Shopping Addiction
The Shopping Addiction Workbook provides helping professionals with cognitive and behavioral assessments, tools, and exercises that can be utilized to treat the root psychological causes of a shopping addiction. It is designed to help people identify and change negative, unhealthy thoughts and behaviors that may have led to a shopping addiction. The activities contained in this workbook can assist participants in identifying the triggers which can lead to an addiction to shopping and teach them ways to overcome and manage those triggers.
The Shopping Addiction Workbook will help participants to shape their behaviors:
- Recognize that they are experiencing an addiction problem.
- Reflect and become aware of the behaviors that were part of and arose from the addiction.
- Build self-esteem in positive capabilities outside of shopping.
- Understand the triggers for preoccupation with various aspects of shopping behavior.
- Develop greater self-acceptance and the ability to change ineffective behaviors.
- Understand recurring patterns that indicate a shopping addiction.
- Learn ways to live a new life without obsessing about shopping and spending.
The Shopping Addiction Workbook is a practical tool for teachers, counselors, and helping professionals working with people suffering from a shopping addiction. Depending on the role of the person using this workbook and the specific group’s or individual’s needs, the modules can be used individually or as part of an integrated curriculum. The facilitator can administer an activity with a group or individual or use multiple assessments in a workshop.
This workbook contains five modules of activity-based handouts that will help participants learn more about themselves and their shopping addiction. These modules serve as avenues for self-reflection and group experiences revolving around topics of importance in the participants’ lives.
The activities in this workbook are user-friendly and varied to provide a comprehensive way of analyzing, strengthening, and developing characteristics, skills, and attitudes for overcoming an addiction to shopping.
The activities in this workbook are completely reproducible and can be photocopied or revised for direct participant use.
Shopping Addiction Modules
Module 1: Emotional Shopping
This module helps participants explore their emotional and impulsive shopping behaviors. It explores why people shop to deal with unsatisfying emotions, ways of stabilizing these emotions, how to control shopping impulses, and how to deal with emotions before shopping, during the shopping experience, and after purchases have been made.
Module 2: My Compulsive Shopping Behavior
This module helps participants explore how people become compulsive shoppers by examining where and when they shop, the various forms of shopping they use, the reasons they shop, the long-term effects of their shopping behavior, and how they can be more mindful to avoid shopping.
Module 3: Consequences of Overshopping
This module helps participants examine the consequences of addicted overshopping in their lives by examining how their shopping behavior affects their relationships, finances, job performances, recreational activities, family life, and personal emotions.
Module 4: Financial Responsibility
This module helps participants be more mindful of their financial responsibility to overcome their shopping addiction by examining how they can identify triggers, avoid temptation, stay away from shopping venues, ask others for help, create a budget, and take responsibility for their shopping behavior.
Module 5: Moving On
This module helps participants discover ways to move on from their addiction to shopping by exploring enhancements to self-esteem, disclosing secrets about their shopping behavior to trusted people or significant others, reframing shopping thoughts, and understanding how shopping is often used to fill voids and meet unmet needs.
Shopping Addiction Card Deck
Using the Discussion Starter Card Deck will break the ice, encourage openness, and help introduce a specific subject. Activity handouts included in these workbooks are reflective, easy-to-use exercises, presented in a variety of formats to accommodate multiple intelligences and different learning styles. Each question corresponds to a page in the workbook.
