Classes & Workshops

Classes for Mental Health

Workshops for Skilled Habits 

Learn To BE Mentally Healthy

  • Classes Teach The Wise Consciousness of Mental Health.
  • Workshops Teach The Skilled Habits of Mental Health.
  • Classes are Prerequisites to Register for The Corresponding Workshop.
  • All classes and workshops meet for four consecutive weeks as 90-minute Telehealth sessions. Each Class and Workshop is limited to 6 students.
A man and a woman sitting on a couch

Tuition for each four-session class and four-session workshop is $160.  Members receive a 20% tuition discount.

 

Consciousness has many definitions. I teach Wise Consciousness as the awareness of self, others, and experience in a context of clear interpersonal boundaries which accurately interprets causal responsibility and assigns constructive meanings to experience. Teaching Wise Consciousness enables people to correct the troubled meanings of experiences that have damaged their mental health for years, and even decades. When Wise Consciousness prevails, skilled habits can be taught to manage the corrective action that improves one's mental health. Teaching skilled habits includes analysis of behavioral options, and selecting the right intention (a morally or ethically correct achievable action) when put into practice. Continued practice produces the skilled habits of mentally healthy people.  

Classes explore how the transgressed meanings of your experiences shaped your unwise consciousness, damaged your self-esteem, infected your identity, and trapped you into self-doubt and unskilled habits that limited your potential happiness and success. Classes teach that recovery from unwise consciousness is achievable when you revisit the transgressed meanings of your experiences to analyze and correct their pathogenic meanings that shaped how you see yourself.

Workshops discover and tailor the practices you need to recover from your self-doubt, your unskilled habits, and your self-defeating defenses that may have been labeled psychopathology (a mental illness). In workshops, you practice building the skilled habits that allow the emergence of your positive self-image, your identity integration, and the flexible boundaries and defenses that promote healthy interpersonal relationships and deliver your mental health. Workshops will also focus on practices to prevent relapse of your former unskilled habits. 

 

The word consciousness has an unlimited number of definitions. This writer clarifies a working definition of consciousness as the awareness of experience (i.e., energy exchanges between self and surroundings) and the prevailing meanings assigned to experiences that endure as beliefs and attitudes. When meanings assigned to experience are harmonious with universal nature and accurately define causal responsibility, wise consciousness prevails, enabling the skilled habits of mental health to flourish. When meanings diverge from universal nature and confuse causal responsibility, unwise consciousness prevails, giving rise to unskilled habits that damage self-image, infect identity, and pollute humankind.

Classes explore how transgressed meanings of your experiences shaped your unwise consciousness, damaged your self-esteem, infected your identity, and trapped you in unskilled habits that limited your potential happiness. Classes teach that recovery from unwise consciousness is achievable when you revisit the transgressed meanings of your experiences to analyze and correct the pathogenic meanings.

Workshops uncover and tailor the practices you need to recover from your unskilled habits and self-defeating defenses that may be labeled pathological. In workshops, you practice building the skilled habits that support your emerging; positive self-image, identity integration, and flexible boundaries and defenses that promote healthy interpersonal relationships. Practices will also focus on relapse prevention of your former unskilled habits. 

Tuition for each four-session class and four-session workshop is $160.  Members receive a 20% tuition discount.

 

Instructions To Register for Classes and Workshops

  1. Please review the class and workshop descriptions and make note of the class or workshop titles and numbers you are interested in attending.
  2. Select the "SIGN UP FOR CLASS-WORSHOP" button and complete the pop-up form with your contact information. Indentify your 1st, 2nd, & 3rd choice of classes or workshops you'd like to attend.
  3. Select the "SEND INFO & PREFERENCES" button. Your contact information and preferences will be sent to john@johnviolalcsw.com and your submission will be acknowledged by email conforming your class or workshop preferences.
  4. You will be contacted by phone and email when the next class or workshop you prefer is schedule with the dates and times of your four week class or workshop.

Classes teach Wise Consciousness for your Mental Health and are PREREQUISITES to all Workshops.

 

CLASS # C01 -- Understanding Your Feelings as Different From Your Emotions

  1. What did you learn about feelings and emotions from your family of origin and your childhood, adolescence, and adult communities?
  2. How do you now value your feelings in your family and communities?
  3. Where in your body do you experience the energy of your feelings?
  4. Do you validate your feelings, and can you consciously encode your feelings into language?
  5. Do your feelings inform your needs, and do your needs direct corrective action via emotion, i.e., behavior?
  6. Do you have the courage to express your emotions, and can you self-soothe when the responses from others hurt?

