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Kathryn’s Bio

Kathryn Fentress did her graduate work in clinical psychology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. She graduated with her Ph.D. in 1971 with an emphasis in Humanistic Psychology.  She relocated to West Palm Beach, Florida to work at one of the first Community Mental Health Care Centers in the country.  There she was involved in training and supervising volunteers and paraprofessionals in crisis work and suicide prevention.  She also saw individuals, couples and families in the outpatient program, provided psychotherapy and assessments for inpatients, taught parenting classes, and was a consultant to the Substance Abuse Treatment Program.

Kathryn and her family moved to California in 1974 to live in an intentional community. While there she volunteered at the

Oakland's Women's Health Care Center and began to explore her spirituality in a more committed way.  Meditation and living in tune with the land, the weather, nature, and community provided a grounding for her spiritual values.

In 1975 the family moved on to San Diego where Kathryn eventually served as a counselor and then program director for a drop in facility for youth at risk.  Her job duties included working with the teens and their families, training volunteers, and doing outreach to other agencies in the community.

Kathryn relocated next to Missoula, MT in 1978 looking to raise her children out of the city and in a safer environment.  She also went hoping to connect with Native Americans to learn more about their spiritual practices and their connection to spirit through nature. Within a few months she was hired as a psychologist for the Confederated Tribes of the Salish and Kootenai People.  For the next 6 years she worked with Native programs counseling, training, and supervising in the Indian Health Clinic and the Alcohol Treatment Program.

She enjoyed this work and the people were accepting and gracious to her. She was eventually invited to attend medicine ceremonies, powwows, and sweat lodges.  Kathryn received many psychological and spiritual gifts from these ceremonies including lasting friendships. She also became clear that she was not to pursue further training in shamanism but instead to broaden her exploration of mystical experience.

In 1983 she and nine other women created a spiritual circle to explore accessing direct spiritual experience through the use of ritual, ceremony, guided meditation and trance states. This group met weekly for two years and Kathryn became very practiced at guiding others in deep visualization work. At  the same time numbers of clients came to her that wanted to heal deep childhood wounds and were open to the inner journeying needed to effect significant psychological change. It was in this phase of her development as a psychotherapist that she recognized the power of the trance states of consciousness in combination with a spiritual framework that allowed for the effects of trauma to be dramatically mitigated.

Kathryn moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1985 to do a sabbatical at Naropa University and ended up staying there another nine years.  These years were very expansive both professionally and spiritually.

On the professional front, Kathryn set up a private practice and became involved teaching and supervising interns at Boulder Graduate School. BGS was a Master’s level program that granted degrees in Transpersonal Psychology and Holistic Health. She became Department Chairperson for the years 1990 and 1991 and helped design the transpersonal curriculum that was eventually adopted by Naropa in 1993 after BGS closed.  She then taught courses at Naropa.

Kathryn also received training in EMDR (see link on home page) and added this powerful technique to her set of tools for dealing with the effects of trauma. She took training with Carl Hollander in Psychodrama and other courses in the use of hypnosis for healing abuse issues.

On the spiritual front Kathryn took a year long study with the Tibetan Foundation in Denver, Colorado. This group had two missions: 1) to clear unconscious programming or limiting beliefs; and 2) to open to channeling higher wisdom from spiritual guides or from our own souls.  This program assisted in developing her intuition, understanding the complexity of unconscious programming, and working with the energy body as part of the healing journey.

In 1994 Kathryn relocated to Bellingham, WA to be near the sea and to put down roots. Almost immediately she was invited to work with people of the Lummi, Upper Skagit, and Swinomish Tribes. Through this work she developed a specialty in healing trauma: especially sexual trauma, childhood abuse, and trauma from domestic violence.

Kathryn now serves as a Native American specialist to other counselors and case managers working with  Native children. She is a clinical supervisor for Evergreen AIDS Foundation, and supervises graduate students and professionals in the community. She continues to bring a transpersonal perspective to all her work and is deeply committed to her own spiritual unfolding.