Katie Love, LCPC, CADC
Katie Love is a trauma-informed therapist in Chicago offering judgment-free care for adults and couples navigating substance use, anxiety, trauma, depression, ADHD, grief, sexual concerns, intimacy, and relationship stress.
A trauma-informed therapist for honest, judgment-free work.
You may look capable on the outside while anxiety, grief, substance use, intimacy concerns, or relationship patterns quietly take up more space than you want them to. You do not need a perfect explanation before starting therapy. Katie offers a steady place to say what is actually happening and understand what sits beneath the coping, conflict, or emotional overwhelm.
Therapy with Katie is warm, direct, and collaborative. She asks thoughtful questions, gently names patterns, and helps clients build clarity without judgment. The goal is not to force change or fit you into a script. It is to understand your story, expand your choices, and create change that works in your real life.
As a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor, and trauma-informed therapist, Katie brings harm-reduction principles to conversations that can be difficult to have elsewhere.
Support for what feels difficult to say out loud.
As a trauma-informed therapist, Katie focuses on substance use, anxiety, trauma and PTSD, depression, ADHD, grief, sex-related concerns, and couples issues. Her care is affirming and tailored to the person or relationship in front of her.
Substance Use & Harm Reduction
Katie helps clients explore alcohol or drug use without shame, labels, or unrealistic pressure. Together, you can understand triggers, identify the role substances play in coping, and define practical changes that support your health, relationships, and goals. Learn more about substance use and mental health support from SAMHSA.
Anxiety & Emotional Overwhelm
When worry, racing thoughts, physical tension, or overthinking make it hard to feel present, therapy can help slow the cycle down. Katie helps clients recognize patterns, build emotional regulation skills, and respond with greater clarity.
Trauma & PTSD
As a trauma-informed therapist, Katie supports clients processing trauma, PTSD, and painful experiences that continue to affect safety, trust, relationships, or daily life. The work moves at your pace and focuses on understanding triggers, strengthening regulation, and rebuilding self-trust.
Depression & Low Mood
Depression can feel like heaviness, disconnection, irritability, exhaustion, or losing interest in what once mattered. Katie helps clients understand the patterns beneath low mood and develop realistic steps toward greater connection and functioning.
ADHD & Executive Functioning
Katie helps clients manage ADHD-related overwhelm, focus difficulties, procrastination, emotional intensity, and inconsistent routines. Therapy emphasizes practical strategies, self-understanding, and reducing the shame that often surrounds executive-function challenges. The National Institute of Mental Health explains ADHD symptoms and care.
Grief & Loss
Grief can change from one hour to the next. Katie offers space to process death, relationship loss, identity shifts, and other meaningful changes without being rushed toward closure or expected to grieve in a particular way.
Sexual Concerns & Intimacy
Katie provides sex-positive, affirming support for concerns involving desire, intimacy, sexual identity, kink, boundaries, consent, and nontraditional relationships. These conversations are approached openly, respectfully, and without judgment.
Couples & Relationship Issues
Katie works with couples and individuals caught in recurring conflict, emotional distance, trust concerns, or difficulty communicating needs. Therapy helps make the pattern visible so partners can relate more directly and intentionally.
A trauma-informed therapist can help when concerns overlap.
Mental health concerns rarely stay in separate boxes. Anxiety may intensify ADHD symptoms. Grief may affect intimacy. Trauma may shape communication, coping, and substance use. Katie helps clients understand how these experiences connect so therapy can address the whole pattern rather than treating one symptom in isolation.
When anxiety and ADHD reinforce each other
Difficulty focusing, unfinished tasks, missed deadlines, and inconsistent routines can create anxiety and self-criticism. Anxiety can then make it even harder to begin, prioritize, or stay present. Katie helps clients separate ADHD-related challenges from the painful labels they may have learned to place on themselves.
