Kay Therapy

12/18/2025

In the midst of holiday goings-on, don't forget to invest in yourself.
And for those thinking to themselves, this is a January problem...I feel you, and I'll be here to unpack everything with you once all the lights are taken down and it's back to business in 2026.

Specializing in working with high-functioning individuals struggling with mental health behind the scenes, with women regaining their self-esteem, and with people healing from the effects of unhealthy or abusive family or relationship dynamics. I also have a focus on de-stigmatizing men’s mental h...

05/01/2025

I'm going to let you all in on something... 👀

If you've been looking for a therapist for weeks or even MONTHS, message me with your state/location and insurance, and I'll get back to you with AT LEAST five (FIVE!!) therapists who can work with you. (Obviously this remains confidential, and you can even message me anonymously I believe). Seriously, it's WAY EASIER than you think.

Every. single. day, I see tons of therapists posting in Facebook groups about needing to find someone for a client/friend/family member/co worker, and their posts are met with DOZENS of comments from therapists with openings, ready to see you!

DON'T waste your time on these long waitlists and then only see a therapist for a couple of months before they dip out. Connect with me and I can get YOU connected!

04/29/2025

💥 Dealing with Panic Attacks? Read This.

Panic attacks can feel super overwhelming 🚨 🚨 🚨 but you can take back control! Here’s how:

🧠 Recognize it: "This is a panic attack. It will pass."
💨 Breathe slowly: Inhale 4 sec → Hold 7 sec → Exhale 8 sec. Repeat. Other helpful techniques include anything to override your nervous system, which is in overdrive 🚀 examples include progressive muscle relaxation and holding an ice cube to your wrist (seriously, it works!)
🖐️ Ground yourself: Try the 5-4-3-2-1 method (use your senses!). Do a guided meditation (the app Insight Timer is my favorite).
💬 Be kind to yourself: You're not weak. You're human. Panic attacks are increasingly common in our unstable and tumultuous climate.
🤝 Reach out: Talk to a friend or therapist. You’re not alone.

You’re stronger than your fear. Save this for when you need a reminder.

Don't forget, I offer immediate openings for adults 18+ in Maryland for virtual therapy. Contact me today for a free consult!

04/27/2025

My Journey to Becoming a Therapist

People often ask me how I got into this field, or what I find rewarding about it. The answer lies in my background, and why I decided to become a therapist. Here’s the story of how I landed here.

My journey of becoming a therapist has been…challenging! I actually always wanted to be a vet growing up, but I quickly realized science and math were seriously NOT my thing, so I shifted gears a bit. My lived experience with depression and anxiety in adolescence first introduced me to the helping field. I found my experience with mental health professionals so impactful and healing that I began to want to explore how I could “give back” (corny, I know, but it’s true). After I pursued my masters in social work degree, I gained a wealth of experience in several settings. I DEFINITELY did not go from grad school straight to therapy.

BEFORE I became a therapist in private practice I held internships and jobs such as: working with individuals with co-occurring mental health and intellectual disabilities in rural North Carolina; monitoring the progress of and helping support transition-aged youth in the foster care system in Montgomery County, MD; providing intake assessments and group therapy to adults with serious mental illness in an acute psychiatric hospital setting; working with the child welfare system in rural, Eastern Shore of Maryland, assessing for child safety and facilitating resources and supports so families can stay together; providing individual therapy to court-mandated youth involved with DJS as well as providing s*x offender treatment to adults; doing crisis intervention and mental health support for middle school students; and providing in-school therapy for kids ages 4-17 all across Talbot County, MD. THEN, I became a therapist in private practice.

The best thing about being a social worker/therapist is that I am CONSTANTLY learning. I’ll never know everything there is to know about human behavior, or therapy, or adverse experiences, and that is such an exciting idea. All of my clients, past and present, whether we met for one session or a hundred, have shown me how much strength and resilience each of us hold. Witnessing the transformation of someone dealt the most awful hand in life imaginable, feeling destitute and hopeless, finding within themselves how to achieve a life they’ve always dreamed of, is a privilege I am honored to have. It truly never gets old.

I offer immediate openings for adults 18+ in Maryland for virtual therapy. Contact me today for a free consult!

