About Thursday Girls
Thursday Girls provides a safe supportive space for members who are dealing with the challenges of living with metastatic breast cancer.
Thursday Girls is a free, weekly therapy and support group for women of any age, living with advanced, or metastatic, breast cancer (MBC). It is facilitated by two experienced social workers, Emma Moran-Wall and Marg Haywood. There are currently three groups: two weekly women’s groups and a fortnightly group for the partners of the women run by Sue Fisher. The face to face meetings are located in Box Hill, an eastern suburb of Melbourne, Australia. All meetings can be attended in person or via Zoom.
The groups have three main functions: to share information, create meaningful relationships with people in similar situations and get in touch with difficult feelings and thoughts, dilemmas and challenges. Examples of sharing information about living with metastatic breast cancer include talking about clinical trials or managing unpleasant symptoms caused by treatments like radiotherapy or chemotherapy.
Thursday Girls is a not for profit organisation that currently receives no government funding and relies on donations and fundraising to continue its invaluable services.
What Happens in a Session
The group is about helping its members to get in touch with, and share, the difficult feelings and thoughts associated with living with advanced breast cancer. Even though people can live for many years with advanced breast cancer, the diagnosis brings up powerful feelings like fear, sadness, shame and anger. It may be hard to express these feelings because being in touch with such feelings is a risk, exposing one’s vulnerability. But research and experience has shown that naming, expressing and sharing such feelings can be beneficial for individuals, as well as for the group as a whole. When a group member shows their feelings, and this resonates with others who show they understand and share these feelings, the individual feels better and stronger, and the whole group is strengthened.
Each group lasts for one and a half hours. There is no fixed agenda. What is discussed is determined by the current concerns of the members. In the case of face to face meetings, informal socializing follows. This enables friendly, supportive bonds to form. Contact and support between group members between group members is encouraged.
The size of the groups needs to be limited to about 12 members in order to ensure everyone has a chance to speak, and to maintain the powerful intimacy that the group generates
Our Vision
We are Thursday Girls. We seek to provide a mutual aid group that is accessible to all who seek hopeful companions on the rocky road that is metastatic breast cancer: helping each other and our families to never stop living life; to love, and to laugh and to learn; to share with, and care for each other so that we are not alone in our experiences.
Our Mission
Thursday Girls is a not-for-profit organisation, a mutual aid group established to facilitate mutual support for women living and dying with metastatic breast cancer. This is achieved by taking into account their physical, psychosocial, emotional, spiritual and informational needs – primarily through a professionally led therapeutic group experience, and through close supportive relationships and communication between the members. Support for their partners is offered through their own group.
Would you like to volunteer with Thursday Girls?
Simply fill out an expression of interest and we will get in touch!
History
The Thursday Girls Group started in 1997, facilitated by Dr David Kissane (psychiatrist and lead researcher) and Dr Christine Hill (psychologist). Funding was by the National Health and Medical Research Council as part of a worldwide clinical trial to assess the impact of supportive-expressive group therapy on the quality of life of advanced breast cancer patients. The evidence suggested that both quality of life and life expectancy improved for participants. When the trial finished in 2003, Dr Christine Hill and Dr Fiona McDermott (social worker) facilitated the group for the next 13 years until the end of 2016, when they retired. Marg Haywood and Sue Fisher took over group facilitation in 2017 and were joined by Emma Moran-Wall in 2023.
Links to published information about the Thursday Girls can be found under Publications on this website.
