Working With KD: An Honest Look at You
Originally published: 2024-03-10 · Updated: 2026-11-12
Clients often describe me as gentle, approachable, easy to talk to, and even a little silly. I’m glad those qualities come through. Therapy asks us to bring parts of ourselves into a room that we may have spent years hiding, judging, or trying to fix. Feeling comfortable with the person across from you matters.
But warmth alone isn’t the whole therapy experience. I want our work to help you understand yourself and make changes that matter in your actual life. That takes safety, honesty, and sometimes a willingness to be uncomfortable.
Here’s a little of what that looks like in my office.
A Place to Be Human
You don’t need a polished explanation of what’s wrong. You can arrive confused, anxious, exhausted, or unsure why the things you’ve tried haven’t helped. We begin with your experience: your history, your biology, your relationships, and the ways you’ve learned to get through the day.
I’m interested in what it’s like to be you. What are you carrying? What keeps happening? What do you need that you’ve learned to dismiss, suppress, or feel ashamed of?
We also make room for ordinary humanity. Social media is very good at suggesting that everyone else has the beautiful house, the effortless relationship, the remarkable children, and a life that ends in “happily ever after.” I don’t want therapy to become another place where you feel pressure to achieve that version of yourself.
There’s room here for a meaningful life with imperfect days, difficult feelings, and dogs that do not cooperate with the plan.
Compassion and Meaningful Challenge
After years of doing this work, I don’t want to sit beside someone’s suffering indefinitely without helping them find a way to respond differently.
That doesn’t mean rushing, pushing past your limits, or deciding what your goals should be. It means being honest together about what’s helping, what isn’t, and what we may need to practice next. We can respect why a coping habit developed while also recognizing that it may now be keeping you stuck.
Sometimes the work involves noticing something you’ve been avoiding. Sometimes it means questioning a rule you’ve lived by for years. Sometimes it’s learning to tolerate a feeling without immediately trying to make it disappear.
We make those decisions together. You should be able to ask questions, tell me when something doesn’t fit, and understand why we’re using a particular approach.
Understanding the Whole Picture
Similar symptoms can have different stories underneath them. Anxiety, low mood, intrusive thoughts, relationship struggles, and sensory overwhelm don’t tell me everything I need to know about a person.
We look at the patterns around your symptoms: what triggers them, what you do next, and how that response affects you over time. Your experiences and neurological differences matter, too. Understanding ADHD, autism, and neurodivergent identity can change how we make sense of what has felt difficult.
The aim is to find an approach that fits you, rather than asking you to squeeze into a predetermined version of therapy.
What We Might Work on Together
Depending on your needs and goals, our work may include:
Recognizing thoughts, feelings, and patterns. Naming what is happening gives us something more useful to work with than “Why am I like this?”
Changing responses that keep you stuck. For OCD, this may involve Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), including practice responding differently to intrusive thoughts and compulsive urges.
Making space for your history. When trauma is part of the picture, we may discuss approaches such as EMDR or DBR and whether they fit your treatment needs.
Understanding sensory and neurological differences. We explore how your environment, expectations, and ways of processing the world affect daily life.
Practicing outside the therapy room. Insight matters, and so does what you do with it in a conversation, at work, or during a difficult evening at home.
You don’t need every approach on this list. The work follows what we learn about your particular experience.
I’m Practicing, Too
For much of my thirties and into my forties, I lived with a relentless, goal-driven mindset. Success brought relief, but it also came with anxiety, lost sleep, and health concerns I could no longer ignore.
Reconsidering that way of living meant making room for difficult feelings and changing habits that had been rewarded for years. I’ve written more about that in My Story of Perfectionism and Burnout.
These days, I place more value on the ordinary moments: hugging my partner, Steve, laughing as our dogs play, getting a heartfelt text from my nieces or family, and watching clients face something they once felt unable to face.
I share that because acceptance and change are things I practice in my own life. Knowing the concepts doesn’t exempt me from being human. Unfortunately, there is no therapist loophole.
Finding a Way Forward That Feels Like Yours
I want therapy to help you understand your own needs, trust your observations, and build ways of responding that you can carry beyond my office. We’ll return to your goals and talk about what is changing, what remains hard, and what needs adjusting.
You don’t have to become someone else to do this work. You get to discover more of yourself, including the parts that don’t fit neatly into anyone else’s expectations.
If you’d like to explore working together, you can meet the team or reach out to KDH Counseling about availability and fit. We provide therapy in Lafayette, Louisiana, with in-person and telehealth options.
