Kelly Strider, LPC, CADC III

Welcome! What do you want to change?

I've been providing individual and relational therapy to adults and teens for almost 20 years. I use DBT, motivational interviewing, systems and attachment theories, and parts work to help clients make internal and external changes to their emotions, behavior, and relationships, so that they can create what DBT calls "a life worth living." I also think that story-telling has immense therapeutic potential--not just articulating our own stories to ourselves, but learning how to share those stories with others, and how to connect with other people's stories as sources of community and self-understanding.

I joke that I "practice and preach the gospel of dialectical perspective." This goes beyond imparting the various skills that DBT offers--skills that can be extremely helpful in their own right, but are no substitute for cultivating the ability to acknowledge the simultaneous contradictions in the world. The more we can do that, the better we get at so many crucial things: allowing ourselves to experience the fuller range of our feelings; softening perfectionism; transforming relationships instead of losing them; making sense of scary and painful events, both past and present; creating sustainable behavior patterns. 

I'm also particularly passionate about the importance of relationships in our lives--familial, social, professional, and/or intimate--though I don't believe there's one right way to "do" relationships, or an ideal breadth or depth people should achieve in them. I want to see people be able to configure their constellation of connections in whatever manners they think are best--so long as others' rights to safety and self-determination are respected--because relational fulfillment has so much impact on our mental health. 

I'm constantly impressed, humbled, and gratified by the kinds of changes my clients are able to make with the help of effective, supportive therapy. I tend to work best with clients who have experienced family-of-origin trauma, are struggling with anxiety and perfectionism, and/or want to create for themselves life paths that fit who they are, even if that means rejecting dominant messages and making something new.

As you engage in the important process of finding a therapist, please remember that there are many things we can do by ourselves, and others that require the witness, encouragement, collaboration, and guidance of someone else (that's one of those pieces of dialectical perspective). I hope to hear from you soon so that we can explore doing that kind of work together.