 

CLASS # C02 -- The Quartet of Self-Doubt, Demystifying Anxiety, Worry, Procrastination, and Depression

  1. How did you learn you were suffering from an Anxiety or Depressive Disorder or acquired the title Worry-Wort or Procrastinator?
  2. If we eliminated the words anxiety and depression, what would we be talking about now?
  3. If worry and procrastination were never invented, what would you likely learn about yourself?
  4. Has your pathogenic labels alienated you from the spontaneous experience of your natural feelings?
  5. Has your pathologized identity or labels that carry social disapproval robbed you of your potential and trapped you in self-doubt?
  6. Are you aware of the Myths, Mysteries, and subjectivity surrounding psychopathology?

 

CLASS # C03 -- Substance Abuse & Other Self-Destructive Habits "What's Going On?" Marvin Gaye's Mega Hit  Asks The Right Question For This Class

  1. Habits involve thought and behavior. Obsessions are thoughts, and compulsions are behavior; let us explore the relationship between Habits-Obsessions & Compulsions (HOC).
  2. All HOCs have stages beginning with experimentation and ending with addiction.
  3. Life's challenges often lead to adverse experiences causing suffering and the need for comfort. Where do we go for our relief?
  4. When adversity overwhelms our coping skills, The need for relief feels urgent.
  5. The author John Gray used the term: "Living Out-Of-Scarcity." Insufficient support systems + inadequate coping skills + Self-defeating habits = No relief.
  6. Mood-altering fixes: Food, Sweets, Alcohol, Drugs, Gambling, Sex, Shopping, Exercising, Sport are HOCs that become self-destructive.

Workshop teach skilled habits that RECOVER from the harm your mental health suffered from self-doubt.

 

WORSHOP # W01 - Practices to Master the Skilled Habits to Embrace Feelings and Confidently Express Your Emotions

  1. Everything is energy, sitting with feeling energy.
  2. Epidermal inputs, feeling the energy from external sources.
  3. Internal sources of energy, the Vagus Nerve, afferent energy transmission.
  4. Mind is a verb regulating the flow of energy and information.
  5. Embracing the spontaneous and conscious experiences of feeling
  6. Affect how family, culture, and mores influence our regulator value system.
  7. Converting feelings into emotion (language and behavior) with courage, yielding confidence.
  8. The five psychosocial phases of the mastery of feelings: are a) spontaneous experience, b) validating, c) encoding, d) emoting, and e) self-soothing.

 

WORKSHOP # W02 - Living Free of Self-Doubt Practicing Skills to Eliminate Anxiety, Worry, Depression, and Procrastination.
 Us Three sang, "Got bad knowledge of self, got sad knowledge of self, got mad knowledge of self. Gotta-get good knowledge of self gotta-get-it."

  1. Sitting with feelings to allow need and corrective action plan to percolate.
  2. Visit your library of experiences, cataloging the unnatural and incorrect meanings of self that fuel your self-doubt.
  3. Credit the authors of the unnatural and incorrect messages you inculcated and reframe correct compassionate meanings.
  4. Embracing the coherency of your revised Autobiographical Narrative (CAN), allowing this CAN to restore belief in self to eliminate self-doubt.
  5. Embracing fear as an appropriate and natural feeling requiring corrective attention such as caution, preparation, and rehearsal.
  6. Using critical thinking and problem-solving to move forward confidently.
  7. Develop a self-care plan of positive attitudes toward self, others, and life.

 

WORKSHOP # W03 - Recovering From the Self-Defeating Habits With Their Obsessions & Compulsions.

  1. Synanon, the Grandfather of Recovery, Was a Life Sentence & Partially Correct to the 28-Day Promised Recovery Centers and Their Pitfalls.
  2. Embracing Suffering as a Natural Experience in Life.
  3. The Skills to Manage Our Feelings: Spontaneity, Validation, Encoding, Emotion, Self-Soothing.
  4. Redefining Our Understanding of Trust and Attachments.
  5. Skilled Habits: Taking-In-The-Good, Being In-Joy-To Enjoy, Following-Your-Curiosity, Discovering-Your Passions, Empathic-Assertion, Vulnerable-Intimacy, Loving-Kindness, Devotion-To-Self-Care.
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