Meet Kaylin Zabienski

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kaylin Zabienski.

Hi Kaylin, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself. 
I got started officially when I was about 14 years old. I took an Intro to Psychology class in high school and never looked back! I always knew I wanted to help people; I thought I was going to be a doctor, but I really didn’t want to go to medical school. I was so glad that I discovered therapy for my path. It’s been a lifelong journey for sure, and of course, my vision has evolved, but the thing that has remained steady and constant is that I want to help people love themselves and feel good about themselves so they can keep suffering and stress to a minimum. Along my path to becoming a licensed therapist, I started learning about the mind-body connection and decided to get my 200-hour yoga teacher training done so that I could bring yoga into the therapy room. That has really made a huge difference in how I show up for my clients, and it’s also had a huge impact on how they show up for themselves. 

Now, I get to teach yoga classes in studios, mindful movement at a treatment center, see individual clients in my private practice, AND create online, self-paced courses for people to guide themselves through healing. I really feel like I get to do it all! 

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
You know, from that outside I think it has been a pretty smooth road. I’ve known what I want to do in the broad sense for a really long time. Internally, it’s been a different story. Taking my own advice and learning to love myself and feel like I am enough, for example, has been difficult and ongoing. It’s one thing to talk about self-love love, and it’s a completely different thing to actually work on it and heal your trauma. Feeling confident in my abilities to actually understand and help people can be a struggle sometimes, but that’s why they always say to “trust the process.” Even on days when I don’t see a lot happening in session or in a yoga class, I can trust that changes are being made just because I showed up and, more importantly, just because the person showed up for themselves. Change and healing don’t always have to be a big breakthrough moment, and more often than not, it isn’t. Change and growth is what happens slowly, over time, sometimes imperceptibly. You don’t know how far you’ve come until you take a moment to look back at where you started. 

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I specialize in helping millennial women reduce stress and anxiety. I’ve always been a really laid-back, chill person on the outside, but on the inside, I describe myself as a big ball of stress. I never let it out for anyone to see, which, of course, makes stress and anxiety worse. I’ve had to figure out how to actually relax and calm down and not just seem like I’m calm. Related to this, I also realized I’ve been a big people pleaser all my life, which was definitely part of the stress and anxiety I was feeling. Healing people-pleasing behaviors is hard, but it’s so worth it because it makes actually relaxing easier. You can’t relax if you’re trying to solve everyone else’s problems for them. It’s never-ending. You have to set the boundary and take care of yourself first. When I discovered that about myself, and how to lessen those tendencies, it was like my life opened up for me. So, in addition to more general stress and anxiety, I really love helping people pleasers to recover and learn how to take better care of themselves. 

If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
I’ll use a phrase I learned from Brad Stulberg on this one. I think that what makes me most successful is my Tragic Optimism. Tragic Optimism is the acceptance of hard times, knowing that suffering is a part of life while maintaining an optimistic outlook on life anyway. It’s about allowing space for the positive and the negative, the light and the dark. I love that term because I’ve always leaned more toward optimism but with an attitude toward the darker aspects of life. I don’t ever want to shut out the bad and the suffering. I want to acknowledge it, accept it, and figure out how to make it less. And that’s what I help my clients to do too. 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kzcounseling.com
• Instagram: kzabswellness

Image Credits
David Wiskowski