Coaching: It's what we do
Coaching is a collaborative way of supporting all aspects of life. When we are whole and balanced, we are able to improve life and relationships, enhance our lives, make decisions, resolve issues, and establish, deepen, and maintain authentic relationships— and live an abundant and limitless life. We are ready to do the work. Are you?
COACHING services
You were meant to thrive!
But that is not always the case. In fact, often we struggle with what seem like simple things. We find ourselves existing through life but not finding deep joy, connection or meaning. We get stuck. We feel a block. We want better! We provide you with concrete tools and practical strategies to improve your life and relationships.
When we struggle in one area, we suffer in all the rest. But— when we make changes to better ourselves and relationships in one area, all the others improve! We help you do what works.
We've got you, it's what we do!
Sometimes we are still struggling to manage something that dropped into our life months, even years, later.
What is holding you back? What beliefs limit you? What are those insecurities that have been following you around all your life? Which patterns did you inherit from your family that might now be keeping you stuck? Whether it is time management or a series of toxic relationships—this junk shows up, and it prevents us from living fully.
A GOOD FIT FOR YOU IF:
You want to be better. You are not living as the fullest expression of yourself.
Personal Coaching
Your relationship is struggling or you want more intimacy. You want pre-marital counseling,
A GOOD FIT FOR YOU IF:
We crave connection but are blocked by the pain history that gets in the way. We disappear, physically and emotionally.
One partner feels alone and like they don't matter and the other feels they are always being criticized and can't get anything right. The more one asks for the other to show up, the more the partner disappears physically and emotionally. You both bicker and fight and the idea of sitting and just hanging out seems elusive, if not impossible.
Couples Coaching
GRIT Kids
When kids learn to overcome adversity, resilience becomes the byproduct, which is necessary for independence. What more could we want for our children. Through curiosity about our thoughts and feelings, we grow the insight to develop, evolve, adapt and transform. Learning to live with purpose is a necessary life skill.
Kids need grit. GRIT is the ability to sustain long term goals in the face of adversity. Let's cultivate this as soon as possible.
A GOOD FIT FOR YOU IF:
You want to uncover what is prompting your child's behavioral patterns causing distress in the family.
You are in that in between stage - you are certainly no longer a child, but don't feel like an adult.
A GOOD FIT FOR YOU IF:
A developing and growing brain, complicated relationships, and identity development - emerging adulthood takes work!
This phase of life is difficult for youth and their families. The purpose of adolescence through young adulthood is to develop autonomy, to develop lasting relationships with others, and to begin to separate from parents. This is difficult and often causes conflict in the family and can feel out of control for the young and emerging adult.
Teen Coaching
My mission in life is not to merely survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style
Maya Angelou
Certifications and Trainings
sensorimotor Psychotherapy
EMDR
Dialectical Behavioral
Reiki
mindfulness & meditation
Emotionally Focused therapy
motivational interviewing
Acceptance & COmmitment
Somatic experIencing
Havening
Certifications & Training
Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict. SE facilitates the completion of self-protective motor responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, thus addressing the root cause of trauma symptoms. This is approached by gently guiding clients to develop increasing tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and suppressed emotion.
SE offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states. It provides effective skills appropriate to a variety of healing professions including mental health, medicine, physical and occupational therapies, bodywork, addiction treatment, first response, education, and others— Excerpt taken from SETI.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders resulting from multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics, together with over 45 years of successful clinical application. The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability to function with resilience and ease. Excerpt taken from SETI
An Embodied approach to healing
Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict. SE facilitates the completion of self-protective motor responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, thus addressing the root cause of trauma symptoms. This is approached by gently guiding clients to develop increasing tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and suppressed emotion.
SE offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states. It provides effective skills appropriate to a variety of healing professions including mental health, medicine, physical and occupational therapies, bodywork, addiction treatment, first response, education, and others— Excerpt taken from SETI.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders resulting from multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics, together with over 45 years of successful clinical application. The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability to function with resilience and ease. Excerpt taken from SETI
An Embodied approach to healing
Excerpt taken from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) is a complete treatment modality to heal trauma and attachment issues. SP welcomes the body as an integral source of information for processing past experiences relating to upsetting or traumatic events and developmental wounds. SP incorporates the physical and sensory experience, as well as thoughts and emotions, as part of the person’s complete experience of both the trauma itself and the process of healing. Excerpt taken from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.
An Embodied approach to healing
SP seeks to restore a person’s ability to process information without being triggered by past experience. SP uses a three-phase treatment approach to gently guide the client through the therapeutic process – Safety and Stabilization, Processing, and Integration. The therapist must pay close attention to the client to ensure that they are not overwhelmed by the process while simultaneously engaging their own abilities and capacities for healing.
It is thought that SP strengthens instinctual capacities for survival and assists clients to re-instate or develop resources which were unavailable or missing at the time the trauma or wounding occurred. Once resources are developed and in place, the traumatic event can be processed with the aid of resources. SP is a well-developed approach with decades of success in the treatment of trauma and developmental wounds. — Excerpt taken from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.
Excerpt taken from ACBS Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was developed within a coherent theoretical and philosophical framework. It is a unique empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility means contacting the present moment fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation affords, changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values.
ACceptance and change
Based on Relational Frame Theory, ACT illuminates the ways that language entangles clients into futile attempts to wage war against their own inner lives. Through metaphor, paradox, and experiential exercises clients learn how to make healthy contact with thoughts, feelings, memories, and physical sensations that have been feared and avoided. Clients gain the skills to recontextualize and accept these private events, develop greater clarity about personal values, and commit to needed behavior change.—Excerpt taken from ACBS Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.
