Kate Halliday, LCSW

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.

Kate has always been drawn to images, representations, and experiences of transformation. Music, poetry, literature, the natural world, and emotional relationships have always been her education. When Kate started learning to be a teacher of young children (in her first career she worked for Head Start and in elementary schools), and then 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. Nowadays she is exploring how her long personal relationship with Shamanic healing (mostly drawn from her Celtic roots) and plant medicine beautifully synergizes with AEDP’s theory of Transformance and deep relational healing.

Kate’s first commitment as a clinician working in a rural New York State community has been to represent the people she and her regional supervisees serve: these include economically struggling members of diverse and marginalized groups. A member of the LGBT community herself, she has worked with gay and transgender people since she became a therapist. And as an aging cis-female, Kate is personally aware of the cultural disempowerment that comes for that demographic!

Kate grew up in mid-20th century Britain, and was painfully and uncomfortably aware of arbitrary class differences and how the power structure assigned and enforced them. Since she was a student in the 1970s she has been committed to social justice in her activism and in her profession; however, the recent surge of public recognition of the pervasive effects of systemic racism has summoned new energy in her for learning, and she has been facing more layers of deeply embedded biases and ignorance in herself. Kate is very grateful to be part of the AEDP community as we grow towards our potential as a genuinely “diverse and equitable” organization.

Kate lives in a high saddle of land in the hills outside Ithaca New York, with her wife, three dogs, and (currently) 10 chickens. Her connection to the land and the beings who inhabit it supports and replenishes her. One of the highlights of her day is the time after dusk when she crosses the driveway to put away the chickens, and can notice where the moon is rising and locate her favorite constellations as they begin to pierce the darkness. Silence and darkness restore her.