Therapeutic Coaching for Couples
Intensive Transformational Couple Therapeutic Coaching – a two day course of coaching in effective communication, connection, encounter, intimacy and healing accumulated wounds.
- Is your marriage or partnership strained?
- Are you trying to heal your relationship after an affair?
- Are you managing the effects of addiction in your relationship and looking to change?
- Do you want to create a relationship that is safe, passionate, and long lasting?
- Is separation or divorce looming?
- Do you want to improve your relationship and re-connect with your partner?
- Are you interested in learning skills that will help you create more effective communication in your relationships, not only with your spouse or partner, but also with your children?
When your most intimate relationship is feeling strained, it is painful and stressful. Couples can find themselves behaving in ways they could never have predicted in those early loving times. Any children in the relationship can be affected and this can add to the stress all round. Whether you are married, engaged, beginning a new relationship, in a committed partnership, or wanting to repair communication in any relationship, this intensive course can help:
- Develop new ways of resolving conflicts together
- Re-establish effective communication with your partner
- Increase passion and intimacy
- Recreate and enhance the friendship you share with each other
- Develop your confidence in your abilities to communicate more effectively and connect on a deeper level in all your relationships.
Consultancy in the Workplace
Teams in conflict; teams wishing to address stress management to aid healthy team productivity; teams who have been traumatised by specific events; teams who want in house training on specific topics, are all met with bespoke prepared facilitation to meet the needs of the particular group. Jan has offered critical incident debriefing to organisations, and supervised for London Ambulance Service supporting their peer Support Teams. She has given training to teams in residential care, developing their understanding and skills in meeting the needs of people with learning disabilities, autism, the epilepsies, and ‘challenging behaviours’.
Consultancy for Film Companies
Consults with Film companies to support those making films and those who are the subjects of films. Has worked on documentaries as well as docu drama and drama films. Areas of particular experience: childhood trauma/abuse; vicarious trauma (especially important in those making films involving traumatic material); end of life and bereavement; learning disabilities; Autistic Spectrum Disorder. See publications below. Works face to face, on Skype and on phone, as well as travelling when necessary.
About Jan
Jan Hawkins is a Person-Centred therapist, supervisor, group facilitator and trainer. Informed by trainings in psychodynamic, CBT, SFT, and other therapeutic traditions, prior to arriving home in the Person-Centred Approach, she is passionately committed to providing relationships in which clients, supervisees and groups are able to change and grow in self directed, yet accompanied, ways.
Jan ran groups for Survivors of childhood abuse during the early nineties, controversially offering groups with women and men together, and for those who had experienced any type of abuse. Many students and supervisees reported their difficulties in locating good, practical and developmental training for practitioners focussing on the issues raised by a history of childhood abuse. In response to this expressed need in 1994 Jan created, and co-facilitated, a Diploma course in Counselling Survivors of Childhood Abuse, the first initiative of its kind in Europe. Since then, through FDP, Jan has continued to run post counselling training courses and study days with a conviction that experiential learning is imperative for the continued development and deepening of the core attitudinal qualities of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard, which are crucial to Person-Centred and other relationship focussed therapies. She has been particularly keen to encourage therapists to extend their practice to people with learning disabilities, many of whom suffer silently from their legacies of childhood abuse.
A background in lecturing in psychology and special needs, and her experiences over 30+ years since working with her first client in therapy, Jan feels blessed to have worked in a variety of settings. With a core of therapy and supervision, she also consults with filmmakers, and supports palliative care teams in their work. Jan feel she does one thing, but does it in a variety of ways!
Thought of the Week
Carl Rogers (1997) states:
“It seems to me that clients who have moved significantly in therapy live more intimately with their feelings of pain, but also more vividly with their feelings of ecstasy; that anger is more clearly felt, but so also is love; that fear is an experience they know more deeply, but so is courage. And the reason they can thus live fully in a wider range is that they have this underlying confidence in themselves as trustworthy instruments for encountering life.”
Foundation for the Developing Person
Due to the COVID Pandemic, all the summer study days went ahead on Zoom, with positive feedback. Winnie the Pooh and the Inner Landscape serving 28 people onZoom!! Being a technophobe, I could not have imagined ever managing Zoom for groups, but it has gone well –I attended a training myself in America because of this! As life continues to be somewhat precarious with the virus, I am planning to offer all of the Autumn’s study days on Zoom too. This will make them slightly cheaper, and I hope more accessible, especially if anyone, like me, has to continue to be careful with underlying health conditions.So please do let me know if any of the following studydays, certificated for 6 hours of CPD, appeals to you.
Each day will consist of some input on the topic, experiential processing, and space to discuss practical issues relating to the theme. Each workshop will be from 10.00am till 4.00pm with a longer than usual lunch break to allow for zoom rest, and will cost £65. If you would like to attend, please select the course you are interested in to email me and request a booking form. I look forward to hearing from you.
A day for practitioners to explore the COVID impact
Saturday 5th September 2020
This day will offer theopportunity to share with others, how the lockdown has affected you and your practice. As the new term begins, and with the hope that some have had breaks away in August, how does the autumn ahead feel for you? Are you already seeing clients face to face, or still needing to work online? How have you experienced the lockdown yourself? The pandemic affects us all, but how has this impacted on your work with clients? We will also explore vicarious trauma, anxiety andself-careas aspects of our lockdown experience.
‘Let me tell so much truth. I want to tell the truth in my work.The truth will lead me to the light’.
(Maya Angelou)
Friday 18th September 2020
This day will invite participants to reflect on these lines, what does truth mean to you? What is the challenge in being authentic in our lives and work? What are the costs and benefits of the struggle for authenticity? How has a lack of truth impacted on your clients’ lives? In PC practice, where acceptance is so important, how can we empathically challenge when, for example, one in a couple has a very different truth than the other?A day for reflection and sharing.
