Professional Experience

Katie is a clinical psychologist who works with adolescents and adults. She is experienced in treating a range of different presentations including depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, trauma, grief, clinical perfectionism, procrastination, relationship issues, eating disorders, body image issues, personality disorders, work-related issues, sleep disorders, LGBTQ+ issues and more. She is particularly skilled in helping people who struggle with regulating intense emotions.

Katie has a Master’s and PhD in Clinical Psychology, where she conducted research into how emotion affects what we learn; the processes that underlie chronic, recurrent depression and protective factors against this; and adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies that influence how life stressors impact us.

Katie embraces minimalism and intentional living, which to her is about intentionality in what we choose to keep in both our physical environment and internal world. She believes that, in a similar way, therapy is about working through our clutter, organising it, and making values-based decisions about what beliefs and life patterns are worth keeping and cultivating.

Katie works collaboratively with her clients in an empathetic, validating, respectful and empowering way. Her aim is for her clients to have a safe space to talk about their experiences, to gain insight into their beliefs and patterns, and to engage in more effective responses to life’s challenges.

In her sessions, Katie supports her clients in making behavioural shifts towards a more meaningful life. She helps her clients understand and change their limiting patterns, including their sense of self (e.g., self-worth; confidence; self-esteem; perfectionism) and how they interact with others (e.g., fear of rejection or abandonment; people-pleasing; self-sacrificing; approval-seeking). She equips her clients with strategies and skill-building to manage their challenging symptoms, while also digging deeper to get to the root cause and understand where these difficulties stem from (e.g., early life experiences; trauma processing; life stressors).

Katie works eclectically by drawing on different treatment modalities. She particularly values taking a Schema Therapy approach to help her clients understand their current reactions to triggers. One of her favourite techniques is called Emotion Bridge, which involves tuning into one’s current emotional, cognitive and physical reaction to a trigger, and using this feeling to identify and unlock their associated history and life experiences that created this reaction. Establishing this separation from the past and the present empowers people to learn to respond differently to their triggers.

Katie feels privileged to help her clients feel truly understood and validated, to share in their ‘aha’ moments, and to witness them feeling proud and excited about something that they’re finally able to do, despite how scared or upset they used to be. 

When she’s not working, Katie enjoys going to the gym, checking out escape rooms, playing boardgames, watching a good show, spending time at the beach, going for bushwalks and travelling.