Gail Kirk Poust

LMFT

Profoundly: this specialty found me before I chose it. I've experienced pregnancy loss, an infertility journey, the disorienting transition to parenthood, perimenopause, and a chronic health condition in my own life. During my hardest chapter, I wrestled with the question many of my clients bring to me: what would make life meaningful if the future I'd counted on didn't arrive? Finding my way through that question is what led me to this profession. In practical terms, my experience shapes our work in two ways. First, you'll never need to convince me that what you're going through is real. I've felt the dismissiveness of "it's just hormones" from the patient's chair, and my office is the opposite of that. Second, the tools I teach aren't theoretical to me; I've used them in my own life, which means I know the difference between what sounds good in a book and what actually helps at 2 a.m. Your story will differ from mine, every story does, and I'll never assume otherwise. But you'll be talking with someone who has stood somewhere near where you're standing.

Warm, collaborative, and purposeful. My foundation is Narrative Therapy: we look at the stories you've inherited about what your body should do, what a parent should feel, how strong you're supposed to be, and work on reclaiming authorship of the ones that will define you going forward. Around that foundation, I bring practical, research-backed tools from CBT, DBT, ACT, and ERP, plus Gottman Method and Gordon Effectiveness Training for relationship strain, selected for your situation rather than applied one-size-fits-all. Expect structure alongside the warmth: we'll set concrete goals early, measure progress against them, and I'll regularly give you skills to practice between sessions. An hour a week matters most for what it changes in the rest of your life. My care is culturally sensitive, trauma-informed, and LGBTQIA+ affirming, and I welcome clients of all genders, identities, and family structures.

Yes, my clients arrive with wildly different stories, but the same five threads run through nearly all of them. Life transitions: something has changed (a diagnosis, a birth, a loss, a new decade) and life on the other side doesn't resemble life before. Identity changes: new roles, chosen or not, that don't yet fit the person you've always been. Body challenges: a body that feels unfamiliar, unreliable, or like it has broken an unspoken agreement with you. Feeling overwhelmed or out of control: the coping strategies that always worked simply don't work for this. And grief, sometimes for a tangible loss, like a pregnancy, and just as often for intangible ones: a dream, a capability, a future you'd already furnished in your mind. Noticing these threads has shaped my approach in a specific way: I treat the whole pattern, not just the presenting problem. A client may come in for postpartum anxiety, but we'll also tend to the identity shift and the grief for her former life hiding underneath it, because in my experience, that's what makes recovery hold. It's also why I work from a narrative foundation: every one of these threads is, at heart, a story mid-revision, and therapy is where you get to influence how the next chapter reads.