Psychiatrists and Psychologists

Biography

Biography: Verena Hein

Abstract

More and more people the German population makes use from coaching and self-payed psychotherapy offered by non-medical psychotherapists. Coaches/therapists are faced with different challenges. They have to help the clients/patients to solve the problems in a quite short time. Especially coaches have to focus on the topics of the clients. They have to establish a therapeutic relation in a very short time. A third part of the German population is affected by mental illness. In addition, the hidden prevalence and the rate of 12 month prevalence are increasing. Because of that coaches and therapists have to be aware about the stress history and mental diseases about which the clients/patients do not speak or do not know. The Polyvagal-Theory describes the three parts and five states of the autonomous nervous system (ANS). The first and oldest part is the dorsal vagus nerve/complex (DVC, Freeze state), the second is the sympathetic nervous system (SNS, Fight/Flight state) and the third is the ventral vagus nerve/complex (VVC, Safety state, correlated with the Social Engagement System, SES). The Polyvagal-Theory helps to understand the behavior of the clients/patients as well as the possible root cause for several problems. The problems of the client/patients are often coupled with a situation and one of the stress states of the ANS. Coaching and therapy methods should mind the problem correlated stress state and the pre-dominant ANS state. The presentation will illustrate this presumption at three different cases of coaching clients. The three examples are physical and mental healthy, experienced scuba divers who reported the same problem. The coaching process and the methods were adapted to observations about the pre-dominant ANS state, used the SES activation method EmpAtECS^® and different interventions. The goal was to reach the ANS state SES for the process and the bygone situation.