Kristin Hirt, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist

I welcome you to come as you are. I consider our collaborative therapeutic relationship an authentic meeting of equals. I understand you as essentially good, worthy, unique, and capable. In this relationship, your voice matters. And if you're not feeling confident just yet, I'll help you cultivate your authentic voice. I'll help you see your existing strengths and skills, and we'll build on them for further growth. I approach healing and growth holistically and appreciate you as multi-faceted: feeling, thinking, physical, social, and spiritual. Together, we'll consider how to bring these various aspects of you into balance to create your experience of enhanced well-being. My approach to our work is both insight-oriented: we'll seek to understand what's driving your current challenges, and solution-focused: with these new understandings in mind, we'll explore new choices to effect the change you seek. We'll explore the interplay between what's conscious to you now and underlying dynamics that may not yet be fully conscious. We'll aim to bring subconscious dynamics into your fuller awareness to empower your informed agency and choices that are more attuned to your authentic needs and goals. We'll pay closer attention to your habitual thought patterns and consider how unexamined thoughts can sometimes trigger feelings and reactions that haven't been helpful for you. We'll consider expanded perspectives for more integrated, effective views of yourself and others. With mindfulness practice, you'll shift gears from a hurried running on autopilot to a more steady, intentional curiosity and presence to what's unfolding in the here and now. Our therapeutic relationship will serve as a tool for learning about your relationship style and patterns. I draw a therapeutic perspective largely from a trauma-informed attachment lens, exploring how your earliest attachments, especially with family of origin, shaped your internal emotional blueprint and expectations about relationships, and how that underlying script has played out, often repeatedly, in your adult relationships. Understanding these early influences allows us to rewrite relationship narratives with informed choice, hanging on to the parts that work, letting go of those that don't. I also draw influence from sociological, systemic, and feminist lenses, exploring the reciprocal interplay between internal landscapes and external social landscapes and influences. My work with couples is influenced by a trauma-informed attachment lens and draws from training in emotionally focused couple therapy, Gottman, and non-violent communication. I bring humility, respect, and genuine interest to our collaboration. My style is down-to-earth, non-pathologizing, and interactive, with healthy doses of humor (when appropriate). I welcome diversity of all kinds and embrace a social justice perspective. I've been in practice as a psychotherapist since 2000.

I work with individual adults, couples, and other pairings, including parents and adult children, sibling sets, friends, and colleagues seeking to better understand each other in order to work through friction. My previous work with children, youth, and families at-risk or with a history of neglect and abuse means that I've worked across the developmental lifespan: I understand the issues from a child's perspective, an adult's perspective, still carrying the wounds of childhood, and a parent's perspective. I bring well-rounded experience to understanding how intergenerational trauma impacts both parenting and a child's experience of being parented, as well as how social-systemic stressors like racism and sexism, low income, housing instability or homelessness, physical or mental illness, substance abuse, domestic violence, and exposure to community violence can impact a parent's capacity to parent optimally, and the impacts to children of such stressors. I've worked cross-culturally with immigrants, first-generation children of immigrants, and folks of diverse races, ethnicities, gender identities, and sexual identities. I'm available for telehealth video and phone sessions.