Excerpt taken from ACBS Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a well-known humanistic approach to psychotherapy formulated in the 1980’s and developed in tandem with the science of adult attachment, a profound developmental theory of personality and intimate relationships. This science has expanded our understanding of individual dysfunction and health as well as the nature of love relationships and family bonds. Attachment views human beings as innately relational, social and wired for intimate bonding with others.
Research supported relational model
The EFT model prioritizes emotion and emotional regulation as the key organizing agents in individual experience and key relationship interactions. EFT is best known as a cutting edge, tested and proven couple intervention, but it is also used to address individual depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress (EFIT – Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy) and to repair family bonds (EFFT – Emotionally Focused Family Therapy). This model operationalizes the principles of attachment science using non-pathologizing experiential (paralleling Carl Rogers) and relational systems techniques (paralleling Salvador Minuchin) to focus on and change core organizing factors in both the self and key relationships.— Excerpt taken from ICEEFT
Excerpt taken from ACBS Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a comprehensive multi-diagnostic, modularized behavioral intervention designed to treat individuals with severe mental disorders and out-of-control cognitive, emotional and behavioral patterns. It has been commonly viewed as a treatment for individuals meeting criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) with chronic and high-risk suicidality, substance dependence or other disorders. However, over the years, data has emerged demonstrating that DBT is also effective for a wide range of other disorders and problems, most of which are associated with difficulties regulating emotions and associated cognitive and behavioral patterns.
radical acceptance and change
As the name implies, dialectical philosophy is a critical underpinning of DBT. Dialectics is a method of logic that identifies the contradictions (antithesis) in a person's position (thesis) and overcomes them by finding the synthesis. Additionally, in DBT a client cannot be understood in isolation from his or her environment and the transactions that occur. Rather, the therapist emphasizes the transaction between the person and their environment both in the development and maintenance of any disorders. It is also assumed that there are multiple causes as opposed to a single factor affecting the client. And, DBT uses a framework that balances the treatment strategies of acceptance and change - the central dialectical tension in DBT. Therapists work to enhance the capability (skills) of their client as well as to develop the motivation to change. Maintaining that balance between acceptance and change with clients is crucial for both keeping a client in treatment and ensuring they are making progress towards their goals of creating a life worth living. — Taken from DBT-Linehan Board of Certification. (click to learn more)
Excerpt taken from EMDR Institute .
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes.
Evidence based tramua resolution
EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes. The brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward mental health. If the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a disturbing event, the emotional wound festers and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. Using the detailed protocols and procedures learned in EMDR therapy training sessions, clinicians help clients activate their natural healing processes — Excerpt taken from EMDR Institute.
Excerpt taken from Psychology Today.
Motivational interviewing (MI) is a counseling method that helps people resolve ambivalent feelings and insecurities to find the internal motivation they need to change their behavior. It is a practical, empathetic, and short-term process that takes into consideration how difficult it is to make life changes. Motivational interviewing evolved from Carl Roger’s person-centered, or client-centered, approach to counseling and therapy, as a method to help people commit to the difficult process of change. The process is twofold. The first goal is to increase the person’s motivation and the second is for the person to make the commitment to change. As opposed to simply stating a need or desire to change, hearing themselves express a commitment out loud has been shown to help improve a client’s ability to actually make those changes.
A commitment to change
The role of the therapist is more about listening than intervening. Motivational interviewing is often combined or followed up with other interventions, such as cognitive therapy, support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and stress management training.— Excerpt taken from Psychology Today.
According to psychologist, neuroscientist, master trainer and overall badass, Dr. Kate Truitt, "The Havening Techniques system is comprised of protocols and methods that rely on the electrochemical makeup of our body to create healing. Utilizing similar functional mechanisms as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), they include the newest advancements neuroscience. Havening Techniques provide a gentle, client-centered approach to the rapid release of encoded traumatic memories. This allows for fast and effective healing from posttraumatic stress disorder and other fear-based disorders such as anxiety, panic disorder, and phobias.
Havening: healing in your Hands
More about Havening
Without a doubt I know I am going to receive the help I need! Vanessa was extraordinary with me and got right to the point with compassion and honesty.
Redd
Life Coaching
"Since I have been working with Shannon I feel like I have gained a whole new perspective on life"
Jane
Life COaching
She is compassionate, honest, empathetic and down to earth. I have been in and out of therapy my entire life. Working with Vanessa and Shannon has changed my life for the better in just a short amount of time."
real people say:
"Vanessa listens with a kind, compassionate heart and I can tell her anything..."
"...without feeling judged. She also has given me practical tools I can use and I really noticed how much I was ignoring the signals my body was sending me. Definitely noticed a shift even after the first session."
Ann H
Wellness coaching
Yes, It Really Gets Better
"I was initially drawn to her because I was curiously skeptical."
"Vanessa came highly recommend by a colleague. In all honesty, I was initially drawn to her because I was curiously skeptical. I stayed because she is crazy, wicked smart and I actually experience the changes. We don't just talk about problems. We resolve them."
Irene K
Couples coaching
"Shannon really gets my son. She has an easy going and fun-loving demeanor."
"My son looks forward to seeing her and our family has been able to spend time together without everything turning into a circus. I appreciate the way she both dumbs down what she is talking about so I understand it without talking down to me."
Samuel
Parent of school aged child
(not actually Ann!)
Not Sam
(His son
is great!)
Not Irene. But she
said this:
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Are You Ready to Become a Better You?
The future you will be glad that you did the work. Life can be so much more that what it is now.
Let's do This.