Let Her Help You With Your Hairballs
Katy has worked hard on herself and her study of change. What makes transformation happen?
She has been described as a "lightning rod," being able to assess and treat clients according to their own needs and strengths, listening deeply to their own wishes and enlisting the client in the plan for improvement or personal growth. Katy does not believe that the therapist has the answers, but that she has tools and interventions which can offer the changes clients long for.
Katy herself has recovered from a horrible eating disorder which consumed her life and literally ate her up. She weighed 300 pounds and could not stop eating. Now, the compulsion to overeat is gone completely and without dieting. She writes, "It's so great to put on a pair of jeans and walk my dogs. I eat when and how I want. Oh, sure, I still have an extra ten pounds that come and go, usually depending on my anxiety level or my love life, but who doesn't?"
Counseling is a process that includes emphasizing your strengths and natural gifts. Katy does not believe in shame or judgement, and there are rare places to work through your issues like this, with this kind of safety. She also understands deeply the relationship between eating and relationship needs. Many addicts trade food for love, or get stuck in attachments to unavailable partners, or are unable to stop avoiding intimacy. Her own experience has been informed by such books as:
- Terence Reals' I Don't Want To Talk About It (for understanding
men who withdraw or shut down)
- Pia Mellody's Facing Love Addiction (for love addicts with a constant
attraction to emotionally unavailable partners)
- Geneen Roth's Feeding the Hungry Heart (for eating addictions)
- Harville Hendrix's Getting The Love You Want (for couples communication)
Katy Byrne has also done an in-depth study of coupling, Gottman, Hendricks, Snaarch, Scarf, and many others. She became obsessed with the study of love when her own relationships seemed harder than they should. As a result, she has a wealth of information about what helps marriages better communicate and believes in short term therapy, when needed, with the "real work" done at home. She's interviewed experts for radio and television and utilized their brief or long-term therapy techniques and approaches to help people talk to each other and come through the tunnel to the other end, into the light of more fun and closeness.
Need Coaching as a single person?
Katy Byrne can give men feedback in a single session. Sometimes you need to learn to listen better, sometimes a it's a haircut or fashion consultation, at other moments, a sense of humor. Katy can offer "object relations," a clinical term which refers to the way we relate to others. Both women and men will find immediate change occurring in all of their relationships, in how others respond to them - if you are open for feedback.
Katy Byrne, MA, MFT, licensed family therapist, has been in private practice for over 20 years. Her compulsive eating led her to diets, twelve step programs, multiple therapies and the agony of trying to vomit, which led to her hairball book and finally to recovery. Hairball Diaries: The Courage To Speak Up was her way out. As Katy learned not to stuff emotions and needs, she evolved into a size 10. She now walks down the street in jeans, which was a lifelong dream. She eats whatever she wants, when she wants. The disorder left after a breakthrough in therapy. She lives and works in Sonoma, CA.
