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MS230: Essential Counseling Skills for Animal Communicators, Healing Practitioners and Those Providing Grief Support ::
Upcoming Class Section Begins:
Content and Purpose
I’ve always known in my heart that the necessary foundation of all healing work is compassion and love. Without this foundation, healing work can become a merely intellectual or ego based offering of techniques, paradigms or tools to clients. At the same time, compassion and love alone do not heal if we lack empathic inquiry into our clients’ stories and hearts.
Effectively communicating the energies of love and compassion to our clients is not automatic, however deeply we may feel these qualities in our hearts. They need to be effectively and appropriately expressed. It is the skillful expression of empathy along with compassion and love that creates a sacred haven of safety, understanding and acceptance in which our clients can open to their own full healing.
Receiving the energy and associated skills of empathy allow a person or animal who is in pain or in struggle to feel acknowledged, understood and capable of a greater openness to healing. Offered without empathy, the best expertise and healing tools in the world can be experienced as useless. Next to love, empathy is the most powerful force in the universe to facilitate healing. This workshop provides an opportunity to learn very specific skills to bring the power of our love, compassion and expertise alive to serve the clients we care so much about.
The workshop is about the conscious overlay of basic yet powerful counseling skills into our work as animal communicators and healers. When strategically and intentionally applied, these skills allow us to bring the best of what our souls have to offer to serve others. It's not about becoming a therapist. It's about borrowing time tested concepts, skills and ethics from the field of therapy--which research has shown to have an extremely positive impact on the growth of clients--and applying them to our healing arts work.
In this intensive and intimate workshop, in informational presentations, discussions, handouts, exercises and practice sessions participants have an opportunity to:
- Frame consultations to be Client-Centered & Empathy Based: what that means, what it looks like, how it's structured, what is involved; how this approach is different from other counseling and consultation styles; research indicating its positive impact on clients
- Learn how and when to use words that heal through empathic inquiry and response
- Identity and practice the skills of emotional empathy
- Identity and practice the skills of gentle. strategic questioning for clarity
- Understand soul empathy, how we can use it, and its power to heal
- Recognize how personality type impacts both practitioners and clients (animal and human clients alike)
- Understand how to create and maintain healthy and ethical boundaries in working with clients: energetic, emotional and business boundaries
- Understand the purpose and limits of appropriate use of self disclosure in consultations
- Learn how to protect yourself from depletion and unnecessary absorption of others' pain
- Increase their comfort level in being present with others' pain
- Explore effective and ineffective references to spiritual beliefs when helping others
- Understanding special applications in counseling:
- Trauma, abuse and post trauma stress
- End of life transitions and grief support
- Behavioral issues with animals
Who Should Attend
This workshop is appropriate for both practicing professionals and those studying animal communication or any of the healing arts fields and who are interested in strengthening the impact of their practice by integrating effective counseling skills into their work with clients.
Teresa’s Background in Counseling
Teresa has an undergraduate degree in psychology and a masters degree in counseling from Villanova University, and has completed post graduate work at Columbia University and the University of Nottingham, England where she studied with Carl Rogers, the creator of Client Centered Therapy.
She has also completed the clinical training program in Post Traumatic Stress at the National Center for PTSD, Dept. of Veterans Affairs, and has studied at the Grief Recovery Institute in Los Angeles. Teresa also worked at a hospice for a year where she was hired to create grief healing workshops for surviving loved ones. While there, she also conducted research to create the competency based Grief Support Skills profile.
Teresa’s passion for the ethical use of counseling skills has been at the root of her education and professional work since 1976. She has used the counseling skills taught in this workshop in her early career of counseling delinquent adolescents, during her fifteen year career in corporate organization development, in her pet loss counseling work (support groups, workshops and private sessions) since 1986, and in her animal communication and flower essence practice since 1991.
Class Details:
| Prerequisite: | Status as an advanced student or professional practitioner is recommended and requested. At least two classes in animal communication or other healing arts subjects. Experience with client sessions, case studies, or interactions with clients in a clinic setting, or equivalent. If you want to enroll and have questions regarding these prerequisites, please e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . |
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| Class format: | Teleclass. |
| Course hours: | 10.0 hours in five 120 minute sessions. |
| Course credits: | 10.0 units. |
| Tuition: | $360.00 / $330.00* |
*Early registration incentive pricing available 2 weeks in advance.
This class is facilitated by Teresa Wagner.
Click here to visit our calendar for available class dates and to enroll now!
To purchase the Fieldwork review component for this class ($65) please click here.
Please review the appropriate Enrollment Policy, as well as the Student Waiver, prior to registering.
*This class is for informational purposes only and is in no way meant to cure or diagnose anything. It is not a substitute for professional medical or veterinary care.