Jennifer Keeling is a Registered Clinical Counsellor located in Saanich, close to Elk Lake. She provides counselling by phone or video, in-person sessions will be available in the future. She has worked with children and families since 1995 as a social worker, and more recently, as counsellor/therapist. Jennifer works with a variety of personal concerns, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, relationship difficulties, and emotional struggles.
Many of these matters can be traced back to early personal experiences, often originating somewhere in our personal history. These experiences can have a strong lasting effect, influencing our present day emotional and behavioural experiences. Trauma is not always a dramatic events such as a terrible accident or violent act. Rather, trauma is often a result of receiving negative information about ourselves early on from caregivers, or others in our lives. These experiences often result in negative self-messages and self-defeating behavioral patterns, leaving us in a constant state of self-doubt and insecurities.
Jennifer will help you unravel the complicated stories that reveal where those patterns of negative thinking and beliefs started, and how they influence your life in the present and future. That detailed history informs a personalized and customized treatment plan, which will tackle the root problem, or series of problems.
Jennifer prefers to use a therapy called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). EMDR is a highly studied, research-based therapeutic treatment approach with impressive clinical success rates and efficacy. Research studies show EMDR works to resolve traumas, resulting in previously triggering issues no longer creating any distress or disturbing emotional fallout. During EMDR sessions, counsellors facilitate the EMDR protocol and treatment structure, resulting in rapid resolution of traumatic experiences without having to dig up the details of the actual event that cause trauma.
For more information about EMDR, click here.
Jennifer is a Doctoral candidate in Counselling and Psychotherapy and has a Masters in Counselling Psychology. She is registered with The B.C. Association of Clinical Counsellors.