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Life
Coaching
FAQ Life
Coaching Position Announcement |
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Life Coaching Services
Village Life Coaching
by Laurel Freeman
The Life Coach program at the Village I.S.A. is a
program that grew out of a desire to find alternatives to inpatient
psychiatric hospitalization for our members. It has been an eight-year
labor, growing, changing and expanding as our experiences taught us new
lessons. I had worked for twelve years on a Psychiatric Emergency Team
(PET) prior to coming to the Village. My job on the PET team was to
evaluate adults with psychiatric disabilities for voluntary or involuntary
commitment. Over the years I learned of several important mistakes that
the system makes in this commitment process:
- It waits too long to get help to people. Many times,
in making home visits, I would hear from family, friends and neighbors
that the person with the illness had been going downhill for months. I
often wondered; if someone they trusted had visited and intervened
earlier, could that hospitalization have been prevented?
- It sends them to strange places, where their history,
their individuality, their comfort zone is unknown. How much comfort
can any of us get from such an environment? Wouldn’t it be better to
get the help in their natural settings, with the support system they
already have, rather than from strangers?
- It teaches lack of responsibility for one’s
recovery. Once hospitalized, the individual becomes a
"patient". The decisions are all made by
"professionals". Collaboration is no longer the accepted
approach to problem solving. Rather, the patient takes a passive role,
is placed in a unit where all decisions are made for them. It denies
an opportunity to learn how to participate in their recovery and learn
how to manage their illness.
Our life coaching program addresses all these areas. It involves giving
one on one extra attention to our members when they are under a lot of
stress, beginning to decompensate, or returning to the community after a
hospitalization. The life coaches are known to them, and in fact, may be
one of them. The intervention usually takes place before the member is in
need of hospitalization. It does not always prevent a brief period of
inpatient treatment, but there are times it does. And this offering of
choices makes the program worthwhile.
The Life Coaching program encourages our members to solve their
problems in their natural environment whenever possible. It makes sense to
me to use hospitals when the member’s behavior is so out of control that
no other alternative exists It also makes sense to me that whenever
possible, learning to cope in the "Real World" is a more
valuable lesson.
The Life Coaching program involves much collaboration with the member.
They are involved in choosing a life coach, deciding for how many hours or
days or weeks they will need help, and deciding when they are ready to be
back on their own. They continue to work actively with their case
management team and their psychiatrist. When the crisis is over, they can
take credit for being an active part of their return to well being. This
is a very powerful experience to have.
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