We create new stories of empowerment and find ways to be fully supported in the journey toward goals.
I witness a lot of frustration from clients toward themselves because they wish they could just stop overindulging with their vices, or could just show up with friends and family members in a way that honors their integrity. The repeated failed attempts exhaust them. Such a huge part of mental health healing is letting go of the myth of the quick fix and the myth of the miracle cure.
About Molly Fitz King
Louisville, Kentucky Therapist specializing in
DBT, sensory modulation and autism
I’m Molly Fitz King, I started my career in 2011 at The School for Autism which inspired me to go back to school to get my masters. I have clinical experience in inpatient, outpatient, and community mental health settings that I believe has prepared me for this work.
I primarily practice DBT and sensory modulation. I rely heavily on approaches that use the body to regulate the mind. For clients who are comfortable using art, music, dance, writing, and enactment, I have a second license in Art Therapy and love any opportunity to unite the verbal with the visual. I specialize in treating people with Autism and have a strong background in trauma and mood disorders.
As a clinician, it’s really important to me that I am never dictating your healing but rather with you in a process of getting closer and closer to your core and how you want to show up in the world. Diagnosis is often a part of the process but I emphasize that I am sitting across from a human who is struggling and certain labels or diagnosis can make us lose sight of that.
I take my own personal mental health seriously and my long term commitment to learning about myself informs how I show up as a provider. I play a sport I love twice a week. I practice all the strategies that I discuss in therapy sessions but one I regularly go back to is mindful movements and walking meditation.
“I strive to help people restore hope in their own ability to heal, to live a life in line with their values and to give themselves permission to be human along the way.”
— Molly Fitz King
Specializations:
Sustainable changes are made through small acts over time.
I primarily practice dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and sensory modulation. Treating people with autism is one of my specialties along with treating trauma and mood disorders.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
This method of therapy helps individuals struggling with obsessive thinking, and emotional dysregulation. The first few skills you learn help you use the body to calm the mind. Once you are less activated you begin to look at strategies to improve communication in relationships and ways to insert mindfulness techniques into your daily life that are a good fit for you. When we are still highly activated it can be hard to nail down realistic mindfulness skills. This is why trial and error in session are so important. I do not currently offer DBT group therapy and frequently partner with other providers if clients are in need of this additional service. This method was created for individuals struggling with significant mood swings but the main skill, wise mind, can help people with Autism soften black and white thinking and find nuance in complex situations.
Sensory Modulation
This method uses vision, hearing, scent, taste, proprioception, interoception, vestibular, and exteroception. We start with an overview of preferences and dislikes in each of these sensory areas and look at ways to engage each system multiple times per day. An outside glance at this method could look overwhelming due to the large number of listed senses, however practice makes engaging with each area of healing pretty intuitive over time. My first exposure to this was in 2011 in the School for Autism where I watched how much peace the children got once they were able to enter the sensory room multiple times per day as part of their sensory modulation.
Art Therapy
I have a second license in Art Therapy and love to use opportunities to unite the verbal with the visual. I frequently expand art into enactment, music, dance, and writing so there is no limitation held on artistic expression. Art therapy helps clients stop attempting to think through all their problems and allows them space to slow down, feel, and accept. Creating in this setting is focused only on the process and not on any measurement of quality or talent. Some of the art we create are grief maps, barrier drawings, and all fine shelters.
About Scribbles
Scribbles is still undergoing his training and he will eventually work one day per week. He got his name because, in art therapy, scribbling is very important. It is the first mark making we all engage in as children no matter how technically skilled we become in art later in life. It unifies us as creators of visual arts and reminds us that no matter what age we are, art can be temporary and can be messy. We can make creating about movement and rhythm and humor. We all start our mark making journey with scribbling and if we are lucky we give ourselves the opportunity to go back. Scribbles provides a playful and calming presence that keeps sessions rooted in regulation. We will process hard things in our journey together and he will be with us for grounding purposes.
“Maybe they (dogs) remind us, in this way, of our own origins, when our bodies were not yet assumed into the world of speech. Then we could experience wordlessly, which must at once be a painful thing and a strange joy, a pure kind of engagement that adults never know again.”
— Mark Doty, Dog Years: A Memoir