Following years in pastoral ministry and missions, Kate now devotes her time and energy to serving others through therapy. As a certified clinical traumatologist, Kate’s primary focus is on walking alongside patients as they heal from trauma.

Kate’s choice to become a therapist, and to focus specifically on trauma, happened organically. While serving in Haiti and Nicaragua, she found herself often working alongside other missionaries who had lived through difficult experiences. She learned that she had a gift for listening and helping them to find healing.

When political unrest made her specific missions projects unsustainable, Kate returned to the United States to pursue a degree in clinical mental health. The formal education supplemented her natural abilities with the technical skills she needed to counsel others as her vocation.

Through working in church settings, she gathered a lot of diverse counseling experience helping couples and families. As a ministry professional herself, she also offered empathetic care to pastors’ wives and other family members.

Building on that experience, she pursued years of additional training to become a certified clinical traumatologist, which is now Kate’s specialization. She works both with high needs patients, where she assists individuals coping with severe trauma, and at Living Well, where she offers a variety of services toward emotional and spiritual healing.

Kate is trained in advanced CBT (cognitive behavior therapy), DBT (dialectical behavior therapy), the Gestalt method, internal family systems or “parts” work, EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) for post-traumatic stress disorder, and play therapy. Living Well has a play therapy room where Kate works with children facing adjustment disorders or otherwise responding to traumas like divorce, adoption, or abuse.

She is relatively new to the Jacksonville community, but she loves being near the beach and her numerous nieces and nephews. As one of nine children, Kate has a large and supportive family with whom she enjoys spending as much time as she can.