Have you talked to a counsellor about your nightmares?
The content of dreams and nightmares are not always discussed in counselling, but they can have a significant impact on our mental health and wellbeing. Anyone suffering from repeated nightmares will know that the feelings associated with a nightmare can linger and cause distress in our waking life, even if we don’t fully recollect the details of what happened in the dream.
Frequent, intense nightmares can disrupt sleep, and even be linked to increases in suicidal ideation. New research points to specific ways to spot early warning signs and help those who might be most at risk. We now have a clearer distinction between trauma-related nightmares and more typical dreams, and how these can be treated differently.
In our October team training, EVC welcomed Dr. Leslie Ellis, dream and nightmare researcher and author of A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy: Implementing Simple and Effective Dreamwork (2020), for team training on working with nightmares. Dr. Ellis reviewed the recent research about the impact of nightmares on mental health, and offered us some very valuable insights about how we can address nightmares within the realm of the counselling session. Our training with Dr. Ellis has offered us a simple technique that we can use to help our clients to process nightmares.
If you’d like to know more, please contact us to book a consultation with one of the team members who has completed this specialized training. You can also check out Dr. Ellis’s work on her website at: https://drleslieellis.com.
