Developing Both Sides of Your Brain:
Managing Your Anxiety

Anxiety is an orientation; ways of how to be you. Many people say, "it's been with me most of my life."  Anxiety is isolating, lonely, and keeps you stuck in old patterns of attention, thinking, and relating to other people. Research suggests that anxiety is often a model of behavior that children "adopt" from one or both parents. For the most part, I believe this is true; if you suffer from generalized anxiety, likely one of your parent's did too. In this workshop you will learn to develop the expectancy to experience the non-anxious part of you, how NOT to let your feelings become predictors, how to tolerate ambiguity, increase your tolerance for options, regulate the "second-guesser" or "worry warthog" and build the confidence in your own beliefs and inner resources. You are more than your anxiety. This group combines cognitive behavior therapy and hypnosis techniques.

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Future Learning Labs

Sex for Survivors: Healing After Abuse

Sex: There is nothing more central to a person's identity than their sexuality. For most, if not all survivors of childhood sexual abuse, anxiety is a deeply felt and crippling feeling of helplessness, confusion, and self-doubt. The fact is, anxiety is part of sex. Tolerating anxiety makes even better sex. Too often, survivors use avoidance as a short-term coping strategy however, that just intensifies anxieties in the long term. In this workshop, you will learn how to practice developing that part of yourself that creates safety, clarity, and confidence, how to recognize patterns of avoidance and accommodation, and learn the emotional joy of developing your sexuality while confronting and tolerating personal anxieties in the bedroom.

Stressed Kids, Stressed Parents

The most painful aspect of anxiety is that it seems unresolvable. For our children, their anxieties seem to never stop and problems get bigger and bigger. How can we teach our children that most problems are resolvable? What words do we use? How can we teach them to use their own inner resources and imagination to organize what seems gigantic? In this workshop, parents and children learn the basics of self-regulation. What is it, and what it's not? Parents learn to incorporate skills that teach their children and themselves how to self-regulate. When parents can self-regulate their own anxieties they model self regulation to their children.