Our New Directions Healing Workshops will help you to:
- Resolve anger and rage
- Leave behind the feeling of hopeless and powerless feelings
- Reduce anxiety and depression
- Overcome strong feelings of sadness and grief
- Heal from punishing guilt and toxic shame
- Improve your relationships
- Develop compassion and forgiveness for yourself and others
- Increase your energy level and efficiency at work
We have found no other vehicle where people do this quantity of healing in a 3-day weekend, while learning emotional tools to continue growing and healing afterwards.
HOW IT WORKS
Phase 1: We create a Super-Safe Environment– “You are not alone”
Concept: Create a safe space. Give permission to speak. Share stories (family members are excluded from first workshop weekend. All follow-up workshops can be attended by them). Listen to others, Build trust, confidence and empathy. Explain and encourage personal responsibility. Get commitment to participate for 3 days.
Goals: Reduce feelings of isolation. Build emotional safety, rapport and camaraderie. Appreciate the importance of feelings. Begin to open up, “learning/feeling/sharing vs. protecting/avoiding/hiding”. Get involved in the process.
Phase 2: Education – Left-brain Cognitive Understanding
Concept: Lecture, reading and exercises on how thoughts, feelings and belief systems work, how the brain stores and retrieves emotionally traumatic memories and experiences, and what can be done to best manage these areas.
Goals: In an education-modeled lecture setting, stimulate left-brain function through concepts and information. Once understanding of the process takes place, the left-brain can give the right-brain permission to proceed, release and heal. Knowledge and understanding breeds comfort and hope.
Phase 3: Processing – Right-brain Affective Release (the most significant sessions)
Concept: Group and individual exercises, assignments and coursework in processing of right-brain stimuli and emotions to allow the brain to release and to change. Participants will get individual attention, with the support of their group, to ‘go back there’ and tell their story, while allowing their body to feel whatever it wants/needs to feel, as strongly as it wants to feel it. This very simple, easily reproducible process/concept (“you gotta feel it to heal it”) has done more to relieve the pain, anger, fear and horror than any other process currently known.
Goals: Process feelings. Ability to manage the right-brain responses to traumatic stimulus; create pictures of strength and power to reside side-by-side with the emotionally-charged pictures so that images can be recalled and experienced without negative emotional impact. Conquer fear, harness anger, manage pain, replace the horrors.
Phase 4: Behavior Management – Integrate Left-brain Knowledge and Logic with Right-brain Pictures and Emotions
Concept: Lessons, drill and practice putting the whole brain to work to build acceptable coping skills for current and future internal and external environments.
- Communication skills
- Know/Accept/Express feelings in productive ways
- Connect with others on a feeling/caring/heart-connection level
- Create positive support systems
- Friendships and work groups
- Develop relationship strategies, priorities and skills.
Goals: Ability to understand and use the emotional tools to become a therapeutic person to self and others.
Phase 5: Now What? – After-care, Maintenance and Debrief
Concept: Make plans for the future. Provide list of resources and options for continued involvement. Acquire post-treatment assessment and statistics. Exit interviews.
Goals: You will leave with a sense of connection, relief, hope, direction and support, and a new ability to manage and control their thoughts, feelings and behaviors, even when re-triggered.
