Consultations

Robin Shapiro has been providing individual and group clinical consultation since 1990 and has been an EMDRIA-Approved Consultant since 1999. She is especially good at pattern recognition, seeing what is driving the clients’ dysfunction and how to tackle it. She believes that consultation has several functions:

Providing new lenses through which to see clients and roads to healing, including

1. EMDR’s Adaptive Information Processing model (AIP), that sees PTSD as being a misconnection of the neural networks of the safe present and the past danger. EMDR can be used with other therapies to deal with many clinical problems.
2. Ego State Therapy, that sees these neural networks embodied in “parts” that can interact to help us understand, connect, and heal the rifts and stored distress and dysfunctional networks. Ego State Therapy is mandatory for work with highly dissociative clients, one of Robin’s specialties.
3. Attachment-based therapies, that show where and when clients learned and didn’t learn what they need to be able to love, be loved, connect, and have boundaries with other people and to know that they, themselves have always been loveable.
4. Somatic therapies, that show the trauma, shame, and other issues stored in the body and how to move them out.
5. Culturally-based lenses that use the above therapies to deal with the effects of sexism, racism, class issues, homophobia, and a host of other cultural issues.

Support of therapists while they are doing the hard work and hearing the traumatic stories of their clients. In her groups, Robin strives to build supportive community for each therapist. In individual and group consultation she acknowledged the distress that clinicians can have in doing this hard, brave work, and discusses self-care for each of us.

Helping EMDR clinicians to become certified. EMDR therapists may or may not want to become certified, which includes at least 10 hours of individual and 10 hours of group consultation, or 20 hours of individual consultation, 50 EMDR sessions with at least 25 clients, and 12 hours of EMDRIA continuing education credits. (Robin no longer provides consultation of consultation for EMDR CITs.)

Consultation groups are generally 2 hours long. Each clinician gets 30 minutes of consultation. Groups may be in person, on the phone, or on Secure Video. Groups cost $85 per person. There is a 6-month commitment for each group. You must pay for when you’re not there, but you get other’s paid-for time when they don’t show up, so each group is 2 hours. (Some groups start with 2 or 3 people, which is fine.) Many groups are scheduled in 6-month blocks, so there are no surprises. Some groups agree each time when they will meet again.

Individual consultation can be for 30 or 60 minutes ($85 or $170), in person, on the phone, or on Secure Video.