JG Gillis Counselling

  About three years ago, a lady walked into my office and she was suffering from one of the worst cases of anxiety and depression I had seen. She was almost always in tears. I won't give her real name or her age, but let's call her Sarah.  Sarah grew up in a relatively (at least on the surface) normal family, but she felt like she was invisible growing up. She felt like she had to pour oil on troubled waters so everyone would get along. She felt like she had to be perfect and she panicked when she couldn't be. She was extremely despondent and had even considered suicide a couple of times in her life. As she sat with me telling me her present story - an infidelity in her relationship with her (now) husband - she cried. And she cried.  I started talking about looking after herself. What did she do to have fun? What activities made her feel good?  She couldn't think of any that she was practicing at the time - and said she "should" do it but couldn't stick wi...

Recently, I finished a course in the program I'm taking to become a certified Emotionally Focused Individual Therapist. It was an intensive two days, all day event live by Zoom, with 72 participants from all around the world.  During that course, we got to see an entire session of EFIT (Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy). That's when I had a "light bulb moment". I saw someone practicing EFIT from start to finish, in various phases of the method, with a real client who was brave enough to let their vulnerability be seen by those in training (in being recorded).  Over the last couple of years, as I learn more and more, I have been incorporating elements of EFIT into my practice - with clients' permission of course - but only using the individual techniques (which work) with them. Here, finally, I saw that EFIT (as in all Emotionally Focused Therapy: with couples, families, and individuals) is a way of being with clients, of walking alongside them on their jour...

Grief is a topic not many people want to talk about, but it is a fact of life that we need to address. Grief comes about by means of a loss - whether a loss of a person in our lives, a cherished dream, a job, a relationship, or a part of ourselves. It can even be a loss of something we never had.  Many of us have heard of the stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) and we mistakenly think that these are stages that proceed in an orderly fashion, like items on a "to-do" list. However, it doesn't work that way. These are common components that can occur in our grief, but can be experienced more like a whack-a-mole game, popping up seemingly at random, and sometimes we can experience two or more of those states at the same time.  The common belief is that we "get over" grief. We don't. But it changes. Free image from Pixabay.com I like to compare it to being out in the ocean during a storm. The waves are so high, so frequent, tha...

Most of my clients don't mention Thanksgiving; it's an excuse to have a long weekend and they only talk about it after it has happened and only if it was stressful for them. Their stressors mostly and usually centre around Christmas, Easter, Valentines Day, Mothers Day and Fathers Day. Royalty-free photo from Pixabay To me, Thanksgiving (in the US, Columbus Day) is bittersweet. In 2013, while my youngest was still alive, and homeless in her car in Edmonton Alberta, I was so discouraged and was thinking of cancelling the big meal. She got wind of it, and pleaded with me: "Oh Mom, don't cancel Thanksgiving. Look at me; I'm living in my car but I'm still thankful. I'm thankful that I have you and Dad, and my friends who love me, and a place to sleep at night. Please Mom. Please." So, touched and moved by her concern for ME, I did Thanksgiving traditions that year. Less than 2 weeks later, she was gone. So yeah, bittersweet. I still celebrate...

When does trauma end?  The short answer is that it doesn't.  More precisely, no matter how short-term or long-term the trauma has been, or is, the brain's response to trauma is the same. It rewires itself to protect the person from further trauma. So, while the incident(s) may be over with, the trauma lives inside of the person and needs to be processed before the brain can heal itself.  I saw this image today of PET (positron emission tomography) scans of a normal brain's function and that of someone who had experienced trauma. It was very telling. The front of the brain is where we do our thinking and make decisions. The temporal lobes (circled in the image) are where we process new information so the front of our brains can decide what to do. The back of our brains is where we have our automatic reactions: fight, flight, freeze, and so forth (it's also called the "lizard brain.")  Trauma interferes with our ability to process new information and to make int...

When I was a child, my home life was chaotic and unpredictable. It depended very much on my mother's mood. I never knew when or whether I would be hugged or beaten. At the time, I thought everyone's life was like that. I believed that delusion until well into my adulthood. But even as a child, I knew when I felt safe. I would seek those feelings - even though I had no name for them - in the company of adult neighbours, or other relatives who were within walking distance, or even in solitude. I made sure (learned the hard way) to let my mom know where I was going and how long I would be there. And I would set out to visit these people. Back then, someone was always home; women stayed home to keep house and keep the home fires burning, so to speak. And I would visit folks who always smiled when they saw me coming.  I remember going to see my grandmother (my mom's mother) who lived about a half a mile away. I would enter the yard and the first place I'd go was to see the a...

  What an ordeal the last few hours has been! First I discover that my WordPress site at judygilliscounselling.wordpress.com is inaccessible to me, then I discover that I cannot report this fact to them without logging into my wordpress account, which I cannot do. Anyway, you'll note some of my archived information in my previous post. :) Since the last time I posted, in the summer of this year, much has changed and I wanted to update my readers, if they ever find me (LOL).  I'm now almost a year into private practice. I wrote my entrance exam to the PEI College of Counselling Therapists on October 27, 2022, and I am awaiting the results. Passing the exam means that I will be able to become a member of the College (like the College of Physicians and Surgeons, only for Master's level counsellors!) and use the title, "Counselling Therapist." It also means that more health insurance companies would be covering my services for those with such plans. So if all goes wel...