Kaytee Stengel
Hi, I'm Kaytee, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who has worked in a variety of setting including homeless encampments, maximum security county jail, behavioral health court, and one on one therapy. Across all of these settings I have found the human experience, at its core, to be universal. I have also found that a large percentage of human suffering comes from the meaning or story we take away from experiences and how we use this an information to self-evaluate and decide how we think and feel.
First session
In our first session, we will begin to establish a relationship, and you can check me out. I will be learning about you through questions and asking you to share things you would not otherwise tell a complete stranger, and I encourage folks to speak up if it's too much. I am constantly looking for patterns and parallels and much of this can be identified in the first session along with core beliefs and automatic thoughts. These are the starting points for all types of therapy and are a natural result of conversation. I want to ensure you feel safe with me and am always open to feedback or being told I am wrong.
Strengths
There is a lot to be said for minimizing the inherent power imbalance between a therapist and a client when a therapist will know much, much more about the client. I want to even the playing field as much as possible by being clear that I am also a human having a human experience and I am by no means an expert on life or anybody else's life. I can, however, provide a different perspective, guidance, validation, empathy and a variety of treatment modalities to assist with your identified goals. I will push you deeper sometimes and other times allow for silent observation.
Ideal clients
My ideal client is one who comes ready to work. We will spend time talking about a variety of topics and I want to get to know you and how you operate, but we will also get into the body, the present, the past, look at patterns, systems, draw parallels, and identify contributing factors. Today's goal may end up being the very thing holding you back. I am a firm believer that we don't get to decide where the work takes us and surprising things can happen in our external world when we attend to our internal selves. These journeys can be uncomfortable and even painful at times as we often find others do not change with us or take well to our growth.
Treatment methods
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
I use CBT as a starting point. Identifying our foundation belief systems and automatic thoughts can help guide us to why we feel the way we do about ourselves, others, and life in general. We also get to identify the sources of this information so we can challenge not only the information, but the validity of the source. When we begin to understand why we think and feel the way we do, it becomes so much easier to change.
Attachment-based
Understanding our most primitive relationships and how they impact how we learn to see ourselves and interact with the world can lead us to a wealth of information on why we think, feel, and act the way we do. I use attachment-based therapy to help you identify unmet needs and how you can meet these needs for yourself.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Internal family systems has been a game changer for my work. I use it to guide clients towards understanding how their primitive or childhood unmet needs and wounds cause "parts" of us to fragment off of the self and get stuck in time. We then have other parts that step up to protect these wounded parts, us as a centered self, and get these unmet needs met. This can often present as what we call "symptoms". When we can identify these parts, when and why they are showing up, and differentiate between our parts and our self, we can work together to meet these needs ourselves. Most importantly, Internal Family Systems is about having compassion towards our selves and our parts, understanding that even the parts of us that we have long wished would go away are in need of healing, allowing us to soften our view and language towards ourselves and come from a place of understanding.
Dialectical Behavior (DBT)
Distress tolerance, black and white thinking, and radical acceptance are crucial concepts to getting our nervous systems regulated, allowing two things to be true at once, and accepting things we don't want to with the understanding that fighting against them is what causes much of the distress and when we can move into acceptance, we have a new point to stand on to address these issues without the fighting against.
Somatic
Bringing the mind back into the body and bringing the two into alignment is vital to any type of therapy. This can look like mindfulness, using our senses to ground ourselves into the present moment, or identifying and releasing stored energy in the body that has gotten trapped as a result of living in fight of flight for so long.