Dealing with the Fear of Harming Our Clients
If you’re already coaching clients or want to become a coach and you have a love for the mind-body connection, you might have felt nervous about really digging into mind-body work with your clients for fear of bringing up issues and mishandling them, and it’s vital to be using trauma-sensitive tools to prevent just that.
It’s true - when we take our clients into their bodies and help them become more aware of the sensory experience of living in the body, we run the risk of helping them tap into stored emotions about traumatic or stressful situations.
This is unavoidable for two reasons:
We are all taught to suppress emotions in our culture, families, and schools. This isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s just the way adults have handled emotions for generations, and the good news is lots of parents are working on doing it differently these days!
Our natural protective mechanism when we encounter something really stressful or traumatic is to dissociate, which just means the mind pulls away from the raw, painful emotions and sensations in order to get through the difficult experience. Often we don’t realize that happened and then emotions come up far later - even years - to be processed.
When we’re coaching clients around releasing chronic pain, it’s vital to reconnect them with their bodies, emotions, and sensations. When we’re coaching clients around connecting to their inner wisdom, it’s also vital to create those same connections.
What the heck should we do, then, to make sure our clients are safe, we aren’t crossing lines into therapeutic work we aren’t trained to handle, and our clients get permanent and lasting results?
Coaching with a mind-body focus is a vital field because it covers processes and practices that are not taught in many traditional mental health training programs simply because the medical model doesn’t always fully explore (yet) issues like chronic pain caused by the disconnect between mind and body and the toll that takes over the years.
We’re offering a vital, needed service, whether we’re coaching around chronic pain or not, because bringing together practices for connecting to inner wisdom and its guidance, releasing self-pressure, regulating the nervous system, handling mind-body syndrome/TMS/stress-induced illness, and dealing with overwhelming emotions creates a very unique and necessary blend for our clients that they are unlikely to get anywhere else as a whole package. They’ll have to piece it all together if they ever do run across all the right resources to do so.
Whereas, we can get them relief and results without them having to research, study, experiment, and test different practices, all while feeling awful and doubting if they’re on the right path. (Seeing as that’s how I figured all of this out, I’d love to save others the years of effort that took!)
To prevent harm as a coach, it’s essential to know our limitations as a coach. We’re not trained to work with freshly discovered trauma, nor are we trained to directly approach trauma healing (unless we’ve specifically been trained through a trauma healing program that allows us to practice in the field as such).
It’s also essential to have an in-depth understanding of trauma so that we can be very clear around what serves our clients and what doesn’t, even though we aren’t doing trauma therapy with our clients. I’ve personally had experiences in therapeutic settings with fully trained therapists, even, when I felt completely retraumatized.
There’s nothing worse than leaving your therapy or coaching session with the new trauma of that session on top of your existing trauma! That’s the opposite of what we want to do for our clients!
For this reason, mind-body coaching tools need to be created with safety in mind. They need to avoid poking directly at a client’s trauma or trying to “dig it up.” Trauma surfaces naturally through triggers, so we need to trust the body’s natural healing process.
Mind-body coaching tools need to give our clients a way to feel emotions that allows them room to be themselves, honor themselves, and not feel forced to stick with something or a sensation that feels like too much right now. (No matter how much we think someone needs to feel their feelings!)
Mind-body coaching tools need to allow space for the most important aspect of coaching, which is attunement with our clients. The coaching tool should never take precedence over the simple act of being a kind, attuned listener who validates the emotions our clients are feeling.
After working in this field for fourteen years and having spent ten years with mind-body practices for myself prior to that, I could probably rant on about this topic for another fifty thousand words, lol. But, we all have other things to do today, so I’ll pause here to say that this is exactly why I’ve created an effective, proven, tested, safe, and trauma-sensitive set of mind-body coaching tools that you can trust and that do all of the above and more.
And, of course, I don’t share those tools willy-nilly without the in-depth training to back them up. Tools are only as useful as the fashion in which they are wielded.
So, if you’re feeling excited to add a mind-body focus to your coaching or training to become a coach with a mind-body focus, you can be sure that you’re learning how to coach safely, responsibly, and compassionately when you join me in my Mind-Body Magic Life Coach Training Program.
The program has been in existence since 2010, and I’ve constantly evolved and improved the mind-body tools with the latest research and information on the mind-body connection over the years. The method I’ve developed, called the Mind-Body Magic Method, has helped thousands of humans release chronic pain, relieve stress, connect to their inner wisdom, and create permanent and exciting shifts in their lives all over the world.