04/24/2025

Work/Life Balance–Beyond the Buzzword

In today’s grind culture, and with the recent return-to-office mandates 🙄🙄🙄 it’s more important than ever to find a healthy work-life balance. But what does that really even MEAN? And more importantly—how do we actually ACHIEVE it?

Work/life balance isn’t about splitting your day into equal parts—8 hours of work, 8 hours of personal, “you” time, and 8 hours of sleep. If only it were that simple. True work-life balance is about prioritization, boundaries, and most importantly, alignment with what actually matters to you. And–obnoxious therapist saying incoming– it all depends and can be FLUID.

So how do we even know we’re at the point where our work/life balance is out of whack? Again, it depends and can look different for everyone, but I typically see this as: constantly checking work emails after hours or on your personal device, responding to messages while on PTO, fatigue that just can’t seem to be resolved with sleep, and burnout feeling more like a baseline than a red flag.

Think of balance as INTENTIONAL and STRUCTURED. Balance doesn’t happen by accident. It’s something you build, protect, and adjust regularly as needed. Here’s some steps to actually get there:

1. Set Boundaries—and Keep Them: Start and end your workday at consistent times. Mute Slack/Teams/email notifications after hours. BIG pro-tip: remove any work-related apps OFF of your personal devices.
2. Prioritize What Matters Most: Not everything on your to-do list is urgent or even necessary (despite the fight-or-flight-response-provoking emails from your manager). 🚨🚨🚨 As we say in the healthcare field, triage, triage, triage. What needs to be done AT THIS MOMENT? What can wait until EOD or end of the week?
3. Take REAL Breaks: Lunch AWAY from your work screen. A walk in the middle of the day. A weekend without checking emails. These small pauses aren’t indulgent—they’re essential.
4. Use Your Time Off: Your PTO is part of your compensation, not a privilege. Use it to rest, recharge, or just catch up with yourself. No apologies, sorry not sorry.
5. Simple, small things to create separation: take your lanyard off as soon as you exit the building for the day. Close your laptop and your home office door until you need to go back the next morning. Making your commute about YOU (good music, calling a friend, listening to a good true crime podcast 👀, and worrying about work when you get there.

All in all, you are more than your job title, your output and productivity, or your calendar. Your time is valuable, your well-being matters, and you’re allowed to live a full life both at and beyond your desk.

Need help creating boundaries at work or finding more balance in your day-to-day? Don’t forget, I offer immediate openings for adults 18+ in Maryland for virtual therapy. Contact me today for a free consult!

04/23/2025

Do you ever find yourself wondering why you feel SO DRAINED and exhausted all the time? 🫠 What’s the solution? Rest? Yes! But that’s only PART of it. If you find yourself trying to feel more energized and have more bandwidth, but only feel more drained in the process, the answer might lie in HOW you’re resting.

Did you know there’s actually SEVEN different types of rest? Take a moment to think about what comes to mind for you when you think of resting. Many people first think of sleeping or lying down (also very important) but there’s actually many different ways to get rest.

1) Physical rest: This refers to giving your physical body some rest. Sitting down for a while, lying down on the sofa for a bit, and getting high-quality sleep are all ways to get your brain and body rejuvenated. Some people think of gentle movement such as stretching or yoga as getting rest, but to me, rest means… rest. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️🤷

2) Mental Rest: Our brains are constantly making decisions and mapping things out throughout the day. It’s important to incorporate some mental downtime as part of your self-care routine. Mental rest really focuses on the here and now. Things like mindfulness and guided meditation can be helpful to feel grounded, and to just simply be.

3) Creative Rest: This type of rest is one that is often overlooked when we think about rest. Also, being creative isn’t limited to being artistic. If you are creating or producing anything, you’re engaging in creativity (read that again). Taking intentional breaks from activities where you’re making, producing, or creating something, is a great way to give yourself some rest.

4) Sensory Rest: As with mental stimulation, our brains are constantly taking in stimuli that require energy and effort. Sensory rest focuses on, well, the senses. We come across countless different smells, tastes, sounds, or tactical sensations all day, every day, which can have impacts on our lives in ways we don’t even realize. If you’ve ever heard someone say “I’m overstimulated 😅 "or “this is sensory overload 🥵” they’re probably experiencing too many sensations at once. A good way to get rest from this is to minimize sensory input, or focus on just one sensory experience at a time. Sitting and closing your eyes while listening to calming music, and being in a quiet and dark room while doing deep breathing exercises are great ways to get some sensory rest.

