Coaching for Personal and Social Transformation
Train one-on-one with Dr. Arpaia to learn specific stress management skills and how to apply them to your life.
We start with Unease Modulation Model and how to identify the different components of stress. We then apply this knowledge to help you increase your effectiveness under stress in a sustainable and adaptive manner in the situations most relevant to your goals.
I only take a select number of coaching clients. Please fill out the New Client Survey so I can learn more about your goals and if we would be a good fit.
I have never felt comfortable with how mainstream psychiatry applies the medical model to most anxiety and depressive disorders. Even when I was in residency, I noticed that while the medical model places the source of anxiety and depression in the brain of the patient, the patients I saw were experiencing anxiety or depression from stresses such as overwork, relationship difficulties, financial insecurity, moral injury, or physical limitations due to illness. I also disliked the pathologizing nature of the medical model. No matter how much lip service was given to “reducing stigma,” the terms used to diagnose patients with mental disorders were stigmatizing, even if their “disorder” was a reasonable response to an unhealthy environment.
Within my own practice, I shifted from a treatment orientation where I was supposed to diagnose and fix a person who was inherently sick to a training orientation in which I was working with a person who was healthy and who needed to learn some skills. The patient and I worked collaboratively to develop skills and resources for dealing with stress more effectively. People liked the training orientation as it was empowering instead of pathologizing.
In addition to seeing patients, I have always done some coaching or training. I have worked with athletes and CEO’s to help them improve performance under pressure. I have led meditation retreats for business owners teaching how to apply mental skills for solving complex organizational problems. I have also created materials for medical first responders and now work with an international team to reduce use of force errors by police officers. I provide consulting to veterinary hospitals to improve team communication and conflict-resolution skills. While people usually want to learn the skills to improve in their profession, they also find the skills help them have more fulfilling relationships with their family and friends.
The skills I teach are based on a model of stress that I developed to train people to deal with stress more precisely. In this model stress has 5 components: difficulty, unease, activation, modulation, and reserves. People learn to identify the components based on their experience without requiring direct physiological signs. This helps them apply the skills rapidly and without having to rely on technology. The skills are applied to reduce problematic feedback loops among the components, perceptions, and responses. The model can be applied to help someone improve any stress-related condition or outcome. The publication describing the model can be found online:
The Unease Modulation Model
An Experimental Model of Stress with Implications for Health, Stress-management, and Public Policy
Arpaia, J and Andersen, JP. Frontiers in Psychiatry. June 2019.
In the first couple of sessions we will cover a practical framework for understanding stress and stress physiology by identifying interactions between cognitive processing, alarm systems, and activation/modulation systems in the nervous system. We will then apply this knowledge to help you increase your effectiveness under stress in a sustainable and adaptive manner in the situations most relevant to your goals.
Five individual coaching sessions are available to doctors through the PWP.
Typical goals include:
- Healthy lifestyle changes
- Treating mild/moderate burnout
- Treating severe burnout
- Clarifying core values
- Helping patients with difficult conditions such as chronic pain
- Making “difficult” patients less “difficult”
- Improving teamwork
- Negotiation and conflict resolution
- Leadership and the art of “good-enough”
- Dealing with moral injury