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Jerry Donoghue is available for private session work with individuals and couples. Rates and information to set an appointment are at the bottom of the page. Any questions, please feel free to call.
Couples come to me either in crisis or are tired of long-standing conflicts that continue to recycle and want resolution, completion, and peace to restore their loving connection. Some couples also seek coaching to enrich and deepen an already solid relationship; they want to "top off" their relationship with exploring deeper levels of intimacy and expressions of love.
For couples in conflict I offer:
• A powerful way for each person to be deeply heard and understood about specific conflicts that are currently presenting themselves. Facilitating such quality connection itself often inspires a softening and natural resolution to occur.
• Assistance in clearly defining what each person wants in the relationship and supporting the couple to generate specific strategies so that both people can get their important needs met.
• An understanding and application of a paradigm outside the right/wrong frame of reference in which most of our conflicts reside. I invite couples to resolve their conflicts from a different level from which they are created. Many long-standing, seemingly intractable conflicts, can get a sense of completion and the relationship can be restored to wholeness.
For couples wanting relationship enrichment I offer:
• Exploring subtle obstacles that prevent deeper levels of intimacy and closeness.
• Deepening the capacity to want to freely give and receive from each other.
• An open and nonjudgmental way to honestly explore. I don't evaluate or prescribe to couples some ideal way to be or a viewpoint about what they should be doing and where they need to go. I yield to the couple's own values and needs to inform the process.
"My husband and I were having some marital issues that needed real attention. Jerry was such a huge help in getting our marriage back on track. He was extremely professional, genuine, and insightful. He listened, provided guidance, and truly cared about us as human beings. Jerry gave us strategies for how to handle our different emotions and ways to work and talk together as a couple. I was amazed at how each session would unfold and what new discoveries I would find out about myself, my husband, and my marriage. I was also amazed at how Jerry was able to tap into deep personal issues; issues that one can bring with him/her into a marriage and how those can make a marriage worse if not dealt with." Natalie Kiefer
Sometimes couples choose to do the 8 week course privately. What this looks like is the couple will buy a book "Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life" by Marshall Rosenberg. They will be given a compatible workbook written by Jerry Donoghue which includes some practice exercises. They'll schedule a session each week for 8 weeks. This intensive learning period has done wonders for many couple. Please feel free to call to ask any questions about the way I work. There is more information about how the compassionate communication model is effective with relationships on the relationship page. To learn more about the logistics of couples coaching please click here.
Private session coaching can support a wide range of challenges people encounter in life. Everything from gaining clarity about a particular decision, working through mid-life changes and transitions, working with relationship patterns, working deeply with yourself at your core or supporting you on your spiritual path. I have developed a personal growth process I call Inner Empathy Work which supports people in an innovative way. Below is an extensive explanation of the kind of support you can expect:
Inner Empathy Sessions Are A Different Kind Of Contribution
An Inner Empathy session is not a therapy session. Inner Empathy is a coaching method of inquiry where you learn to hold empathetic and compassionate presence for whatever emerges in your experience. In an Inner Empathy session, there is no need to diagnose, analyze or label you according to some theoretical ideal of what is and is not psychologically healthy. You will feel a sense of comfort and ease from the facilitator’s non-judgmental care and acceptance of whatever emerges.
Inner Empathy is nonpathologizing because it is not based upon the premise that something is wrong with you that needs to be fixed. Inner Empathy is based upon the premise that empathetic awareness is available to you now to hold presence and connect with all aspects of yourself on a feeling/need-based level. Holding such empathetic presence for the various conscious/unconscious aspects of your inner world can inspire natural, self-corrective shifts. Your well-being will be self-defined and based upon the choices you make based upon your unique set of needs and values.
Harmonizing Deep Conflicting Needs Where One Set Of Needs Is Unconscious
Have you ever wanted to take the initiative to meet a need but something deep and strong within you held you back and you didn't’t know what that was? Often people are challenged with competing needs scenarios where one set of needs is at odds with another set that is unconscious. For example, suppose you said you were experiencing conflict around wanting to follow your passion at this stage of your life. You want to live your passion, but there is something holding you back.
An Inner Empathy inquiry would help you to connect to the need that is being met by not doing your passion. Sometimes this inquiry into what is holding you back is easy and sometimes this unacknowledged need is deeply embedded beneath protective layers. Accessing it requires patience, diligence, and a skillful empathetic presence. Bringing the previously unacknowledged need that is holding you back into empathetic awareness is the first step to experiencing the possibility of moving towards doing your passion. Harmonizing deep conflicting needs like these in your life can make a meaningful difference in your own system of meaning.
