Clinical Practice
I did not come to systemic therapy because one model explained change well or felt like home. I came to psychotherapy through the recognition that no single way of being could fully hold how people survive, relate, and change across embodied, relational, social, and institutional contexts.
The materials that follow show how this understanding has shaped my clinical work, my evolving theory of therapy, and my reflection on becoming the kind of therapist and supervisor that theory requires.
Philosophy of Therapy
My Philosophy of Therapy begins with the limits of any single map.
I have learned to move among systemic, attachment-based, narrative, somatic, and skills-based approaches, not to collect models, but to meet the complexity of how people survive, relate, and change. This theory reflects both an advanced integration of couple and family therapy traditions and a developing specialization in work with queer, trans, neurodivergent, diasporic, and otherwise marginalized people whose distress cannot be understood apart from the relationships, histories, bodies, and systems in which it takes shape.
Clinical Specialization
My developing clinical specialization is queer-affirming, relational, somatic attuned, DBT-informed treatment for individuals (teens and adults), couples, polycules, friends, and families experiencing emotion dysregulation and interpersonal distress. This work integrates structured skills, systemic conceptualization, and attention to identity, culture, and power. The selected artifacts demonstrate my clinical methods, intervention development, populations served, and continuing growth through training, supervision, research, and outcome evaluation.
‘Shadow & Light’
I developed this and 2 other experiential interventions for my MAMFT 2025 Annual Conference training, “Decolonizing Your Practice: Southeast Asians, Storytelling, and the American Caste System.” It translates the training’s examination of colonial mentality and caste into a practical, systemic approach to colorism, cultural betrayal, identity, and belonging within Southeast Asian diasporic communities.
DBT Skills Training for Queer Folx
This 12-week group reflects my application of queer- and trans-affirmative relational therapy. I use DBT skills to support mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness when immediate distress makes reflection or connection difficult. These skills are placed within a narrative-systemic and socioculturally attuned group process that attends to identity, embodiment, power, minority stress, and belonging.
The group also creates space to examine relational conflict, life transitions, community strain, and the pressures of navigating restrictive sociopolitical conditions. The aim is not simply better coping, but greater choice, stronger relational capacity, and forms of connection that do not require self-erasure.
Independent Observation of Process Group Facilitation
In early summer 2026, Charlie McGregor, a counseling Master’s student from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, observed one session of a closed, 12-week queer process group that I designed and facilitated through KWS Consulting & Wellness. Charlie was present with the informed consent of group members. Charlie has also consented to have his observations shared as part of my portfolio.
In his subsequent course reflection, Charlie described several features of my group work:
My facilitation relied on intentional silence, selective reframing, and trust in members’ ability to offer one another empathy, perspective, and relational accountability.
The group provided a nonjudgmental setting for discussing family boundaries, consensual nonmonogamy, shame, and experiences of not being heard in other therapeutic settings.
Members’ varied neurodivergent forms of movement, attention, and expression were accepted without being pathologized or unnecessarily redirected.
The student understood the group’s cohesion and relative autonomy as evidence of the relational groundwork established earlier in the group process.
Charlie’s observation offers external evidence of my ability to establish structure without overcontrolling the group, cultivate queer-affirming and neurodivergence-affirming community, and use the group itself as an active mechanism of therapeutic change.
Charlie’s observation also affirmed an important principle of my clinical work: competent facilitation is not measured by how much I speak, but by whether members develop the safety, language, and relational capacity to engage one another meaningfully.
-Charlie McGregor, Master's Counseling Student, Saint Mary's University of Minnesota
June 2026
Supervisory Practice
Supervision is a relational space where power, culture, embodiment, evaluation, and care meet, and where competence is shaped through attention rather than performance. The task is not to manufacture a therapist in someone else’s image, but to create the conditions in which judgment, responsibility, and an ethical voice can take form.
Supervision is embodying and modeling the art of therapy.
Across three semesters, my experience of supervision has shifted away from a primary focus on risk mitigation and correcting for my own past negative supervisory experiences. It has become more about developing a supervisory stance grounded in discernment, relational accountability, and who I am becoming as a leader. It is place where I practice staying with complexity long enough for clearer judgment, deeper accountability, and a more durable professional self to emerge.
Critical Inquiry Questionnaire: First-Semester Synthesis
I began using the Critical Inquiry Questionnaire during my first semester teaching graduate MFT students and have continued using it throughout my teaching. Adapted from Brookfield’s (2015) Critical Incident Questionnaire, it serves as an ongoing reflexive practice through which I examine how students experience the course, identify needed adjustments, and model giving and receiving feedback as a clinical and professional skill. The synthesis below reflects four anonymous questionnaires completed during Weeks 2, 6, 8, and 11 of that first semester.
Across 12 responses, students were most engaged through case consultation, session review, identity and power reflection, open dialogue, and direct peer feedback. They consistently identified multiple perspectives, clear boundaries, instructor modeling, and opportunities to discuss difficult clinical situations as especially helpful. Periods of distance were more often connected to fatigue, cognitive load, emotional activation, or competing clinical demands, although individual responses also highlighted the need for equitable participation and careful pacing of dense material.
Students’ questions shifted over the semester from internship logistics and basic clinical procedures toward more complex matters of therapeutic judgment, including process versus content, relational uses of interventions, case conceptualization, pacing, and the therapist’s role in a client’s change process. These patterns reinforced my commitment to experiential learning, transparent structure, and classrooms where feedback leads to visible reflection and revision.
I continue to use the questionnaire not simply to evaluate whether a course is “working,” but to remain accountable to what is happening in the room, how power and participation are being experienced, and what I may need to reconsider in my teaching.
NOTE: full report only available to faculty.
Reference
Brookfield, S. D. (2015). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Philosophy of Supervision
My philosophy of supervision begins with the question of what becomes possible when authority does not demand sameness.
Formed from a minoritized location within a field historically organized around white, cisgender, and heterosexual norms, it understands supervision as a relational system where power, culture, embodiment, evaluation, and care are never incidental.
Written as part of the 30-hour Fundamentals of MFT Supervision course required on the path toward the AAMFT Approved Supervisor designation, this philosophy joins systemic theory, collaborative practice, and ethical accountability to cultivate clinical judgment and a professional voice without requiring assimilation into inherited norms.
