I Believe...
  • I believe that most of the issues people struggle with are issues we all face as we seek to create meaningful lives.
  • I believe in the importance of a good fit between client and therapist, and in addressing together how the work of therapy is helping the client in their day to day life.
  • I believe that in the context of an individual’s life experience, their behavior makes sense; or rather, made sense in some context or time in their life.  This approach helps me to avoid pathologizing human beings or their behavior, and instead to be respectful and curious about an individual’s experience.
  • I believe that each individual is really the “expert” on their own life and experience, but that often people get stuck in unhelpful ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, and therapy can help with that.  As well, many people find themselves living and thinking in ways that do not feel authentic, or ways that do not allow them to know and use their talents, strengths, and gifts.
  • I work with people to help them come into a fuller appreciation of and access to these often-neglected parts of themselves, as well as to provide opportunities to learn new skills for living when needed.

Areas of Specialty

Life is difficult.  This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.
It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.
M. Scott Peck​
  • Women struggling with issues of empowerment and depression (voice, invisibility, connection to self, personal power, and power in relationships).
  • I have received John Gottman’s Advanced Marital Therapy Training and my work with couples is grows out of the Gottman Method, a compassionate and respectful way of working with couples that often brings about significant changes in their relationship by focusing on building the marital friendship, reducing hurtful conflict, and enhancing partner’s abilities to understand each other.  (For more detailed information on how I work with couples see the “How I Work” section)
  • I also enjoy and have experience working with gay and lesbian couples.
  • Individuals working to overcome trauma, grief, and loss, whether the result of childhood trauma, loss of a loved one or pet, or the more vague loss of self that often happens in marriage or parenting. 
  • Blended or stepfamilies are often experiencing intense challenges and fragility at the same time.  I bring in my own experience in a blended family to enhance our work.
  • When one family member suffers with a chronic illness or disability, all family members need to make adjustments.  I have experience helping families absorb the impact of and cope with a variety of issues, including epilepsy, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, diabetes, scoliosis and back pain, and heart disease.

Using Poetry in Therapy

Poetry is simply speaking truth.  Each of us has a truth as unique as our own fingerprints.  Without knowing that truth, without speaking it aloud, we cannot know who we are and that we are already whole.  In the most profound way, speaking our truth allows us to know that our life matters, that our viewpoint has never existed before.  That our suffering, our joy, our fears and our hopes are important and meaningful.  One of the best-kept secrets in this technically oriented culture is that simply speaking truth heals.​

How to Contact Me​​

I want to beg you, as much as I can,
to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart,
and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms.
Rainer Maria Rilke
8401 5th Ave NE
Suite 103
Seattle, WA 98115
206-854-7333
Send me a message
Copyright (c) Catherine Haynes - All Rights Reserved