Katie Chen
Therapist
A Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC), Katie earned her Master’s degree in Clinical Professional Counseling at Loyola University Maryland. Prior to pursuing her path toward licensure, she enjoyed a career in the performing and visual arts, which meandered slowly toward and within the wellness field before finding a home in mental health counseling. Katie is a certified Nature Informed Therapist and has completed the Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) Externship training program at the Philadelphia Center for EFT under Dr. Ting Liu. Katie believes that relationships are a healing vessel and that if we focus and deepen the connections that are most important to us, we can better navigate the challenges of life with a sense of purpose, and meaning. Katie helps individuals and couples reshape attachment patterns, rebuild trust, find clarity, and enhance communication. It is her belief that by nurturing a sense of authenticity and embodiment within vulnerable spaces, clients will experience a newfound fulfillment within relationships, whether it be in relationship with themselves, their passions, their loved ones, with nature, or within their greater community.
Katie’s eclectic experience has led her to feel passionate about providing and holding space for adults that are navigating transition, upheaval, change, loss, grief, stress, anxiety, and depression, and especially as these elements pertain to interpersonal conflict, separation, divorce, shifting of roles, career change, burnout, performance concerns, injury, illness, or other losses. Katie especially enjoys working with creatives and individuals who intertwine their passion with their career. Based on her own experience in the arts, she brings a nuanced understanding of the complexities that arise when success and achievement within an art form calls upon a degree of perfectionism and refinement that can cloud and obstruct the real purpose and meaning behind creative expression. By restoring integrity in their embodied experience, and exploring the meaning and purpose behind their “why,” clients can begin navigating through the resulting burnout or existential anguish that can arise out of this disconnection.
Therapeutic Approach
Guided by a humanistic and integrative healing lens, Katie holds the relationship between therapist and client as a vessel for change, and imperative to enabling the mind, body, and spirit to come together as a whole. Katie believes that when the therapeutic relationship is built upon trust, openness, and authenticity, all meaningful topics can be collaboratively explored, making change and healing inevitable. When this process occurs with the support and offerings from nature as a co-therapist, she has found that even deeper relationships can be foraged.