caitlin harrison, amft
Los Angeles Sex Therapist & Religious Trauma Specialist
hello,
i’m a believer that softness is a strength and that you are not too much.
i help humans go from feeling stuck in narratives of shame and guilt to finding themselves as a safer home, so that they can experience relationships that feel authentic to who they are.
About caitlin (she/her)
I am here to assist you in the process of coming home to yourself. I believe therapy is the place to create a safer and loving home within yourself, with rooms for optimizing relationships and your future. To be at home within yourself means that you are able to embrace your full self—all the parts of you that need nurturing, support, and renewal.
I am dedicated to creating space that allows you to feel included, safe, seen, and heard. This means that I am doing my own work as a white, cisgender, straight, able-bodied woman to allow you to explore all of the intersections of your identity, knowing that I won’t have all of your lived experience. For those that I have the honor of working with, I use empathy, transparency, and authenticity to meet you where you’re at. During our time together, I will use humor, vulnerability, and embodiment practices to increase your potential to grow. When we begin our work together, we will collaborate to help you heal from the past, integrate the present, and create hope for the future—I will act as the hope holder when it feels difficult to see a way through.
I value relational therapy because I love getting to show up as myself in the room. I am funny, optimistic, caring, and I am more likely to refer to Taylor Swift than Carl Rogers (and I’ll also name how Taylor’s white feminism is a problem but damn those lyrics still get me). I hope that getting to know a little more about who I am will help you to show up more authentically as well. We are building a relationship together that gets to be a platform for other relationships in your life! To help you develop skills for deepening your relationships, I will reflect both how you impact me and why that matters, and invite you to do the same. It also means that I get to reflect all of your strengths! You have made it this far for a reason! I love hearing about all the ways that you have survived this hard and rigid world. Let’s look at what you’ve accomplished, and then decide what is going to suit you best as you move forward—gaining empowerment and deeper, more reciprocal relationships along the way.
When I work with partners in relationship therapy, I rely on my experience and training to be the firm container that you and your partner need to be able to explore and redefine how your relationship feels. I have the experience of training in a couples therapy modality with live supervision, which taught me to keep calm under pressure! I also love helping folks to redefine intimacy in their relationships. I am a kink friendly, sexual trauma informed,and sex positive therapist, so our sessions can be a helpful space for you to explore what you dream of your sex life to be. I utilize effective communication strategies, like my knack for asking the tough questions and talking about the things that no one else will, to aid you and your partner in getting down to the nitty gritty and finding your way back to loving each other—if that is what your relationship needs. Sometimes the most loving thing is ending the relationship, in which case, I will be here to help guide you through this process as well.
religious trauma specialist & embodiment therapist in Los Angeles
Religion is a system of faith and/or spirituality that often gets complicated due to oppressive and rigid institutions that are governed by control and binaries. Religion is not always bad, but it has more often than not caused intense hurt and pain due to lack of liberation and unconditional love.
For more on defining what religious trauma is, please read my blog here. In working with those that suffer the impact of religious trauma, I have found that it is helpful to state that I myself have been impacted by systems of conservative Evangelical Christian religion. My own lived experience allows me to have shared language and reference points that connect with troubling parts of your own past—like how purity culture hurt you too!
Many folks who are navigating religious trauma find themselves having difficulty feeling allowed to be in their bodies. Embodiment is the awareness that emotions happen in our bodies first, not our heads. When you have been raised in high control environments, you may not believe that your body is telling the truth. Let me tell you this—your body (at the shape and size it is currently at) has always been a truth teller and I honor the story it is telling. Together we can work on listening better to what it is saying so that you can feel permission to feel joy, sadness, euphoria, connection, resonance, love, doubt, and everything in between.
My training with esteemed religious trauma specialists has taught me that an important part of this work is reclaiming and redefining what spirituality looks like for you. Does it look like Atheism or Agnosticism? Or getting more into the Zodiac and Astrology? Does it look like finding a church that is affirming of LGBT2SQIA+ folks? These are just some of the questions that we get to explore together.
I’m inspired by the work of adrienne marie brown, bell hooks, Esther Perel, and Emily Nagoski. These educators, social justice activists, authors, and therapists are focused on community work and the role that pleasure, love, and liberation play in social justice. I believe that in order to feel loved and to feel enough, your community needs to support you. By collaborating on ways to increase pleasure in your day-to-day, I feel confident that we will be able to make space for your more authentic self, and attract others who want you to feel that way too.
Career Highlights & key trainings
Creating a Kink-Friendly Practice: AASECT, American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists
Healing Intergenerational Trauma with Peter Levine PhD and Efu Nyaki: The Embody Lab
Reclamation as a Clinical Intervention: Reclamation Collective
i am…
I am the first to laugh at my own jokes and will sing along loudly to the radio even when I don’t know the words. I am an intersectional feminist and focused on unlearning the privileged and colonized narratives I have grown up in. I am forever a former theater kid. I love to wake up early for slow mornings. I am a big sister and a Virgo. I love being a host and celebrating the little things. I grew up in a conservatively religious, and loving, home. I enjoy continuing to get to know myself and my relationship with others better, including the relationship I have with the feminine divine. I am a bandwagon Dodgers fan. When not working, you can find me watching movies and eating peanut butter M&M’s with my husband and our beloved English Bulldog, Mabel.
california registered associate marriage & family therapist no. 121100, supervised by Kaitlin Kindman LCSW no. 82453
we would love to connect with you.
The easiest way to get started at Kindman & Co. is to book a twenty minute complimentary information session with our Care Coordinator, Clarissa. On this call, she will ask a little about you and what’s bringing you to therapy at this time, share about our practice and our relational therapy approach to make sure it’s a good fit, and pair you with the therapist who is best suited for you.
**Please note that we are only able to work with clients physically located in the state of California at this time.
