About Katie

About me

Here's what most people don't know about me: before I was anyone's therapist, I was the kid nobody could see.

Most people meet me as the clinician, the coach, the person families land with after they've tried everyone else. But if you want to understand why I do this, really why, you have to know who I was long before any of that.

I grew up in a family of divorce that was enveloped in chaos and friction. And as kids often do, I shrunk into a kid who didn’t want her needs to distract from everyone else’s. I became a kid with a whole inner world that nobody around me could see.

I did well in school, but most of my memories of those years were of being bullied for being overweight. Kids chased me home from school, calling me names that I still think about from time to time. I felt left on the outside of the friendships and the ordinary belonging that kids should be able to consider a rite of passage.

For a lot of my childhood, I felt more like an observer of everyone else's life than a participant in my own. I watched the world choose other people, over and over, and I quietly built a whole belief system out of it: that I wasn't the kind of kid who got chosen.

I did everything I could to hide and shrink, and as a result, I didn't have a relationship with a trusted adult.

There are so many kids who grow into adults without having that close relationship with a parent, especially when they're kids that struggle behaviorally.

So when I say this movement is for the kids who are misunderstood and unseen, I need you to know I'm not describing an audience. I'm describing a kid I knew personally.

I know what it costs a child when parents can't unlock the code. I know what it heals when someone finally finds the key. And I know, from both sides of it now, that being truly seen can reach a kid even after years of going without.

That's what I'm here to do. For your kid. And honestly? For the version of you that's been going unseen in this struggle too.

What I carried into the work

I became a therapist, a behavior consultant, and an executive function coach because I never wanted another kid to spend decades unlearning the belief that they weren't enough.

For twenty years, that's what I did. I worked with the kids everyone else had given up on, the ones labeled lazy, defiant, too much, not enough, and the worn-out, devoted parents and who loved them and couldn't understand why nothing was working.

And here's what twenty years taught me: those parents were never the problem. The moms who find their way to me are some of the most loving, selfless people I've ever met. They aren't failing for lack of trying or lack of love. They've been handed the wrong information about what's actually going on inside their kid, and then blamed when the wrong tools didn't work. They were doing everything they were taught to do. They were just taught the wrong things.

And then it came home

And then it became extremely personal.

When my son James was diagnosed with ADHD at four, I watched the world respond to his hardest moments, the moments he needed the most grace, with shame and dismissal. And something rose up in me I had never felt before. A fierce, non-negotiable love that didn't flinch based on his behavior.

I went up against schools, systems, and every person who told me I was wrong, because I knew, in my body, what it costs a child to not be seen. I had been that child. And I was not going to let him be.

Advocating for my son taught me what unconditional love actually feels like, not as a concept, but as a lived thing. And somewhere in fighting for him, I started to understand that the little girl I used to be had always deserved it too.

James is 17 now. He's thriving. That still gets me, every time.