and

I am Kerry K Skiffington, Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor (LCMHC). Put simply, my practice serves Adult Women in 50-minute sessions on a fee-for-service basis.

….Oh, and call me Kerry.

Specialties

• Anxiety & Depression

• Trauma/PTSD Recovery

• Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)

• Expat Couching and Counseling

Techniques

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

• Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

• Mindfulness & Meditation

• Grief Therapy

• Skills Training

• Structured Problem Solving

• Hypnotherapy

So what does all that mean?

Whatever you come to me for help with, it isn’t the diagnosis that matters but how YOU are living YOUR life. I help people who find themselves sometimes getting in their own way change that pattern and find a better path.

Anxiety. On edge all the time - about specific things or about everything. You know better than I do if this is you. You feel like you have no control over what could happen to you and so your mind practically writes novels about ‘what if…?’ Anxiety can show up as panic attacks where your whole body is reacting - tight chest, rapid heart beat, the shakes, the sweats. Sometimes it’s no more than a constant set of thoughts going round and round in your head or just plain dread you can’t explain. Contact me to learn how to stop them.

Depression. The clearest sign of this is that you just can’t get out of bed, get motivated to do anything even the things you have loved doing, maybe you find yourself withdrawing. Some people feel hopeless and can’t see any point, nothing seems meaningful or gives you a sense of purpose. I know it’s hard to think even contacting a therapist, feeling like that, too, is pointless. It’s not; send me an email below.

Trauma/PTSD Recovery. Something really, really bad happened to you so you find yourself looking over your shoulder and waiting for the other shoe to drop - you know it’s going to because nothing good ever happens without shit coming down sooner or later. Sometimes your loved ones complain that you just can’t let yourself have fun or relax. If this sounds like you, it could be that there’s been a trauma you haven’t finished sorting out within your own heart. Sometimes we are unaware of the really, really bad thing happening because it was in our childhood and just was the way things were - like if you had alcoholic parents and maybe you never knew when they were going to explode so you had to be ready every minute. It doesn’t have to be abuse or war to be PTSD; email me.

Borderline Personality Disorder might as well be called Purple Shirt Disorder - it’s just a name and not a very good one. It does NOT mean you have multiple personalities or your personality is on some borderline between any two things. If you easily feel abandoned or have doubts about your closest loved ones actually loving you, if you are quick to react and feel hurt about what people say or do, if you have a hard time controlling your emotional responses to things, this may be you. The key elements here are feeling just not understood, feeling disconnected from other people, and/or feeling like others make an effort to make you feel badly about yourself. Read the ‘Testimonials’ here - 3 are from people with BPD.

So the Techniques I use are tried and true, evidenced-base therapies that I use when and where it seems right. These skills can help most everyone, whatever their diagnosis - I use them, too. The CBT, DBT, Mindfulness and Structured Problem Solving are practical ways to make your way in the world, coping with events and interactions in ways that help you get what you need and improve self-esteem because of it. Skills Training is how I give you these. Hypnotherapy is something of a different flavor, a means to help clients find out what they really want if they are having a hard time putting their finger on it, but also a way to help dismantle any self-sabotaging barriers you might be putting in your own way.

Expat Coaching and Counseling. Moving to a new country -whether by choice to retire or to follow a job or spouse’s job- is a huge change in your way of life. Just to get there is a massive project in terms of logistics, paperwork and bureaucracy, and wrapping your head around the whole deal. I have lived in three countries not my own - Great Britain (at two different times in my life), Czechia, and now Croatia. Soon I will be in France. So I will be living your experience at the same time, with the benefit of having done it before. I expect new challenges and reasons to be overwhelmed AND I have the skills to navigate my life in Europe and

My American counseling license covers treating Vermonters and has no such restriction. My coaching training comes from my experience in work in hypnotherapy, acting as a ‘counseling peer’ within a mental health agency in Vermont, and through the skills I use currently with clients who have been just beginning their expat journey. Many of the skills from counseling and coaching are the same. CBT skills and DBT, for example, will help you navigate the changes and the emotional consequences. My first degrees were in Cultural Anthropology, which brings its own skills and way of looking at a conundrum that neither mental health approach includes. And the quest for meaning and purpose are fundamental for both practices because that is a human need; this particular set of questions is common among expats especially.