Curriculum Overview
Restore Small Groups offers several different curricula to be used within the small group process.
Each curriculum uniquely prepares you to enter into a healing community where you can find relief from your struggles, and step into real change in areas where you have been stuck. The purpose of small groups is to build authentic relationships while finding hope despite loneliness, depression, substance abuse, relationship issues, anxiety or anything holding you back from living in freedom.
Journey to Freedom
Journey to Freedom is an eight-week group led by trained facilitators, offering a safe and encouraging place for participants to step out of contemplating change and into real action. With honest dialogue directed towards laying a foundation for change, Journey to Freedom creates a common language so that all can share without fear of judgment.
This foundational group is the heart of Restore Small Groups’ program. It is the recommended curriculum for starting your own small group program through a partnership with Restore. Individuals can also purchase this as a stand-alone book to be read for personal growth.
What does Journey to Freedom address?
Understanding the true nature of hope
Recognizing and responding in a healthy way to your feelings
Silencing the inner critic, learning self-love and overcoming toxic shame
Identifying healthy relationships
Grieving unresolved and unspoken grief
Healing the past and seeing new possibilities for the future
Finding connection and universality in the human experience
Creating a Plan of Change to help move forward to next steps
Journey of Transformation
Journey of Transformation is an 8 week course designed to take participants even deeper into their story and to a place of sustainable life change. It is a contemplative journey to help you understand your personal story and inner life more fully and compassionately. It will guide you through the stages needed for internal transformation, and allow you to find your own path toward emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being. In Journey of Transformation you will learn about:
Understanding the true nature of transformation
Developing a healthy paradigm
Identifying toxic messages that control behavior
Breaking the habit of being yourself
Letting go of fear, shame, insecurity, and doubt
Making decisions between stimulus and response
How past failure controls our thoughts about the future
Finding your North Star
Creating the life you've always wanted
Journey to a New Beginning After a Loss: Freedom from the Pain of Grief and Disappointment
Journey to a New Beginning After Loss is an eight-week group led by trained facilitators to address the constant but often unacknowledged losses of our lives. Many grief groups address the obvious losses in life like the death of a loved one or a divorce. But we experience so many other kinds of losses in life and need a safe space to process those too. Many of us have lost tangible things like a job, financial security, a beloved pet, friendships, a home, a community, or our children as they grow and become adults. We have all lost intangible things as well like our dreams and expectations, our hopes, our innocence, trust, security, self-image or self-worth. Where do we go to process these kinds of losses? This eight-week group offers a caring place to work through the grief of any major life change. In this safe, confidential environment you can:
Openly process the sadness, anger and loneliness associated with loss both past and present
Identify losses that have accumulated throughout the years and need resolution
Work through the stages of grief
Find comfort with others who are processing loss
Understand what forgiveness and acceptance truly mean and what they look like for you
Journey to Living with Courage: Freedom from Fear
Journey to Living with Courage is an eight-week group led by trained facilitators to address both the daily fears of life as well as unprocessed fears that may be causing anxiety in everyday life. Fear is a part of everyone’s story. In this group, you will work to locate the root of your fears, acknowledge them and find healthier ways to face them in daily life. Find the support you need to identify your fear triggers, achieve dreams once stifled by perfectionism, work through co-dependent behaviors, and move forward from the pain caused by abandonment and rejection. In this group you can:
Learn how to identify healthy versus life-controlling fear
Develop the tools to identify and overcome rage and anxiety
Be encouraged to live boldly in the light of who you truly are
Build a life of faith, surrender, passion and courage
Journey to Healthy Living: Freedom from Body Image and Food Issues
Journey to Healthy Living is an eight-week group led by trained facilitators to address struggles with body image and your relationship with your physical health. Food is necessary to our survival, but many of us have developed an unhealthy relationship to it. Whether you struggle with overeating, lack of eating, food attraction or aversion, poor nutritional planning, confusion with food choices, or difficulties with self-care, this group will help you to contemplate, identify and discuss your unique needs. Additionally, we associate food, our body image, and our physical activity, often struggling with critical messages about how we should be rather than identifying what is a healthy routine for us. In this group, you can:
Experience a safe place to process body struggles and find new healthy habits
Understand the origins of your relationship to food and how that impacts your current life
Contemplate what a healthy body looks and feels like for you
Appreciate the physical body that is not separate from, but very much a part of your spiritual and emotional identity
Journey to a Life of Significance: Freedom from Low Self-Esteem
Journey to a Life of Significance is an eight-week group led by trained facilitators that encourages honest dialogue around improving self-esteem and acknowledging feelings of worthlessness, disappointment, and brokenness. We have all experienced toxic shame somewhere on our journeys. Perhaps we heard and experienced at home, or we may have first encountered it at school, church, in our neighborhood, in sports or other activities. Toxic shame is the experience of feeling humiliated, unsafe, teased, put down, ignored, manipulated or lesser-than. It can become a pattern in our lives that we have trouble recognizing. This group offers emotional healing through affirmation and encouragement. Discover your self-worth while developing a more positive self-image by:
Redefining who you are and uncovering the various faces of low self-worth
Identifying the special gifts, talents, and potential that are unique to you as an individual
Building on the foundations of self-worth to strengthen your perspective and identify the origin of negative thinking and messages