What is your Role As Coach-counselor?
In my results-oriented partnership with a client, each of us plays an important role. Some clients arrive with clear and specific purposes in mind. Others need help in discovering what they want to achieve. I counsel clients struggling to resolve a wide variety of problems. For over thirty years I have specialized in working to end violence against women, especially physical, sexual and emotional abuse by intimate partners. Below, I give an example of how my counseling-coaching is practiced in helping an Abused Woman. I can help you resolve other problems, as well, often by short term counseling-coaching, and sometimes through longer term In-Depth Therapy.

Using cognitive therapy techniques I show you how to evaluate and refine your thoughts and through behavioral therapy teach you to make step-by-step changes from destructive habits to healthy ones that enable you to treat yourself with respect and compassion. As a result, you feel more confident, energetic and optimistic. As coach, I can help tailor exercises to your particular needs, much as a physical coach does in aerobic or weight training.

What Can You Do If You Are Abused?
If you are subjected to controlling, bullying, manipulative or violent behavior by a partner, boss or anyone trying to gain power over you, I can help you:

1. develop a plan for your emotional and financial security and physical safety.
2. clarify what is being done to you.
3. recognize how abuse affects your feelings and prevents you from achieving the quality of life you want.
4. weigh the physical, social, emotional and financial risks of staying in the relationship against those of leaving.
5. decide on the next steps to take to achieve the goals you have chosen.
6. find emotional and practical support for whatever path you take.
7. evaluate whether your plan is working well.
8. If the plan doesn't succeed, together we modify it, until it produces results.

Depending on your situation and your goals this process can be short or long term. I can help, whether you are a man or a woman, a parent or adult child and whether you are in a situation where the abuser is an intimate partner, a boss or someone in a different role. Click on www.abusedwomen.org to see my publications website, then click on HELP NOW to read excerpts from my books for abused women. Completing the exercises in my books can speed your therapy results.

When Emotions Keep You from Achieving Your Goals:
Perhaps you suffer from long periods of sadness, hopelessness, depression, or anger. The feeling may have reached the point at which life no longer seems worth living. By attending to negative thoughts ("life will never get better"; "I'm a hopeless case") you can change them to thoughts that reflect reality more accurately. That process plus new habits of physical exercise and making connections with supportive people can lighten your mood. As you consistently do that work, the weight of hopelessness and despair lifts, opening the way for the positive energy needed to create a stimulating, satisfying life. With conscientious practice in between sessions, some clients achieve their goals in ten or twenty focused sessions.

Adult Children and Aging Parents Learn to Talk Across Generations.
As parents and children shift into new stages of life they are challenged by adjustments to changing roles and responsibilities. Differing perspectives on the meanings of independence, shifting financial situations, and physical and mental infirmity are common, yet many of us are surprised when such a situation catches up with us. Learning to discuss feelings and thoughts about those changes can lead to new awareness of each person's fears and hopes, so that decisions acceptable to all parties can be made.

If you are an aging parent or an adult child of one, you can meet with me together, or separately. Either way, you can learn to talk constructively and honestly across the generations. I will help you rediscover your shared core values and the deep feelings those values generate. The process can lead to creative discussions about emotionally loaded topics such as safe driving, assisted living arrangements and others related to competency, dignity and independence. The result is a win-win relationship.

Diminished capacities of parents and changing roles of adult children can bring pain, stress and grief in their wake. But they may also provide opportunities for increased intimacy and growth. Short-term, focused coaching for adult children, aging parents or both can pave the way for adjusting to the changes. Please see below for information about a group on the same topic.

1. Step by step, a woman who has left an intimate partner discovers satisfying ways of living on her own, making independent decisions and achieving goals she chooses.
2. A client analyzes the uses and abuses of power, and discovers how to use her own power in constructive ways.
3. Men and women develop new ways of evaluating their own and others' behavior, which diminishes their destructive anger and enables them to control debilitating moods.
4. Clients suffering chronic or ongoing feelings of hopelessness or grief evaluate and change how they talk to themselves and take steps to change responses to difficult situations. They discover that life holds satisfactions, and even joy, after all.

What are your Client Expectations?
As a client, you decide what steps you are willing to take to achieve your goals of feeling better, gaining more control of your life or improving relationships. You decide whether you want to change and monitor your thoughts. You choose to practice activities that enhance your self-confidence, energy and social interactions. After trying them out, you decide whether they are useful or not. If they don't achieve the desired results or if you don't want to do the activities, after all, we revise them together, to discover which actions help you stay on your chosen track.

Once you have practiced the skills you learn in counseling sessions, you can continue on your own to gain even more control of your thoughts and actions. You will be on your way to becoming your own counselor-coach. You will hold yourself accountable for staying with your new habits, and will know how to give yourself pep talks as, step-by-step, you continue to achieve more of your goals. I offer the option of sessions for occasional "tune-ups" in person or by telephone or e-mail.