May is National Mental Health Awareness Month

May is National Mental Health Awareness Month

May is officially National Mental Health Awareness Month (aka Mental Health Month). Mental Health Awareness Month was created with the goal of reaching out to millions of people across the US through media, local events, and screenings to raise awareness of mental health issues. In 2014 President Barack Obama signed a…

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Working with Attachment Trauma and EMDR Therapy

"Boy, Toddler, Ceo, Child, Kid, Cute, Happy, Baby" by Courtany via Pixabay (CC)

When therapists are first learning EMDR Therapy, they quickly realize that single incident traumas easily reprocess, and more complex cases do not respond using the standard protocol without learning more skills to recognize the underlying Attachment trauma. In order to successfully navigate Attachment Trauma, EMDR Therapists need to learn how…

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Self-Care Books for Therapists

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Therapists and counselors often ask their clients how they are taking care of themselves. It’s an important part of therapy. The big question is — How are therapists taking care of themselves? Are they doing for themselves what they expect their clients to do? Many therapists often put themselves last…

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Why Therapists Need to Develop a Self-Care Plan

"Compassionate hands: taking care of our heart" by Enver Rahmanov via Wikimedia Commons (CC)

Psychotherapists and counselors are in the field of helping people: they are people who want to make a difference in the world. They give and give and give. What seems to be a common theme for many psychotherapists is that they often forget to give to themselves. They are easily…

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Books on Working with Somatic Interventions and EMDR Therapy

1503 Connections of the Parasympathetic Nervous System

Many EMDR Therapists receive training in body-centered ways of working with trauma to learn how to see trauma in the body and have interventions that will help the client move through and integrate the trauma more completely. If you are an EMDR Therapist interested reading more about how trauma impacts the…

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The Story of Overcoming Trauma in Disney/Pixar’s ‘Inside-Out’

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Spoiler Alert: This post will discuss characters, scenes, and plot points from Disney/Pixar’s “Inside Out” In Disney/Pixar’s “Inside Out”, the character Riley is depicted through her emotional world inside her brain and memories. When we first meet Riley, she is a happy 11-year old girl living in Minnesota with her mom and…

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Books for Working with Complex PTSD and EMDR Therapy

signs and symptoms ptsd - by Gajah (Wikimedia Commons - CreativeCommons)

Therapists trained in EMDR Therapy often ask how to work with Complex PTSD due to the complexity of the treatment. An important aspects of working with Complex PTSD is learning how to resource the client so that they can stay present in their body and learn how to feel their…

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Proxemics and Nonverbal Communication in EMDR Therapy

Diagram representation of personal space limits. Inspired by Reaction-bubble.png by Libb Thims (WikiCommons - CC0)

In the field of somatic psychology, nonverbal communication is a key element. Nonverbal communication is the ability to read and understand people’s nonverbal signals. Have you heard the phrase “actions speak louder then words”? Well, it’s true! 60 – 70% of our communication is nonverbal while only 30 – 40…

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