Dr. Katherine Holshausen

As a clinical psychologist with a special interest in matters of the heart, my work centers on two main areas: helping individuals and couples navigate the complexities of relationships and emotional connection, and supporting clients—particularly first responders—in healing from the effects of trauma.

Many of the couples I work with include one or both partners who work in high-stakes, high-exposure professions, and whose relationship struggles are inseparable from what they carry home from that work. What people experience in those roles shapes how they connect, how safe vulnerability feels, and how much of themselves they can bring into a relationship. That complexity doesn't disappear at the front door, and it isn't supposed to. It shows up in the relationship, and that is exactly where we work with it.

Through Emotionally Focused Therapy, I help couples understand the cycles they're caught in, not just the arguments on the surface, but the attachment needs and emotional injuries underneath them. That kind of understanding changes things. When partners can finally see what is actually driving the distance or the conflict between them, something shifts. The work becomes less about who is right and more about how to find each other again.

For couples who want to do concentrated, immersive work, I also offer couples intensives. These are extended therapeutic experiences that allow us to go deeper, faster, creating meaningful momentum for couples who have been waiting a long time for something to change, or who simply want to do the work without stretching it across months of weekly appointments.

Trauma is woven through much of this work as well. Whether it arrived through a single event or accumulated over years of difficult experiences, trauma shapes how people understand themselves, how close they allow others to get, and how they show up in their most important relationships. Working through those experiences in therapy creates the conditions for something genuinely different to become possible, both within a person and between partners.

I have worked with people through some of the most emotionally demanding chapters a life can hold, the ones you can't prepare for and can't easily explain to someone who hasn't lived them. My approach is warm, relational, and genuinely collaborative. I take the work seriously without taking myself too seriously, which means there is room for humour alongside the hard stuff, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Life is complex. If the answers were simple, you would have found them by now. You don't have to keep navigating this alone.