ANXIETY | DEPRESSION | OCD | CODEPENDENCY | c-PTSD | HEARTBREAK | INSECURITIES | ADHD | REACTIVITY
ATHENA MCKEE, LPC, C-DBT, CCTP
Hi, I'm Athena
10+ Yrs Licensed Counselor & Certified Coach
40+ Yrs Life Experience & Mom of 2 Teens 😉😉
Best of Scottsdale, Counselor Award
I provide a collaborative, compassionate therapeutic space for my clients to vent, unpack and navigate the big and small things, your relationships, career, life's ups and downs, while overcoming limiting beliefs and even heal from a loss, heartbreak or trauma.
I also incorporate empowering emotional processing, nervous system calming and secure relating skills with communication tools and boundaries practices, to build self-trust and mental, emotional and relational well-being.
Areas of Focus
Heal Anxiety, Depression, PTSD
Learn vital emotional processing skills to heal and calm your nervous system.
Self-Worth, Tame Inner Critic
Evidence-based methods to balance insecurities and boost self-care and self-trust.
Social Skills and Relationship Health
No more power-struggles. Learn Secure Relational Skills for more trust, love and respect.
Resolve Maladaptive Coping
Gain self-leadership over choices instead of reacting to painful feelings.
Align with Your Values and Purpose
Tap into your values, purpose, genuine wants and goals for your personal and professional life.
I just wanted to say thank you. It is wonderful... for the first time in my life, I am seeing and feeling healing!!!!
Client, Age 42
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We cannot expect to calm anxiety, detox shame, prevent reactivity, tame our inner critic, process emotions, and heal from regrets, heartbreak or trauma, if we don't know how. So, let's learn how with proven methods.
Skills and Capacities That Impact All Areas of Life
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Did you know...
... according to neuropsychological research most emotional and mental health disorders, low self-worth, insecurities, and social and relational distress patterns are due to chronic nervous system activation, core beliefs, and the ways we maladaptively cope and try to make the pain of chronic activation (stress) go away.
These four types of maladaptive stress reactions and patterns cause havoc on all areas of life, on our neurochemicals and how we feel in each moment:
We get stuck...
... looping in this chronic activation and maladaptive patterns are primarily due to a lack of awareness and skills. Skills needed to process emotions, balance core beliefs, calm our nervous system and build secure relationships.
Skills we can learn through self-awareness and evidence-based therapies and practices.
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Learn
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Heal
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Balance
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Foundational Skills and Therapies
Once you learn and practice these, you'll notice how all four skills are needed, working together. Much like a car needs four wheels, studies show we need these four core abilities for emotional, mental, behavioral and relational health. For example, you may be good at giving and complimenting, but without communicating your genuine wants you'll be left feeling disconnected, devalued and resentful.
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Four Maladaptive Stress Types
Understanding your default stress type(s), associated symptoms, triggers and specific maladaptive coping methods is the first step. Our Attachment Style, childhood and adulthood experiences, trauma, adaptations, birth order, genetic predispositions and personality, have a complex impact (in some cases, diagnosed as complex-PTSD) in how we develop our default stress types.
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A current event can have only the vaguest resemblance to a past situation — and this can be enough to trigger the psyche’s hard-wiring for a fight, flight, fawn or freeze response.
Pete Walker, MS
Author ComplexPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving
Get Unstuck from Chronic Stress, Anxiety, Insecurities and Maladaptive Coping Reactions
Stuck in chronic stress is the cause and effect of depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, reactivity, insecurities, relationship conflict, low self-esteem, and maladaptive coping patterns like people-pleasing, sabotaging, obsessing and self-berating. Emotional nervous system calming and secure relating skills help us get unstuck. Therapies include DBT, CBT, CFT, EMDR, IFS and Nervous System Informed Therapy.
Give a woman a fish, feed her for a day. Teach her how to fish — feed her and her 'village' — for a lifetime.
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Truly grateful for all you have done for me. I've had dozens of therapists throughout my life but never felt benefits until now. I can feel such a shift. Thank you!
