Kate Halliday, LCSW, is Senior Faculty, AEDP Institute from Ithaca, New York.
Throughout Kate’s nearly 30 years as a psychotherapist, she has always been better at noticing the ways her clients are remarkable, resilient, and lovable than theorizing about the ways they are wounded.
When Kate started learning to be a therapist, it was the magic of witnessing change and growth in other human beings that enlivened the experience for her. In psychotherapy, this led Kate to study Family Systems Theory and Narrative Therapy, then EMDR, and finally AEDP.
Kate’s sensibilities and temperament were formed by and in reaction to her childhood in a Scots family who lived in a small village in the south of England. A sense of the privilege and alienation of having an outsider perspective followed her to the United States, where she settled as a young adult. Other formative experiences include six years at a rigorous and spartan girl’s boarding school, from which she “time-travelled”, much too young, into an American academic setting with entirely different rules, at a time in history (the 1970s) when even those rules were being challenged.
During the years following graduation from college, Kate expanded her experience of real life (and further distanced herself from her early training in conformity) by embarking on single parenthood. In her late twenties internalized heterosexism prompted a last-ditch effort to please her family: she married a man. Both her parents then proceeded to die, extremely young. Along with the grief, a new sense of freedom came; Kate finally permitted herself to come out. This was at a time when it was not certain that in doing so she would not lose her children in a custody battle, but it was her good luck to have chosen a thoroughly decent man with whom to co-parent.
Coming out in her 30s finally offered Kate the chance to do the relational work of successive approximations of real romantic relationship, until finally maturity and good luck bestowed the love of her life upon her. Genuine independence and self respect has its benefits: even after the shared turbulence of their early years, her children have evolved into good friends. Her great good fortune in finding AEDP has contributed to more personal healing and growth, relationally, than she’d imagined possible.
The experience of designing and building a house in the country with her rest-of-life partner has been supported by their shared love of the land and respect for all the living beings: human, animal, and plant, who came before them upon it. Kate has been exploring Shamanic traditions of healing for 25 years, with a focus on her own Celtic roots. What she has learned though her experiences in what is called “non-ordinary reality” informs and sustains her. A deep relationship with the natural world is the bedrock of her capacity to meet herself and other. Now Kate lives among hills and waters that feel as familiar to her as the skin of her own body; and as she ages, is learning to love deeper and wider, so that when death comes, it will not be a disaster.
Ben Medley, LCSW (he/him/his) is an AEDP senior faculty member and has taught AEDP internationally. He has a private practice in New York City and specializes in working with the LGBTQ+ community. Ben has a particular interest in the psychology of oppression and developed AEDP’s 4th representational schema The Triangle of Social Experience to help therapists be mindful of how social experience shapes clients’ internal working models and informs their affective experience. Before private practice, Ben earned his degree in Clinical Social Work with the NYU Silver School of Social Work where he co-led the LGBTQ+ student organization, He has worked in Greenwich House’s HIV mental health program and the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services’ LGBTQ+ mental health treatment unit. His paper “Recovering the True Self: Affirmative Therapy, Attachment and AEDP in Psychotherapy with Gay Men” is published with the SEPI Journal: the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration and he has written a chapter on using portrayals to process core affective experience for the most recent AEDP book Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0, Washington D.C.: APA. His newest work, a chapter on AEDP, will be published in Experiential Therapies for the Treatment of Trauma with Routledge Publishing Company.