The Clinicians
About Therapy With Kathryn Sullivan
When You Know You’re Okay and Your Body Hasn’t Caught Up
Sometimes the hardest part of trauma is knowing intellectually that you are okay while still feeling as though your mind or body is waiting for something bad to happen.
You steer around the things that remind you of what happened. Anxiety arrives suddenly, with nothing in the day to explain it.
Some days you feel disconnected from yourself, or flooded by an emotion that seems out of proportion to the moment. Other days it’s the plain frustration that an old experience still has this much influence over your present.
The knowing and the feeling run on two different tracks, and only one of them responds to being told the danger has passed.
Why Trauma Shows Up as Behavior in Your Child
For children and teens, trauma is even harder to put into words. What you see at home is the outside of it: school difficulties, anxiety, withdrawal, or emotions that feel too big to explain.
A young person rarely has language for what happened yet. Asked to produce it, they go quiet, or the behavior gets louder.
You’re the one noticing, and you’re the one deciding what to do about it. Waiting for your child to find the words first can mean waiting a long time.
Process What You Can’t Yet Put Into Words
In both cases, what happened got recorded somewhere language has not reached yet, and going over it more carefully has not been enough to move it.
EMDR is one route in. It helps an overwhelming experience lose some of the emotional charge attached to it.
With children and adolescents, expressive arts and play-based approaches open another: ways of processing and communicating that don’t require everything to be explained through conversation. Drawing it, building it, playing it out all count as language here, and a child who can’t tell you what happened can show you.
The work is trauma-informed, collaborative, and paced around you rather than my agenda.
Your Body Catches Up to What You Already Know
The aim is to be able to go near what you’ve been steering around, without pretending it didn’t hurt.
The memory stays. What changes is how much of your ordinary week it gets to run.
What grows out of that is more freedom to move through the world without the past constantly deciding what happens next.
About Kathryn Sullivan, MA, LSMHC
Hi, I’m Kathryn. I work with children, teens, and adults experiencing trauma, anxiety, depression, and emotional overwhelm.
My work is trauma-informed, with specialized training in EMDR, expressive arts, and play therapy. Cognitive-behavioral approaches come in where they’re useful.
As a pre-licensed mental health counselor, I practice under supervision.
The style I bring is warm, grounded, and creative. What matters most, especially with young people, is that therapy feels like something happening with them rather than something being done to them.
Reach Out Before You Can Explain It
Whether you’re asking for yourself or for your child, the starting point is the same.
We’ll begin with what’s already there, at a pace set by you.
Tell Us Where You’d Like This to Move
You don’t need the whole thing figured out before you write to us.
Some people know exactly which kind of therapy they want. Others know only that something isn’t working anymore, and that’s enough to start with.
Tell us what’s been going on, what you’ve already tried, and what you’d like to feel different. We’ll think it through with you and point you toward the therapist and the approach that fit.
You’ve done plenty of understanding already, and now it’s worth finding out what gets it moving.