Kayla Tiller (she/her)

As Clinical Director of two Critical Incident Stress Management Teams, seeing the impact of secondary trauma and compassion fatigue feeds my passion for the mental health of first responders and helping professionals.

I also have special interest in working with individuals and families navigating new and difficult life transitions and look forward to gaining the opportunity to work with other populations.

Professionally, I have been working in the mental health field since 2010. This experience has ranged across the span of mental health crisis work in community mental health, work with older adults in long term care, and currently in inpatient psychiatric work as the Manager of Psychiatric Programming. Collectively, these experiences have given me a deep understanding of the impact of mental health across all systems and remind me of the great resiliency of individuals.

In SFBT, we work backwards. Instead of focusing on how to "fix a problem", we focus on answering "what is the end goal?" and learning from our past success to tell us how to get there. We start by asking questions like, "what do you want your life to look like?", "what would need to be different between now and then?". You work with your therapist to create your own path forward, focused on where you want to go versus why it will be impossible for you to get there.

Motivational Interviewing is about increasing our readiness for change by understanding our internal strengths and motivations. Your therapist is there to guide, empower, and help you find your own sense of meaning. Through this focused style of communication, we can move past the surface level reasons why we are or are not doing something we care about deeply. MI asks you the questions you need to get unstuck and move to the next stage of growth.

This is probably the one you have heard the most about. It looks at how your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions all work together. We start by understanding what negative thoughts get in your way the most, how they make you feel, and how you respond. We'll explore what often causes these negative thoughts to come up for you. Then we'll make sure you know tools you can use to calm your body down in these situations so you can respond differently.