Working In The Present With The Innate Wisdom Of Your Body/Mind System
Working in the present means we engage and empathetically hold presence for whatever is organically emerging in your experience during the session. You may have a particular issue you want to explore or maybe even engage some unsavory aspect of yourself that troubles you. You will learn to trust that the particular feelings and needs surrounding this issue that emerge in the present are what seek your empathetic awareness. You also will learn to support others and operate from the premise that the other people’s body/mind system knows what is best for them and give them a type of support that honors their innate wisdom.
Working in the present also discourages you from being preoccupied and totally identified with past memories or future projections. These past/future excursions can be endless, disconnecting, and can represent a subtle way of protecting ourselves from feeling feelings and connecting to needs/beliefs that long for empathetic presence. Present-time work will include connecting to how you believe you are, in totality, these past memories and future projections as they are happening. The Inner Empathy work will help you get separation from these memories or projections and support you in staying present to whatever is occurring in the moment. A trust in a calm centeredness emerges. This serves as a foundation upon which to do your inquiries.
Support That Cultivates Your Own Self-Presence And Guidance
During and Inner Empathy session, the guiding principle the facilitator will operate under is to support you in connecting with your own empathetic awareness to hold presence for whatever challenging aspects of yourself emerge. This kind of support builds your own inner resources to continue to connect deeply with yourself. This follows the principle of teaching you to fish instead of feeding you a fish for the day. Also, cultivating your self-presence is a hedge against getting lost in your inquiry. It is very easy to become identified with your core feelings/needs and believe these feelings/needs represent your identity. Cultivating the capacity of your empathetic awareness to stay present and hold these deeper aspects of yourself becomes essential. The more capacity you develop to hold empathetic awareness, the deeper you can go into your inner world to hold presence for your core feelings/needs and associated beliefs. Learning this skill can open the way for ongoing self-support throughout your life.
Experientially Working With Deep Core Needs,
Feelings, And Beliefs Allows Something Useful To Happen
Inner Empathy work was specifically designed to efficiently navigate your inner world for the purpose of connecting with core unconscious feelings/needs/beliefs that are deeply embedded in your being. The presupposition in this work is that these unconscious core feelings/needs/beliefs are largely responsible for the quality of the life we lead and express themselves in our daily life in many ways. In my experience, chronic troubles with relationships, career, parenting, etc, all find their inspiration in unconscious core feelings/needs and associated beliefs.
Inner Empathy work acknowledges that the way you access your core feelings/needs and associated beliefs is a critical factor in whether such connection is useful. Do you emotionally and experientially connect with these deeper aspects, or does your intellectual part take over the inquiry and hold these feelings/needs and beliefs in an intellectual way? A lot of personal growth falls prey to the intellectual parts of us that keeps us disconnected from deeper core needs/feelings/beliefs. This is why people who think they have connected with their core beliefs do not see any change in their lives.
The Inner Empathy work was designed to support people in directly accessing these core feelings/needs and associated beliefs experientially and emotionally. The overriding assumption and intention contained in Inner Empathy work is that such deep empathetic connections with core feelings/needs and beliefs will create a quality of connection where we can trust that something useful will occur. Useful will be self-defined as you connect with the unique expressions of your core feelings/needs.
Inner Empathy Sessions Are Cost Effective
Inner Empathy work creates the conditions for deep and meaningful work to be done quickly, efficiently, and safely. Many people have expressed gratitude to me about my efficiency in working with them. They express how they wish they would have found my work sooner as they reflect on how much money they could have saved. My clients tell me that issues they had struggled with and were unsuccessful in resolving despite years of therapy/coaching were successfully resolved in just a handful of Inner Empathy sessions. My intention is to make my services obsolete in the fastest way possible without impacting effectiveness or safety.
What Type of People Flourish Doing Inner Empathy Work?
The people who seem to thrive in doing Inner Empathy work have been on a spiritual path and/or have already done a lot of personal growth work. I enjoy helping people untangle the subtle ways they confound themselves with their own brilliance, knowledge and personal growth practices. It is gratifying to help support someone who has refined their awareness and is willing and ready to receive the effortless shifts that come with the Inner Empathy work. It gives me a great sense of meaning and purpose to support people who are coming to the end of their search and wanting to experience the fruition of all their personal growth work... who want to abide in the present more fully...who yearn to experience a stabilized wholeness in their life.
To find out more about Inner Empathy work, a free chapter of the Inner Empathy book can be downloaded on the book chapter page.
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2008 © Jerry Donoghue
Asheville Compassionate Communication Center
150 E. Chestnut St. #1, Asheville, NC 28801 • 828-252-0538 • Email