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Kathryn Shelton,LCSW
Integrative Psychotherapy
Areas of Expertise
Integrative Psychotherapy
Integrative psychotherapy is an approach where I draw from various therapeutic orientations, selecting methods best suited to your unique challenges. With over 20 years of experience working with adults and adolescents, I’ve had the opportunity to learn and practice multiple modalities. I am trained in trauma-informed therapies such as EMDR and Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy.
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In my sessions, mindfulness is at the core of my practice. As a mindfulness practitioner, my highest priority is to be fully present with you in each moment. I provide a non-judgmental, accepting space for all of your emotions, thoughts, opinions, and experiences. My goal is to create emotional safety, allowing you to explore your internal world and how you navigate life and relationships. The therapeutic relationship is central to this process, offering the foundation for meaningful exploration and growth.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Are you bothered by feeling anxious or on edge more often than you'd like? Do you feel stuck in a state of discontent? Do you wonder why distressing emotions within seem to be trigger so easily?
Mindfulness skills can help you learn to identify and understand your emotional triggers. We will use mindfulness skills to recognize emotional reactivity and learn to regulate and tolerate distressing emotions.
I will help you learn to attune to signals from your nervous system (flight, flight, freeze, or fawn). Recognizing when its's activated and learning how move to calm when it's warranted. It is natural and inherently protective to want avoid discomfort. The body helps protects us by triggering the defense system. But sometimes that level of defense is not helpful. ie. there is no tiger chasing us! We may be particularly reactive when we have a history of trauma. When we try to avoid our emotional experience it only grows stronger perpetrating more need for avoidance, numbing, or others compulsive behaviors. In mindfulness based therapy I help you to approach your emotional experience, whatever it may be, with non-judgment, compassion, and acceptance. When we practice allowing ourselves to feel and accept a wider range of emotions, we can reduce suffering. Acceptance does not mean changes in life are not made. In fact, it's the opposite. When we allow for our full experience it can become crystal clear if there changes we would benefit from making. There is another way to go through life. Our traumas and emotions do not have to be running the show.
Click here for more on my approach.
Behavioral Coaching
Behavioral coaching is a method of treatment where goals and obstacles to reaching goals are identified. Working together we can discover what is getting in your way. Common behaviors are avoidance, perfectionism and emotional reactivity.
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
For some, therapy is a longer term endeavor that unfolds over time as you encounter various changes and challenges in your life.
Psychodynamic therapy recognizes that we are naturally influenced by our childhood environment. It understand that we are often acting from a place of pain, fear or sadness that we are not entirely aware of.
The safety of therapeutic relationship plays a large and transformative role as you deal with underlying causes of suffering. By exploring your upbringing, including your family system, cultural factors, traumas, societal influence and pressures, we start to understand the factors that shaped you. They shaped how you view yourself, thoughts, feelings and how you relate to others and the world as a whole.
Insights in these areas can reveal limiting belief systems and that were perhaps created for a protective purpose but are no longer serving you.
Now can be the time for a new way of being and relating to yourself and others.
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Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy
Clinical research is showing that Ketamine has broad reaching effects on mental health and can be a catalyst for insight and promote lasting change. During KAP, I provide a safe presence and support you as you explore your inner world during a non-ordinary states of consciousness.
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Psychedelic Integration Therapy
Archeological evidence suggests that plant medicines have been used in indigenous communities for over 5000 years. Currently the only legal psychedelic available in the US is Ketamine. I do not endorse any illegal activity or make referrals to obtain illegal substances. I do however believe in education and harm reduction.
Your experiences with psychedelics deserve to be explored in a safe, non-judgmental environment and with an educated mental health professional. I can provide this for you whether you are considering psychedelics or have previously had psychedelic experiences.
Click here for more on Psychedelic Integration Therapy.
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