More About Katharine…
I’m a counselor, musician and singer/songwriter from the Snake River Valley in Idaho. I’ve played guitar since childhood (I also make beats!) …. and also was ALWAYS a bit different and standing out, for better or worse. There was anxiety that I think had been present all my life, but I managed day to day with the help of great friends and mentors.
In college I was able to make connections on campus and fell into the Counseling program, and got super lucky since it happened to be the best around! I chose the “Student Affairs” emphasis and had excellent, nationally recognized faculty and doctoral students helping me learn the art of counseling and student advising. I found my calling through the process of becoming a counselor …it was confusing and difficult and I was not without personal challenges but I learned all I could, persevered, and never gave up!
After graduate school, I practiced in the trenches of mental health with who I can only describe as …deranged social workers. Not fun. It was very challenging but awesome because I learned that although I thought I would just be an advisor working on college campuses, I could do clinical mental health pretty well! In sessions I was making meaningful connections with very mentally ill folks with Schizophrenia and complex issues, and those who needed a bit more than a buttoned-down square.
Though I was growing as a person and as a counselor I started having severe panic attacks, which was pretty frightening to say the least and was not something I had learned a lot about in school. It seemed like no one could help me even though I was surrounded by medical and mental health professionals. Turns out, most of the time panic is not something folks want to talk about, even in a mental health clinic!
Eventually, with doctor’s help we discovered I was losing my hearing to an inherited condition called Otosclerosis… with the best specialists in the West at University of Utah, my hearing was mostly recovered. Hallelujah, right?! I could hear again relatively normally, and I could get back to making music and listening to clients again. Still, I had to find a new way to deal with health anxiety, panic, uncertainty, and most importantly, the self-doubt I was still experiencing.
Once I learned more about self-doubt and how THE MIND causes panic and other challenges, I was empowered to start working with all the negative, painful, and anxious emotions swirling inside all the time. I learned a style of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy from a protege of Dr. David Burns MD, and it completely changed my life. It took time and baby steps, but I could now see a path to overcome these feelings by creating a way of seeing the world that weighs ALL my options, not just what anxiety was telling me.
Encouraged by a renewed sense of confidence, I was able to work on my career again… so I some added extra letters to my name, acquired additional counseling licenses in other states, and developed a whole new outlook! I now teach others how to reframe their ideas on-the-fly so that they can feel safe inside and not terrorized by negative ideas. I overcame self-doubt once I realized that nobody can really hurt me but me; nobody has the right to scold or scorn me and I shouldn’t scorn myself, and I can live well without permission.
I’m here to help you find your path out of Self-Doubt, once and for all!