Resilience: A Building Inner Strength Journey

Welcome to the Resilience Podcast! Returning for another episode today is our Operations Director, Katelyn Kiley! Join us today to learn more about how trauma impacts the brain through Katelyn’s training and experience! More about Katelyn: Katelyn Kiley, LPC, collaborates with clients to achieve lasting change by clarifying and fostering present-day skills for stability, coping, and connection, while also holding space for the deeper, embodied healing that allows clients to actually access those skills when they need them. In her sessions, Katelyn is thoughtful, nonjudgmental, open and compassionate. She is a trauma-informed therapist, which means that she takes care to establish a safe and supportive environment for change, and assists clients with noticing and working with their experience not only in thinking brain but in body as well. (If this sounds too woo-woo for you, don’t worry! Katelyn loves engaging with skepticism, and will adjust to match your level of comfort and safety.) She enjoys working with clients to help them connect to their present-moment experience and explore their values across all aspects of their identity, in order to discover and cultivate a life that is meaningful and fulfilling for them. Katelyn is trained in EMDR, an approach to therapy that utilizes bilateral stimulation (a fancy name for movement on both sides of the body) to support the nervous system in order to allow clients to desensitize and process overwhelming life experiences. Because EMDR engages not just the thinking brain but also the body, it can address stuck points that more cognitive approaches are unable to reach. Because our nervous systems are our stress response systems, EMDR can be helpful with any mental health condition where stress is a factor—which is to say, all of them. Prior to joining Resilience Counseling in 2021, Katelyn accumulated a variety of clinical experience, including providing family therapy services to families facing a range of complex issues as an FFT clinician, intensive in-home therapy services and therapeutic mentoring to high-risk children and adolescents, parent support services, and outpatient counseling and advocacy work for survivors of sexual and domestic violence. Katelyn received her BA from the University of Virginia and her MEd in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from The College of William and Mary. In addition to her work with clients, Katelyn is the Director of Operations for Resilience Counseling. Katelyn is LGBTQIA+ affirming and a culturally responsive therapist. She works with individuals aged 16+ and couples.