I work as a non-clinical, complexity-oriented human science field researcher and scientific psychotherapist with a special interest in complicated, difficult, painful, enduring states of being which are often the natural consequence of any kind of experience involving traumatic stress, tragedy, catastrophe, terror, rage, profound loss, grief, and deep anxiety.
I specialize in scientific, naturalistic, non-clinical psychotherapy to help intelligent people move through terror and stress-induced psychological difficulties while building healthy, long-term resilience.
I use interdisciplinary non-pathological research methods and practical application processes to study, understand, and pragmatically address the fallout or the aftermath extreme stress events, situations, contexts, or chronic living conditions that induce a physiological and psychological state that involves terrorization and activation of the natural fight or flight response followed by a functional freeze state that endures in perpetuity until it is adequately comprehended, beheld without judgment, and approached with care and compassion and effective practices. Examples of the kinds of psychological consequences I specialize in are the result of any kind of trauma, tragedy, catastrophe, disaster, or other extreme stress event or chronic experience. Such events or situations often involve being terrorized in some way, and also haunted with moments of terror afterward. Extreme stress-inducing events or chronic living contexts also often eventually result in depression as a form of exhaustion, which is partly a consequence of not adequately addressing or actively ignoring the psychological difficulties that frequently follow any kind of extreme stress experience, acute or chronic.
Through almost two decades of research and one decade of practice, the group of people I am most accustomed to working with and understanding, in both professional and personal experience, are those often categorized as visionaries, inventors, pioneers, independent thinkers, and extreme sport athletes.
Aside from academic stamps, what I view as most important is that my work is entirely scientific, in both research and practice. Moreover, I work in an entirely non-medical, non-clinical, non-pathological way. I do not assign medical diagnoses for what I consider to be adaptations to extreme events and situations. If if comes out during our work together that you have some kind of psychopathological problem rather than an adaptation problem (adaptation problems are usually due to external conditions that block the otherwise natural movement through grief, gaining self insight, growing, healing, becoming stronger, while psychopathology is a deep-set way of being, not something that can change; psychopaths do not become healthy people over time; they usually become worse or just stagnate forever no matter how much effort is put into them by people who are healing and growth oriented. psychopaths are vampires, and there is no way to change the nature of a vampire; they can only be left to rot and die, and that’s actually what they prefer anyway. Psychopathology is permanent, and is fundamentally about avoidance of reality, anti-growth, and cowardly attempts to violate, manipulate and control others for one’s personal gain, due to a profound incompetence in life in every conceivable way). If psychopathology surfaces as the fundamental problem we are dealing with whilst working together, I will continue to work with you during a short transition period, but will recommend a clinical practitioner as more suitable for your personal psychology, as they are trained to help people manage their personal, irreparable, character defects over a lifetime (sometimes using medication) and are trained to help vampires become more comfortable in life. Concerning long-term work, beyond just a few months’ time, I work exclusively with mission-oriented rather than comfort-oriented people. The field of clinical psychology is designed mainly to help comfort-oriented people, which leaves the bulk of mission-oriented people with nowhere sufficient or adequate or suitable for doing deep personal growth work beyond the superficial levels of mere existence.
I’m mainly a field researcher and theorist. I use a theory development methodology to study the psychology of complex decision-making under extreme stress, fear, and time constraints within mortally dangerous conditions. As a human subjects researcher, I abide by a set of ethics and Federal laws, including the necessity to store client files in a safe, secure, encrypted manner while maintaining anonymity of everyone I speak with as this is a fundamental requirement for researchers who study human subjects.
I use a filing system that includes no personally identifiable information, and I create a private login area on a different website hosted in Germany by a company (Secura GmbH) that focuses on high security and where privacy laws are very strict, so that you can retrieve the notes I write during and after our discussions anytime you’d like, and you can also fill out anonymous forms inside the encrypted login area anytime that you would like to add more notes, tell me ideas, etc. It’s like a private little space for you if you choose to use it, but you do not have to if you prefer not to write self reflections to me during our process of figuring out what is going on with you in a deep way and what to do about it. If you use Proton VPN to access the site you get a double-layer of encryption as Proton is the only VPN which uses an extra layer, based in Switzerland, where privacy laws are also very strict.
Secondarily I am a certified psychotraumatologist and WA State certified psychological consultant. This means I have two sets of ethics and laws that I must adhere to (and which I would anyway even if I had no certifications) and in trying to accommodate both the Federal and the State laws and ethics, due to some limitations inherent to my non-medical, non-clinical license, I only work with with high-functioning adults, and I do not work with vulnerable populations or people under the age of 18.
The population I know best and have the most experience with is super-intelligent, mission-oriented people who tend to be pioneers, inventors, BLAH BLAH. I have worked with this population formally for 15 years, and these are the kinds of people I have also known best in my personal life for more than half a century.
However, I often work with other populations and when I do, I find ways to explain my insights in less technical or abstract terms that what are normally found in the fields of philosophy anthropology, which are the main fields I draw from during hypothesis formulation when making case studies, along with my own ideas that I have been building since 1998 which is when I began doing informal psychological consulting work, then in 2001 I started doing my work in a formal, methodical way using a complexity-oriented research methodology hundreds of times by now. The method I use to delve into psychological and ontological disturbances does not apply extant theory during the process of case formulation, but relies entirely on the data given by participants, and only in the late stage of the process some theory might be applied, but not from clinical psychology, rather from fields within human science that are old, much older than modern psychology which is not really very good at understanding human nature and developing truly representative theories, and clinical psychology also has a bad habit of trying to over-simply and cartoonize people to fit into the little boxes created by lab researchers, but in reality those simplified concepts do not always apply, yet alternatives are not available because lab research on humans cannot be complexity-oriented; only field research can capture the true complexity of human nature, and in doing so, good theories cannot be developed without drawing from ancient fields such as philosophy, physiology, and anthropology. This means modern psychology is an inadequate field when it is used as a stand-alone field to try and understand people and help them in ways that go far beyond techniques to manage and control behavior or thought in order to reduce symptoms, but in the long-run the glorified techniques stop working. As soon as there is a period of chronic or extreme stress, all those clinical techniques crumble because they are superficial. It is better to grow, mature, integrate, and release disturbances so that movement toward fulfillment of potential comes naturally, requiring no force, and so that growth is sustained because it is deep within the organism, in a realm beyond the need to control, manage, eradicate, and dominate symptoms. There is no need to waste time and energy on symptoms when they dissolve without effort during an actual real growth process.
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Katrina Kessler, PhD — Traumatologist 