Clean language
Saturday 3rd October 2020
Based on work by David Groves, a pioneering New Zealand psychotherapist, who worked with repressed traumatic memories,developing an approach which fitswith the PCA, byusing only the client’s language. Paying particular attention to the client’s metaphors, and developing a way of working which enabled clients to lead in their own healing, his work is mainly known by NLP and/or hypnotherapy practitioners. However, I have found that clients often (especially those traumatized as children) naturally head towards a trancelike way of experiencing, and that some therapists miss this opportunity to accompany the client into a deeper healing opportunity. This day will allow particpants to learn about the clean language approach, how to spot a client going into trance, and how to avoid becoming an obstacle to that process.
What happens to our clients in the event of our sudden death or illness?
Friday 30th October 2020
A crucial, yet underexplored aspect of our work as practitioners, is how we consider our clients’ potential reactions to our unexpected death or illness. This study day will allow participants to explore their feelings, attitudes and beliefs about the impact on their clients, in the event of their own sudden illness or death. There will be space to plan for such eventualities, as well as to look at the practical implications for ensuring that the best interests of clients are attended to, should the practitioner be suddenly forced to stop their practice due to illness, or death. Given the pandemic, exploring this subject seems especially pertinent. I have, myself, recently updated my plans, and contracted with a new counselling Will executor. Join with others to explore this sensitive subject.
Dissociation –Creative Survival
Sunday 1st November 2020
Where there is chronic abuse in childhood many learn to survive by dissociating from the experience. This may involve leaving the body, numbing out, splitting off, depersonalising and/or derealising. The experience and expression of dissociative process can be confusing for therapists as well as for the person experiencing it. The vulnerability of people experiencing dissociative processes to being pathologised and diagnosed with various mental illnesses (i.e. psychosis, personality disorders and so on) comes from a lack of understanding of this survival strategy. This day will focus on what dissociation is, how it acts as a somewhat protective strategy, and how we may empower individuals who may be experiencing dissociation now.
Alice in Wonderland and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Saturday 21st November 2020
CPTSD shares the symptomatology of PTSD but results from chronic trauma, often from childhood. It affects many Survivors of childhood trauma long into their adult lives.Survivors may have lived continuously with nightmares, sleep disturbances, hypervigilance, hyperarousal, self-harming, dissociation, self-esteem and self-concept issues and a variety of other difficulties. Others who have lived with chronic trauma in relationships of domestic violence, and other chronic trauma experiences, develop the same painful symptoms of CPTSD. This study day will focus on the effects of this for daily living and consider ways of supporting clients in their understanding, and overcoming of this painful and distressing (sometimes paralysing) experience. We will also explore the related ‘Alice in Wonderland Syndrome’ symptoms which help to understand some of the dissociative experiences people with CPTSD live with.
The Healing Power of Story: The Tale of the Ugly Duckling
Sunday 6th December 2020
The story of the Ugly Duckling has particular relevance to those who feel the outcast in their family of origin. For individuals who grew up sensing that there was something wrong –some mismatch between themselves and other members of the family –this story can bring hope. This day is appropriate for anyone who feels drawn to the story, whether because you identify with the experience of feeling different and outside the family, or you are working with clients who have this experience.
Publications
Collateral Damage: Casualties of Alcohol Misuse: An Anthology
Paperback – 17 Jan. 2020
This anthology contains chapters written by individuals who have been affected by loving/caring about someone close, whose use of alcohol has impacted on the relationship. There is so much literature focusing on the experience of alcohol addiction or dependency in the medical and professional helper material, but scant attention given to those who live with and/or are affected by the person whose drinking is causing harm. Those who have given their time to this project have done so using their own voices. This gives the collection a variety of styles which provides the reader with a wide set of experiences. The editor is eager to encourage writing as a therapeutic option when processing painful experiences, especially where the individuals are unable – due to their loved one’s alcohol misuse – to have the open dialogue which might help them. Sadly in all the cases presented herein, the contributors are left to manage the effects of another person’s departure into a different world, a person they have loved and cared for. For those who love someone who misuses alcohol, this book will offer company. The contributors have shared experiences they have previously found impossible to talk about. Readers may find themselves in these stories, and as a result, feel less lonely.
Listening to their Voices: The Person-Centred Approach to Autistic Spectrum Disorder
Paperback – 17 Dec. 2017
This book includes verbatim interview contributions from individuals who have ASD, their parents, siblings, and some professionals. It is written by a therapist who works with all those groups, so that other chapters include examples of the lives and experiences of those with ASD. The purpose of the book is to introduce the how to of Person-Centred Planning, by introducing the Person-Centred Approach to anybody supporting people with ASD. Readers would include support workers, social workers, counsellors/therapists, medical practitioners, volunteers, and any other practitioners aiming to support people with ASD to reach their best potential in life.
Voices of the Voiceless: Person-Centred Approaches for People with Learning Difficulties
Paperback – 1 Jan. 2002
“Voices of the Voiceless” is an inspiring, passionate and comprehensive exploration that offers hope and encouragement to counsellors and practitioners working with people living with learning difficulties. Although the effects of learning difficulties and the effects of society’s treatment of people with learning difficulties are lifelong and often severe, counselling and healing are possible. The author argues that even those people who have the most severe learning disabilities can benefit from counselling, and not simply from behaviour management or medication to manage and control them. Jan Hawkins integrates 15 years’ experience of counselling and her 25 years’ experience as a mother of a person with learning difficulties. The book contains many moving accounts of the healing process and detailed examples of interdisciplinary working and the power the Person-Centred Approach offers for those who are metaphorically and often literally voiceless.