Practitioner Profile: Elizabeth Venart

Elizabeth Venart, M.Ed., NCC, LPC is the Director of The Resiliency Center and a Licensed Professional Counselor in the State of Pennsylvania. She is also a National Certified Counselor through the National Board of Certified Counselors.

Elizabeth has over fifteen years of experience in providing counseling, clinical supervision, and training services. For nearly ten years, she worked in non-profit crime victim centers providing individual and group counseling—as well as crisis intervention and critical incident stress management services—to women, children, and men impacted by traumatic grief and crimes of violence. Elizabeth also worked as a school counselor for seven years—at an independent school for boys and with an alternative school for children with emotional, behavioral, and learning challenges.

Individual, Couples, and Group Counseling
Elizabeth's counseling specialties include trauma and anxiety, stress management, job burn-out and career transition, helping couples and families communicate and solve problems more effectively, and enhancing personal creativity.

A Person-Centered Approach
The foundation of Elizabeth’s work with individuals, couples, and groups is relational. Before any other work can occur in counseling, an atmosphere of respect and safety must be developed within the relationship.

Trusting in the power of individuals to find their own solutions to life’s difficulties, she uses a person-centered therapy approach in her work with clients—working as a facilitator and coach to help people discover and access their inner resources. Bringing a trauma-informed perspective to her work, Elizabeth recognizes that unresolved grief and hurt are often at the root of individuals feeling stressed, "stuck," or unhappy.

She helps individuals and couples identify their strengths, release pain from past experiences, and move closer to the joyful lives they desire living. Through counseling and the integration of mindfulness practices, people are able to move more fully into the present moment and develop a greater appreciation for their innate resiliency.

Strategies and Solutions for Healing
Elizabeth recognizes that people come to therapy looking for information and resources to help them, especially when struggling to create new patterns in their relationships or working to overcome experiences of grief and trauma. Working with children, couples and families, she focuses on concrete skill development in areas such as communication and conflict resolution.

Cognitive Therapy
She uses principles from mindfulness-based cognitive therapy to help clients learn to identify how their thoughts can contribute to or help lessen their experiences of pain—and to learn various methods for slowing down their mind so that they can more fully experience the present moment.

EMDR
Elizabeth has completed both Level I and Level II training in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) as well as several advanced training programs on the use of EMDR with children, severe trauma, and dissociation. She is experienced in using EMDR to facilitate clients’ successful healing from trauma, grief and anxiety (>Visit www.emdr.org).

Expressive Arts
The expressive arts provide a wonderful vehicle for self-expression and the exploration of alternative perspectives. Elizabeth encourages interested clients to experiment in session and between sessions with using the expressive arts (collage, writing, music, etc.) as a tool for greater self-awareness, the opening of new possibilities, and the creation of empowering visions for the change they desire.

Group Counseling
In her groups, Elizabeth provides opportunities for individuals to connect with others, tap into their strengths, participate in activities and discussions designed to promote greater self-awareness, and receive support in creating positive changes in their lives.

Clinical Supervision and Training Programs for Health Care Professionals
Elizabeth provides clinical supervision and training programs to individuals, groups, and organizations and is available to provide LPC supervision to counselors seeking licensure. She has over ten years of experience supervising counselors across a variety of settings.

Clinical Supervision
Her approach to supervision is, like her counseling style, rooted in a humanistic, relational framework. While she can provide clinicians with a variety of different strategies to help them in their work with clients, she focuses first on the quality of the relationship the counselor has with the client and any obstacles to empathy and mindfulness. From there, she invites counselors to listen deeply to clients and their stories and to trust themselves and their intuition more fully. Elizabeth also provides career guidance to counselors as well as vicarious trauma consultations to both individuals and organizations.

Training Programs for Professional Helpers
Elizabeth has been providing training programs to professional helpers since 1996. She has presented at the local, regional, and national levels, and her strength lies in making the material come to life for participants through reflective exercises, dialogue, and opportunities for creative expression and the development of personal insights.Her training specialties include trauma, vicarious trauma, counselor wellness, team-building in organizations, and creativity development.

From 2003 through 2007, Elizabeth served on the American Counseling Association's Task Force on Impaired Counselors (>Visit the Task Force website). Part of her work on the task force included the development of effective intervention programs to facilitate counselor wellness and serving as a co-editor for a special journal issue on counselor wellness through the Journal of the Counseling Association for Humanistic Education and Development.

Elizabeth is an adjunct instructor with the Behavioral Health Counseling Sciences Program of Drexel University where she teaches Group Counseling I and II.  

For more information about Elizabeth or the services she provides, please visit her website at www.elizabethvenart.com, contact her at elizabeth@theresiliencycenter.com, or call (215) 542-5004.

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