Group Counseling

Stressed out, racing thoughts, socially anxious? These groups provide skills focused on managing the physiological symptoms of anxiety, challenging anxious thoughts, and coping with anxiety.

• Tuesdays, 5:30pm - 7:00 pm
• Thursdays, 12:30pm - 2pm

This group is a confidential, in person space for undergraduate Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) students. This group is ideal for exploring the challenges and experiences that come with our racial identities, as well as the experience of attending a predominantly white institution.  With the support of Pitt counselors (who are also BIPOC), the group provides an opportunity to find validation, new perspectives, motivation, and acceptance among BIPOC peers.   We’ll also take some time to focus on general wellness and staying emotionally healthy during college and beyond.

• Tuesdays, 11:00am - 12:30pm

For those who have lost family members or other loved ones, this group offers a space to share experiences of loss and receive support.

• Wednesdays, 12:30 - 2:00pm

This group will provide students with skills for managing their emotions. Students struggling with anger, frustration, episodic depression, anxiety/irritability, stress and feelings of emptiness would benefit from this group. The group will be a combination of skills building and discussing how those skills have been effective towards their emotion regulation. Three categories of skills will be taught:

• Mindfulness: designed to teach a student how to focus their mind and attention.
• Distress tolerance: centered on accepting the current situation and finding ways to survive and tolerate the moment without engaging in problematic behaviors
• Emotion regulation: learning to identify and label current emotions, identifying obstacles to changing emotions, reducing emotional reactivity, increasing positive emotions, and changing emotions.

• Mondays, 3:30-5pm

Executive Skills functioning group is a group designed for students with diagnosed ADHD and/or struggling in any of the 11 executive skill domains: task initiation, prioritization, time-management, response inhibition, emotional control, flexibility, goal-directed persistence, sustained attention, organization, working memory and metacognition. This group is psychoeducational and skill building.

• Thursdays, 5:00pm - 6:30pm

How much is too much?  Are work, school, or relationships impacted by a habit or routine? Is there a behavior or activity in your life that is out of balance?

“Finding a Balance” focuses on creating a supportive, affirming atmosphere where participants can learn how to manage the level of behaviors that may have become too dominant in their lives. These behaviors include, but are not limited to: social media use, video gaming, smoking, substance use, shopping, gambling, and other behaviors that start to feel a bit overwhelming.

This group will not ask you to stop these behaviors, but rather, try to empower you to take back control so that you can decide how much you want to continue to engage in the behavior.

• Thursdays, 3:00pm - 4:00pm

For only graduate students, this group is ideal for exploring personal, academic, and practical challenges that can affect your work in graduate school.

• Fridays, 9:30am - 11:00am

The Making Friends with Yourself group is based on the mindful self-compassion program and will teach students how to become their best ally and be able to treat themselves as they might naturally treat others who go through the usual ups and downs of life. The group will focus on building and maintaining self-confidence, increasing internal resilience, addressing self-criticism and self-hate, identifying obstacles to self-compassion, becoming more mindful of our emotions and needs, and learning how to motivate ourselves using values and encouragement.

• Wednesdays, 3:30 - 5:00pm

Pieces of the Puzzle is a group based on Internal Family Systems (IFS) theory and parts work. This will teach students to effectively notice and describe their internal environment, create internal safe spaces, and meet with parts of themselves that are neglected, avoided, ignored, or disliked. Students will find methods to understand their values, purpose, and needs, allowing them to offer all parts of themselves compassion through a series of guided practice activities and group discussions. The aim of this group is to teach students to turn towards all parts of themselves rather than try to escape those parts, by building self-awareness, increasing clarity, and relating to themselves with kindness and curiosity.

• Fridays, 3:30pm - 5:00pm

This group provides a safe place for students who have experienced any type of sexual abuse or assault to move closer to healing. This group is inclusive of all gender identities.

• Mondays, 12:30-2pm

The primary focus of this group is to provide education and support to any Pitt student who has experienced trauma (i.e. interpersonal dating abuse/emotional abuse/survived natural disasters/crime) to increase empowerment and learn coping skills about the healing process.  All gender identities are welcome to join.

• Thursdays, 9:30 -  11:00am

This group can be a valuable way for members to learn about how they experience others and how others experience them. Such experiences can enhance members’ abilities to create and sustain satisfying relationships and manage the variety of challenges that often arise in relationships, whether they be with friends, classmates, co-workers, supervisors, partners, or family members.

• Women's USO: Wednesdays, 11:00am - 12:30pm
• Men's USO: Tuesdays, 12:30pm - 2:00pm