Education:

M.S. from the University of Nebraska–Omaha, 1997

Background/Experience:

• 4 years working as Clinic Coordinator at the UNO Community Counseling Clinic
• Former Adjunct Faculty at UNO College of Education, Counseling Department
• 7 years as private practitioner

Professional Interests/Specialties:

• Helping people with depression, anxiety, trauma, developmental, career and relationship issues.
• Helping people process trauma from critical incidents and the difficulties of life.
• Helping children with trauma, grief, loss, development and behavioral issues.
• Helping parents with the difficulties of parenting.
• Desensitization and processing of phobias and anxieties.
• Exploration of goals, growth and personal meanings to enhance our life experiences.

Professional Affiliations/Activities:

• American Counseling Association
• National Board Of Certified Counselors
• Certified Level II EMDR Practitioner

Child Centered Play Therapy

Jill has over 100 hours of training in Play Therapy, including an Intensive Supervised Clinical Experience at the University of North Texas Center for Play Therapy.

Information about Play Therapy from The University of North Texas Center for Play Therapy http://www.coe.unt.edu/cpt/parentsindex.html.

What is Play Therapy?

Play therapy is to children what counseling is to adults. Play therapy utilizes play, children's natural medium of expression, to help them express their feelings more easily through toys instead of words.

Does My Child Need Play Therapy?

Throughout their lives, most children go through difficult times, such as the divorce of their parents, trouble making friends, or adjusting to changes at school or home. Some children need more help than others to get through these times. If you or other adults in your child's life are concerned about your child's behavior, play therapy can help. It is the most appropriate treatment for helping your child work through difficult times and helping you gain a better understanding of what your child is going through.

Why Play Therapy?

Play Therapy is the most appropriate method of treatment for children who are having difficulties coping with life situations. Though children lack the cognitive skills to express themselves with words, they are fluent in the language of play. Play therapy allows them to express themselves in the way in which they are most comfortable.

SandTray

Sand Tray is a form of Therapy that involves playing with sand and miniatures in any way that is pleasing to the client. It has Jungian roots and helps both children and adults to address emotional issues at a profound and symbolic level. Children can process in play what they are not yet developmentally ready to process through cognitive verbal skills. Sandtray allows us to access both trauma and resources in a gentle, natural and FUN manner.

Certified practitioner

Jill is a certified EMDR practitioner with full Level I and Level II training.

For more information, go to: http://www.emdr.com/index.htm.

What is EMDR?

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy treatment that was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories (Shapiro, 1989a, 1989b). Shapiro’s (2001) Adaptive Information Processing model posits that EMDR facilitates the accessing and processing of traumatic memories to bring these to an adaptive resolution. After successful treatment with EMDR, affective distress is relieved, negative beliefs are reformulated, and physiological arousal is reduced. During EMDR the client attends to emotionally disturbing material in brief sequential doses while simultaneously focusing on an external stimulus. Therapist directed lateral eye movements are the most commonly used external stimulus but a variety of other stimuli including hand-tapping and audio stimulation are often used (Shapiro, 1991). Shapiro (1995) hypothesizes that EMDR facilitates the accessing of the traumatic memory network, so that information processing is enhanced, with new associations forged between the traumatic memory and more adaptive memories or information. These new associations are thought to result in complete information processing, new learning, elimination of emotional distress, and development of cognitive insights. EMDR uses a three pronged protocol:

1. the past events that have laid the groundwork for dysfunction are processed, forging new associative links with adaptive information;
2. the current circumstances that elicit distress are targeted, and internal and external triggers are desensitized;
3. imaginal templates of future events are incorporated, to assist the client in acquiring the skills needed for adaptive functioning.

Is EMDR an efficacious treatment for PTSD?

EMDR is the most researched psychotherapeutic treatment for PTSD. Twenty controlled outcome studies have investigated the efficacy of EMDR in PTSD treatment. Sixteen of these have been published, and the preliminary findings of four have been presented at conferences. Studies using waitlist controls found EMDR superior; six studies compared EMDR to treatments such as biofeedback relaxation (Carlson et al., 1998), active listening (Scheck et al., 1998), standard care (group therapy) in a VA hospital (Boudewyns & Hyer, 1996), and standard care (various forms of individual therapy) in a Kaiser HMO facility (Marcus, Marquis, & Sakai, 1997). These studies all found EMDR superior to the control condition on measures of posttraumatic stress.