Kat Hathaway

What’s calling you to therapy?

• Perhaps you’re seeking relief from distressing feelings of anxiety or depression

• Or maybe you’re having relationship or parenting issues

• You might be having disturbing body symptoms

• poor sleep

• pain

• illness

• sexual issues

• Perhaps you’re engaging a life task

• becoming a parent

• committing to a relationship or ending one

• menopause

• reaching midlife

• retiring from work

• It could be that you need help to grow into a more positive version of yourself

• Maybe you need someone to talk to, someone to support you through a stressful time

• You might have heard about mindfulness and meditation and are curious to explore these practices

• Maybe you’ve been to other therapists and are looking for something different, something more creative or wholistic … or

• where you’re heard and attended to in a particular way

My practice is located just outside of Emerald, in a tranquil studio among the trees in the beautiful Dandenong Ranges, Melbourne, approx. 1 hour drive from Melbourne CBD

My name is Kat, and I’m able to help with any of these issues. I’m highly trained and accredited, with 10 years of clinical practice. I love my work and genuinely care for the well-being of my clients.

Find out more about me, my qualifications and the way I work.

The decision about who to work with as a therapist is a very personal one. Not all therapists suit all clients. You are welcome to call me for a phone chat before you book in for a session. Then, once you’ve sat in the space with me, and experienced how we work, you’ll know whether we’re a good match.

How I work… safe, curious, knowledgeable, experienced, invested.

“As a Soul Centred Psychotherapist, I create a safe and sacred space in which to engage with clients in a way that can form a deep and genuine therapeutic relationship.

This relationship is essential to the process of journeying with clients in a soulful way. It provides a sense of safety, trust, and containment within which the client can have the freedom to explore and bring present whatever naturally comes.

As part of this relationship, I listen to the client’s story, both with a trained ear and a curious, compassionate heart. Sometimes it can be great relief to have someone genuinely ‘hear’. I will ask questions such as “how was that for you?”, “what does this mean to you?”, “if this were to happen in your life, what might that give you a sense of?” and “what do you notice as you tell me this?”. With this kind of attention, the meaning and embodied experience of a client’s story can become more available to them.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your Life and you will call it Fate.
Carl G. Jung

An important aspect of engaging with psyche in a Soul Centred way is the development of mindfulness or a “witness” capacity. I practice this in the hearing of a client’s story and, where appropriate, teach this capacity to clients.

Mindfulness can cultivate a client’s relationship with their own lived experience and Self overall. Our modern Western society tends to value “thinking” above all else. However, as a Soul Centred Psychotherapist, I believe that it is crucial to also be mindful of other aspects of being human, such as feeling, sensing, imagining, and noticing our own relationship with the world and ourselves

When the overwhelming feeling, which often accompanies trauma or pain, interferes with the ability to have a full experience of being human, I use a range of psychotherapeutic techniques in a client centred way to resource the client, both in and out of therapy sessions.

Want to go deeper?..... In addition to the hearing, engaging, and resourcing techniques, which are essentially the skills of a counsellor, I have been trained with a particular emphasis which allows me to engage with a client in a deeper, more soulful way. In this way, a journey can be undertaken in which the meaning, beliefs and personal mythologies which underlie everyday experience can be made more conscious and available to the client. In this context, the relationship between therapist and client makes me a curious and knowledgeable companion and support person as clients explore the journey available to them.

I feel deep respect and care for the uniqueness of each client as their journey unfolds with its own individual sense of timing and meaning. Throughout this process, I hold to the Soul Centred understanding that there is no right or wrong way for this journey to occur … no objective sense of the time the process ‘should’ take … and no one you ‘should’ be.”

Influences

I am informed and continually inspired by the thinking of people such as Carl Jung, Thomas Moore, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Marie Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Robert Johnson, Sylvan Tomkins, Milton Erikson and Babette Rothschild.

My work is enriched by the mythologies of Ancient civilizations, fables and faerytales from around the world, and the insights of Alchemy.

Modalities I use

Tapping/Thought Matrix Meridian Therapy

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” ~ World Health Organization, 1948

As an overarching comparison, this technique utilizes the structure and predesigned formula interventions similar to Emotional Freedom Technique. Based on the healing understandings from Traditional Chinese Medicine, and in a way which is similar to acupuncture, tapping accesses the meridian system of the energetic body to create healing and resolution for blocked emotions, negative beliefs and trauma states.

