Today we’d like to introduce you to Katie Schmidt.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I am a trauma-informed Behavioral Food Therapist. I live in Oakland, and I see clients virtually from all over, including many who live in LA. I help clients explore their story with food but also the story that lives underneath; the life experiences, environments, relationships, and neglected trauma and desires that have shaped their relationship to food.
In my early 20s I discovered a capacity for and deep curiosity to hold people’s stories, particularly the emotions and longings that were felt but left unexpressed. I began listening to others’ stories in a purposeful way when I was 23, living in a remote indigenous village in the Guatemalan highlands. I sat with groups of women from the village, facilitating and listening to their struggles, shame, fears, and hopes for safety, support, and choice in their home life and community. These conversations planted the seed of desire to cultivate relationships and safe spaces for raw, honest expression to be witnessed. Fast forward through graduate school and living and working in diverse communities here and abroad the past 20 years, I now see how vital it is for our healing that we not only have an outside witness to our stories but we also learn to offer deep presence to ourselves — one where we listen to our body, nervous system, emotional and relational patterns, and that deeper, intuitive knowing. This is the integrative framework I use today in my practice to help my clients feel equipped to support themselves in a radical, authentic, and attuned way.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No, not at all! At times, it’s felt vulnerable, uncertain, and scary to be in uncharted territory without a roadmap, putting myself out there, building a private practice, and finding my voice. Due to life circumstances this last decade, I had to uproot my life and business and reestablish community and a sense of belonging across 3 countries and 5 homes. During this time I’ve also navigated grief, the dark night of the soul, and painful but ultimately life-affirming choices that defied logic but were in service of a deeper knowing, remembering and reclaiming who I am.
Through so much upheaval, I’ve worked hard to establish a strong sense of inner safety and stability from which to ground myself and hold space for clients, regardless of what’s spinning around me. I’ve learned to be with the messy, non-linear process that is life. I share the personal side because this inner calm and “okay-ness” mirrors what my clients also seek. I value bringing my humanity to the therapeutic relationship. My own life experiences allow me to offer a depth, compassion, and capacity to hold the complexity, contradictions, fragments, and distress that is an inevitable part of my clients’ process as well. It’s important to me that they know — and <i>feel </i>from my presence — that this messy, non-linear process of growth and healing is exactly what it’s supposed to be and that it’s possible to find stability within it.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I do therapy differently in that I actively recognize the multiple dimensions of our being; all the ways we come to know and express ourselves — through our physical body, our stories and identity, our relationships, and our sense of meaning or purpose in life. I weave these dimensions into our work in a tangible way to help clients equally experience, express, and care for all layers of themselves. This is what the tagline of my business, <i>radically authentic care</i>, means. Initially, I help my clients understand the role compulsive or controlled and restrictive eating has played in their life and the way it became an adaptive survival strategy to seek safety and comfort. But our deeper work extends beyond food — and even beyond the realms of traditional talk therapy — as we translate across the dimensions to tend to emotional triggers, nervous system dysregulation, somatic and fascial holding patterns, and unexpressed pain or longings underneath that perpetuate the food cycle today. Because of this approach, many of my clients reach out from other starting points, including a desire to heal the mother wound or other emotional wounds from childhood, release the energy of trauma held in the body, navigate life transitions or relationships, or live in a less reactive, more intentional, aligned way.
<b>What are you most proud of brand wise?</b>
I’ve always valued taking a grass-roots approach in my business. Even though I see a lot of my clients virtually, I create live community by offering talks and workshops at local libraries and on public lands. And I practice trauma-informed care that’s rooted in wholeness and justice because our well-being does not exist in a vacuum. We are impacted by the communities and larger systems around us. Marginalized and discriminated groups carry the burden of systemic and sociocultural oppression. So many of us are experiencing the impact of this in the current political environment. I include this layer in my work with clients because naming injustice, when appropriate, is the first step to not repeating harm in the therapeutic relationship. And healing starts with the individual and when there’s safety. Taking care of ourselves is an act of resistance and an essential pillar to healing the whole. By owning choice to tend to ourselves, we reclaim agency and autonomy to acknowledge and honor our very existence – our bodies, spirits, and lives. When we are individually equipped to regulate ourselves and create inner stability, we will have the clarity and grounding to help others in a sustainable way.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
I offer a free 20-minute video consult for anyone looking for support and curious to see if this could be a good fit. You can reach out to me through my website: www.wholenourishment.net
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.wholenourishment.net
Image Credits
Angela Jazmín Studio https://www.angelajazminstudio.com/
