We run in-person and remote groups for teenagers, young adults, adults, and seniors.

Westchester Group Therapy prioritizes groups for adolescents , as we know that teenagers often communicate best in a room with their peers, rather than alone with adults. We are eager to support other clinicians by supplementing their individual and family treatment through group intervention. Believing that the guided group therapy approach affirms teenagers’ self esteem and social competencies, we encourage group cohesion and emotionally validating interpersonal interactions at every session. Drawing from DBT and CBT training, we enable teen participants to develop and practice new strategies and skills to manage stress and interpersonal conflict, to improve social skills, stabilize mood difficulties, and regulate behavioral outbursts with family and peers. Applying our orientation toward attachment and family systems, we help young people increase their emotional vocabulary, take social risks, and increase authentic empathetic reactions toward one another and their families and communities. Group members also use our sessions to process recent conflicts and stressors and to obtain peer feedback on problem solving responses to their home and school challenges. In a nutshell, our teen groups provide supportive environments to process shared life challenges and adversity. We offer a specialized group tailored for clients with a sibling with special needs, developmental delays or significant medical difficulties. Other groups serve teenagers living through parental separation and divorce. We also form groups for adolescents processing and healing from bereavement at the loss of close family members. Our groups are usually time limited at eight to twelve weeks while some groups benefit from a “maintenance” phase to continue relationships established through their initial group experience. 

Themes for our adolescent groups include:

- Social Skills Groups (ages 12-15)

Teens ages 13-16 struggling to build a strong peer group will obtain new skills for managing social anxiety, provide one another with support and enjoy positive social experiences. Session will include guided social activities, ice breakers, skill development, and guided open discussions. 

- Emotion Regulation Groups (ages 15-17)

Young people face lots of stressors that can lead to emotional outbursts and feelings of being out of control.  These feelings and the behaviors that come from them can cause problems with friends, family members and others in their lives. Emotion regulation groups allow participants to learn adaptive skills for managing emotional triggers and get support and encouragement around common triggers.

- Social Skills for Teenagers on the Spectrum (14-17)

This group allows teenagers on the spectrum to experience positive social encounters and share with one another their particular dilemmas. Group can guide teenagers to offer one another feedback and emotional support. 

- Well-Sibling Groups  (Ages vary depending on need)

This group is for teenagers with a sibling who has special needs, medical difficulties, and developmental delays. This group allows these "well children" with high need siblings to support one another, validate the particular challenges that they experience, and encourage  one another's self awareness and capacity to express their own emotional realities and needs.

Young adults go through an array of rapid life changes, as they move away from their parents’ and families’ orbits, adapt to the excitement and challenges of living on college campuses, interview for and adjust to new jobs, and navigate the complex terrain of dating and socializing as adults. They embark on major shifts in their identity formation in all areas as they contemplate greater personal, financial and emotional independence from their families of origin. Our groups aim to support young adults facing these major life transitions. We organize our young adult groups around shared experiences, while also encouraging participants to build their social skills and expand their perspective by listening to the challenges others may face that are different from their own. Believing that young adults have during their adolescence established various internal resources to manage stress and overcome hurdles, we approach young adult group therapy with the theme that adulthood requires individuals to become more comfortable with and adept at “taking the wheel” themselves for their lives: building awareness of their own intuitions, identifying their own internal cues about decision-making and risk-taking, and flexibly learning new skills and habits to encourage new growth and greater wellbeing. We design our young adult group sessions so that members feel empowered to share their stories and concerns and exchange new perspectives, validation and support, in a manner that only the peer group at this life stage can offer.  

Groups for Young Adults include:

- Launching

Some young people struggle to develop plans and social networks once high school winds down. This group helps to create shared motivation, encourage social risk taking, and improve skills for taking on and managing new and unpredictable life challenges.

-Navigating Dating

Young people in this group will share challenges and fears, obtain ideas about how to manage pressures around dating and balancing other personal priorities, and process stressors, anxieties, and mood reactions to this life stage.

We guide our adult groups not only to offer support and empathy but also to provide authentic and meaningful insights to participants about where individuals’ frequently experienced thoughts and actions, preconceived beliefs, or other patterned reactions may be impeding personal progress and processing. Creating a group that can provide honest, surprising, and at times challenging responsiveness to group members requires consistency, shared expectations, and a foundation of warmth, mutual concern, and deeply felt connection. We believe that the group can be transformative for individuals whose therapy may feel stuck or repetitious, as members may find themselves willing to take risks in groups in new and unexpected ways. Our adult groups not only offer individuals ideas and skills for new ways to respond to current stressors and distress but also ask participants to consider changing long-standing habits in their management of the difficulties they face.

Besides aiming for personal development for our group members, our groups widen the communities of these members, bringing together individuals from outside individuals’ familiar circles to process similar challenging experiences. Group themes include new parenting challenges, parenting challenging or dysregulated school-age children, launching young adults, coping with divorce, and support around bereavement and aging. As with our teenage groups, our adult groups are time limited, and after the group session series concludes, some groups may continue to meet on a less frequent basis to maintain connection and continue the benefits of what members obtained during the active group session. 

Topics for adult groups include bereavement, relationship stressors, parenting support, aging, and managing separation and divorce.