— Client Age 50
I just wanted to say thank you. It is wonderful... for the first time in my life, I am seeing and feeling healing!!!!
— Client Age 42
I used to have panic attacks. Now if I feel anxious I trust myself to self-soothe and feel better in a few minutes.
— Client Age 19
The ability to calm my nervous system with regulation is something I didn't even know existed. Learning DBT has improved my entire life.
— Client Age 28
Thank you for your help over the past several weeks. You helped me restore my self-worth and push my confidence to move forward with my life and career.
— Client Age 38
I hope you have a smile knowing how you are really having a healing impact on people! Thank you for helping me heal and learn to love myself.
— Client Age 47
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Why focus on learning and skills-building?
We now know that most emotional and mental health conditions are due to a lack of social-emotional health skills and maladaptive coping, 'getting' and 'protecting' behaviors that cause havoc on our lives and relationships — people-pleasing, sabotaging, obsessing, blaming, binging, etc. only to feel depleted, exhausted, stressed and disconnected.
UNDERSTANDING WHY AND HOW TO FEEL BETTER
Why emotional nervous system health skills?
Lack of processing skills results in unprocessed emotions results in what neuropsychologists refer to as 'emotional constipation' — a chronic stress state with cortisol, adrenalin and other stress chemicals stuck in our cells. This results in anxiety disorder, OCD, depression and other mental health conditions, along with dysfunctional immune system, sluggish metabolism, and severe depletion of 'feel good' oxytocin and serotonin. This lack of oxytocin, known as the 'love hormone' disables our ability to feel calm and secure with ourselves and loved-ones.
PRACTICING SKILLS AND ACTUALLY FEELING BETTER
Leads to inner critic and depressing helplessness
To make matters worse we berate ourselves or blame others, thinking we should just be able to 'snap out of it' and 'feel better' even though we don't know how to deactivate our nervous system. Our inner critic rails against us only making matters worse by increase more stress chemicals, falling victim to the cycle of feeling powerless or anxious about our emotions and symptoms, grappling with shame, anxiety and helplessness.
PRACTICING SKILLS TO RELATE TO YOURSELF BETTER
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What is an insecure vs secure attachment style?
Our attachment style — stemming from childhood, directly correlates to the quality and duration of our relationships with family, partner, friends and career. It is foundational to our self-worth, self-trust, purpose and naturally provides us with the strength, awareness and capacity to stay out of the Codependency Trauma Triangle (conflict triangle, drama triangle, abuse cycle) where we lose ourselves and suffer.
PRACTICING SKILLS TO RELATE WITH OTHERS BETTER
When repeatedly criticized, ignored or traumatized in childhood, we learn to survive by over-relying on the use of one or two of the 4F's. This severely impairs our ability to relax into an undefended state, circumscribing us to a very narrow, impoverished experience of life.
Pete Walker, MS
cPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving
Contact
DBT Core Skills
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
You may be surprised to learn that every emotion had a distinct message and purpose. With DBT and neurosensory skills, you gain the power to understand and process your emotions in a productive, beneficial way. Calm anxiety, anger, OCD, panic and even ptsd emotional flashback.
To be most effective, DBT is designed to learn one lesson a week, with individual guidance from a licensed therapist or DBT trained instructor, and DBT Skills group (optional) for six months. It takes time to use the skills and have them work. When they do, you will have "lightbulb moments" and actually experience results you can feel.
Mindfulness is the foundational element and starting point in therapy, providing essential groundwork for the other three skill modules.
Distress tolerance skills help you get through intense emotional pain without making the situation worse. Builds neuroplasticity 'tolerance muscles.'
Emotional regulation involves understanding and processing your emotions, and choosing how to express and respond.
Interpersonal effectiveness help you be more effective at listening and communicating your wants and needs to ensure you feel respected, supported and cared for.
Emotional pain changes relative to how you react to it. When you move toward it in an adaptive way, pain shrinks. When you move away from it, pain grows. Try to avoid it, pain pursues you like a monster in a dream.
