Kelty is a 4th year doctoral student at Pacifica Graduate Institute, accruing hours toward licensure as a psychological associate to Dr Elena Bagourdi. She has 10 years of experience working in the field of mental health and addiction. Kelty’s interest in the field comes from lived experience, and when sitting with her clients she is mindful of the power dynamic inherent to psychotherapy by maintaining a sense of equality. Kelty believes that symptoms have meaning, that the psyche leads the way in the therapeutic process, and facilitates development of the client’s own relationship with this aspect in order to access their own innate self-healing capacities. Kelty is trained in the depth psychology tradition with a focus on trauma informed modalities, attachment theory, existentialism, and relational Gestalt, and is philosophically informed by feminism, queer theory, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. She has a special interest in working with those from marginalized communities, is LGBTQ+ and gender nonconforming allied, and maintains awareness that human beings and their sufferings exist also within social, cultural and historical contexts.
