The Happy Family Training method, a unique therapeutic technique created by a Chattanooga life coach, is expanding to the West Coast, marking the first time the method will broaden its reach outside the Southeast.
Danielle Alvarez Greer is a certified life and spiritual coach from North Chattanooga. She founded her practice, Happy Family Coach, in 2013 and developed Happy Family Training and the Happy Kid Toolkit, two programs designed to instill self-awareness, intuition and responsibility in families and communities.
Her goal is to remove the habit of blaming and recognize solutions between bickering siblings, dysfunctional families and confrontational employees, she said. In addition to personally helping families learn to communicate with each other and become more functional, Greer trains and certifies therapists, educators, social workers and anyone else interested to use her methods.
She has been contracted by Beloved Housing in Los Angeles, an organization designed to help newly sober mothers reconnect with their children and learn to cope with their lives in healthy ways. Beginning June 1, Greer will travel to LA to train the staff so that they can implement her model into their own program. She will also be observing families within the program for five days, offering coaching and advice to the mothers based on her interactions and observations.
"I'm excited about living with them and sharing with them other possibilities versus what they've always known," said Greer, a mother of two children herself.
Her unique therapy method involves "reality triangles" to teach others about their own behaviors and reactions to tough situations.
The first triangle categorizes individuals based on their coping mechanism: "Blaming Bully," "Helpless Baby" or "Bossy Helper." These characteristics represent the negative roles a person can take on and how easy it is to move from one to the next. The second triangle is made up of the "Respectful Leader," "Happy Kid" and "Caring Friend." These represent the flip-side of the first triangle and how these positive roles can impact lives.
Greer said she works to help her clients understand the reality triangles and guides them toward the skills they need to recognize their own negative behaviors and redirect them to positive ones instead. Watching her 15-year-old son own up to and take responsibility for his actions and seeing her 11-year-old daughter hold herself accountable and accept her faults makes Greer confident in her therapy model.
"My entire family has benefited from it," she said. Though, hers isn't the only family that's benefited. What she's seen with clients backs this up, she added. "It's just amazing, results that I've seen."
Greer has high hopes for her method's expansion and would like to one day expand the program to a national scale.
"I don't know what God has planned for me out there," she said. "All I know is that these tools have made such an impact on my life that all I can do is take that out there and share it with all the people I can."
Greer's Happy Family Coach office is located at 100 Cherokee Blvd., Suite 304. Families or organizations that wish to set up a session with her can visit happyfamilycoach.com to schedule or learn more.