Interpersonal Communication in Counseling and Relationships

Catalog description

Increased knowledge of fundamental patterns for improving communication through language and language patterns allows students to master promoting change-work in individual, couple, marital, and family counseling and coaching. Students would advance their resourcefulness in applying communication to form or enrich relationships. Students would demonstrate an enhanced level of applying communication processes that presuppose a structure of healing assumptions within the communication framework. The range of skills involves students eliciting high-quality information, formulating solution-focused questions, and demonstrating the application of well-organized communication processes in performing counseling and coaching. Students learn to address clients’ mental health and relationship issues by building communication designed to indirectly presuppose meanings that transform limiting thought-frames into positive frames – promoting optimism, hope, and healing attitudes – as the context for beneficial change in clients, drawing from positive psychology, emotional and social intelligence, and neuro-linguistic communication, a range of themes are addressed: Rapport, bonding and connecting, nurturing, attachment and love, compassion, male/ female differences, optimal functioning, and increasing meaning and purpose in life.