Sessions may focus on recognizing overwhelm earlier, building realistic routines, breaking large tasks into manageable steps, and responding to setbacks without turning them into evidence of personal failure. The goal is not perfect productivity. It is creating systems that work with your brain and support the life you want to live.
When trauma affects mood, trust, and connection
Trauma does not always appear as a clear memory. It may show up as hypervigilance, emotional shutdown, irritability, avoidance, difficulty trusting, or feeling disconnected from your body. In relationships, protective reactions can be misunderstood as disinterest, anger, or rejection.
As a trauma-informed therapist, Katie helps clients notice these reactions without shaming them. Therapy can create space to understand what your nervous system learned to do for protection, strengthen emotional regulation, and develop more intentional ways of responding when the past feels present.
When grief changes daily life and relationships
Loss may affect sleep, concentration, motivation, identity, intimacy, and the ability to keep up with ordinary responsibilities. Grief can also create tension when partners or family members process the same loss differently. One person may want to talk while another becomes quiet or focuses on practical tasks.
Katie helps clients make room for grief without treating it as a problem to solve. Individual or couples therapy can support honest communication about what has changed, what each person needs, and how to remain connected while grief continues to move in its own way.
When substance use becomes a way to cope
Alcohol or drug use may begin as a way to relax, sleep, connect socially, avoid painful memories, or get temporary relief from anxiety and depression. Over time, the same strategy may create new concerns involving health, work, trust, finances, or relationships.
Katie’s harm-reduction approach begins with understanding rather than punishment. You can examine what substances provide, what they cost, what situations increase risk, and what kind of change feels realistic. Therapy can support recovery goals while also addressing the anxiety, trauma, grief, or loneliness underneath the behavior.
When sex and intimacy become difficult to discuss
Sexual concerns can involve desire differences, shame, pain, identity, past experiences, kink, boundaries, consent, or changes in closeness. These topics may feel especially difficult when previous attempts to talk have ended in defensiveness, silence, or conflict.
A trauma-informed therapist can help create safer conditions for these conversations. Katie supports clients and couples in identifying needs, communicating boundaries, understanding emotional and relational patterns, and approaching intimacy with greater honesty and respect.
The coping strategy may make sense, even when it no longer helps.
You may be using substances to quiet anxiety, avoiding conversations about sex or intimacy, grieving a loss that others seem to have moved past, or repeating the same conflict with your partner. These experiences can overlap. Stress can intensify substance use, grief can affect intimacy, and anxiety can make communication feel harder.
A trauma-informed therapist can help connect those dots with curiosity instead of blame. With Katie, you can identify what triggers the cycle, understand what the behavior has been trying to do for you, and practice healthier ways to cope, communicate, and reconnect.
How a trauma-informed therapist supports meaningful change.
Katie blends trauma-informed care, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and harm-reduction principles. She does not work from a rigid script. Sessions are shaped around your needs, values, readiness, and goals.
Her style balances warmth with accountability. Katie will listen closely, ask honest questions, and gently challenge patterns when doing so can create clarity. You remain the expert on your life; her role is to help you understand your patterns, expand your options, and move toward sustainable change.
You do not have to perform strength in the therapy room.
Healing begins when you feel safe enough to be honest about what you have been carrying. You can bring the uncertainty, the relapse fear, the grief that arrives without warning, the intimacy question, or the relationship conversation that keeps getting stuck.
Katie creates a confidential space where your experiences are met with respect and thoughtful curiosity. Her approach as a trauma-informed therapist moves at a pace that honors your boundaries while still creating room for meaningful change.
Affirming care matters.
Katie welcomes clients across sexual orientations, gender identities, relationship structures, faiths, cultures, and lived experiences. You do not have to minimize or explain away important parts of yourself to receive care.
Therapy that is honest, human, and useful beyond the session.
Before the first session, you may be asked to complete intake information about what brings you to therapy, relevant history, current concerns, and what you hope will change. You do not need to tell your entire story at once. The purpose is to give Katie a starting point and help the first conversation feel more focused.
