Specialties

Approach

The most essential ingredient for effective counseling is the creation of a safe, supportive healing environment. Elizabeth Venart provides a nurturing environment for people to explore their concerns and facilitates healing through a combination of mindfulness strategies, cognitive therapy, and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Sometimes people come to counseling with clearly identified challenges and goals. Elizabeth works with them to create a plan that will work and supports them as they move forward towards their desired changes. Other times, people arrive at counseling unclear about what exactly is troubling them but knowing that they need support to decode and move through it. Elizabeth believes strongly that everyone makes sense once you know their story and helps people unlock the mystery of their sometimes bewildering symptoms, so they can move toward greater freedom and joy in their lives. Her work involves partnering with people to help them tap into their own innate resiliency.

Elizabeth has found an integrative approach to counseling, especially when doing trauma work, incredibly beneficial. As a result, she works collaboratively with other practitioners at The Resiliency Center to create unified, whole-self, healing experiences. Her specialties include trauma and traumatic loss, anxiety, job burn-out and career transition, helping couples and families communicate and solve problems more effectively, and enhancing personal creativity.

EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a comprehensive, highly effective therapy that integrates knowledge from neuroscience with mindfulness, cognitive therapy, and body-awareness approaches. At its core, EMDR is an integrative approach to healing trauma that facilitates fundamental change by helping people access their inner resources and resiliency. Trauma may include everything from widely recognized events such as witnessing a suicide, being in a car accident, or experiencing childhood abuse to often overlooked but pervasive experiences of cruelty or neglect, such as school bullying and having one’s feelings invalidated or dismissed.

Traumatic experiences include an emotional response (fear, shock, hurt, sadness, etc.) that is often held in the body. Over time, these stored, unprocessed emotions can result in physical pain, interpersonal conflicts, heightened emotional reactivity to everyday situations. While most experiences are processed and become a part of distant memory and the narrative storyline of one’s life, traumatic memories are stored in their original form – with the pictures, feelings, body sensations, and other sensory memories (sounds, sensations, smells) still intact. When something happens in the present that reminds a person of an unprocessed memory, they may react with a much bigger reaction than the situation warrants. An example is the person who becomes enraged in traffic jams or feels devastated when something doesn’t go as planned. Through EMDR, people process stored, unhealed traumatic memories so that they no longer get triggered in the present day. As a result, people are freer to act on their desires, to make clear decisions, and to respond to situations more effectively.

Many people who have been to counseling previously and found it only moderately helpful – or not helpful at all – find the relief and lasting change they are seeking through EMDR. Neuroscience research has found that traumatic experiences often result in biological changes in one’s mind and body, and, therefore, words alone are often inadequate to process its profound impact.  EMDR repairs the impact of trauma at the psychological, biological, and interpersonal levels. Through processing the traumatic memories that fuel current difficulties (such as depression, anxiety, relationship problems), EMDR addresses the source of problems in order to free clients from the weight of the past and empower them to live more joyful lives.

EMDR was founded on the premise that all individuals possess an innate capacity for growth and healing. Individuals are viewed as experts in their own healing journey. Partnering with clients to heal trauma and activate their innate resiliency, counselors serve as supportive guides who allow clients to discover their own strengths. Elizabeth has worked successfully with people experiencing anxiety, those with recent or distant traumatic experiences, those at a career impasse who seek to make changes, and also those wishing to optimize their performance and create more joy in their lives. She has been honored to witness the courage of individuals to overcome adversity and transform their lives from surviving to truly thriving.

> Read Elizabeth’s Article on EMDR

Creativity

Creativity is the wellspring of life, and it is not present only in some of us but lives in all of us. Creativity is the source of our best ideas, our humor, our desire to try something new, our intuition, our wish to make sense of things, and our energy for change. When we keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result – and become frustrated when we don’t get it – we may need a bit more creativity in our approach. 

