Therapy for Physicians and Healthcare Professionals
Located in Lee's Summit, serving healthcare workers across the Kansas City area.
You spend your working life managing other people's worst days. Then you go home and you're supposed to have something left.
You already know the advice. You've sat through the wellness module, you've been sent the mindfulness app, and you've noticed that none of it changes the staffing, the charting or the volume. Being told to practice self-care by the system generating the problem is its own particular insult.
I'm a licensed counselor in Lee's Summit and I work with physicians, nurses, residents, therapists and other healthcare professionals. As a Licensed Professional Counselor in Missouri and a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in Kansas, I see clients on both sides of the state line, in person or virtually anywhere in either state — including outside standard hours where my schedule allows.
Burnout isn't a personal failure, and I'm not going to treat it like one
Most of what gets called burnout is a reasonable human response to unreasonable conditions. Short staffing, moral injury, productivity targets, and a culture where needing help is treated as a liability. You did not cause that, and no amount of individual coping is going to fix it.
So this isn't a page that promises to make you resilient enough for an unsustainable job.
What therapy can actually do is narrower and more honest: help you find where you genuinely have room to move, work out what's yours to carry and what isn't, and give you one hour that belongs to you. That's smaller than fixing the system. It's also considerably more than most healthcare workers currently get.
Exhaustion that a day off no longer touches
Feeling nothing where you used to feel something — for patients, for the work, for your family
Dreading the next shift on the drive in
A patient outcome you can't put down
Moral injury: knowing what good care looks like and being prevented from providing it
Second-guessing every decision, or the opposite, a numbness that scares you
A relationship at home that's suffering from what the job leaves you with
Wondering whether you want to do this at all any more, and what that would mean after everything it took to get here
Inner emotional turmoil, and the part nobody debriefs
There's a specific kind of damage that comes from being placed in situations where every available option is wrong. It isn't stress and it isn't quite trauma in the usual sense — it's the injury of acting against your own values because the circumstances left no good route.
Healthcare rarely makes space for this. There's a patient loss but that’s immediately followed by a 2 p.m. clinic. The debrief that should happen doesn't always make it on the schedule, and the trauma and distress accumulates.
Therapy is a place to go back and process what you had to step over at the time.
What brings healthcare professionals in
Trauma, and why I work this way
My clinical background began in trauma, working exclusively with survivors of sexual violence for seven years before I moved into working exclusively with healthcare workers during the pandemic and then into perinatal work. That shapes how I work here.
I'm EMDR Level 1 and 2 trained, which is useful for the specific events that stay with you — a resuscitation, a loss, a case that replays. EMDR works on the memory itself rather than requiring you to narrate it repeatedly, which matters to people who have already told the story clinically more times than they wanted to.
I'm also Level 1 and 2 trained in Internal Family Systems. IFS tends to land well with clinicians because the part of you that stays calm and competent through anything is genuinely useful at work and genuinely exhausting to be, and IFS gives you somewhere to put that without dismantling it.
Fertility, pregnancy and parenting in medicine
Physicians and nurses experience infertility at higher rates than the general population, and the reasons are not mysterious: training years that overlap exactly with peak fertility, shift work, and a culture that treats delaying a family as the professional default.
Then the same job that contributed to it gives you no room to treat it. Cycle monitoring doesn't negotiate with the hospital or clinic schedule. Nobody wants to explain to a program director why they need a 7 a.m. appointment every other day for two weeks.
I work with infertility and perinatal mental health as my primary specialty, so this crossover is somewhere I can be genuinely useful rather than sympathetic. More on that on the Infertility counseling and Postpartum therapy pages.
Returning to practice after parental leave deserves a mention of its own. It is usually far harder than anyone admits in advance.
Confidentiality, and the fear that stops people booking
A common reason healthcare professionals don't seek therapy is not time. It's the worry about what happens to the record and if there’s actually a safe space to discuss patients.
I'm an independent private practice. I'm not part of your employer's system, I have no relationship with your hospital, your program or your group, and your sessions are not visible to them. I'm also not an EAP, so there's no employer-facing element at all. I have to abide by HIPAA laws and everything we discuss falls under those laws.
If you have specific questions about confidentiality and how it applies to your situation, ask them on the free consultation call before you book anything. That's a completely reasonable use of the call and I'd rather you asked than stayed away.
Sessions that fit a clinical schedule
Virtual sessions are available anywhere in Missouri or Kansas, which for most healthcare workers is the difference between attending and cancelling. In-person appointments in Lee's Summit are available if you'd rather be somewhere that isn't a screen.
If your schedule rotates, we can work around it rather than expecting the same slot every week.
Session length, fee and format
Individual therapy: 50 minutes · $140 · first session $165
Couples therapy: 50 minutes · $165
Format: in person in Lee's Summit, or virtually on a HIPAA-compliant platform anywhere in Missouri or Kansas
Payment: HSA, FSA, most major credit cards, debit cards, cash and check
Reduced fee: therapy scholarships are available — please ask
Training in reproductive mental health
Katie Kirkenmeier, MA, LPC, LCPC, ATR, PMH-C
Seven years working exclusively with survivors of sexual violence before moving into perinatal work
40-hour advanced sexual assault training
EMDR Level 1 and 2 trained
Level 1 and 2 trained in Internal Family Systems through the IFS Institute
Certified in Perinatal Mental Health (PMH-C)
Registered Art Therapist (ATR)
Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology: Art Therapy, The Adler School of Professional Psychology
Licensed Professional Counselor in Missouri and Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in Kansas
Questions about therapy for healthcare professionals
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I'm an independent practice with no connection to your employer, your training program or any EAP. If you have specific concerns, raise them on the consultation call — it's a good use of it.
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Then we won't start there. Some clients come biweekly, some come in bursts around the hard stretches, and virtual sessions remove the drive. We can find something that works with and around your schedule rather than requiring you commit to a standing appointment.
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No. Nurses, residents, advanced practice providers, therapists, techs, EMS and anyone else in healthcare. The job looks different from each seat; the strain has a lot in common.
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No. This is licensed clinical therapy. If what you need is genuinely structural — a job change, a schedule change, a conversation with leadership — I'll say so rather than treating it as something to feel differently about.
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Yes. If you live in Missouri or Kansas, we can meet on a secure, HIPAA-compliant video platform anywhere in either state.
Schedule therapy in Lee's Summit or virtually
Book a free 15-minute consultation, send me a message or text 816-875-0078.
I reply within two business days.
You spend all day telling people not to wait until it's worse. The same applies to you.