During the first session, Katie will begin learning about you as a person rather than treating you like a checklist of symptoms. You may discuss anxiety, mood, attention, substance use, trauma, grief, relationships, or other concerns that affect daily life. You and Katie can identify priorities together, ask questions about fit, and begin shaping goals that feel relevant and realistic.
Ongoing sessions may include reflection, direct conversation, skill-building, and attention to patterns that appear in thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and relationships. A trauma-informed therapist should explain the purpose of an intervention, respect your ability to make choices, and adjust the pace when a conversation feels overwhelming. Katie welcomes feedback about what is and is not helping.
Progress is not always linear. Some sessions may bring relief and clarity, while others may uncover emotions that need time and care. Therapy can involve learning to notice small changes: pausing before reacting, naming a need more clearly, recognizing a trigger, making a different choice around substance use, or approaching a difficult conversation with more steadiness.
Real Conversation
You can speak openly about substance use, grief, anxiety, sex, and relationships without being reduced to a diagnosis or met with shame.
Thoughtful Challenge
Katie helps you notice contradictions, avoidance, and repeating patterns with care, curiosity, and respect for your readiness.
Practical Change
Sessions build insight alongside strategies for coping, emotional regulation, communication, boundaries, and decision-making.
Katie may be a strong fit if you want warmth, honesty, and accountability.
Katie works as a trauma-informed therapist with adults and couples who are ready to look beneath the surface of anxiety, grief, substance use, intimacy concerns, and relationship distress. You do not need to have everything figured out. You only need a willingness to start where you are.
Her approach may especially resonate if previous therapy felt too passive, too scripted, or disconnected from the realities of your life.
A good therapeutic fit should feel respectful, collaborative, and clear enough for you to ask questions or express concerns. The first sessions are an opportunity to notice whether Katie’s direct style, clinical focus, and approach align with the kind of support you are seeking.
Helpful next steps
Common questions about working with Katie
What does a trauma-informed therapist do?
A trauma-informed therapist considers how past or ongoing experiences may affect safety, coping, relationships, and emotional regulation. Katie emphasizes choice, collaboration, pacing, and respect while helping clients work toward meaningful change.
What are Katie Love’s therapy specialties?
Katie Love supports adults and couples with substance use, anxiety, trauma and PTSD, depression, ADHD, grief, sex-related concerns, intimacy, communication, and recurring relationship patterns.
Does Katie offer substance use therapy without judgment?
Yes. Katie uses harm-reduction principles and honest, collaborative conversations to help clients understand their relationship with substances and define realistic, sustainable change without shame.
Does Katie help with anxiety, trauma, depression, and ADHD?
Yes. Katie helps clients understand and manage anxiety, trauma and PTSD, depression, ADHD, emotional overwhelm, and executive-function challenges using trauma-informed, practical, and individualized care.
Can I discuss sex, kink, or nontraditional relationships?
Yes. Katie offers an affirming space to explore sexuality, desire, kink, consent, boundaries, intimacy, and diverse relationship structures openly and respectfully.
Does Katie work with couples?
Yes. Katie works with couples navigating communication difficulties, emotional distance, intimacy concerns, trust, and recurring conflict patterns.
What is Katie’s therapy style?
Katie’s style is creative, direct, collaborative, and grounded in trauma-informed care. She draws from CBT, DBT, and harm-reduction principles while tailoring sessions to each client.
How do I schedule with Katie?
Use the secure scheduling link on this page to request an appointment with Katie, or contact the JL Family Services intake team if you need help getting started.
Ready for an honest conversation?
Whether you are navigating substance use, anxiety, trauma, depression, ADHD, grief, sexual concerns, or relationship stress, you do not have to carry it alone. Katie offers the direct, affirming support of a trauma-informed therapist to help you understand the pattern and begin moving forward differently.
