Presenter: Kate Halliday, LCSW

Kate Halliday, LCSW, (she, her, hers) is an AEDP senior faculty member  from Ithaca, New York.

Kate is a white, cis-female, lesbian psychotherapist born and brought up in the UK, now based in Ithaca New York. She has been in private practice since 1998 after a number of years spent in community human service agencies. As a member of the AEDP community, Kate is particularly pleased to have developed and maintained a thriving local AEDP group in the Finger Lakes region of New York. As Senior Faculty, she teaches the Essential Skills courses, and developed her “Experience Teaches” series. Her Advanced Skills courses have a focus on the “+1” aspects of being an AEDP clinician. She has also re-discovered an early passion for time limited treatment as a member of the AEDP Research project.

Kate began her career as a nursery school and elementary school teacher, and went on to train as a clinical social worker, also gaining a postgraduate diploma in Women’s Studies. Kate’s clinical work, evolving from early training in Developmental Psychology and subsequent professional experiences, has focused from the beginning on Trauma, Dissociation, and their repair. She has always been deeply committed to serving her own community; a high percentage of her clients are LGBTQ. She has run numerous lesbian “coming out” and process therapy groups for adolescent and adult women. She spent several years volunteering with the local Suicide Prevention hotline, during the early days of the AIDS crisis, and went on to work as a pre- and post- HIV testing counselor. Being a lesbian was not on the menu of approved options in Kate’s family or culture of origin, but she navigated the patriarchy as well as she could. Coming out in her 30s finally offered Kate the chance to do the relational work of successive approximations of real romantic relationship, until finally arriving with gratitude in a committed relationship with her wife, Pat. Over the course of their now 25 years of marriage, they’ve built a house on land that is contiguous with the Lavender Hill Lesbian and Gay community (while acknowledging and honoring that all the surrounding territory is homeland
unceded from the Haudenosaunee-ga ancestral lands). Genuine independence and self respect has its benefits: even after the shared turbulence of their early years, her 3 children have evolved into good friends; and in her professional life her good fortune in finding AEDP, the model and the community, has contributed to more personal healing and growth than she’d imagined possible.