“Courage is your natural setting. You do not need to become courageous, but rather peel back the layers of self-protective, limiting beliefs that keep you small.”

Who works with this population:

Kimberly Koljat, IMFT-S, LMFT, RPT-S, RDT

The people that find the best success in working with me are:

• People who are looking for insight into their behaviors and choices in life, who want to get to the root of the “why” and make changes from there.

• People who have lost someone or experienced a life transition and want an empathic, realistic, relational way of working with grief who allow them to move at their own pace through their grief, who help them discern between the pain of grief and the suffering of grief.

• People who want to unpack childhood trauma and unhealed wounds to prevent their pain from emotionally hurting others in relationship.

• People who navigate the world as a Highly Sensitive Person or with neurodivergence.

• People who are interested in the process of long term, insight focused therapy for the betterment of their relationships to self and others.

• People who are seeking an LGBTIQQA+ affirming space.

• People who may identify as people-pleasers, and/or often put the needs of others before their own.

• People who are seeking not only a place to verbally process their experience, but they are interested in the utilization of creative arts, somatic work, and movement within the work to learn more about themselves and how they navigate the world.

This work is rooted in seeking the source of behaviors through attachment theory, psychodynamic work, client centered work, neurobiology, and systemic family therapy and embodied in modalities like play therapy, drama therapy.  I help clients realize their resiliency to difficulty in life, including trauma, transitions, and identity exploration.  The goal is not to avoid difficulty, but to understand that difficulties happen, and we can experience them and know how to care for ourselves to get through them.

I offer a unique service to my clients that has its foundation in the therapeutic relationship, and is driven by the client's needs and strengths.  Therapy is not a one-size-fits-all experience, and the modality in which we work is catered to your specific needs, whether it's expressive arts, talk therapy, or embodied relational therapy.

Adults can benefit from the behavioral rehearsal and stress release found through the therapeutic process.  Through sand tray work, narrative work, and expressive arts, I help adult individual clients explore their right brain creative self and their left brain logical needs to create a "plan of action".

A lot of the work I do with adults is grief work. Unlike what is frequently assumed in pop culture, grieving the loss of a loved one is not a five-stages-of-grief experience. in fact, Kubler-Ross created the stages of grief for those in their dying process, not those left in the wake of their death. Late in her career, Kubler-Ross spoke out again the overgeneralization of that practice. Grief is a highly avoided topic in our culture, and those who are grieving are often left not only grieving their loved one, but grieving the way in which they engaged in the world before their loss. Much of my work is aligned with Megan Devine’s grief work, and I highly recommend her resources for clients- from her writing workshops, her documentary, and her books. Unlike other therapeutic work, grief work is not the Hero’s Journey of making meaning and growth through harrowing experience. Grief is painful. The pain of grief doesn’t go away and we cannot transform that pain, but the suffering we experience can be transformed.

If you are experiencing a significant loss, and you’re not sure how to be with someone who is grieving a loss, I highly recommend watching Speaking Grief, the documentary on the experience of grief and how to support others who are grieving.