LICSW, 30 years of experience
New to Grow
Welcome! My name is Katherine. I have been a licensed independent clinical social worker for 30 yrs. I also have a 2nd master degree in nursing and worked as a licensed RN and nursing professor for a decade. This mental health/health combo has helped me to understand the very close relationships between our brain chemistry, our physical wellbeing and our mental health the enormous differences hope and support can bring to or take from our physical and and mental abilities, the multitude of ways and places a therapist can intervene - as a gain in any one one area, just as a loss, spills over into all the others. Finally I have been on both sides of the therapeutic relationship and the hospital bed, and it has given me a new perspective on what clients have to go through and the level of courageit takes to show your wounds to a stranger. The photo above gives you, at least, the face who you will be meeting before you book an appt. with me.
If you come in the midst of a crisis, my goal for the first sesson is to identify your most critical concern and make a plan with you to get some quick relief and calm everything down. If you our not in crisis, you can expect me to start with exploration - What motivated you to come to therapy at this time? What are you hoping to accomplish? What are your questions or concerns about therapy and/or me as your therapist? I will answer them honestly. What else do you want to share? If you have multiple goals or needs, which one is the most important or pressing? We will start with that one. Then I will recommend one or more methods and some blending of these and some adaptations to their interventions based on your answers. But it is your therapy. I won't prescribe or pressure; I will recommend and invite. Therapy is a relationship involving mutual trust and commitment. I don't offer any highly directive approach. If that is what you want there are therapists who do and I can help you find one.
I have been a practicing therapist for a long time, serving a wide variety of people using many different therapeutic approaches. This has allowed me to develop expertise in effectively treating a wide variety of concerns using many different therapy modalities and techniques. For some years I have been able to blend interventions from various therapeutic methods and to shift gears from one group of interventions to another based soley on what is best for each client. In addition, I was a practicing advanced level nurse for over 10 years and I still keep my hand in it, so I have an unusual level of understanding about how physical and mental health symptoms impact each other and how emotional symptoms show up in the body and can be relieved by working with the body and vice-a-versa. Finally I experienced trauma during much of my childhood and teen years before there were any really good treatments for it so, with the help of a wonderful therapist, we had to find a way to healing using what we had at the time. Once good trauma treatments were developed, I commited a certain amount of my practice to volunteer work with military and veterans. I know trauma and depression intimately for both sides and that makes a difference. I have also been involved in growth and wholeness work for many years, first only with myself but, not long after, opening this to others.
I actually have two ideal clients who, on the surface, may sound very different but who, on a deeper level, are quite similar: 1. The first client is someone who is doing fine, but finds themselves asking "Is this it? Is this all I can expect from my life? Is this all I have to give to it?" And this person has a growing suspicion that the emptiness and lack of meaning they are sometimes feeling are messages from down deep that are asking to be heard - a talent or gift that is just waiting to be used, a passion or life purpose that is ready to be embraced, an unfulfilled dream that could still be realized. 2. My second ideal client comes to me in crisis. They're ability to cope as normal has been overwhelmed. They are lost and have no idea how to get home. They may almost without hope that their lives will ever get better. Both ideal clients are ready for something very different. The first because they have outgrown their former level of coping and second becuase it no longer exists for them. Often the crises in our lives come from that same deep part of ourselves. The message comes out more demanding and despairing but the underlying force is the same. Often my second ideal client, once they have gotten some real relief, decide they do not want to go back to just being ok, they know where that eventually led, and they know they now have a unique opportunity, before the concrete resets, to continue their forward journey armed with their new coping skills into something better.
Eclectic therapy is different from all other treatment methods. All other therapies attempt to fit the client into a specific treatment method. Only eclectic therapy attempts to fit treatment methods to the client. Eclectic therapy recognizes that the client is much more than their diagnoses or a single intervention formula. The eclectic therapist values each person's uniqueness, their individual strengths and needs, hopes and fears, preferences and goals. And it blends and adapts methods and interventions based on the client's uniqueness to craft an individualized treatemnt plan. I have practiced electic therapy for 30+ years. Below I am listing some of the treatment methods and interventions that have helped many clients in some aspect of treatment. But there is no combination that fits every client for everything so it is just a list.
I've been using some form of psycho-education for about 10 years to help many clients understand their problems and symptoms. One of the biggest problems for most of us, myself included, is that we don't fully understand our problem. Why do we feel the way we feel? Why do we keep repeating behaviors that harm us? Why do we let go of dreams? Why can we not achieve our goalsPsycho-education often gives us that missing information. Depending on the issues we learn about their origin in our brain chemistry, their mind-body connection, their evolution from perfectly good coping skills when we were younger that do not serve us well anymore, we can undertand why we freeze when we want to act and act when we know that is not a good idea, why we feel so quickly and intensely about some people or situations and are almost unaware of others... Whatever the struggle, understanding brings freedom and we it is very hard to change something, especially long term, when we do not first understand it.
I have been doing Trauma Informed Care for 25 years. For complicated trauma that has its roots in a very a confusing or frightening set of events in childhood, attachment theory or internal family systems can be very helpful in understanding and identifying how past trauma is affecting the present. For trauma expressed as a phobia, exposure therapy and exposure response prevention can help manage or even eliminate the phobia. Interventions from cognitive processing or cognitive behavioral thera py can help the client change thoughts, feelings and beliefs about the trauma and that can be used to change related choices and behavior patterns. Tapping, EMDR and Brainspotting techniques reconnect the more instinctive and reactive part of the brain to the more cognitive and analytic part of the brain. The trauma memory that has been trapped in the highly reactive survival brain where it has continued to create a fight/flight/freeze response even though there is no real present dangeris now able to move over to the analytic and integrative part of the brain that simply stores it as a past memory with little or no power to affect us in our present or our future. If the trauma response includes high anxiety or panic attacks, mind-body techniques can be very helpful in managing or eliminating severe anxiety and panic attacks. These include polyvagal stimulation, awareness exercises, self reassurance and commands, deep breathing, imagery, and full body relaxation. I offer gentle exposure or exposure response prevention for clients struggling with a phobia or increasing self-imposed isolation. Some clients are interested in mindfulness or play therapy to build tolerance. I do not provide these but often invite a client to try another tolerance building activity such as yoga, meditation, qi gong, dance, music and art.
I sometimes use Jungian techniques that tap into the subconscious to accelerate self-understanding and growth. These include dreamwork, active imagination, and/or exploring feelings and images evoked during a session. Occassionally, clients will come to me (not because they need relief but) because they want to fulfill some lifelong passion, or untapped potential. Some clients (after getting relief and achieving their initial therapy objectives) want to continue therapy toward a larger goal. These clients who are focused on self-exploration and self-growth often choose a Jungian or similar psychodynamic approach.
I have used some version of Psychodynamic Theory (including Ego Psychology and Jungian Theory) throughout my 30+ year career to help me conceptualize what is going on beneath the client's conscious awareness. And to help me use this understanding of the unconscious - its drives, desires and beliefs - to help my clients understand how they get stuck and how to get unstuck, to help clients see what stage of development needs more attention, to help them balance and fully integrate unconcious needs with the concious mind. The end goal of this work is always to replace lower level defenses, maladaptive behaviors, and unhealthy coping skills with ones that are more functional, more adaptive and more resilient.