 First sessions are all about building rapport and understanding what you are wanting from your counselling experience. If it turns out that you are interested in EMDR, then what I'll share during this article may be of interest to you! Please know that no therapy is one size fits all. There are many layers and approaches in counselling psychology and to the complex experiences people have. This information is intended to introduce you to EMDR therapy to inform your expectations prior to starting counselling. First EMDR Session: Building Trust and UnderstandingThe initial session of EMDR therapy focuses on building a strong therapeutic alliance between you and your therapist. Therapeutic alliance refers to the collaborative and trusting relationship between counsellor and client. A strong therapeutic alliance facilitates open and honest communication and ensures clients feel safe, supported, and understood, which in turn enhances the therapeutic process and outcomes. First Sessions May Look Like:History gathering: Exploring your background, any trauma experiences, and past and current symptoms. Sometimes, a symptom checklist is included (such as the PCL-5 for exploring symptoms of post-traumatic stress or the HADS for exploring symptoms of anxiety and depression). This information is important as it ensures your counselling experience is tailored to your specific needs and goals - you are in charge of sharing what feels comfortable to you. All of this information informs your therapist's case conceptualization: their understanding of your history, presenting issues, and trauma experiences you've gone through. It includes your emotional, cognitive, and somatic responses to trauma and potential challenges that may arise during the process of therapy. This detailed understanding is used to formulate a tailored approach to address your unique needs and goals. Discussion of EMDR: Your therapist will talk about the process of EMDR, how it can help, and how it can be used for both building emotion regulation skills and trauma processing. This is a great opportunity to ask questions and have a demonstration of bilateral stimulation. Establishing Safety: Feeling safe, heard, and comfortable with your therapist and within the therapeutic environment is crucial. I strive to provide a rationale for all the therapeutic approaches I use, maintain transparency with the questions I ask, and build in emotion regulation to better ensure you are prepared for future sessions. Treatment Plan: Lastly, you and your therapist will collaboratively develop a treatment plan that focuses on your goals and needs for counselling - this sets the stage for what to expect during each session. It's important to note here that life happens: while we may have a treatment plan, we can work with it flexibly if life throws you something unexpected. Your sessions are yours; therefore, your therapist might start each session by exploring anything that may have changed for you since the previous session and what you feel is important to focus on. EMDR SessionsOnce the foundation is laid in the initial session, subsequent EMDR sessions typically follow a structured process that includes the following phases: Preparation: Before delving into trauma processing, we will work on enhancing your emotion regulation skills. This phase ensures that you are equipped to handle the intense emotions that may arise during EMDR. Your therapist might teach you about the window of tolerance concept, introduce an emotions-sensations vocabulary, and describe the rating scales EMDR therapy utilizes. For example, the Subjective Units of Distress Scale (SUDS) is a self-report measurement tool used to quantify a person's emotional distress or discomfort level in response to a specific trigger or memory. It uses a 0 to 10 range, where 0 represents no distress, and 10 signifies the highest level of distress imaginable. It helps in deepening emotional and somatic awareness and tracking changes in your emotional state during sessions and over time, thus guiding the pacing of EMDR. Assessment and Desensitization: This is the heart of EMDR therapy, where we collaboratively choose a starting point and work on trauma processing. Your therapist will be your steady guide during reprocessing memories, utilizing bilateral stimulation (eye movements, sounds, or tactile sensations using the Thera-tap device), working towards desensitizing the emotional charge associated with them. During the assessment phase, you and your therapist will explore the negative self-perceptions (negative cognitions) entwined with distressing memories. These perceptions often result from one's assumptive beliefs being impacted as a result of difficult experiences. They can come to be deeply anchored in one's sense of self, making them tenaciously resistant to change. The process of letting go of these narratives can feel like venturing into uncharted territory, which can be unsettling at first. However, once a core negative belief is brought to light, your therapist will support you by gently untangling from it through connection with a positive belief, essentially rewiring the brain's pathways to embrace a more compassionate and empowering self-view. This approach fosters healing and enriches your relationship with self, opening up new possibilities for personal growth and transformation.  Installation: As the emotional distress linked to the traumatic memories decreases, you'll work on installing positive beliefs and self-perceptions to replace the negative ones. Body Scan and Closure: During this ending phase, your therapist may guide a brief body scan to address any lingering physical sensations related to the distressing memory to ensure you are grounded and connected to present-moment safety. You can debrief the session and discuss home practice suggestions for emotion regulation strategies, resourcing imagery, and positive cognitions developed during your session. Reevaluation: The subsequent session typically begins with a re-evaluation of what was previously worked on. It's a way of assessing progress to see if additional work is needed on memory to further you in moving towards your goals. A Key Feature of EMDR: Tracking the Felt Sense of EmotionOne significant difference between EMDR therapy and traditional talk therapy is how they approach the tracking of the felt sense of emotion. In traditional talk therapy, clients often describe their emotions verbally, sharing their thoughts and feelings with their therapist through conversation. In contrast, EMDR therapy places a strong emphasis on tracking the felt sense of emotion. In EMDR, you will be encouraged and guided in connecting with the bodily sensations and emotions you experience while revisiting traumatic memories. This non-verbal tracking allows for a deeper exploration of emotional experiences, which can lead to profound insights and healing. I hope you have found this outline informative. Please know that EMDR is a highly individualized approach, with many different protocols for different experiences, all of which are tailored to your unique needs and experiences. And, in life, progress may not always be linear; it's normal to have ups and downs throughout the therapy process. The key is having a trusting therapeutic alliance where we can discuss these ups and downs and continually modify your treatment plan to ensure your needs for therapy are met. Patience and self-compassion are key. Healing from trauma takes time, and EMDR is a tool that can help facilitate that process.