Tony Fahkray
Chronic Nervous System Activation Stress and Maladaptive Coping
Nervous System Informed IFS Therapy
Learn how to get unstuck from automatic reactions and behaviors, activated and triggered emotions, automatic assumptions, insecurities, thoughts and limiting beliefs and relational patterns that impact your nervous system, both causes and effects.
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Neurochemicals and Symptoms
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Core Beliefs and Trauma Triangle Patterns
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Maladaptive Reactions Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn
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Secure Sense of Self vs Insecurities
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Secure Attachment vs Insecure Attachment
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If we lack emotional health skills, whenever stress arises the human brain switches to autopilot and has an inherent tendency to do more of the same, only harder [maladaptive protective reactions]. Which is precisely, more often than not, the wrong approach in today's world.
Robert Cooper, PhD
Attachment Style Focused Therapy
Heal Your Insecure Style
The latest research shows 50% of adults in our society have an Insecure Attachment Style. This also results in chronic nervous system activation.
When you understand Insecure Attachment Styles (Anxious, Avoidant, Fearful-Avoidant) everything suddenly clicks. Stemming from childhood and influenced in adulthood, our attachment style effects:
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How we feel about ourselves and others
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Thoughts, emotions and behaviors
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Nervous system and neurochemicals in each moment
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Mental, emotional and physical health
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Responses to stress and vulnerability, both adaptive and maladaptive
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Foundation of self-worth and sense of lovability
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Self-care consistency to align with personal values, wants, needs, safety, connection
Fortunately, our attachment style isn't set in stone. It can change, evolve and is treatable. Through learning, we can develop more secure patterns and secure sense of self.
Four Attachment Styles
Secure and Insecure Types: Anxious, Avoidant and Fearful-Avoidant
Even though we all tend to have some traits and tendencies of each style at some point in our lives, we tend to default to one more than the other, along with associated triggers, assumptions, core beliefs and maladaptive reactions that cause can havoc on our lives.
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Secure Self-Worth and Resolving Inner Critic
Trauma Informed IFS Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral and Compassion Focused Therapies
Inner Criticism without Self Leadership Leads to Chronic Stress and Associated Mental, Emotional and Physical Health Conditions
This is complex and transformational work. With IFS Parts Work, DBT and Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) gain awareness and learn to balance and mentor your inner critical thoughts with Wise Mind.
We all have an Inner Critic influenced by our childhood, adulthood, attachment style, core beliefs and expectations from culture, family and friends, and fueled by social survival needs (connection needs, sense of belonging, purpose, value, etc). Inner Critic uses shame, guilt, and self-berating. It results in a slew of maladaptive protective stress reactions trying to 'get' connection or 'protect' from punishment or rejection.
Our Inner Critics are unique, however there are seven common types
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Perfectionist berates you with impossible standards
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Taskmaster drives you to work and achieve at all costs
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Inner Controller controls and shames like a dictator
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Guilt Tripper unrelenting regret and shame, refusing self-forgiveness
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Inner Destroyer attacks your self-worth (worthiness to even exist)
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Underminer minimizes your accomplishments and strengths
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Molder / Conformist people-pleasing, self-shaming, self-rejecting
With secure relating skills, needs, preferences and requests are stated explicitly. Whereas in the trauma codependency triangle there's this eternal game of trying to get your needs met without explicitly stating what your needs and wants are.
Heidi Priebe, Counselor
My Credentials
Licensure
Licensed Professional Counselor: Arizona / LPC-23927
Certifications and Awards
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Best of Scottsdale Award, Best Counselor 2019
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Certified Relationship Coach / 08101704
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Certified Clinical Trauma Professional / IAPT
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IFS-Informed Therapist (Parts Work) / IFS Institute
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Level 1 Gottman Method Therapist
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Certified Dialectical Behavior Therapist
Education
MASTER OF SCIENCE PROFESSIONAL COUNSELING
2019
Grand Canyon University / Phoenix, AZ
MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION (MBA)
Human and Organizational Behavior
2012
Grand Canyon University / Phoenix, AZ
BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN BUSINESS
ECONOMICS
2005
Arizona State University / Tempe, AZ
