How to Coach Yourself and Others Grief Coaching and Counseling | Page 5

declaring each to be successful. Unfortunately, in each case the client's problem returned within a few
weeks, as the process actually only resulted in temporary relief.
Other techniques take advantage of the normal human desire to avoid pain and our built-in defence
mechanism, disassociating, to simply further disassociate the client from the feeling. Again, this does
not resolve anything, but just shoves it down further into the person's hiding places for uncomfortable
feelings.
One truly unfortunate thing about techniques that do not provide resolution is that the client is often
held responsible for the success or failure of the process. People are told things such as "you are not
ready yet to heal this", "you are resisting the process", and "you need to do something else first before
you can heal this".
There are a small number of techniques that I have found that incorporate processes to facilitate
complete resolution of the unresourceful or excessive feeling, and in this article I shall discuss two,
that if properly used, have a very high success rate:
AER (Awareness, Expression, Resolution) and
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).
The proper use of EFT is a topic best covered in another article, but suffice to say here that one should
follow closely the process outlined by the inventor, Gary Craig, and avoid introducing elements of
other systems which attempt to "speed things up" or "reframe a feeling" - the goal is resolution, not
speed or further disassociating from the feeling.

Getting to resolution
Having watched hundreds of people try various healing processes, with varying degrees of success, I
boiled down the results to these four essential elements of a long-term successful healing process.
They are simple, practical and easy to look for:
•

The client experiences full exposure to the feeling, for as long as it takes for resolution to
occur - they remain fully associated. As this can be seen as counter-intuitive, given human
nature to avoid pain and the large number of relief methods being promoted on the basis of
being "quick and painless", one must overcome the tendency to run away from the feeling.
Having someone else guide you through a fully-associated process a few times makes it easier
to eventually be able to do it on one's own, if desired. " Fully associated" means you feel the
feeling, and are looking out through your own eyes, not watching yourself as if watching a
movie.

•

The feeling will diminish in intensity, first to a level that is comfortable and then dissolve
completely. Many relief oriented processes stop once a comfortable intensity is reached.
However, stopping prematurely can lead to the feeling being re-triggered, as it is not gone
from the system, much like cancer can continue to spread if not eradicated.

•

The amount of time needed for a feeling to diminish can vary tremendously, so patience is
important and the classical 50 minute therapist's hour is often not conducive to complete
res