EMDR/ Bilateral Stimulation Processing

“Fear is not a ‘mental’ problem, it’s a physiological response and you can change it.” ~ Francine Shapiro

Based on the work of Francine Shapiro in the late 1980’s, this is a therapeutic modality which is rapidly gaining wider recognition among the ‘mainstream’ psychotherapeutic circles. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) is a technique which opens up accelerated information processing for healing trauma, character structure patterns, disruptive beliefs and behaviour. EMDR/Bi-lateral Stimulation Processing is client centred and naturalistic, yet rigorous and structured, allowing the client's natural drive towards integration and growth to emerge organically.

Therapeutic Ritual

“Ritual instructs not only at the level of intellect… but also at the level of the soul.” ~ Mark Pedelty

Traditional cultures have long held the understanding of the healing capacity of therapeutic ritual. The nature of this work is to directly engage with the unconscious mind, using it’s kind of language… symbol, metaphor, enactment. I use the analogy that all the other work, talking, insights, discoveries, processing can be like walking up to a doorway. Therapeutic ritual contains the potential to enable the threshold to be crossed.

Dreamwork

“Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you.”  ~ Marsha Norman

Our nightly dreams are one of the main ways we can access the impulses and wisdom of the deep Self. The way I treat client’s dreams is respectful and specific to the client. I don’t believe that a broad application of ‘an interpretation’ is appropriate or helpful. Instead, we gently work to discover what the client’s unconscious mind (the Dream maker) is attempting to bring to conscious awareness. This can sometimes become quickly apparent, or it can take longer, where we study the themes which emerge through the dreaming over time.

Working with Parts

“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.”
~Rumi

Have you ever had the experience of saying or doing something that just isn’t ‘like you’?
Developmental psychology holds the understanding that we are not a single, monolithic structure. Traumatic life events, developmental tasks, and certain other environments all have the effect of splitting or separating the psyche into parts. In combination with mindfulness to build ego strength and a witness capacity, we can learn to relate to these parts, to negotiate with them and to achieve a more harmonious inner world.

Hypnotherapy/Trancework

“You use hypnosis not as a cure but as a means of establishing a favorable climate in which to learn.” ~ Milton Erikson

I practice a style of hypnotherapy based on the indirect, metaphorical techniques of Milton Erikson. A state of hypnotic trance exists in many different forms in everyday life. Sometimes it is recognised and utilised (hypnotherapy, rituals, or dance, for example), but most of the time it goes unnoticed (daydreaming, driving a car, reading a book, or irrational fears, to name a few). Hypnotherapy is simply the use of trance for therapeutic purposes.

Creative Therapy

“The object of therapeutic treatment is to return imagination to the things that have become only physical.” ~ Sardello

Our modern Western culture is a primarily right brain society where thinking, analyzing, deducing are all promoted as the best way to solve a problem or develop the self. While the linear functions of our right hemisphere are essential, the imbalance ignores the story of the left brain. Creative therapy, in the form of drawing, painting, claywork and other sorts of ‘giving form’ to experience, is an essential aspect to full understanding of the psyche, it’s issues and it’s resolutions.

Working with Archetypes

“Within the affliction is a complex, within the complex an archetype, which in turn refers to a god/goddess… by reverting the pathology to a god, we recognise the divinity within the pathology and give the god his/her due.” ~ James Hillman

The understandings of the collective unconscious and the archetypes contained therein are one of the great gifts of Jungian psychotherapy. Through this work, clients can experience themselves as part of the larger fabric of the world. There is a universality about their struggles and, often, an archetypal assistance in the remedy. Clients can also learn to identify the dominant archetypes which operate within their psyche, to develop conscious relationship and boundaries with those figures, and to actively cultivate other, less dominant, archetypal aspects.

Chakra Work

“What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.” ~ Aldous Huxley

Developmental trauma is addressed theoretically and practically through the Eastern understanding of the Chakra system as a therapeutic approach. This form of healing combines the age-old wisdom of the Chakra system of energy pathways with the latest research in psychobiology. It is an approach that adds a dimension of practical and effective intervention to theories of childhood development and character structure.