Kate Van Pay, Ph.D.

My approach to therapy is integrative and adaptable, with a core foundation in interpersonal process and client-centered approaches. The experience of providing clients with a meaningful connection where they feel secure, heard, and accepted for their true selves is the aspect of my counseling work that I find most fulfilling and often most healing. Being able to give a client with past interpersonal hurts a corrective emotional experience and show them that they can be cared for unconditionally is a privilege, as is helping them to better understand the impact of their past experiences on their current relationship patterns, sense of self, and how they move in the world. I additionally draw on emotion-focused, mindfulness, DBT, and cognitive-behavioral techniques to assist clients in their development of coping strategies and to decrease distress. Throughout all of my work I remain aware of the context of my client’s experience as well as our cultural identities and how they may play out in sessions and within clients’ lives, providing open discussion, transparency, and exploration as desired by the client.  

I identify as a generalist and enjoy working with a variety of presenting concerns and needs. I am especially passionate about engaging in work related to trauma, disordered eating and body image, identity development or concerns, interpersonal relationships, family-of-origin distress, and self-criticism.

Providing supervision is another meaningful aspect of my role here at SCS and it is a part of my work that I most look forward to each week. I take much the same approach to supervising as I do in my clinical work, integrating my interpersonal process and humanistic approaches with developmental theory in order to meet supervisees where they are at. My hope is to help nurture trainees’ clinical identity and self-confidence, empathically challenging them to step outside of their comfort zone and achieve desired growth. I am dedicated to collaboratively building a comfortable, safe, accepting, and culturally aware environment with my supervisees. I strive to show up genuinely in a desire to create an atmosphere of openness, realness, and connection. I find it important to help maintain the unique balance within supervision of working with supervisees to address their professional needs and clinical work, personal experiences and identities, and how the two intertwine.

Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with family and friends, reading, exploring and relaxing in nature, traveling, eating good food, watching movies, and playing board/card games.