5) Spiritual Rest: Before I get into this one, I want to emphasize that spirituality is a deeply personal and individualized facet of life. Spirituality can include believing in a higher power or organized religion, but it doesn’t have to. Something as simple as noticing the symmetry in nature or how we actually feel grateful for a situation that may initially have seemed to be negative can provide spiritual rest. Be curious of the bigger picture and all of the forces and energies that make everything exist.

6) Emotional Rest: The demands of our society have placed expectations on us to always present a certain way. Putting on a happy face, calming ourselves down when we’re irritated to fit the social norm, and biting our tongues can all be very emotionally draining. Emotional rest involves getting really in touch with your values, and being authentic to them. Thinking about what feels honest and genuine to you, and engaging in activities that support that, leads to emotional rest. Avoiding heavy, complex emotions in media we consume, if only for a few moments, is especially needed in times such as these.

7) Social Rest: My fellow extroverted introverts probably know what this means! Social rest means different things to different people, and it’s important to think about how different social interactions leave you feeling. If you feel recharged after being around people, continue to engage in that since it’s rejuvenating. If you feel recharged after alone time, make sure to carve some time to make that happen. Social rest is about putting time in to the engagements that leave you feeling refreshed.

NOTE: I offer immediate openings for adults 18+ in Maryland for virtual therapy. Contact me today for a free consult!

04/22/2025

Have you been told by agencies in your area that they have a waitlist as long as 6 months or even a YEAR before you can be seen by a therapist? I'll let you in on some pro-tip to find someone in just a couple of weeks....

Something CRAZY that I did not expect when starting my own practice, is that there is such a gap between clients needing therapists and therapists needing clients.

Did you know that Maryland, like many states, faces an ENORMOUS shortage of mental health providers? The state of Maryland is estimated to need another 30,000 behavioral health workers by the end of 2028 to meet the demand for services that exists. Source: Danielle J. Brown of Maryland Matters.

So, why is it SO HARD to find a therapist for people in Maryland?! The answer is multifaceted, but here's the gist:

1) People often look to larger mental health agencies for therapy when they decide they want to take the next steps. Many larger mental health agencies employ therapists in an environment where burnout is RAMPANT and the quality of care is lower due to unrealistic metrics and poor compensation and pay for therapists. The expectation for many of these agencies is that their therapists see 30, 40, or even 50 people per WEEK. This leads to burnout, lower quality of care, compassion fatigue, and disruption of services. Therapists burn out, and they leave, leaving their clients hanging. Then, they're put on the dreaded waitlist.

2) People rely on insurance carriers for an accurate and updated listing of providers. Makes sense, right? The issue is, insurance directories are often extremely outdated and don't reflect on up to date information about where the therapist is located, who they're seeing, and what their availability is.

3) People aren't looking at therapist directories or listings. These days, a simple Google search won't cut it. Unless you're looking to be placed on a waitlist for several months, the secret to FINDING a therapist is to search on sites like Psychology Today, Mental Health Match, Therapy Den, and ZenCare. You can filter by speciality, insurance accepted, AND who is ACTUALLY taking on new clients.

NOTE: I offer immediate openings for adults 18+ in Maryland for virtual therapy. Contact me today for a free consult!

04/22/2025

Do you struggle with low self-esteem, perfectionism, and self-doubt that affects your daily life or relationships with others? Do you feel confused or lost about what direction you want to take your life in, or do you feel like you’re always putting on a brave face to get through the day? Do you find yourself hoping that relationships and managing daily stressors will get better? Now, more than ever, high-functioning adults are feeling anxious, overwhelmed, depressed, and lost about how to navigate managing work, current events, and relationship stressors.

Hi! I'm Fiona Kay, a licensed social worker with over six years of experience as a therapist. I specialize in mens mental health, as well as people of all genders struggling with anxiety, panic, depression, low self-esteem, life transitions, perfectionism, and identifying and healing from dysfunctional relationships.