Are you a trauma-informed emotional-intelligence-based life coach, therapist, psychologist or counsellor seeking new clients to work with online via Skype?
I get more requests for coaching from potential new clients all around the world than I can personally handle, so I am seeking like-minded coaches, therapists, psychologists and counsellors with similar backgrounds to me who I can refer my excess clients to.
People contact me because they relate to my story after reading the articles on this site. The most common problem they report comes down to managing anxiety breaking free of a controlling mother and learning to self-parent after having a passive father. Often this manifests in their adult life as difficulties forming healthy, emotionally connected relationships with members of the opposite sex.
They are typically seeking a combination of empathy to heal the pain of the past, and assertiveness skills to move forward in building the life that they want. Most of them are aware of what the problem is because they related to one of my articles on these topics, and need empathy and support to heal and move forward.
I deliberately don’t diagnose people because I believe that intellectual analysis undermines empathy, and empathy is what heals trauma. Also I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist. If I was, I’d probably say they generally have an adult attachment disorder due to a traumatic childhood experience of emotionally unavailable, neglectful or abusive parents.
I get roughly as many enquiries from women as from men. Sometimes the women are in relationships with men who have mother issues and want advice on how to deal with the situation. In these cases the woman often has boundary issues or low self-esteem herself that leads her into relationships with emotionally unavailable men, so I work with her on becoming more assertive with her partner and his mother. Other times the women have issues with their own mother, or parallel issues with anxiety related to a controlling father.
If these sorts of clients interest you to work with, we can establish an arrangement where I refer clients to you in return for a portion of the money they pay you. Because the people who seek me out do so in response to the articles I’ve written about my story, it is important that you fit a similar profile in order to be a similar match to the potential client. This includes:
- Having broken free from a controlling mother
- Dealt with a passive father
- Overcome bullying from other males
- Learned to establish healthy emotionally connected relationships with women
Life is a work in progress so you don’t have to be perfect, but you need to be at least a few steps ahead of a typical client in order to be both relateable and able to help them with integrity.
My approach to coaching is heavily based on emotional intelligence, an awareness of emotional trauma and that empathy is what heals it. To work with clients that I refer you need to be able to:
- Identify their feelings
- Offer deep empathy
- Be emotionally available during the session
- Be comfortable with healthy expressions of anger, rage, sadness, anxiety
- Sit with a client in deep emotional distress
- Not get emotionally overwhelmed yourself
- Bring them back out of distress in time for the end of the session
- Teach healthy emotional expression and assertiveness
- Set clear boundaries and teach them to do the same
- Be assertive with an angry client if the anger turns towards you
- Challenge a client who habitually avoids feelings by intellectualising
- Foster healthy emotional independence so they don’t get dependent on you
- Be flexible about scheduling clients in different timezones
It’s normal to experience emotions yourself during the session, but it’s important to have enough of your own emotional pain healed that you don’t get overwhelmed. The connection between you and the client recreates the healthy parent/child emotional bond through which infants normally learn to regulate their emotions, that the client missed out on. It’s important that you don’t need to disconnect from that bond due to overwhelm on your part. Staying connected when they are in deep emotional pain is what helps heal the relational aspects of the client’s trauma.
You need to be knowledgeable about:
- Emotional trauma
- Empathy
- Emotional dysregulation and how to fix it
- The six basic unpleasant emotions: anger, sadness, fear, guilt, shame, disgust
- Underlying causes that lead to anxiety and depression
- Rogerian therapy (sounds like you feel …)
- Non-violent communication (read Marshall Rosenberg’s book)
- Boundary setting
- Transforming anger into assertiveness
- The somatic nature of emotions (read Waking The Tiger by Peter Levine)
You also need to be able to demonstrate that you have training in emotional-intelligence-based coaching, counselling or therapy and are currently working with clients. If you need training to get started, I could potentially take you on as a client to get you started if you already have some training in counselling or coaching. You will need to provide a biography suitable for me to post on the coaching page of this website, where I will offer a selection of coaches with varying fees.
You are free to nominate the fee you wish to charge per hour, including my referral fee of 30%. I set the expectation with all clients that they pay for sessions ahead of time via PayPal, and you should do the same. Referral fees should be paid to me via PayPal once per month, or via an Australian bank transfer if you reside in Australia.
If this interests you, contact me here and we can arrange a time to talk on Skype about your background and approach to coaching: