About Me- education & My story
Education
2016 BA in Studio Arts with a minor in Psychology from Lindenwood University
2020 MA in Art Therapy with an Emphasis in Counseling from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College
2023 Certified in Somatic Activated Healing
2027-2029 Ancestral Somatics: entering a 3-year program for deeper embodiment of somatic facilitation through a decolonial lens
I began seeing clients in 2018, working in crisis nurseries, community mental health, children’s oncology, substance use recovery, residential mental health, and private practice. Through these experiences, I discovered the harsh reality that the mental health system itself is broken and built on oppression. For a while, I kept fighting to fit into a system I didn’t even want to be a part of because I thought this was the only way to be of service.
Many existential crises later, I realized I get to choose differently.
What I value about Art Therapy is that I was not trained from the perspective of pathology. We have enough mental health therapists who are indoctrinated to approach clients solely through diagnosis, symptom management, and offering band-aid coping remedies that keep you in a loop of disconnection, suffering, and outsourcing your ‘wellness.’ As an Art Therapist (ATR), I was trained to see a person’s wholeness and meet you where you are through creative expression.
When somatic work came into my scope of practice, it was a massive awakening to how important it is to continue facilitating growth, healing, and liberation through a decolonial lens. As I deepen my education with somatics while bridging it with expressive art, I intend to create a space where you can move beyond managing symptoms and explore what it means to reconnect with yourself, your body, your heart, your soul, and your own inner knowing.
If you have any further questions about my education or approach in session, I welcome you to bring them up in a free consultation call!
My story
My name is Kelsey Morgan, and I teach people how to love and liberate themselves from the depths of their darkness through creative expression. I believe that when we have the courage to face and feel our darkness, we can then create light.
My work blends art therapy, somatic movement, and dreamwork. A creative approach rather than a logical one, because pain often resides in places where intellect alone cannot reach. For as long as I can remember, expression was never just something I did. It was the language my body and soul spoke before I knew how to translate it. It is how I found my way back home to myself.
I was the artistic kid always coloring, building fairy houses and cardboard spaceships, writing illustrated stories, making up dances at sleepovers, and going through cycles of vivid dreaming since childhood. This creative nature followed me into adulthood. As I was contemplating what I wanted to do for a career, I knew two things: I loved art, and I wanted to help people. But it wasn’t until graduate school, while earning my master’s in Art Therapy, that I realized my work was not simply about “helping people feel better”.
It was about helping people stop being ruled by the parts of themselves they were too afraid to meet.
I knew this because I was living it. During my first semester of grad school, my own darkness came to the surface in a way I could no longer suppress, escape, or outrun. From the outside, I looked driven. I was working full time, going to grad school, and training for a bodybuilding show. But underneath that, I was unraveling.
I swung from obsessively working out to binge eating. I drank and smoked to ease the pain and give me some sense of false enjoyment. I kept myself constantly busy (as if working full time + grad school full time wasn’t enough). I picked at my skin daily until I had scabs all over my body. I doom-scrolled before it was cool to avoid being present with myself. I slid into hookup culture that eventually landed me back into the trauma-bonded relationship I had just left months before.
At the time, I did not understand why these behaviors were ruling my life. I just knew I could not pause or slow down to be with my mind and body because that’s when things felt scary. When I slowed down, I felt the void encroaching on me. That void felt unbearable. So I kept reaching outside of myself for something to fill it. Food. Alcohol. Attention. Busyness. Numbing out. Chaos. A relationship that felt familiar, even when it hurt.
I would choose anything else that helped me avoid being alone with my body, my thoughts, my feelings, and the pain that was begging for my attention.
Avoidance only worked for so long, though…
Eventually, the darkness I was trying not to face got louder and wreaked havoc. I started to experience flashbacks more frequently. The patterns became impossible to ignore. I had to face the truth: My life was still being shaped by what I had not yet turned towards. I was repeating the past. And if I wanted to be free, I could not keep trying to escape the parts of me or my darkness that were asking to be witnessed.
I realized that only I could pull myself out of the pit of despair.
A year later, something started to click, and my desire to take radical accountability for my life started to outshine my desire to avoid my emotions. Since I was studying to become an Art Therapist, I decided to put my money where my mouth was. I began using the creative process not as a performance or to distract myself from the pain. I used it as a way into my internal world, letting it be the medicine to crack me open.
Expressive art, intuitive movement (what I now know as somatics), journaling, meditation, & dreamwork saved my life.
These practices did not erase my darkness because that was not the goal, but what did happen as I became devoted to this practice of meeting myself is that I stopped being so afraid of what lived inside me. I began to love the unlovable. These practices worked together in helping me gain a relationship with my internal world, reconnecting me to my soul, and understanding its language.
It was integrating the knowing that love and liberation were never about becoming a person with no pain, fear, grief, shadow, or hard moments. It was about no longer letting those parts of me run my life from underneath the surface. To accept the pleasant with the unpleasant and learn how to live freely within it all. That is how I let go of my own suffering. That is what changed everything.
This is the change that I wish for you too. If you’re ready to explore working together, click the button below.