Experiencing rapidly fluctuating and intense emotions can have a significant impact on a person’s wellbeing, relationships, and quality of life.

The Managing Emotions Programme offers easy access to psycho-educational courses, designed to equip people with a range of tools and skills to enable them to manage their emotions more effectively. 

The Managing Emotions Programme is a ‘co-designed and co-delivered service'. This means that the team is made up of a mixture of clinicians and people with lived experiences of emotional difficulties, including personality disorders. 

You don’t need to have a diagnosis to be able to access our courses, but you do need to be referred to us through your GP. 

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Currently, most of our courses are run online on Microsoft Teams but there are some options for face to face courses. We also offer a separate course for carers of people having difficulty managing intense emotions. Information about this course and how to access it can be found below.

Carers can book directly onto this course by filling in this self-referral form. 

If you would like to know more about our courses or have any specific worries or questions please contact us: managingemotions@sabp.nhs.uk

Our courses

Our courses aim to increase your understanding and awareness of why we have emotions, and how they can affect us. We also teach you healthy coping strategies and tools to be able to feel more in control of your emotions. Each course is accompanied by its own workbook, for use during the course and for you to continue to refer back to after the course has finished.

We offer three different courses, pitched at different levels according to need, as well as a course for carers. Please see a summary of each course below. 

You do not need to complete all 3 courses in order, but you can if you would like to. Your referrer will help you decide which course would be best for you.

Duration: 1 session lasting 2.5 hours

About this course: We will discuss why we have emotions, their function and when it feels difficult to manage. We will introduce you to some basic coping skills.

This course is ideal for anyone who is new to psycho-education, or someone who is not sure if the Managing Emotions Programme is right for them and would like to ‘have a try’.

Duration: 4 sessions (one session per week) each lasting 2 hours

In this course we help you to understand emotions in greater depth, looking at their different components and levels of intensity. You will also learn strategies that may help you manage your emotions in different situations.

This course may be for you if you have already completed course one and are ready for more, or if you feel ready to commit to the four sessions. Some of the material is similar to that in course one.

Duration: 8 sessions (one session per week) each lasting 2 hours

This is our most in-depth course. We aim to help you gain a greater awareness of what triggers intense emotions for you, as well as your emotional and behavioural responses to challenging situations.

We will teach you skills that will enable and empower you to start practising regulating your emotional responses.

The session's content covers:

  • raising emotional awareness
  • identifying values and goals setting
  • recognising and challenging unhelpful thinking patterns
  • and a range of other emotional regulation coping skills

There are also elements of optional independent learning activities in between sessions that use the workbook. Mutual support from other group members is an important component of the course. 

This course may be right for you if you have already done the other two courses and are ready to develop your emotional regulation skills further.

This course is also appropriate for people who have already had some therapeutic intervention or experience of psycho-education in the past, and for people who are already, or have recently been, under the care of mental health services and are looking for a refresher or top-up of other interventions.

Duration: 4 sessions (one session per week) each lasting 2 hours (session one is 2.5 hours)

This course suggests strategies to help carers cope and manage their own wellbeing as well as better understand the person they care for. The sessions focus on understanding personality disorders and emotional dysregulation, self-harm and suicide, positive risk-taking and developing helpful coping skills.

The Carers course has been co-developed and is co-delivered by carers and people with lived experience of mental health difficulties.

This course is suitable for carers supporting anyone age 16 or over with emotional regulation difficulties. It may also be useful for those carers who are supporting a younger age group, but please be aware that it will not be able to address specific needs of younger age groups or the needs of other specific mental health conditions.

This course is accessible to anyone registered with a GP in Surrey or North East Hampshire. If someone is interested in attending but is unsure whether the course is appropriate, please contact the MEP team and we will be happy to talk it through with you. This course is self-referral - carers can register their interest by completing this short form or by emailing managingemotions@sabp.nhs.uk

How to access the courses

Courses 1/2/3

These courses are accessible across Surrey and NE Hampshire. Your GP surgery needs to be linked with a GPimhs/MHICS service. Not all areas are currently covered by GPimhs/MHICS services, please check with your GP or mental health provider if this is accessible in your area. There is a planned expansion to cover all of the Surrey and NE Hampshire area in the near future.

Further Information

If you would like to know any more about the course or have any questions please email: managingemotions@sabp.nhs.uk.

Alternatively, you can call us.

If you are registered with a GP in Surrey, please call: 07824 355106.

If you are registered with a GP in North East Hampshire and Surrey Heath, please call: 07824 355109.

Sharing of data

The Managing Emotions Programme team collect personal data required to ensure people receive the support they need. For more information about how data is held please go to our information sharing page.