Examples of Skills I Teach
Cognitive Skills
Cognitive skills help you identify old, automatic ideas and counter them with more rational and current ideas. The exercises are usable at any time and promote clarity, decisiveness, and confidence.
Emotional Skills
The emotional skills I teach have four stages: body tension, feeling and identifying it, processing it, communicating to other people.
Stage 1: Start with noticing the tension in your body.
Stage 2: As you sense the tension, you might write about it, draw a colored scribble about it, move with it, then put words to it.
Stage 3: Each emotion requires different skills to process. All emotions require breaking down old beliefs by confronting whether they were a-ever true, b- partially true or c- true at that time, but not now or d- an incomplete belief that doesn’t take in the opposite truth.
- Part of process is discovering the needs that were not met at the time. This allows the person to fulfill those needs in the present. (Which often makes the emotion evaporate.)
- Processing may include imagining the other person in front of them and voicing out loud what they were not able to say before. This releases the congestion in the throat.
- Self-soothing methods are taught to calm the emotions and re-establish a feeling of safety. These include qigong methods and TA techniques.
Stage 4: Communicating to other people. I teach Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication. It encourages both people in a relationship to define their needs. Clients are encouraged to write down what they want to say so it can be refined, made more exact and truthful, yet less triggering to the receiver.
Communication Skills
Assertiveness skills can be learned using templates. This gives the client an outline to initially learn what to say.
Nonviolent Communication by Rosenberg is taught to assist marriages, issues at work, dealing with friends and setting boundaries, communicating emotions, and asking for what you need.
Trance Work
I teach clients how to break out of automatic trance states due to trauma. Frequently, clients feel overcome and out-of-control because of trance states. Learning how to intervene creates empowerment.
Dreamwork
The exercises in The Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork manual are used. Often, when working on an issue, the mind will provide graphic dreams that describe aspects of the problem. Dreamwork exercises free up the meanings and associations making them clear to the client. These can be done by the client or with the therapist.
Tapping
I teach both EFT and Thought Field Therapy tapping, plus acupressure points from Michael Gach, PhD. They are fast and simple methods to calm emotions and start breaking up old belief systems.
Learning Style + Study Skills
Cooperating with who you are can make learning a joy instead of a chore. Spend less time studying and make it more enjoyable whether learning on the job or in school.