COUNSELING & CONSULTING

Applications include: Counseling, Coma Work and Brain Injury Recovery, Facilitation and Leadership Development, Trialogue and Open Forum.

Counseling

In counseling individuals, couples and families we explore the challenges we all face and facilitate creative journeys that connect us with our visions beliefs and values. Our goal is to help you connect with who you are and relate from your deepest self. Together we create community that embraces diversity. At times we will be coaches that help you solve concrete problems; at other times we will be awareness facilitators that help you process the challenges from your bodies' experiences, relationship conflicts and family life. Again at other times we will help you get in touch with your deepest aspirations and sense of meaning in life. We use talk and solution focused therapy, creative play, inner and dream work.

Please inquire about our sliding fee scale and the insurances that might cover our services.

Coma Work and Brain Injury Recovery

We offer different services that assist your loved ones in coma, help you learn to communicate with them, and support their recovery journey.

From a uniquely positive vantage point Process Work sees life to be the search for self-knowledge and coma an exceptional life form that is still meaningful.

Coma is a deeply altered state of consciousness. It is usually defined as a condition with complete unawareness of the self and the environment. It can result from many medical processes such as brain injuries, heart attacks, strokes, or situations near death.

New research suggests that in fact comatose patients can register what is going on around them but are unable to respond in usual ways with their expressive behaviors being limited to behavioral fragments and minimal cues.

Arnold Mindell founder of Process Work always believed that coma patients have inner awareness. With his wife Amy he developed a method of communicating with patients in coma that is attuned to their altered states and minimal communication signals.

This method called Coma Work (open this link to get to a more detailed description) looks for doorways into the patients' inner experiences through:

• Subtle or incomplete movements,
• changes in the rate and depth of breath, and
• facial cues

To find ways to unfold an interactive dialogue and assist in the inner process the patient is experiencing.

You may read a good testimonial in STORIES OF AMAZING RECOVERIES
See also:
Schiff, E., Yoon-Hang, K., & Maizes, V. (2005): Vegetative States - an Integrative Approach. Alternative Therapies, Vol 11, No. 1, 26-33.
Mindell, Amy, Coma : A Healing Journey : A Guide for Family Friends and Helpers
Mindell, Arny, Coma, Key to Awakening: Working With the Dreambody Near Death.

Facilitation & Leadership Development

Experience and research studies have shown that groups and organizations abide by rational and logical patterns as well as irrational and non-linear processes that are difficult to measure. Today's leaders and social change agents need to integrate information from both worlds as sources for growth and development. A comprehensive leadership methodology and new facilitation paradigm is required to achieve following objectives:

* respect differences and embrace diversity
* understand and facilitate power dynamics underlying conflicts
* facilitate personal and team/community vision and direction
* integrate personal development and inspire growth in others
* support self organizing processes to generate new and innovative solutions to protracted conflicts

The new facilitation paradigm embraces logical and emotional components of social change processes to achieve conflict transformation and community building. In a creative process diverse point of views and emotions are shared and debated to increase understanding and gain access to creative directions. It is based on the principle of Deep Democracy.

To develop our individual and collective awareness as communities, we need all our diversity of feelings, ideas and visions. All experiences are validated and needed to co-create the world we would like to live in.

Health Leadership & Facilitation

Today’s health care culture is beginning to change. There is greater recognition of the value of a partnership-oriented health care system and the importance of empowerment, hope, and self-determination as keys to recovery. There is an increasing understanding that the current emphasis on expert knowledge is detrimental to the healing process.

The concept of Medical Facilitation (open a more extensive description of this concept by clicking on the link) addresses the need to partner with consumers and assist them in processing all aspects of their health process: physical, emotional, spiritual and social.

Given the growing complexity of the health care system, and the difficulty consumers experience navigating it, the need for new facilitative leadership roles is emerging. Peer leaders and medical facilitators are needed to assist individual consumers and communities to advocate for their own health and facilitate the successful achievement of treatment goals and expectations. Health care professionals who are currently trained in recognizing and treating disease would gain from developing skills in facilitating complex relationships and incorporating consumers’ beliefs and expectations in treatment approaches. Process Work offers a range of conceptual and practical tools that serve to increase facilitative abilities.

