Working with ‘Parts’ of our selves
I have become aware of how often I refer to ‘parts’ of our selves when working with coaches in supervision and with clients and how it is always met with ‘that is so helpful’. I thought I would share this approach and my thinking more widely. Examples include: A coach saying, “the client is very …
Is this coaching?
“I was rather taken aback, the client talked a lot about her current relationship difficulties and seemed to want to focus on that, is that coaching? It felt more like counselling”. The implied question seems to be that if this is the content, is that still coaching? For me, the answer is yes. I also …
Longing for apology
I have recently read a remarkable book, The Apology, by Eve Ensor. in this short book she writes the apology she would have liked her father to make to her for the years of sexual and emotional abuse he subjected her to. When I saw her being interviewed she said she had written this as …
Coaching to Change Lives
Gabor Maté, in a recent talk on Healing as a Subversive Act identified the major health indicators in our society are rapidly growing. In those indicators he includes autoimmune diseases, mental health, and addictions. The number of prescription medicines taken also increasing at an alarming rate. In coaching we meet those with depression, anxiety, other …
Engaging with our own therapeutic inquiry
I often recommend that coaches who are interested in understanding trauma and bringing that awareness into their coaching engage with their own internal therapeutic inquiry. I have always ‘done my own work’, firstly in psychotherapy, over the last 8 years through the therapeutic process developed by Franz Ruppert and additionally over the last 2 years …
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What distinguishes beginners from more experienced coaches?
Working recently with trainee and beginner coaches, I was struck yet again by their understandable preoccupations and concerns. Chief among these was a combination of self-doubt and doubt about the coaching process. ‘How can I be sure that these apparently simple questions will help my client?’ ‘What happens if I can’t think of the next …
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Trauma: hiding in plain sight
Cora was a marketing executive in a utilities company. She felt stuck in her career and a kindly boss who had worked with me himself suggested me as someone who specializes in career issues. Cora was the breadwinner in her family and was finding her long commute to work exhausting. Her partner and teenage children …
Deepening your understanding of coaching and trauma
A new event from Coaching and Trauma When you already have some familiarity with the topic of trauma and coaching you will have tried out some of the ideas and approaches. This may have raised innumerable questions for you, for instance The client got upset and I wasn’t sure whether to go on with the …
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How do we become our ‘true’ selves?
Becoming Your True Self by Vivian Broughton Green Balloon Publishing, £7.95 ‘Where can I read more?’ The coaching client has described an early life trauma: parents so preoccupied by their own fights and struggles that he says he felt ‘chronically unsafe’ despite an apparently comfortable middle class upbringing. We have made the link to his …