Engaging in creative activities can awaken new perspectives and help get us unstuck and moving in our lives. Creative activities include writing (poetry, novels, comic books, recipes), painting and visual arts, group problem-solving games, drumming, visualization, singing, and brainstorming – to name only a few! Whether one is seeking new solutions to old problems, in the process of writing a novel, or actively working as an artist full-time, working with Elizabeth can enhance your creativity and awaken new possibilities in your life. Exploring and expressing ourselves creatively can increase self-awareness, self-trust, and self-confidence.  When people desire the integration of creativity in counseling,

Elizabeth uses visualization activities, journaling and free writing between sessions, and the creation of vision board collages to serve as a road map to the ideal future. For many of the people with whom Elizabeth works, increased creativity is one of their primary goals. The avenues for accessing and strengthening dormant creativity and for working through blocks are endless, and often include EMDR, visualization, and a good dose of humor. In addition to individual counseling and consultations on creativity, Elizabeth facilitates a number of groups, workshops, and training programs on the topic.

Therapy for Therapists & Other Healers

Being an effective therapist requires self-awareness and a deliberate focus on sustaining our health and well-being. The stress inherent in the process of connecting to others in the depths of their pain may leave therapists feeling vulnerable and overwhelmed at times. Also, many healers enter the profession in part motivated by the unresolved issues of their own childhoods, issues that may be triggered or exacerbated in their work. While skilled at helping others, therapists may be reluctant to seek their own support, believing instead that they should somehow be able to heal themselves. While therapists can do a lot to nurture their own wellness, counseling offers tremendous support and growth.

Elizabeth’s counseling work with therapists focuses on building a strong, humanistic relationship in which therapists can explore their concerns and learn to use their innate healing resources on their own behalf. Many counselors also benefit from doing EMDR work with Elizabeth to process unresolved traumatic experiences and/or to address negative core beliefs impacting their current happiness.

Practice-Building

Healthcare professionals, drawn into their work out of a strong desire to facilitate healing, often struggle with the idea that their private practice is a business and that this business requires them to develop entrepreneurial skills so it can thrive. Academic training programs in counseling and healthcare occupations rarely include any business classes or even meaningful dialogue about practice-building, so professionals starting an independent practice often lack the information and tools they need to succeed. Practitioners with longstanding private practices may also find themselves newly struggling to grow their businesses, faced with a changing economy, higher numbers of diverse healing professionals in the marketplace, and an increasingly discerning, web-savvy audience of potential clients.

Through her experience in private practice and her role as Founder of The Resiliency Center, Elizabeth Venart has learned what it takes to succeed in the business of private practice. She believes strongly that one’s passion and skills offer the best guide for creating prosperity, and that only surefire way to grow a business is to have a clear vision and a solid plan.  In her work as a practice-building consultant, Elizabeth helps practitioners evaluate how they would like to transform their practices, speak about their work with clarity and confidence, assess their marketing style, create a big picture marketing strategy to strengthen community awareness of their programs and services, and begin taking concrete, meaningful action steps to generate greater prosperity in their businesses.

Elizabeth understands that professionals in the healthcare and healing arts fields are often uncomfortable with the idea of marketing their businesses, as they may associate marketing with sales and feel it is out of alignment with their reasons for entering the field (to help and educate people!). Having navigated through these misconceptions herself, she helps professionals learn to view marketing as an extension of their work – based in principles of education, service, and relationship.

Through individual and group consultations, as well as introductory workshops, she teaches practitioners to redefine marketing in a way that is expansive and energizing and to discover a personalized approach to practice-building that is sustainable over time. Healthcare professionals working with Elizabeth discover new ideas for how they can spread the word about their work  - and create opportunities for those community members already seeking support to find and connect with them.

If you are highly skilled and know you can be of service to others – but you are not as busy as you’d like to be – Elizabeth Venart offers the support and resources necessary to help you create an effective plan for success. To learn more or to schedule a consultation session, contact Elizabeth at Elizabeth@elizabethvenart.com or 215-542-5004.

Highly Sensitive Persons

Elizabeth provides a safe, emotionally attuned healing environment in which highly sensitive persons (HSPs) can heal emotional wounds and move towards greater self-understanding and acceptance. The trait of high sensitivity was first identified by Elaine Aron, author of The Highly Sensitive Person, and can be understood as giftedness in the domain of sensitivity. HSPs are often very intuitive and empathic and can be sensitive to any strong stimulation, such as bright lights, loud sounds, scratchy fabrics, and violent movies. Since only 15-20% of all people are highly sensitive, many HSPs learn to devalue this trait, as they hear from others that they are “too sensitive” or “care too much.” Counseling work focuses on helping HSPs validate and appreciate their many strengths and learn strategies for coping successfully with the experiences of overstimulation (and consequent withdrawal and shutdown that can occur).