Aspen Stand Counseling, PLLC

• WA Licensed Mental Health Counselor Assoc (LMHCA)
• Nationally Certified Counselor (NCC)
• M.A.Ed. Clinical Mental Health Counseling (Seattle University, ’25)
• M.Ed. Adult Education and Training (Seattle University, ’20)
• B.A. Journalism (University of Montana, ’12)
• Supervised by Dennis Eames, LMFT #LF00001930
• Member of Chi Sigma Iota, Counseling Academic and Professional International Honor Society

I am an integrative Relational-Cultural (RCT) therapist, which is the fancy way of saying that I believe that human beings grow through relationships with others, and that I pull from other therapy modalities based on your needs and goals.

I’m a therapist who will:

• Be curious about, and try to deeply understand, your lived experience and what makes you, you.
• See you as the expert on yourself.
• Collaborate with you on insights, tools, and new ways of being. I see therapy as something we do together.
• Challenge you and hold you accountable.
• Own when I make mistakes, and do my best to repair rupture with you.
• Continuously educate myself, not just on emerging theories and techniques, but also on the application of social justice, decolonization, and anti-oppressive practices within therapy and mental health counseling.

In my practice, I draw from:

• Emotionally Focused Individual (EFIT), Couple (EFCT), or Family (EFFT) Therapy (I am trained and recognized by ICEEFT as an EFIT and EFCT Therapist)
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) or Radically-Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO-DBT)
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• Parts work (similar to internal family systems, or IFS)
• Somatic-based practices
• Existential Therapy
• Strengths-Based Therapy
• Motivational Interviewing

I show up authentically in session, meaning you’re getting me, Cait, the full person. I, of course, have filters and boundaries, and adhere to professional ethics, but you’re also going to get the full human. Sometimes I swear. I make mistakes, and will do my best to repair any rupture with you. I use humor. I sit cross-legged in my chair. I fidget.

In my spare time, I enjoy reading and journaling, consuming reality TV, listening to podcasts, including The Bechdel Cast, Maintenance Phase, Eating for Free, and Behind the Bastards, tending to my plant jungle, and spending time with my human and animal family. I love doing tarot readings as a tool for personal growth, and completed a tarot and therapy training in 2024. I also volunteer at Little Bit Therapeutic Riding Center in Redmond, working with folks with disabilities via adaptive riding.

As a white, cis, straight-size, straight-presenting queer woman with non-visible disabilities, I recognize the privilege inherent in my identities. I am aware of the harm my thoughts and actions may have in healing spaces as a result of my dominant identities. As such, I am committed to an ongoing and lifelong practice of self-inquiry and (un)nlearning around bias, racism, oppression, and my positionality.

I have completed, among others, the following additional trainings:

• Treating the Spectrum of OCD and ADHD (December 2025)
• Treating Clients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Improve Psychological Flexibility through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy & Exposure and Ritual Prevention (November 2025)
• The New Exposure Therapy: How Inhibitory Learning Can Improve Outcomes for OCD and Anxiety Disorders (November 2025)
• Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy Externship (July 2025)
• Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy Levels 1 & 2 (July 2025)
• Tarot & Therapy: Intuition and Metaphor (June 2024)

I have always been pulled to understand the people around me and learn their stories. In 2012, I graduated with a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Montana to pursue storytelling. However, my career took a different path, and I spent nearly a decade in online advertising, people management, and training and development, primarily at Amazon. During this time, I pursued a Master in Adult Education and Training at Seattle University (M.Ed., AEDT, ‘20) to better understand how I could help colleagues learn, grow, and develop.

I completed my master’s in June 2020, in the throes of a(n ongoing) global pandemic and a wave of racial awakening and reckoning not seen in the US since the 1960s. I was met with the new challenge of helping people thrive in a remote learning environment, and yet felt that my training and experience weren’t sufficient to confront the many-headed beast of working in a corporate setting during these massive, widespread, and, for many, traumatic events.

I was also grappling with how my actions and beliefs, however inadvertent, helped advance the interlocking cogs of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy, and I knew I could no longer stay on my current path. I realized my passion was not to help people fit within the system, but live the life they wanted to lead despite the system. In 2022, I began the Clinical Mental Health Counseling master’s program at Seattle University. I finished both my Master of Arts and Education and my year-long clinical internship at Opal: Food + Body Wisdom in 2025.

Underneath this list of accomplishments are layers of struggle, depression, anxiety, trauma, and heartache. For a long time, I wondered if my personality was a series of coping mechanisms underneath a wickedly-honed layer of humor and sarcasm. And while on my own journey of healing and self-discovery (and work! Lots of work!), I have come to find hope, happiness, and fulfilling relationships, with myself and others.