Hey there,

When was the last time you felt stuck with a client in session?

It happens to all of us, no matter how many years you’ve been practicing or how many trainings you’ve completed.

Like when you're working through a touchstone memory with a client, but the processing keeps looping back to the same somatic distress. SUDS doesn’t change.

Or maybe you're working with someone carrying a heavy, severe depression, and every attempt at a float-back hits a hard biological wall where they can't access childhood history.

In those instances, the natural temptation is to search for another weekend workshop, buy three more clinical manuals, or spend hours late at night trying to figure out where you made a mistake.

However, in my clinical experience, I’ve found that when we feel stuck with a client, more information isn't usually what we need.

More than anything, what we need is perspective, someone who can see the session from outside the chair we're sitting in. That’s why I regularly advocate for ongoing consultation (and for more reasons than "checking a box" on the way to certification).

First, ongoing consultation moves you past the "protocol panic." In the early days after basic training, whenever a case stalls out, our natural reaction is to search for a new tool, a new interweave, or the right phrase to unlock the processing. But in consultation, you learn to step back from the manual and look at the bigger picture.

You start tracking what is happening in your own nervous system during the session.

You learn to recognize when your urge to interweave is driven by your own discomfort with the client's silence, rather than a genuine block in their memory processing.

Second, ongoing consultation helps you spot subtle blind spots. It’s tough to see your own patterns when you’re sitting in the therapist’s chair.

A good consultant notices when you are rushing the pacing because you feel responsible for fixing the client's pain, or when you’re consistently avoiding a specific target channel because the client’s trauma mirrors something in your own life. Having an objective pair of eyes on your work protects both you and your clients from these unconscious shifts in clinical judgment.

Third, ongoing consultation builds a professional safety net. Sitting alone in an office treating heavy trauma day after day takes a quiet toll on a therapist. But when you share cases in a structured consultation space, you quickly realize that the clinical puzzles keeping you up at night are the exact same ones other skilled therapists are navigating every week.

There's something steadying about that, I think.

A case that felt like evidence of your own inadequacy often turns out to be a normal part of the work, and the energy you were spending on self-doubt goes back into thinking clearly about your client.

That's why I'd argue consultation is as much about your sustainability as it is about your skill. It’s also the reason we started Helicon. We recently launched to our waitlist, giving them a way to find ideal consultation matches, track hours and progress toward goals, discover curated resources and trainings, and connect with each other. We’ll be launching to the public after the holidays and you can sign up here to be notified.

Whether you decide to pursue consultation (beyond what certification requires) is entirely up to you. I've kept consulting on cases long after getting certified, and many of my colleagues have too, simply because nobody outgrows their own blindspots.

If you do decide to seek out consultation, one thing I'd encourage is bringing the cases that feel messy. It's natural to want to present your cleanest work, especially early on, but it's oftentimes the stuck cases that teach you the most about yourself as a clinician.

You don't need to have everything figured out before you walk in.

Showing up with an unfinished case, or an "I'm not sure what's happening here" is exactly the purpose of consultation.

Until next time,

Chris

Thanks for reading Helicon's EMDR Therapist Weekly, where we aim to provide a weekly dose of insights, tools, and opportunities for EMDR therapists; designed to support your growth, sharpen your practice, and connect you with what's next.

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Disclaimer: The information contained in this article is for informational purposes only. This is not legal or clinical advice and we make no guarantees about the outcomes or results from information shared in this document. Proceed at your own risk and discretion.​
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