TITLE OF TRAINING: BASIC COUNSELING

This workshop will look at some of the most fundamental and important issues in counseling. The ability to let go of one's own values, judgements, critical attitudes and move into a space where the client's world and reality are accepted and understood as the only reality the client knows how best to function in. Sensitivity, empathy, and respect for the client's world lies at the foundation of effective counseling. Cultural Sensitivity grows from engagement at this level and becomes more than a buzz word or politically correct action. Cultural sensitivity, in the context of a counselor's work, is personal sensitivity, and essential for establishing rapport, trust, and respect. Without these essential abilities, counseling at a deep level, cannot occur.

Woven throughout this workshop are discussions, readings, and experiential exercises which examine and explore:

• Use of self as a therapeutic tool;

• How to engage with clients and build rapport:

• Identifying counselor's immediate, intermediate and ultimate goals;

• Goal accomplishment;

• Effect of race, sex, age, and other variables on the counseling process;

• Challenges specific to counseling addicted clients;

• Ethical issues in counseling;

• using empathy effectively: recognizing and responding to feelings;

• Neuro-linguistic Programming:

• learning to establish trust and rapport, joining a client's reality, identifying clients' primary representational system and using it for irresistible communication.

• Recognizing and effectively dealing with transference and counter-transference, cues for recognizing their occurrence and techniques for resolution will be explored.

A major focus will be on participant's understanding the concept of empathy in order to construct behavioral counseling objectives which can be directly tied to an overall treatment plan and monitored. A combination of didactic presentation and experiential exercises will be used to facilitate learning.

Participants will be given videotaping opportunities to practice the skills they learn utilizing the "Interpersonal Process Recall" (IPR). The use of constructive feedback will also be addressed.

TITLE OF TRAINING: ADVANCED COUNSELING SKILLS

This is a follow-up workshop to Basic Counseling Skills where the emphasis was on participants' understanding the concept of empathy in order to construct behavioral counseling objectives which could be directly tied to the client's overall treatment plan. Additionally, participants examined some of the fundamental issues in counseling: building and maintaining rapport, joining a client's reality, recognizing and responding to feelings, and representational systems.

This Advanced Counseling workshop will further explore and build upon those knowledge's and skills learned in the preceding workshop. Participants will learn how to:

• actively engage, join and stay with a client's reality in order to establish deep trust and rapport

• How and when to utilize probing questions, confrontation, and interpretation

• effectively utilize empathic responding and

• effectively discern and utilize Representational Systems for creating irresistible communication.

A combination of didactic presentation and experiential exercises will be utilized throughout the workshop.

Participants will be given opportunities to practice the skills they learn on videotape. The use of constructive feedback will also be addressed.

Prerequisite: Basic Counseling Skills

TITLE OF TRAINING: GROUP COUNSELING

This workshop is designed for professionals already working with groups. We will explore and examine what makes groups work; curative factors in groups and how to create and nurture them; the importance of group work in recovery; what to look for in groups and what to do with it when you find it. Transference and counter-transference as group issues will be considered, as well as counselor characteristics, self-disclosure, confrontation, and leadership style.

We will examine group dynamics from the perspectives of focusing on content vs. process; stages of group growth and development; and task and maintenance behaviors. The difference between support groups, education groups, and therapy groups will also be examined.

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