We have a strong natural tendency to avoid pain, whether physical or emotional. There are times when avoiding pain makes sense such as when you receive freezing at the dentists when getting a filling. Unfortunately avoiding dealing with many types of emotional pain, such as the pain of losing a loved one, is not helpful and will lead to problems. If, for example, you get a sliver in your foot, your body will recognize the sliver as being a problem and will constantly be trying to push it to the surface to eliminate and heal you from it. If you resist what your body is doing, chronic complications such as infections and pain will result. Painful emotions operate in a similar manner. If you experience painful emotions, your body will always be trying to push them to the surface to have you deal with them. If you do not know how or you resist dealing with them, chronic problems will usually result. Those problems may affect you directly, such as through ongoing feelings of sadness or anger or indirectly such as through sleep problems or unexplainable physical symptoms. People will typically choose coping methods to help with the painful emotions when they do not know how to resolve them or until they are able to resolve them. The coping methods can help suppress but will never eliminate the painful feelings. There are coping methods that seem less harmful, such as exercising or working, and coping methods that seem more harmful, such as using illegal drugs or gambling. However, they all tend to cause problems, even the less harmful methods, and become bad habits. Trying to change or stop the coping methods without switching to new coping methods that cause their own set of problems is usually impossible without dealing with the painful emotions that are the reason for using the coping methods in the first place, even for hard working, committed individuals. Once the painful emotions are dealt with successfully, the coping methods are no longer needed and can be reduced or stopped completely and permanently. I have been involved in the counselling and related fields for about 30 years working with individuals, couples and family situations in a number of settings including private, mental health, probation, mediation, child welfare, crisis and residential. I have tried to see what is most helpful for people and leads to long lasting change. I have also sat in the client's chair for a number of years getting my own counselling which has helped me learn what and how different perspectives work from personal experience. I have worked alongside, both personally and professionally, a number of other professionals such as psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, doctors, nutritionists and naturopaths and have learned from their multiple views and perspectives, how to better help others. I have tried to put together, in this book, the best of what works and is helpful for making meaningful and lasting positive changes related to clearly describing what feelings are, how feelings work and how to resolve difficult feelings in and of themselves. There is also a section on communication skills. Often bright, caring and well-meaning people will struggle habitually and sometimes seriously, making a variety of simple and complex errors over and over again until their communication becomes difficult, non-functional or non-existent even if the issues they are trying to discuss are not very complicated. Commonly, people are not aware of the mistakes they are making or what skills are needed for better communication to occur. If they are aware they may not be able to implement them or may habitually forget to use them. The communication section looks at many factors that lead to better communication and offers step by step techniques to learn in helping people to develop and follow a better style of communication.