Today we’d like to introduce you to Kat Wilkins.
Hi Kat, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
“Trauma therapist” was certainly not on my list of dream jobs as a child; I would have told you I wanted to be a singer, artist, or teacher. Today, there is no job I’d rather have than to be a therapist. Before graduate school, I actually lived overseas as a teacher, and although I love traveling, the teaching part was not a good fit for me.
Becoming a therapist slowly unfolded into an idea I couldn’t shake. I think it’s because I knew I loved going deep with people, hearing the real stories beyond the small talk, and paying attention to what’s happening beneath the surface. I’ve always had a capacity to feel deeply, and though that has at times brought its own challenges, I’ve grown to appreciate and cultivate this part of who I am.
My work as a trauma therapist is predictably heavy; my job exists because people experience loneliness, grief, suffering, and pain. And I find this to be a great honor: to be trusted by my clients with the worst things from their past, the most awful things about their present, and their biggest fears about the future.
What I didn’t expect was that being a therapist would also allow me to use my creativity, quirkiness, and so many other parts of me that get to emerge authentically. It may sound weird that I think being a trauma therapist can also be fun (not every moment, of course, but there are definitely fun parts). And it shouldn’t be all that surprising, really, when you think about how human beings are wired, how our biology actually supports the reality that healing trauma isn’t only about working through what’s gone wrong in a person’s life. It has to include stuff like beauty, laughter, playfulness, music, dancing, and other things that help our systems move into safety, and to create new neural pathways for being with oneself.
I’ve been a therapist for more than 10 years now, and through some pivotal personal and professional experiences, now specialize in spiritual trauma and trauma that comes from narcissistic abuse.
I really love my job, and I’m so grateful to be where I am today.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
As I alluded to above, my personal life challenges helped shape my professional areas of focus and expertise. About 6 years into my therapy career, my family endured a horrific experience of spiritual trauma in our faith community. It shook our faith, identity, and sense of belonging. It obliterated our connection with people, the world, the self, and God.
But experiencing these challenges didn’t inherently make me qualified to help others with similar trauma. I had to do the work of pursuing my own healing, as well as continuing education and training in areas of narcissism, abuse dynamics, spiritual trauma, and trauma healing. It’s important to me to take responsibility for my own well-being, so that I don’t unintentionally transmit my trauma to my clients–which, unfortunately, is a real danger for any therapist. In fact, my professional and personal experiences have taught me that is it is sadly the very people who should have been protecting us are the very ones who harm us. I’ve worked with clients who have been abused by therapists, spiritual leaders, family members, employers, and romantic partners. It emphasizes to me the importance of integrity, humility, and accountability for anyone who is in caregiving or helping professions.
Other challenges along the way include managing chronic health issues that have made it imperative that I learn to trust the goodness of my body, including its needs and limits. Making space for my own body to have a voice in any decisions I make for my business is a non-negotiable for me now. My illnesses have been unwelcome guests, but through them, my body has taken me along this specific learning path. In a world where most of us have been taught to “just push through,” it’s an intentional and peculiar choice to reject that “hustle” narrative in favor of a gentler pace. It’s a shift I want to keep applying to more and more areas of life, including for my family.
A colleague of mine once said that life is a big mix of the hard things we don’t get to choose and the good stuff we do get to choose. I believe therapy is about this, too. The therapist gently invites the client to cozy up to the hard stuff in life we didn’t get to choose, to be with it with all the compassion, curiosity, and tenderness we can muster (and we definitely can’t do this alone), and to watch, with wonder, what happens when, instead of shoving the pain aside, or ignoring it, or stuffing it, we actually have an experience of a walking-through-it, a being-with-it, and knowing-we-survived-it, and that we have always been deserving of goodness.
And so the process of therapy, just like my experience of becoming a therapist, has been about this “both-and” reality: that both the goodness and the pain get to co-exist, that they both matter, and that both deserve to be heard.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Kat Wilkins Counseling?
I am a licensed trauma therapist based in Orlando who offers trauma therapy intensives either online or in-person in Orlando. These intensives range from 1-5 days and provide clients the opportunity to engage in deep therapeutic work in a shorter time than traditional weekly sessions.
Though I work with many different types of trauma, I specialize in spiritual trauma and working with survivors of narcissistic abuse–partly because those are both present in my own personal history.
This expertise is the reason many clients reach out to me. Religious trauma and narcissistic abuse often occur together, and many clients who find me share that it’s difficult to find a therapist who understands the subtleties and complexities of narcissistic abuse and general abuse dynamics. People who suffer in abusive and controlling relationships often struggle with emotions, thought processes, and behaviors that can easily be misunderstood and judged, even by well-meaning friends, family members, and therapists. This is partly why survivors of narcissistic abuse often experience the additional trauma of being betrayed, rejected, and judged by their communities or families. Having a therapist who gets this is imperative.
I am certified in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which is an evidence-based somatic therapy for trauma. I also integrate Polyvagal Theory, Ego State therapy, family systems theory, and additional somatic approaches into my practice. I work with individuals, couples, families, and organizations.
I like to think that my personality is evident in all of my counseling sessions. When therapists are just starting out, we tend to fall into a type of counseling that focuses more on techniques and less on bringing our full self to the session. This is also how many of us are trained. Clients can sense this, and it’s my belief that the best therapy happens when there’s authenticity from both sides. Clients get to know me, my humanity, my quirks, and hopefully, my love for them (because as weird as that may sound, I do grow to love my clients).
What does success mean to you?
As a trauma therapist, answering this question feels really tricky. But more generally, just as a human being, I am aware in my body right now of some tension as I consider the question. Words like “success,” “progress,” or even “healing” seem to have become inextricably linked to a capitalistic, individualistic way of looking at the world and our bodies. It’s an approach that prizes productivity, efficiency, and measurable outcomes at the expense of so much of the goodness of what it means to be fully human, mainly that our worth isn’t meant to be so tied to our productivity.
For my clients, what might look like “success” from the outside might actually be a nervous system profoundly stuck in some really damaging patterns. Similarly, what might look like “failure” might actually be a person’s system beautifully learning to slow down, make thoughtful choices, access safety, or move more toward being who they truly want to be in the world.
So I want to separate “success” from needing to be about doing, performing, producing, achieving, and so on. I’d love to be able to see it as something more holistic, something that can look different for different people at different times, something that we collectively help one another with, something that makes space for multiple things to exist alongside one another, something that can include slowness, inefficiency, and other things that our society may not be good at recognizing as good, as “successful.”
Pricing:
- Individual sessions: $175
- Couples sessions: $230
- Trauma Intensives: $1400-$5000
Contact Info:
- Website: https://katwilkinscounseling.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katwilkinscounseling/
- Other: https://substack.com/@katwilkinscounseling
