My Approach to Helping
I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Registered Art Therapist (ATR), with a background in community mental health work. Educated at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, I completed my training in community work to provide art therapy to clients of all ages and backgrounds. I believe that art provides opportunities to explore unspoken feelings, needs, and memories that may be hard to verbalize, and is a tool accessible by all clients, regardless of artistic skill.
I have worked with individual adults, families, children, and groups, delivering talk therapy and art therapy services to clients with a spectrum of needs including navigating substance use, relational distress, chronic health issues, and productivity burnout. Trained in systems theories and informed by an abolitionist framework, I assists clients in exploring impacts of capitalism, social disenfranchisement, and unhelpful narratives that can create negative self-talk, feelings of hopelessness, and existential anxiety. I take a client-centered, trauma-informed approach to identifying tools for managing distress, and changing undesired patterns. She pulls from experiential and cognitive behavioral therapies to create a therapy format that is responsive to client needs.
I am part of the queer community and works to support LGBTQIA clients in connecting to community, establishing boundaries, and exploring internalized messages that can impact self-esteem, communication skills, and destructive patterns. I work to reconstruct theories of family life cycles to better represent queer families and relationships and reduce alienation for individuals seeking support. Kathleen is dual licensed in California and Pennsylvania.