Social and political processes of rank and privilege have been shown to correlate with the frequency and severity of body symptoms.

* The more rank a person has, the better her chances of staying healthy.
* There is an individual process of adjusting to mainstream norms and a community process in which possessing rank and privilege influences the ability to stay healthy.
* Internalized cultural norms and the lived socio-cultural dynamics of the isms (age, sex, race, etc.) have a direct impact on our bodies.

A consequence of the above is that symptom work includes work with individuals, relationships and world issues.

* While working with an individual we need an awareness of the process of modernization and an awareness of cultural dynamics as being relevant to any symptom work.
* So, for example, if we're working with a person of lower rank, there's a feeling difference between that work and working with a person of higher rank.
* We may work with them in a similar way but it's important to have an awareness of the difference and how that plays out in their stories and how they and we, working with them, interpret those stories.

Medical Facilitation sees itself as an initial step towards a new culture of dialogue and communication in health care that will help facilitate a co-creative project of reshaping our health care and the values it represents. It is an essential new element that hopefully will give rise to increasing satisfaction, lower costs and reduce inequalities in health care.

Trialogue

TRIALOGUE: Developing a Consumer - Peer/Family - Professional Team Leadership Model in Health Care

Communication between consumers, family members, and health professionals can be difficult in everyday practice. Dissatisfaction of consumers with mainstream medicine originates in poor communication. Non-compliance, the lack of adherence to medical treatment recommendations, difficulties encountered in chronic symptom management, and the problem of medical malpractice and litigation point at unsolved relationship and communication problems in medicine. Differences in language and terminology, perspectives, and interests create communication barriers that result in poor collaborations and outcomes.

Creating partnerships between consumer groups and professionals have potential for reducing barriers and for increasing sustainability and positive outcomes. The collaboration can utilize the strengths of all partners and result in benefits to professionals, the consumers and the community as a whole.

Health-"Trialogue" is an Open Forum that allows a dialogue between consumers, family members and peers, and health care professionals. In the Trialogue Forums consumers, their family members or friends, professionals and interested individuals come together to discuss critical issues and share stories with the help of a trained facilitator.

Health-"Trialogue" embraces the following values:

* Self-determination
* Sharing responsibility
* Empowering relationships based on trust, understanding, and respect
* Meaningful roles in society
* Elimination of stigma, discrimination, and disparities

In this grassroot community process open and honest encounters allow community building and the development of new solutions for health care teams and systems. Trialogue bridges the perceived gap between consumers, health care professionals, and the public.

GOAL: A Consumer - Peer/Family - Professional Team-Led Transformation from an Expert System to a Partnership and Leadership System

Objective: Transform the system to one based on a partnership and leadership culture through a consumer/peer/family-led Leadership Initiative.

Empowerment, hope, and self-determination are repeatedly cited as the keys to people's recovery. The current institutional medical culture, with its overemphasis on expert knowledge, is actually interfering with recovery. Trialogue with its Team Leadership Model seeks a fundamental transformation of the culture in medicine to a system based on consumer autonomy, shared decision making and responsibility, and improved communication.

"Nobody is listening to us. Nobody cares." Says Barbara who suffers from chronic pain.

"We are burned out from balancing patient needs, limited time, and money." Says Peter a primary care physician.

"Limited funds, unlimited demands." Says Jan who works for an insurance company.

"We can't take care of everybody's needs." Says John a local business owner.

Open Forum

Open Forums are gatherings of 30-150 participants. A forum is an arena for a community or organization to gather, to debate pressing issues, conflict and community building. Forums gather different players and organizations together. Forums actively invite and facilitate interaction among all points of view. Forums provide the possibility for an alternate course just at the point a conflict might normally erupt into chaos or people retreat into hopelessness. These points or 'hotspots' are where conflict escalates. With careful facilitation, hotspots are also doorways to creative change within community. The emotions, the history and controversial issues fueling these hotspots need focus and accurate facilitation along with recognition of people's interest and abilities to build and care for community.