Hello! My name is Kathy.

  • Resiliency (PTSD growth)

  • Self Awareness

  • Mindfulness

Professional Philosophy

Everyone at some time has experiences in life, or goes through stressful periods that can affect the way we feel, and what we believe about ourselves, and that sometimes changes our worldview. Recognizing we need extra support and guidance in finding our way back to wellbeing is a courageous step and a shows a readiness and commitment to meet challenges and make changes in your life. I believe that bringing mindful awareness to our problems while offering ourselves supportive self-compassion for our humanity are tools we can all develop and use.

My goal is to help you build wellbeing through a personalized humanistic and existential approach in combination with creative self-expression in order to change negative perceptions and patterns of thought, behavior and emotions and increase a greater sense of personal strengths, coping skills and resilience. The benefits you gain from therapy depend on how actively you participate in the process and put into practice what you learn back into your life. So commit to be open, present and flexible and bring your bravery. and curiosity to our collaboration so you can create a life built on joy, meaning and purpose.

“Being able to enjoy happiness doesn’t require that we have zero suffering. when we learn to acknowledge, embrace, and understand our suffering, we suffer much less. Not only that, but we’re also able to go further and transform our suffering into understanding, compassion, and joy for ourselves and others.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh No Mud, No Lotus- The Art of Transforming Suffering

Personal Background

I have always been creative and made art. From doodling in high school notebooks to getting a degree in Graphic Arts, it was always my intention to be a working artist, and in fact I spent a lot of years as a graphic artist, creating to order, which did not involve my own instinctual vision or voice. Art Therapy has allowed me to bring together my interest in psychology, my personal explorations and always growing understanding of what it means to be human trying to create and enjoy a happy life and my inner knowing about the healing power of the creative process. As an artist and an Art Therapist I have experienced the fulfillment and the healing that comes from creativity and self-expression. For the last fifteen years in inpatient Behavioral Health, I have spent my days using art and creativity to help people express their emotions, organize their thoughts and feelings, cope with anxiety and depression, process trauma and grief and experience the cathartic relaxation of creativity on the level of play. I feel truly blessed every day I get to share and foster the excitement, wonder and wholeness embodied in the experience of making art along with being a guide on the collaborative journey of inquiry and growth that is the gift of therapy.

AREAS OF FOCUS

All of us here at START address the mental health areas of stress, trauma, and anxiety in our practice. We apply these three topics to unique, specific challenges that our clients are going through. I also offer specialized treatment in the following area:

Creating Resiliency & Wellbeing

We all have within us the capacity to grow and rise above adversity. Understanding how our feelings, thought and behaviors work together to shape our wellbeing allows us, with sufficient support, to create a more positive mindset. Art integrated therapy provides a creative format for expressing personal feelings and experiences through exploration of a tangible focus, in order to expand insight into the self and communicate levels of functioning and underlying conflicts and concerns. Acknowledging and naming negative emotions and thoughts does not give them more power, it gives us the power to understand them more. Coupled with a collaborative psychodynamic exploration and processing of personal imagery, clients can be helped to externalize and discharge emotions and thoughts that might be too painful to verbalize through a safe framework for viewing the self objectively, reviewing emotions and limiting beliefs and bringing troubling issues to the surface. Also using a Humanistic/Existential Mindfulness based approach with a focus on identifying strengths, increasing self-awareness and building resiliency helps clients develop resourceful solutions for everyday living, manage stress, increase their self-compassion and reduce their sense of isolation and helplessness and transform their sense of personal empowerment.