Come in and stay awhile.
If you have made your way to this page, perhaps you would like to know a little more about the person you have found here.
A life takes many turns, and mine has carried me through rooms and relationships I could never have planned for. Each one left something with me. Each one became part of the work I do today.
This is a little of the story of how I came to be here.
My name is Katharine, though these days most people call me Kate.
For more than fifty years I worked alongside children and families across every kind of household and income. I arrived first as a teacher, later as a mentor, later still as a counselor and consultant. The hat changed as the need changed. I sat with people through the hardest seasons of a life. Families brought three and four generations into one room. Practitioners came looking for firmer ground under their own feet. My work lives where therapeutic insight meets the intelligence of the body, and five decades close to human struggle taught me the rest of what I know.
Stories reach a person faster than facts, and I have loved them all my life. A metaphor opens a door where explanation only knocks. Pull up a chair and let me tell you a few.
In the beginning...
I began in the creative arts, with a degree in art and dance and years spent in theatre and in ritual. Those years taught me how a room changes when people move through something together. Teaching came next and stayed longest. I taught dance and art. I taught young children in two Waldorf classrooms, where story and rhythm carried the whole curriculum.
Later I taught in special education and learned to read a body long before I learned to read a diagnosis. My first master’s degree, in special education, gave language to what my eyes already knew.
In Detroit I ran a Waldorf-style preschool in my own home and taught parenting classes downtown, open to whoever walked through the door. Story, play, and the routine of ritual made up the curriculum, in an era when the advice ran toward schedules and discipline. The evening news came twice with a camera crew and filmed the children on my property. I sat on councils and volunteered in schools and churches. For several years I served as director of education for Episcopal congregations and wrote the curriculum for their youth program.
Every one of those rooms taught the same lesson. A child arrives inside a family, a family sits inside a school or a congregation, and each of them lives inside a larger village. Pull one thread and the whole weave shifts.
Counseling came near my fifties. I went back for a second master's degree, earned my license, and began the work I still do today in my seventies. For years I sat with individuals and families of every culture and income, across generations, and I carried my creative roots into every room.
One afternoon I straightened the shelves above my sand tray while a girl of six wandered the hallway, waiting on her father. She stopped in the open doorway, took in the miniatures, and announced she wanted to work with this lady. Her father hesitated. “Well, I suppose so. Is that ok with you? She does have anxiety.” We worked together for the next sixteen years. She built worlds in the sand long before she found language for them. One afternoon she pulled three nesting trays out, so they stacked at the edges, each holding a world of its own. “I have lived seven lifetimes Miss Katharine, see here?” Her posture changed as she described each one. The body tells the story first, and I learned to trust it.
Talk carried people a certain distance. The body carried them the rest of the way. Real healing asked for safety and for relationship. It asked for a way in through sensation. Everything I offer now grew from those years.
The great expansion...
The work widened. I co-authored the manual joining Somatic Experiencing with the Safe and Sound Protocol for Unyte, marrying trauma healing to nervous system science. I began training clinicians and mentoring practitioners around the world. I spoke at the International Polyvagal Institute Summit. In South Africa I ran a case study inside an addiction treatment center.
My work crossed borders and carried me into rooms of great wealth and rooms holding very little. I found the same longing in both. A family in conflict, an emerging adult at a threshold, a practitioner losing herself in the work: each one wants to feel met, and each one wants the way home.
an aligned path...
Today the strands run together. Five decades of relational work, a life of teaching and guiding others, and a long friendship with the sacred.
A man of fifty-seven came to me successful by every measure available to him. A business he built. A wife and three children. Friends who loved him. He worked with executive coaches and attended the large events, reaching one summit after another with something waiting for him at every peak.
He arrived bewildered. Grief sat in the room from our first hour together, its source hidden even from him.
We took our time. He looked at the family he came from, at the seasons of a life and their demands, at the patterns he repeated.
At last, he looked at the grief itself. He found a man formed by love and by failure, by service and by delight, whose experience belonged to the people around him. The malaise lifted once he understood his own soul task.
He writes his memoir now, and he founded a nonprofit for men.
Some people come to me for somatic work. Some come for a grief ritual, or for help holding a family through the handing down of a legacy. Practitioners come for mentorship and supervision, and for the steadying that lets them stay present in a difficult room. Others come to a retreat and leave with something they carry for years.
If you are a practitioner reading this, you know the loneliness of holding others while your own ground shifts. I keep a place for you too.
I walk beside people while they remember who they are and create the life waiting to emerge. Whether loss or longing brought you here, I know this path. I would walk it with you.
Write to me and tell me what brought you.
Tell me your story! I will listen.
Credentials, Certifications, and Contributions
I work with individuals, couples, families, and high-impact organizations.
I have taught in a Waldorf school, and worked with a wide variety of ages. I have more than 50 years of experience serving a diverse population as a teacher, artist, business owner, author, counselor and storyteller utilizing my two Masters degrees, M.Ed. in Special Ed. and M.Ed in Counseling, in a creative “outside-the-box” way for solution-focused outcomes.
- BFA, Art/Dance from Kent State University
- M.Ed. Special Ed from Lynchburg College
- M.Ed. Counseling from Lynchburg College
- Licensed Professional Counselor (VA)
Other notable accomplishments:
- Contributor to the book “Through the Eyes of a Child: The Ultimate Guide to Parenting Your Inner Child” by Linda Brady
- Contributor to the book “Getting Unstuck: Practical Guidance for Counselors: What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do” by Jon Winder
- 2018 Award: Best of C-Ville’s Best in Town for Mental Health Professionals
- Somatic Experiencing® (Trauma Therapy)
- Emotional Focused Therapy (for couples)
- Guided Imagery Through Music (GIM)
- Sand Tray World Play
- Mari® Mandala Assessment
- Play Therapy
- Sexual Disorders
- Transforming Touch®, Transforming the Experienced-Based Brain
- Embodied Recovery for Eating Disorders
- Psychodrama
- Gender Identity Formation
- SoulCollage®
- DARe (Dynamic Attachment Repatterning experience)
- Waldorf Early Childhood Education Training
- SEGAN Model (Sensation, Emotion, Gesture (in color), Action, in the Narrative) Creative use of SSP
“Healing asks us to listen to what the body already knows, and to trust what becomes possible when we feel safe enough to be in relationship again.”
Working Together
individuals & couples
Something in you already knows. A tightness, a weariness, an old pattern repeating itself in a new room. We begin with your body’s own intelligence, slow down until sensation can speak, and find the shape of the work together.
Families and Parenting
Children speak in behavior long before they speak in sentences. We look at the message underneath the behavior, at rhythm and ritual, repair after rupture, and the small daily moments where connection either builds or leaks away.
Legacy Families
Legacy travels through the body of a family long before it appears in a document. I work with families navigating succession, estrangement, grief, and the conversations that come with handing down meaning alongside assets.
Practitioner training & mentorship
Attachment & somatics with will rezin
Counseling in Virginia
For those living in Virginia, I offer traditional counseling for individuals, couples, and families moving through anxiety, grief, relationship concerns, and life transitions, grounded in the same somatic and relational approach that shapes all of my work.
global impact
My work has crossed borders and carried me into rooms of great wealth and rooms holding very little. I have taught clinicians, worked alongside treatment centers and community leaders, spoken internationally, and stayed with people long after the formal program ended.
