BIOGRAPHY: I was born in Michigan and lived in Georgia, Northeastern New York State, Ohio, Italy, Illinois, Western New York State and England before settling in Connecticut. I have also traveled around this country and Canada, missing only two provinces and one state. I taught at the University of Illinois, Rochester Institute of Technology, The University of Rochester and The Eastman School of Music before coming East as a visiting writer-in-residence at Trinity College. While retraining in order to practice psychotherapy, I taught at the West Hartford Branch of the University of Connecticut, served in the Writer-in-the-Schools project, and waited tables at Timothy’s Restaurant on Zion Street. In earlier days, I cut stencils and cranked the mimeograph machine for the Cathedral of St. Philip in Buckhead, Ga.; wrote newspaper columns and worked as printer’s devil for the Buckhead newspaper; sold movie tickets and bargain basement shoes, typed forms for the Georgia Department of Education one whole long, hot summer; answered “Dear Davison’s” letters and calls for an Atlanta department store (now a Macy’s branch); lived-in as mother’s help to a big, young family to pay college room-and-board; wore hats as Women’s Editor for the now vanished Troy Record; and tried managing the Alumni Office at Oberlin College in Ohio.
PRACTICE PHILOSOPHY: I like to work with people who are interested in being fully present in their own lives, or who were before something happened. I like to help people make sense of themselves, and become both responsive to and responsible for their lives. I experiment with treatment approaches and will use anything that works. As I listen to personal stories, I pay attention to the language of the telling so that I might help individuals hear and understand themselves. Together we can begin to figure out where their plots veered out of order so that they might now choose different directions and live toward different endings.
Over the years I have tended to attract creative and/or sensitive individuals, young and old, male and female. My practice includes, but is not limited to, teachers, writers, singers and other musicians, actors and gifted adolescents. My own life has been greatly enriched by doing this work. I feel passionate about helping people come fully into the present and being there with them. In this way I can help people discover what binds them to the past or what causes them to obsess about the future, keeping them from being fully alive in the life they are living now.
For additional information or to find out about Elizabeth’s publications, please click on merganserpress.com or elizabethkincaid-ehlers.com.
Contact: Please call (860) 236-6009
