“I said no twice,” Carmen Mbeki says. “Group things are not for me. I don’t share.” She attended all twelve.

The fortnightly group ran with the same nine people throughout. Nobody was weighed in front of anybody. Most of the time was spent on what had gone badly.

What changed at review

Maintenance is its own phase with its own skills, and the team treats it as harder than the losing phase rather than as a victory lap.

An open group restarts every week. A closed group gets to week six and starts telling the truth.

Tomas Ferreira, clinical psychology

The first twelve weeks

The programme front-loads almost nothing. The first phase changes two things and no more, which most people find insulting for about three weeks and survivable after that.

She trained as a peer facilitator in the autumn. “You don’t have to share. You just have to turn up nine times.”

Contributing writer

Tomas Ferreira

A demonstration byline created for this prototype. Not a real writer, and not a clinician.

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