Katherine Z.

Katherine brought to her training in the Developmental Model of couples therapy — with its concept of differentiation (expressing self and understanding other) — decades of experience as a psychologist working with families and individuals around: mental health challenges; school and work/career issues; general unwanted thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; and couple issues. Recently she has been working more explicitly with the effects on current relationships of earlier trauma (much of which is attachment-based). Work in any of these areas can free clients and their partners for happier and more fulfilling lives.

In keeping with her career-long focus in depth psychology and self-actualization, Katherine finds the Developmental Model useful in helping clients discover and shift beliefs, assumptions, and thought/action patterns of which they were previously not fully aware, but which have been hampering their own individual development as well as contributing to problems in relationship.

Once these patterns are out in the open (and their positive intentions, such as protection, understood), the Model then suggests ways to make fruitful changes. This approach is useful not only with romantic partners and committed couples, but also between friends, co-workers, siblings, and parents with their growing or adult children.

Katherine is a cis-gendered, heterosexual White woman with considerable experience in recent years working with both gay and lesbian couples and individuals (and one transgendered woman) and with Black and brown clients and cross-cultural couples in the San Francisco Bay Area. She continues to enjoy work and friendships with American Black colleagues and community members. Decades ago, she lived and worked in Europe (teaching, translating, psychotherapy, studies at the C.G. Jung-Institut Zürich) for over five years and has near-native fluency in German and Swiss German.