Corrie Elliot, a licensed psychotherapist based in Sarnia, is enthusiastic about creating safe spaces.
Originally from Corunna, Elliot earned a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy in 2019. She now works in private practice in both Sarnia and London.
“I’ve been working in therapy for the last five years.”
“I work with couples, families, individuals, and kids. I do therapy with anyone over the age of six, and I specialize in PTSD and trauma,” she explains.
Elliot’s next undertaking is helping children with their emotional health through the art of storytelling. Her first book, Ellie’s Emotional Adventure, aims to help children understand their own feelings.
“It’s about a little girl who goes on an adventure to understand, identify, and communicate emotions. Every page introduces a new emotional lesson,” Elliot explained.
She has also penned a sequel, Ellie’s Emotional Adventure with Fear.
“The second one is the same character that goes on an adventure to learn about understanding fear—how your brain creates fear, how to regulate fear, how to understand and identify fear.”
When working with kids in her London office, Elliot saw that a form of therapy that resonated with young clients was bibliotherapy. Bibliotherapy uses reading and reflection to help clients address whatever issues they want to tackle in their sessions.
“The best part about books for kids is we’re not talking about your thing, we’re talking about the character’s thing, right? A book on anxiety or on grief—we’re not talking about your loss; we’re talking about the character’s loss. So, kids can kind of get the moral of the story with a little bit of distance from their own experience,” she explains.
While Elliot was getting into bibliotherapy as a medium, she realized there was space to fill for children to navigate their emotional experiences and decided to write one herself.
“There’s so many cool authors and stories. And there wasn’t one about emotions that covered all the fundamental lessons and tools that I used and liked. And I was like, well, that would be, like, 40 sentences? I could write 40 sentences. So, the first one came out.”
Her second book, Ellie’s Emotional Adventure with Fear, Elliot says, tackles a more difficult emotion.
“The biggest emotion I see kids have a hard time talking about, and parents have a hard time supporting, is fear and anxiety.”
Elliot says she has plans to expand the series, currently working on a third book focusing on joy and excitement and plans to explore other emotions such as grief, anger, and empathy in future installments.
“I wanted to create a series where the character embarks on different adventures to help kids grasp emotional concepts,” Elliot said. “It could go on forever.”
“But [negative emotions] are often the ones that are discouraged vs encouraged, so I started there.”
Elliot’s primary goal when writing this series, was to allow children and parents the resources to be able to sit with uncomfortable emotions.
“When it comes to anger, sadness, and fear, we often try to get kids back to happy where it’s really good for kids to be able to sit and understand, process, and regulate those negative emotions—so saying, hey it’s okay that you feel this way and here is why it’s happening is important.”
“These books are designed to say it’s good to feel uncomfortable. You can handle and regulate this uncomfortable thing.”
Elliot added, “Not everyone has access to therapy, so my goal was for this book to give people the language to start these conversations: here is your emotional dictionary to take a piece of therapy home and be able to.”
For more information, visit Corrie Elliot’s website. Ellie’s Emotional Adventure and Ellie’s Emotional Adventure with Fear are available on Amazon.