward changing your buying behavior. Didactic material related to compulsive buying, paper and pencil exercises, and experiential exercises are part of each group session. We address the role of culture, and develop media literacy. Each group member learns how to identify and restructure dysfunctional thoughts, manage stress, resolve conflict and social pressure assertively, and deal with the inevitable lapses and relapses that are a part of recovery.

The group is in email contact during the week in between sessions and after each group meeting, the group gets a debriefing email from Dr. Benson recapping how each group member did with his or her goal, reviewing the most important points that came up during the group,  and previewing the work for the next week. During one of the group meetings, the group takes a short field trip to a local mall to do some “on the spot” work on dealing with urges as they strike.

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