Personal Learning & Development.org 

PLD Provides Grief Counseling, Coaching and Support for Healing and Growth After Loss

Click Here for A QUICK OVERVIEW OF OUR SERVICES. Our mission is to help people in the big transitions of life that inevitably involve grief & loss, including: death of a loved one, divorce, couples-conflict, major career change, long-term disability related transitions, recovery from addictions and relocation-resettlement.  Our primary goal is to help people experience healing and wellness throughout their journey of recovery from grief .

What We Do

PLD provides counseling, coaching, guidance, & facilitation of instructional workshops, seminars & support groups, individual instruction, tutoring, mentoring, referral, acquisition assistance for books & learning materials, and tuition and fees assistance for courses, programs and counseling. (Also see our SERVICES page)

What's Behind the Name?

We see counseling, coaching, and group facilitation as a collaborative learning process that we pursue jointly with those we help.   Adults go through a variety of different kinds of learning in life but we believe undergirding all other kinds of learning is what each of us needs to learn about ourselves along the way.  We call this Personal Learning and we see it as essential to all areas of human Development.  Personal learning and development is learning that integrates mind, heart, body and soul.  It enriches our capacities for labor, leadership, leisure and love.

Loss Leads to Essential Learning & Helping Others Helps Us Heal

We have witnessed that leaders in most areas of personal and professional success have said that what they learned from their losses was essential to their subsequent accomplishments.   Also we have seen that people make great contributions to their own success in healing from grief by helping others through grief recovery.  So, an important part of "what we do" is to assist individuals to discern and pursue a  personal mission that includes helping others (e.g. volunteerism, career-change, starting a nonprofit).

Help and Hope for All Who are Hurting

Our Catholic Christian faith is the motivational center and source of our effort to help and encourage but we do not have faith requirements of those who come to us for help.    Our counseling, coaching and group facilitation reflects continuing professional development in multicultural-counseling theory and practice.  We seek to help without regard to creed, race, gender, or ethnicity and without the cultural encapsulation that would impede such help.  For those who want to integrate their faith in their grief recovery, we have tools and methods to help.  For those who prefer not, to we offer the Grief Recovery Method.

Photo (to right): The Grief Recovery Method is one of the tools Personal Learning and Development employs to help people deal with grief.  The Grief Recovery Method is faith-neutral and deals with a wide range of losses.  We see recovery as a process of learning and development through which individuals improve their health and wellness, live a self-directed life, and strive to reach their full potential.  To learn more about the Grief Recovery Institute, click here.

What's New?

See PLD updates & ideas on our FACEBOOK page.

PLD Low-Cost & No-Cost Grief Recovery: In addition to offering low-cost and no-cost grief support through the private practice nonprofit initiative Personal Learning and Development for Grief Recovery, PLD partners Paul & Lola Duffy share their counseling and coaching skills as volunteer grief support-group facilitators at St. Ignatius Martyr Catholic Church's GriefShare group. 

To learn about other low-cost or no-cost grief support services Lola and I offer, our use the form on our "CONTACT US" page.

PLD 12 Step Grief Recovery is an adaptation of the 12 Steps of Emotions Anonymous (EA).  The 12 Steps are broadly if not universally recognized as a way individuals can integrate spirituality in healing without the impediments that can be experienced with other forms of spirituality or organized religion.  If you are experiencing normal or even complicated grief, you know the experience of powerlessness over the emotional pain of grief and the havoc it can cause in your ability to think and act effectively.  This experience of powerlessness is where 12 Step healing has been found to be profoundly effective for millions of people.

Personal Learning and Development for Catholics and other Christians: All of our training and professional development prepares us to do counseling and coaching in a secular, faith-neutral manner.  What is new is that most of our work together now is in a faith-based setting. This allows us to help those with whom we work to integrate their Christian faith understandings in their counseling and coaching process.  See more in "Our Story" at Catholic Faith Matters and the connected group "Personal Learning and Development for Catholics and Other Christians ."

Alumni Giving Back: PLD partners offer pro bono help to and through the alumni organizations of ACC, UT, Texas State and our FBcommunity @HornsCatsandRiverbats.

ACC & PLD Partner to Support Vocational Helpers Empowering compassionate people to provide help to others in need is a big part of the mission of PLD.  Austin Community College has several programs that share that mission and PLD is working in particular with alumni of two of those programs: Human Services and the Certificate for Nonprofit Leadership and Management.