Ari Kirkman
LSW | Licensed Social Worker (In supervision toward clinical licensure)
Who I Am
I believe that healing happens relationally–within our society and our communities, our families, and within ourselves. Therapy works best if we can build a safe and trusting relationship where challenges can be explored. So! You should know a little bit about who I am as a person and as a therapist. I am a white, queer and trans femme musician turned therapist. I am areligious, but I find many experiences to be deeply spiritual, including cooking, being in community with others, singing together, and being in nature.
I am devoted to dismantling oppression everywhere, including the dynamics of power that can exist in therapy space. I will attend to elements of race, class, gender, and sexuality throughout our work together. I orient toward decolonization, transformative justice, and intersectional feminism, and I continue to learn from models of care offered by disability justice activists. I am sex-positive, trans-affirming, polyamory and kink-informed, and body neutral/Health at Every Size-aligned.
What I Do
I believe that you are the expert of your own experience, and my job is to foster a therapeutic space that feels right to you, a space that is safe, affirming, and deeply collaborative. My hope is that our work together will support you in finding more clarity about who you are and where you’re going in life. You might discover a more liberated sense of your desires and boundaries, more softness and ease, greater capacity to confront life’s challenges, and the ability to form deeper relationships with those around you.
I will always support your autonomy–If certain therapy tools don’t work for you, I am happy to toss them out. That said, I do tend to draw from certain approaches and frameworks in my therapeutic work. For example, I am a systemic therapist which means that I take care to explore the context that you exist in, that this context matters, and the world around you may offer many insights in our work together. Because your environment likely includes various systems of oppression, I use an intersectional and liberation-focused lens to work through trauma and hurt that may exist for you as a result of marginalization and generational trauma.
My training as an experiential trauma therapist taught me the importance of involving the body in the healing process, that you don’t simply have a body, you are a body. Our bodies hold onto stress and pain especially as a result of traumatic experiences. This may be stored as tension or an inability to relax, as compulsive movements, as numbness and dissociation from bodily sensations. I utilize EMDR and Internal Family Systems (IFS) to involve the mind and body experientially. EMDR relies on moment-to-moment grounding in the body to reprocess traumatic material, attending to the manifestations of trauma throughout the body. IFS recognizes that there are many subpersonalities or parts that make up who you are, each with their own stories, sensations, and job to do. There are no “bad” parts, and parts work involves getting to know these different parts, recognizing that every part has good intentions even if they get “stuck” doing something you’d rather they didn’t do.
I also pull from mindfulness practices, Psychodrama, and Somatic Experiencing to help you release what no longer serves and to invite ease into the nervous system. From this place, we can access the wisdom and strength of the body to heal and transform pain, and to feel into our pleasure and boundaries with greater curiosity and courage.
The process of unraveling and understanding our personal stories looks different for everyone. Healing work can be messy and grief-filled, and it can also be empowering, liberatory, and profoundly life-giving.This is the work, and I am honored to walk the path with you.
Specialties
Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR)
Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)
Complex & Collective Trauma
Sexuality and Gender Exploration, LGBTQ-Affirming
Combating Shame
Anxiety & Depression
Attachment Healing
I work with
Adults
Individuals
Couples & Polycules
Families
Dyads of any kind (e.g., platonic or peer relationships, friendships)
I accept Aetna, Cigna, Highmark, Quest, & United/Optum Insurances.
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