Women's Support Group

The work

For the things you stopped mentioning at dinner

Most women who come to this group are not in crisis on the outside. They are working, cooking, showing up, answering messages on time. The heavy thing is carried quietly, and it has usually been carried quietly for a long time. The group exists so that it can be set down in front of people who already know the weight of it.

You do not have to be falling apart to belong here. You only have to be tired of holding it on your own.

What the room holds

Trauma, loss, illness, and the caring that never ends

Trauma that was never named as trauma, because it happened slowly or because everyone around you called it normal. The death of someone you loved, whether that was last month or eleven years ago. A diagnosis, yours or someone else's, and the way it quietly rearranges an entire life. Caring for a person who is not going to get better. The end of a marriage. The loss of a version of yourself you had not finished being.

Grief keeps no schedule and does not care that everyone else has moved on. Neither does this group.

How it runs

Online and in person, both of them real

The group meets in person in a room kept quiet on purpose, and online for the women who are far away, unwell, or simply not able to leave the house that week. The online room is not the lesser version of this. Some of the most honest conversations we have had happened through a screen, at a kitchen table, after the rest of the house went to bed.

What a session is like

Nobody is made to perform

You are not put on the spot. You can come and say nothing for the first three meetings, and women do exactly that. There is no round of introductions where you summarise the worst thing that ever happened to you for a room of strangers. When you are ready to speak, the room is already yours.

Groups are kept small so that everyone who wants time actually gets it.

Being straight with you

What this is not

This is a support group led by a holistic life coach. It is not group psychotherapy and it does not replace mental health treatment. If what you are carrying needs a clinician, I will say so plainly and help you think about where to go next. Hearing the truth about that is part of the care, not a failure of it.

What you get

• Meets online and in person
• Trauma, bereavement, illness and caregiving
• Small groups, with no obligation to speak
• Led by Debbie Simon, holistic life coach
• What is said in the room stays in the room
• A private conversation before you ever join a group