About Therapy with Tim Kiernon
So. You’ve Ended Up on a Therapist’s Website.
This probably wasn’t Plan A.
Most people don’t wake up thinking: “You know what sounds fun? Exploring my unresolved trauma with a stranger on Zoom.”
And yet, here you are. Which, for the record, takes more nerve than most people give themselves credit for.
Let’s Clear Up a Few Things
I do not own a pipe.
I do not have one of those creepy Freud couches. I will not stare silently while scribbling cryptic notes that later become a bestselling book about your dysfunction. And despite what television has taught us, I am not going to spend every session asking “And how does that make you feel?” until one of us loses consciousness.
What we’ll do instead is have real conversations.
We’ll figure out what’s hurting, what keeps happening in your life that makes you say, “Why do I always do this?” and what might be worth changing.
Sometimes, we’ll talk about the past. Sometimes, we’ll focus on right now. Sometimes, you’ll have major breakthroughs. Sometimes, you’ll spend 20 minutes on a fight from three weeks ago and accidentally discover the emotional blueprint you’ve been running since third grade.
Therapy is weird like that.
What I’m Actually Trying to Do
My goal isn’t to turn you into a different person.
My goal is to help you become more fully yourself – just with fewer panic attacks, less shame, healthier relationships, and significantly less emotional duct tape holding everything together.
People assume therapy means years of analyzing every thought you’ve ever had. The reality is much less dramatic. I am a therapist, not a wizard.
But the work tends to move when people feel safe enough to tell the whole truth – not just the socially acceptable truth. The messy truth. The contradictory truth. The one you’ve rehearsed saying a hundred times and then immediately decided to keep to yourself.
That’s the truth that tends to matter.
The Niche Nobody Talks About
One of the areas I’m most passionate about is working with adults who lost a sibling during childhood.
Here’s what nobody tells you: when a child dies, everyone understandably focuses on the parents. The surviving siblings often receive an unspoken assignment – try not to need anything right now. Many become experts at being strong, responsible, independent, and easy.
And then, decades later, anxiety, depression, perfectionism, guilt, or relationship struggles seem to follow them around like a loyal golden retriever. Nobody connected the dots. Nobody thought to.
Grief doesn’t disappear just because nobody talked about it.
This is one I know personally. When I was nine, I lost my sister. I know something about grief that doesn’t get to be what it is. About becoming the child who’s okay so everyone else can be okay. That experience shaped why I do this work and, specifically, why this population matters to me.
About Tim Kiernon, LMFT
I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist serving clients throughout Tennessee and Arizona via telehealth.
Years of practice have gone into helping people navigate trauma, grief, addiction, anxiety, depression, relationship struggles, and the occasional life catastrophe that arrives completely uninvited.
The alphabet soup behind my name means I earned a Master of Marriage and Family Therapy (MMFT) from Trevecca University in Nashville, completed my undergraduate work at the University of Memphis, and hold licensure as an LMFT in both Tennessee and Arizona. I’m also a Certified Trauma Therapist (CTT), trained with Judy Crane.
My professional training includes specialized work in problematic sexual behavior. I trained in the model developed by Dr. Patrick Carnes, one of the pioneers in sex addiction treatment. I’ve also completed training as a Daring Way™ Facilitator through Brené Brown’s work on shame resilience, vulnerability, courage, and wholehearted living.
Translation: a lot of time spent studying the things people are most afraid to talk about. The secrets, the shame, the losses that never got properly grieved, and the fears that somehow still have their fingerprints on your life twenty years later.
Outside of therapy, I enjoy being on the water, spending time with family, and occasionally pretending I know what I’m doing in life – just like everyone else.
I also firmly believe that healing doesn’t require perfection, which is fortunate, because none of us are bringing that to the table.
Ready to Try Something Different?
You don’t need to hit rock bottom before reaching out.
You don’t need a diagnosis. You don’t need your suffering to be “bad enough.” And you definitely don’t need to have your life figured out before you call a therapist.
Continuing to do exactly what you’ve been doing has already been tested extensively. If you’re curious whether something different might actually work, that’s enough reason to start.
Reach out through the contact page. We’ll go from there.