EMDR and Trauma Therapy for Brussels

Brussels has a large population of people who deal professionally with other people’s crises, and a small one of people who have anywhere to take their own.

Between the institutions, the agencies, the NGOs and the missions, a great many residents work on conflict, displacement and emergency as a matter of routine. Some have been in the places concerned. Others have spent years reading the material. Both produce a particular kind of accumulated weight, and neither is easy to raise in an environment where everybody is dealing with the same subject and appearing to cope.

The language question, which is not administrative

I am French and I practise in French and English. For trauma this matters clinically rather than practically.

Traumatic material tends to live in the language in which it happened. Working on it in a second language can produce sessions that feel calm, articulate and oddly ineffective, because the account is being translated before it is felt. Most people have a sense of which language the material actually sits in, and it is often not the one they use at work.

What EMDR does

It works directly on traumatic memory. For a discrete event, properly processed, it can be remarkably effective and sometimes quick. The memory remains available but stops intruding.

Where trauma was prolonged, or began in childhood, the work is slower and broader, because there is no single memory to target. Anybody promising a fast resolution of that is overstating what is possible. On that distinction.

Confidentiality

Brussels is a small international city where colleagues, neighbours and children’s classmates come from the same few thousand households. Working with a clinician in London means nothing is held in Belgium, there is no possibility of professional overlap, and nothing is disclosed to any employer or institution without your consent, save for the narrow legal and safeguarding limits every registered practitioner is bound by, which are explained at the outset.

Practical

Brussels is one hour ahead of London. Sessions in French or English, in person in central London when you are travelling. UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, HCPC-registered art psychotherapist, twenty-five years of practice and over twenty using EMDR. Both registers are public and can be checked independently.

EMDR therapy in London and trauma therapy.

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Doctorate of Professional Practice at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.

How the work is delivered from here

All international sessions are by secure video, in English or French. Online therapy is not a reduced version of consulting room work: it is the format that lets weekly work survive living abroad, travelling, or relocating. Sessions run in United Kingdom hours, which suits most regions, and if your time zone makes none of it workable, say so when you enquire rather than assuming it rules you out.

For clinicians and treatment services

Dr Jacquet supervises clinical teams in private residential addiction treatment and in a private psychiatric hospital. For treatment centres, psychiatric units and group practices looking for external clinical supervision, including in places where no supervisor of this seniority is available locally, team supervision is also delivered by video. For individual practitioners, see clinical supervision.