My mission is to offer an empathetic presence to work alongside individuals in and out of relationships in raising awareness of areas for growth, liberation, and acceptance within themselves. You are the best expert in how you experience the world and I am committed to learning. Therapy is intergenerational, work with individuals or relationships affect the systems they are a part of and reverberates across communities. I see my practice as a molecule in the vast ecosystem of collective change.
Kelsey specializes in…
- Licensure
- LMFT
- Clinical Supervisor: Carly Rubin, LMFT and Pilar Hernandez-Wolfe, Ph.D. LMFT, LPC
- Degrees
- BA in Sculpture and Ceramics from Southern Oregon University
- MA in Marriage, Couples, and Family Therapy from Lewis and Clark Graduate School
- Advanced Trainings
- Emotion Focused Therapy Core Skills, by Sharon Chatkupt Lee, PsyD & Katharine McKay, Ph.D, PCEFT, 2022Emotion Focused Therapy Externship, by Sharon Chatkupt Lee, PsyD & Zoya Simakhodskaya, Ph.D, PCEFT, 2021
- Rebuilding from the Inside Out: Somatic Interventions for Individuals, Couples, and Groups, by Theresa Beldon, MFT and Kitty Chelton, MFT, September 2019
My Journey
I am a child of scientists with a penchant for art. I grew up in the bible belt, and have known deeply the experience of living in a place that doesn’t fit. Though my family was supportive and not as religious and conservative as my surroundings, they didn’t know how to help me or my siblings cope with being “different”. On top of this, trauma had left my family incapable of thriving as a cohesive unit that left each of us feeling lost. I am grateful to have a family that recognized this struggle and moved to the Pacific Northwest when I was a teenager. This move opened my eyes to different ways of seeing the world and being with each other. When I attended college, I primarily studied art but recognized something was missing by the time I graduated. I found that my art practice was fueled by thinking about and being in relationship to people and communities and I wanted to know more.
I moved to Chicago after college primarily to live with my sister and find the queer community I had been sorely lacking in the small towns I had lived in for most of my life. What I found was a community that accepted me wholly, connected me to something larger than myself, and showed me a path forward. My experiences in Chicago exposed me to social justice movements and work that sparked a lifelong passion for understanding and fighting for often underserved and marginalized communities. I engaged with youth and artists of different forms. I advocated for the needs of transgender people experiencing houselessness and I worked alongside mental health professionals working in housing, substance-use treatment, and healthcare.
I came to this work out of recognition that relationships are what keep us going through hardship and yet most of us experience barriers to building the relationships we need. I love working with clients who are interested in being challenged, working towards flexibility, appreciate humor, and are interested in having internalized dominant worldviews challenged. I am informed by personal study of anti-capitalist, anti-racist, transformative justice, and disability justice writings. I welcome all identities, backgrounds, and relationship configurations. I have clinical experience is in working with LGBTQIA2S+ community, people practicing polyamory or non-monogamy, mixed race couples, people practicing kink and BDSM, and gender diverse folks. My work is distinguished by my passion about identity, sexuality and relational work as well as grief, trauma and Self work in many forms (worth, esteem, compassion, growth, loving, healing, etc.) I am systemically trained and understand that our context matters in the shaping of our problems and paths to healing. I have an eclectic approach that relies heavily on attachment theory and am trained in Emotion Focused Therapy for couples. I pull interventions from experiential therapies, internal family systems, body-centered somatic practices, mindfulness, sex therapy, and motivational interviewing.
When I’m not being a therapist you can find me making something fantastic and whimsical, tending to a garden, riding my bike, playing with a furry friend, watching the latest sci fi or fantasy show, or spending time with my beloved community.
Some people who inspire me: bell hooks, adrienne maree brown, Sonya Renee Taylor, Resmaa Menakem, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Staci K Haines, Kai Cheng Thom, Peter Levine, Gabor Maté, Brene Brown, and many more.
