Clinical life skills groups help people to integrate with society and to maintain mental wellbeing. Their primary focus is on enhancement of relationship skills and improvement of psychological or spiritual health. It includes communication skills, decision making and problem solving skills, empathy, cognitive awareness and emotion management. They focus on these primary interests, but often include complimentary skills to address other issues that interfere with it.
Help with life skills groups
We operate a location and referral service and can advise you about life skills and available service providers.
Life skills from the past
Most life skills groups involve adolescents who live in dysfunctional family homes or have transitioned from such a home. In dysfunctional homes, parents maintain poor relationships or misuse alcohol or drugs and are poor role models. Their children adapt to life on their own terms and run into problems at school or university. The maladaptive skills last long after they have left their childhood homes.
Life skills can be stealthy
Competent life skills are taken for granted by most people, but many pick up unhealthy traits in the course of life and remain ignorant about it. Positive life skills can even change for the worse without the person being consciously aware of it. When they do sense it, they tend to underestimate the impact it has. Fortunately, we have the ability to readjust or improve existing life skills and to learn new ones.
Life skills can be changed
Reliable research demonstrates that we can change our life skills at any stage of our lives, due to a neural process known as neuroplasticity. This natural process is built into all of us and enables us to unlearn old habits and behaviours and to replace them with new ones. In mild cases, we can manage this ourselves, but in more complex cases, in may require the services of suitably trained therapists.
Clinical life skills
Life skills basically refer to the development and maintenance of mental skills only, but physical health and environmental problems sometimes hamper the acquisition of proper mental skills. There are also personal traits that are not classified as skills, but can affect a person’s life skills. To function properly, life skills groups often include solutions for these secondary problems in their skills portfolios.
Apart from social and mental improvements, well managed life skills and associated elements can also improve financial and employment stability, entrepreneurial skills and many other livelihood and lifestyle elements.
Remedied life skills improve relationships within families started by adults who were previously neglected or abused children. With properly adjusted life skills, their own subsequent family homes function better, due to improved harmony in the family unit.
People with good life skills are less inclined to indulge in risky behaviour or to undermine their health with alcohol and drugs. They have fewer accidents, sustain fewer injuries and are implicated in fewer legal disputes.
Life skills groups are serviced by voluntary local community groups, school and university student support services, religious or church groups, spiritual or meditation groups, government institutions, independent psychologists, and rehabilitation centres. Life skills group therapy is also incorporated in many treatment programs designed for the treatment of behaviour, emotional and substance abuse disorders.
Apart from clinical therapy, there are numerous skills courses being offered worldwide. Many of these are commercial ventures that exploit the term “life skills training” to sell practical training courses ranging from cooking to car repairs. They do not provide professional social integration or psychological recovery services.
There are not many suburban groups that specialise in restoring life skills, so it may be hard to find one. However, one should be able to obtain references and advice from public social security services or from other advisory services that specialise in psychotherapeutic location and referral services.
Call us for advice
Anybody can sense when something is wrong – if you think you need advice about life skills, contact us. We have the outreach, network resources and empathy to help you with discreet information and referrals to mental health providers that comply with your needs.
Disclaimer: Information about health issues provided on public platforms is generalised for large audiences. Individuals are required to obtain personal advice for their specific circumstances from a qualified health professional.