Candice Ryan, MFT Intern

Meet Candice Ryan, a therapy intern who brings a warm, heart-centered, direct style to her practice. Candice is currently pursuing her Master of Arts in Couples and Family Therapy at Antioch University Seattle and seeks to collaborate with clients to find adaptive ways to meet life’s challenges. She uses the experience of being in the therapy room as an opportunity for clients to try out new ways of relating to the self and others. Candice sees individuals, couples, and families and draws from Emotionally Focused (EFT), Narrative, Dialectical Behavioral (DBT), and Solution-focused Therapy models. 

 

Candice believes that people often come to therapy in a stuck place because coping strategies that once worked are no longer meeting their needs. She sees change occur when clients have belief in their own agency. Candice likes getting deep with clients and working on the roots of patterns and problems, but also understands that when folks are in distress, they need stabilization and tools to make life more livable before getting into the "why" questions. She tailors interventions to the client/system's short and long term goals, addressing the pressures of the moment with models like Solution-Focused Therapy and DBT and addressing the deeper patterns and outdated stories with EFT and Narrative Therapy. Most importantly, Candice believes that adaptive change happens when people feel safe and supported, which is what she strives to offer through the therapeutic relationship. 

 

Candice’s ideal clients are focused and motivated. She loves big personalities and people who have been told they’re too much. She is eager to support queer couples, families, and parents of trans or nonbinary kids. Candice doesn’t consider conflict to be inherently negative and finds high-conflict relationships interesting. She enjoys working with service industry folks and is well-suited to support clients at the intersection of queerness and disability and those who have been impacted by poverty and sudden loss. 

 

Outside of work, Candice is an avid and passionate gardener. She loves being in natural bodies of water, especially hot springs, and watching women’s sports, especially WNBA basketball. She plays video games and new interests include weight lifting and oil painting. Candice’s community involvement is motivated by her passion for food and housing justice, leading her to mutual aid efforts, gardening collectives, and affordable housing advocacy.  

 

Candice’s life experience, background, and identities have given her a unique perspective and a wealth of empathy. She is a middle-aged, white, queer, cis woman. She is a parent to a queer, nonbinary teen. She was married to a man, widowed, and is now partnered with a woman. Candice was raised in evangelical Christianity and has since found her way to other spiritual practices grounded in the magic of the natural world. In her previous career Candice was a cook and chef. She has navigated higher education as a non-traditional student and single parent. Candice is kink and poly friendly, fat-positive, proudly antiracist, feminist, working class, pro-labor, and describes herself as analytical, painfully earnest, and a silly goose. People are her special interest and she can’t wait to meet you!