Kintsugi Counseling Services

08/04/2026

https://www.kintsugicounselingservices.com/post/what-if-your-personality-isn-t-your-personality

"I'm just an Enneagram Two.""That's just my Myers-Briggs.""I'm a Virgo.""I'm just an introvert.""I'm a people pleaser.""I'm an anxious person."We have become remarkably good at describing ourselves. We can tell others our attachment style, our Enneagram, our Myers-Briggs type, our love language, our...

07/10/2026

Florida, here I come! ☀️🌴

I’m excited to share that I am now credentialed to provide telehealth therapy services to adult individuals and couples located in the state of Florida!

As a Marriage and Family Therapist, I work with individuals and couples navigating trauma, attachment wounds, relationship challenges, anxiety, life transitions, betrayal, infidelity, and the complicated patterns that can leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves and from the people we love.

My approach is compassionate, relational, trauma-informed, and grounded in the belief that healing does not require becoming someone new. Sometimes, it is about understanding how we learned to survive, reconnecting with the parts of ourselves we lost along the way, and building healthier ways of relating to ourselves and others.

I am currently accepting new Florida telehealth clients, and several insurance plans are accepted, with additional plans coming soon.

If you are in Florida and looking for support, or if you know someone who may be a good fit for my practice, feel free to reach out at [email protected].

And as always, referrals and shares are deeply appreciated. 🤍

05/12/2026

NEW BLOG POST 🤩

Mother’s Day is complicated, to say the least.This year, I created an AI-generated image of little me, Kara, sitting beside adult me, Myung Jin. I then printed it out and framed it as a Mother's Day present to myself.At first glance, it might seem simple or symbolic. Maybe even sentimental.It wasn...

05/10/2026

Today is a personal post.

This photo is AI-generated of little me (Kara) and adult me today (Myung Jin).

Mother’s Day has become more layered and complex with every passing year.

At first, it was about my mom. Rightfully so. Appreciating all that she gave, sacrificed, carried, and offered to the best of her abilities and capacities.

Then it became about my mom and my sister, as I grew older and realized how much my sister mothered me, too. How often she protected me, helped me, guided me, stood beside me, and loved me like a second mother growing up.

Then it became about me, too. First with Bailey, then Bailey and Emma, and now Bailey, Emma, and Kenzie.

And this year, Mother’s Day also became about little Kara and adult Myung Jin.

About learning how to hold space for the little girl inside me with more tenderness, protection, honesty, grief, curiosity, accountability, and love.

And also holding space for the mother who carried me first, the one I will probably never know or meet, but whose absence and existence both continue to shape me.

The older I get, the less I think motherhood is about perfection, excellence, selflessness, or getting it “right.”

I think it is about showing up.
Messy. Loving. Unhealed. Hopeful. Exhausted. Angry. Joyful. Scared.
Trying.
Failing and repairing.

Losing yourself and finding yourself again.

Realizing love is not purity. It is participation.

And maybe unconditional love is not what many of us were taught it was.
Maybe it is not endless tolerance, martyrdom, or perfection.

Maybe unconditional love is the willingness to keep learning, keep repairing, keep growing, and keep showing up more honestly than the day before.

Kintsugi.

Not hiding the fractures.
Not pretending they never existed.
But allowing them to become part of the story, part of the beauty, part of the wholeness.

I’ve learned a lot about motherhood between adult “mom” Myung Jin and little Kara. And I think they’re both still learning together. 🫶

04/17/2026

We’ve been taught this idea in such a black-and-white way.

“Loving yourself so you can love others” was never meant to mean you can’t love others until you love yourself.

Because you can.
You already do.

You love your partner. Your kids. Your people. Even while carrying self-doubt, self-criticism, or quiet self-rejection.

The truth is, we don’t love others instead of how we love ourselves.
We love others through how we relate to ourselves.

So yes, you can love deeply while struggling internally.

And also, those same wounds can show up in how you love:

- Needing reassurance again because you don’t believe it
- Over-giving to feel worthy
- Shutting down when you don't feel good enough
- Reacting from fear instead of connection
- Struggle to receive and accept love
- Equating performance with worth
- Fearing abandonment
- Over-explaining to be understood
- Hiding parts of you to avoid rejection or judgment

Not because your love isn’t real.
Because your pain is.

Self-love isn’t a prerequisite for loving others. It’s what allows your love to feel safer, steadier, and less effortful.

It’s what turns:

“Do they still love me?”
into
“I know I am worthy of love.”

It’s what softens defensiveness into curiosity. What shifts survival patterns into connection!

You are already loving people the best you can with what you have.

And as you build a more compassionate relationship with yourself, your capacity to love doesn’t just grow. It becomes more consistent, more grounded, and freer.

The work isn’t to become perfectly self-loving before we’re “allowed” to love others.

The work is integration.

04/13/2026

Your feelings are real.

They come from somewhere honest. Your history, your experiences, your relationships, your pain, your body remembering what it has learned.

And… real does not always mean true in the present.

Sometimes what you feel isn’t about what’s happening now. It’s about what has happened before.

That first thought.
That first reaction.
That immediate emotional wave.

That’s not something you chose.
It’s shaped by conditioning, attachment, trauma, and memory.

It makes sense.

And also, it’s not the whole story.

Your power lies in what comes next.

The second thought.
The pause.
The moment you begin to notice, instead of reacting.

You are not responsible for the first voice that shows up.

You are responsible for the one you choose to listen to.

This isn’t about dismissing your feelings.

It’s about relating to them differently.

Listening, without letting them define you.

Understanding, without automatically believing them.

Because healing isn’t learning to stop feelings and first thoughts. It’s learning how to stay grounded in the presence of what you feel, challenge and reframe the thought, and choose what comes next from an integrated place.

Next time you feel activated:
1. Pause, take a deep breath
2. Name the feeling
3. Notice the thought attached to it
4. Gently question it, "Is this fully true, or familiar? What else could be true here? What do I want to do with this feeling, instead of from it?"