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There’s a lot of therapeutic approaches out there when it comes to counselling psychology. This is the first of several articles about Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and what you can expect in an EMDR therapy session.  Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a form of psychotherapy that helps individuals process difficult or traumatic experiences that may be causing distress in their lives.
It works by processing trauma memories which reduces intensity of feelings and negative beliefs attached to the trauma. During an EMDR session, the therapist will guide the client to recall a specific memory or experience while also providing bilateral stimulation, which can be in the form of eye movements, sounds or taps. The bilateral stimulation helps the brain to reprocess the memory, reducing its emotional intensity and allowing for a more adaptive resolution. The goal of EMDR therapy is to help clients achieve healing and positive change by effectively processing past experiences, improving coping skills, and promoting psychological resilience. Learn more at: Click here to read an in-depth overview of EMDR https://emdrcanada.org/ https://www.emdria.org/ Several brain chemicals, known as neurotransmitters, are involved in producing feelings of happiness. These include:
Overall, these brain chemicals work together to create feelings of happiness and well-being in the brain. There are some activities that when engaged in regularly, can promote the release of our brain’s natural happy chemicals. Check out the list below and see if there are some small daily activities you can add to each day to promote overall feelings of emotional well-being.
Overall, engaging in healthy activities that promote relaxation, reduce stress, and improve mood can help boost serotonin levels naturally.
Overall, engaging in activities promoting social bonding, relaxation, and physical contact can help boost oxytocin levels naturally, leading to trust, connection, and well-being. Thinking now of your daily routines and mental wellness, would any of the above suggestions fit for you?
Trying the Calmigo Smart Calming Companion I recently had the opportunity to try out Calmigo (Smart Calming Companion), an inhaler-type device that is said to “provide drug-free relief for moments of distress or anxiousness”. Check out my feedback in the video below or read on – and grab the coupon code LIVEHAPPY for $30.00 off if you are interested in purchasing the device! When I was approached to try the product, I was immediately interested due to the trauma work I do and the focus on emotion regulation that work involves. A cornerstone of any emotion regulation practice involves deliberate breathing: learning to slow and deepen the breath.
Too often we just haven’t learned to breath in a way that positively impacts our health. Without this learning, we end up taking shallow breathes, breathing rapidly, or holding our breath – all of which ramp up the physiological experience of stress in the body and do nothing to calm and sooth our mind, emotions, and body.  Moral injury is rooted in a violation of personal values. It’s an important concept but it is one that many people haven’t heard of. It refers to the extremely distressing psychological, behavioural, cognitive, and spiritual aftermath of exposure to events that violate our sense of ‘what’s right’. Regardless of if these morally injurious events were through commission, omission, or betrayal, the lingering consequences on a person’s sense of self are tremendous. Main PointsHow often does the strong pull of anxious thinking lure you into its’ loop of incessant worry, what-ifs, and not-good-enoughs? Spending time on the thoughts that worry and anxiety drive you to think about isn’t the best the way out of it. In fact, thinking the thoughts that accompany anxiety often breeds more anxiety. We need a way out of those thoughts. One that calms our body and our mind, so that we can more accurately and compassionately deal with the experience. The RAIN meditation by Tara Brach offers just that.
The RAIN meditation is an excellent way to steer out of anxious thinking cycles, deepen compassion and connection to self, and anchor back into the present moment. Take a moment and play with these 4 steps, to build self-compassion and step out of stuck thinking.
It is also incredibly empowering because you will have created that internal sense of calm. One of the goals of learning to regulate emotion is to render all those unhealthy coping strategies unnecessary. What’s cooler than seeing your book for sale on a bookstore shelf? Seeing it appear in a movie! Check out this short film by the very talented Director Chris Di Staulo: Lovers to Strangers, on Vimeo Chris’ latest short film brings attention to the concept of love bombing.
New relationships can feel intoxicating at the beginning. You want to spend all your time with the person, getting to know them and enjoying their company. You still live your life as you normally would, while nurturing the new relationship and getting a sense of how this new love interest fits into your world. Healthy romantic relationships have a solid foundation of friendship (respect, trust, and kindness). This is my public service announcement about kindness during COVID. Also known as ‘don’t be a dick’. If someone forgets to sanitize their hands when entering a store or enters without donning their mask – a kind reminder is all it takes. And if they can’t don a mask due to medical reasons – please listen with understanding, not judgment or resentment. Seek first to understand.
When we react with anger, it’s like we take the behaviour of others and stab ourselves with it. Then we project our hurt onto them and view them as the villain. No one here is the villain. There is no us against them. We are all in this together. Every single one of us. So please, if you are feeling grumpy, take a moment to care for yourself. If you find you’re feeling angry or impatient when around others, try these super simple tips: Where ever your inner voice of shame originated from, when you hear it rear its ugly head, acknowledge it for what it is (“Oh, hello there Shame”), and anchor into the present moment with a deep breath. What could you say to yourself instead, to start cultivating an attitude of acceptance and compassion?
Not sure how to cultivate an attitude of acceptance? Check out the following list and do one item from it every single day. Or, if you have a strategy that works for you, share it in the comments so that we can all learn from and encourage each other! |
AuthorSusan Guttridge is a trauma-informed Master level Counsellor with the clinical designation of Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCPA). She has 20+ years experience providing individual and group therapy. Archives
February 2025
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