Understanding Fear of Feelings:
Basic Principles of Emotion Focused MI
with Sky Kershner, LCSW, DMin
Starts Jan 8, 2025 - Feb 28, 2025 (with two breaks)
Wednesdays at 2:30 - 4:00 pm EST (nyc time zone)
Course Outline and more info, click here
Number of classes: Six: Jan 8, 15, (off 22), 29, Feb 5, 12, 19, 2025
Meeting on Zoom
Duration of sessions: 90 minutes
Tickets: $125 for the course ($20 /class)
Register: https://buytickets.at/wvmi/1481970
This is a psycho-education course about the experiencing of human emotions
- what they are,
- how we sometimes struggle to experience and express them, and
- how these challenges can lead to suffering for ourselves and others.
In this course we will explore the concept of Fear of Feelings, also known as Affect Phobia, and discover ways to help ourselves and others heal from anxiety about our feelings and avoidance of our internal experiences.
Feeling feelings is not always easy for us humans. Have you ever heard someone say "I hate to feel sad" or “I don’t like to get angry"? It’s a real problem then when an emotion like sadness or anger shows up at the door for a visit, isn’t it?
Have you ever given someone a compliment, only to have them brush it off, unable to feel the healthy pride in their accomplishment? Have you ever done this yourself? (If you have, you are not alone!)
In this course we will seek to understand what's going on behind these common human approaches to emotions. In particular we will focus on four basic human emotions that we tend to have trouble with: curiosity, anger, sadness, and pride. I'm tempted to say healthy pride, because some of our natural emotions are so quickly stigmatized by us as bad or wrong, so we sometimes need to distinguish between ‘healthy’ pride and ‘unhealthy’ pride. Do you see what I mean?
Emotion Focused MI
This course is a foundational course for what we call Emotion Focused Motivational Interviewing. You do not need to know what Motivational Interviewing is in order to enjoy and benefit from this course. Everyone is welcome.
For those who are interested, Motivational Interviewing is a way to have a conversation with someone about making a change in their life. Usually that change is a behavioral change. In Emotion Focused MI we are listening not only to a person's thoughts about change, but also to their emotional and somatic experience as they talk about ways they might be feeling stuck or ambivalent in their situation. This can be very helpful, since emotional and somatic awareness can provide a person with important information about “what feels right” for them.
In this course, we will look at how bringing emotional and somatic awareness into an MI conversation can deepen our ability to evoke, empower, and affirm the person as they tackle the hard work of change. By helping a person somatically feel the cost of staying the same and the deep desire for the benefits of change, we can support them in becoming more grounded in their intentions.
This course is an exploration of how conversations about feelings and their somatic pathways can enhance both our personal awareness and our conversations with others.
Who is This Course For?
This course is ideal for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of human emotions and how the avoidance and fear of emotions impacts our lives.
You can expect to gain valuable insights into the nature of emotions and learn practical techniques to help yourself and others navigate difficult feelings. By the end of this course, you'll have a deeper understanding of emotional processes, as avoidance of emotions and anxiety about emotions, and be better equipped to address emotional challenges in both personal and professional settings.
Whether you're a mental health professional looking to expand your skillset or an individual seeking personal growth, this course offers valuable tools for emotional awareness and regulation.
Register here: https://buytickets.at/wvmi/1481970
This course was first presented as a full day presentation at the International MINT Forum by Sky in Christchurch, New Zealand in October 2024, and in a mini version at the IEDTA Conference in SanDiego in November 2024. See the intro promo video here.
For the Course Outline and more info, click here
Questions?
skykershner@gmail.com
