Psychology Counselling for IBS

First Session: Building Awareness

History Taking: Your narrative, experiences, and symptoms are all important to understanding your present moment.  Identify what’s not working and what is working.  The first session is the start of the transformational journey towards balance.

Psycho-education: I provide psycho education to all my clients to help explain the nervous system, the stress response, attachment, the vagus nerve, and the mind-body connection.

Resources: We look at both internal and external resources that are already being used to help regulate, provide safety, and resilience.  This includes your work with your dietitian.

Introduction to Mindfulness and Tools:
Breathing and building awareness skills is essential to our overall well being, ability to manage stress, and to be more resilient. Begin to learn how to use mindfulness and breath work in our first session.

Second Session: Pattern Discovery & Mindfulness Training

Identifying patterns: The body holds memories and is often cut off from our awareness until it becomes too “loud” to ignore.  We operate on auto-pilot most of the time and don’t often consider how our bodies and mind can overtake us based on habit and old patterns. These patterns may have been adaptive to keep us safe but can get stuck on repeat in times when we don’t want to be reacting mindlessly.

Mindfulness Training: In session we will continue where you’re at in building stronger skills in stress management and focused attention.  This training is a skill that allows us to stabilize our attention so we can notice our states and not be overtaken by them.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Along with training in focused attention, we identify many cognitive (thoughts) that sometimes can get in the way or influence our behaviours and beliefs.  We bring more awareness to our thoughts so we can interrupt and eventually be able to change our behaviours.

Third Session: Stabilizing, Skill Building, and Resourcing

Listening to the Body: Using mindfulness and the therapeutic relationship we can work towards listening to the body.  We do this by developing what’s called interoception, which is the ability to sense our internal states and sensations.

Self-Compassion and Integration: Uncovering old wounds will often start to arise when we start becoming more mindful and aware.  Making sure we have the skills to hold the uncomfortable will allow us to start integrating the experience.

More Mindfulness Training: More breathing, more tools to increase the ability to be with how things are and not how they should be.

Fourth Session: Individualized Session

This session is about your individual needs and matching where you’re at in terms of change. Therapy can be unpredictable (just as life is) which means we may need to go back and re-look at patterns, or attune more closely with the body, or work more on mindfulness skills.

Please note that this session outline is a general map as to how they will look.  Depending on the client’s personal history, presenting symptoms, and experience, this map will often be adapted slightly to meet the needs of the individual.  When using EMDR, the protocols in this therapy model are similar and are used in a trauma-informed way.  Sometimes stabilization, resourcing, and skill building take a number of sessions before trauma work can begin.  With any transformation it can be complex, hard work, and slow but very beneficial to achieving more balanced well-being.