A graduate once described their experience on one of our courses as “like therapy on steroids.” Whilst our work isn’t therapy, it does share some clear parallels amongst its significant differences. 

As a start, our courses are a powerful combination of group work, where people sit in a circle and talk, complimented with one-to-one tutorial sessions. Both are spaces that enable healing in some shape or form: “to be healed is to be seen and heard” is a principle we share early on in our courses.

Yet the way we move toward that goal at Foundation for Change (FfC) is significantly different from traditional psychotherapy. For this reason, we describe our courses as therapeutic, but not therapy. 

Now, the range of psychotherapeutic modalities is vast, with currently over 40 distinct modalities registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, and many more hybrid models in existence. This piece is not intended to position one approach over another, but to compare to deepen understanding of the FfC approach.

Some traditional therapies include elements of psychoeducation - helping people understand diagnoses, patterns, and emotional processes in ways that normalise experience and reduce stigma. This is a crucial part of our courses too. Alongside learning about diagnoses and labels, however, people also explore much more: about society, inequality and the mechanics of power, about learning and thinking, about group dynamics. In this sense, our scope is broader and more systemic in emphasis than the ground typically covered in traditional therapy.

Broadly speaking, therapy tends to rely on the idea that the person brings the raw data of their life, and the therapist provides the structure, challenge, and perspective to help turn this into change. In this sense, we share something important with therapy. Where we differ is how we use education to create this transformation. At FfC, learning itself is the tool for change. At various points on our courses, we teach people the theories and concepts that underpin therapeutic frameworks—such as Gestalt or Solution-Focused Brief Therapy—rather than doing the therapy to them.

This matters. Being “done to” can unintentionally reinforce a power imbalance: the familiar Transactional Analysis dynamic of “I’m OK” (therapist), “You’re not OK” (client). Instead, we work from an “I’m OK, You’re OK” position, one of the core principles of our approach.

The process is enlightening and empowering. Many people recognise the techniques they themselves experienced during their own process of therapy, which demystifies the work. It can feel as though they’re being let into a secret, sometimes elite world, with an underlying message of: “I’m important enough to be taught this.”

We bring our understanding of TA into all we do, aiming to ensure parity. This “I’m OK, You’re OK” stance is deeply refreshing for people in contrast to their experiences of therapy and treatment. Facilitators check in and check out alongside participants - a practice often absent in more traditional approaches - and share aspects of their own lived experience in a deliberate, boundaried way. The intention is not self-disclosure for its own sake, but to communicate something essential: we all struggle in our own ways.

As one graduate put it when asked what felt different about FfC compared to other treatment models:

“The way there is one level and no one person holding power. The approach felt one of ‘we are all in this together.’”

This redistribution of power serves many functions, but perhaps most importantly, it acts as an antidote to the “othering” that can occur in spaces like ours - the idea that only some people need support, while others are somehow exempt from suffering.

Power is one difference. Language is another.

Another key point of departure is our use of education to build a shared emotional vocabulary. It allows the root of the word emotion - emovere: to move out - to truly emerge. It names experiences that are often felt in the body but for which people don’t realise there is a word. This can be an incredibly lonely place to be: it is difficult to connect with others and to experience the power of shared understanding when we don’t have the language to do so.

In this way, education becomes an antidote to alexithymia, a trait often co-occurring in people with PTSD or autism, in which people have difficulty identifying, understanding, and expressing their feelings, leading to a limited range of experience and confusion between physical and emotional sensations.

Words, then, become bridges between experience and integration.

I’m reminded of a graduate who described the intense shame she felt in therapy when she couldn’t answer her therapist’s seemingly simple question: “What do you think was behind that?” In that moment, she just didn’t know. The therapist likely didn’t intend to shame her - but her own history and vulnerability meant that this gap felt deeply painful.

Our courses are structured to support the gradual and delicate process of making meaning: of peeling back the layers of the onion that is a person’s life. Exploring theory together in an educational environment fast-tracks this process. The conditions are created with the utmost care, intention, and attention to safety and security. This increases people’s receptivity to learning and supports the often-painful work of self-reflection.

The structure and intensity of time is another major difference.

Traditional therapy typically involves one to five hours per week. By contrast, our Psychology for Change course runs for 100 hours over eight weeks (and our Feminism for Change course for 62 hours). This short, immersive structure enables profound change in a condensed period.

Having therapy for an hour a week often feels manageable alongside the many other plates being spun in a person’s life. Yet there is a vast difference between trying to dig down into the roots of something over several weeks (and sometimes several years), and doing so across a single, intensive day, supported by a shared theoretical framework.

Through theory - for example, a full day spent exploring attachment - participants are offered frameworks that often illuminate questions they didn’t even realise they were holding. Space is created to critique, absorb, and make sense. Joining the dots becomes empowering and liberating, especially in a group environment where others are naming their own connections. Where many once believed they were alone, they now realise they are not.

Crucially, this process supports the rapid development of agency. People often move from “I’m anxious about learning” to “I’m able to learn,” and often to “I love learning!” Coming to something that feels more like a college course than therapy or treatment creates a vital shift in identity: from someone in need of help, to someone capable of learning - someone doing something for themselves. Agency, again.

Furthermore, though the needle has most definitely moved over the last decade, going to therapy still carries with it a stigma amongst some people and amongst some populations. In such contexts, going to a place of learning rather than going for therapy can be owned and experienced in a profoundly different way. 

In the same way that we are not seeking to denigrate or replace treatment for drug and alcohol addiction, we similarly are not seeking to replace therapy. We see the experience of our courses as different - and deeply complementary - to both. Education is our catalyst for healing. Therapeutic, yes. But not therapy.