Navigating Identity and Belonging Through Creative Therapy
Discover Your Path to Healing with Katy
At Beyond the Sun, we offer a unique blend of talk and art psychotherapy to help you explore your identity, relationships, and emotional patterns in a supportive environment.
Meet Katy: Your Guide in Therapeutic Exploration
Katy Wagner, MA, ATR-P, LMHCA, is a psychotherapist and creative practitioner whose work integrates talk psychotherapy and art psychotherapy. Trained in art therapy at Herron School of Art + Design, she brings extensive experience supporting individuals and families navigating adoption, identity, and complex relational dynamics. Her approach draws from psychodynamic, relational, and developmental perspectives to understand how behavior, identity, attachment, and nervous system patterns interact. Through conversation and creative process, Katy helps people make sense of layered experiences that may be difficult to access through language alone.
Understanding Our Process
Understanding the Present Situation
Step 1: Free 15-Minute Consultation
We begin with a brief consultation to determine whether the practice is a good fit for your needs. This conversation allows you to ask questions, share a general sense of what is bringing you in, and understand how Katy’s approach may support your situation.
If it feels appropriate to move forward, an intake appointment can be scheduled.
Developing an Approach
Step 2: Intake Appointment
The intake appointment explores current concerns, history, goals, and context. This conversation helps clarify what is happening in the present and what support may be most helpful.
Collaboratively, we develop an approach based on the individual, family, or system involved.
This may include talk psychotherapy, art psychotherapy, family work, parent consultation, or other supports depending on the situation.
Therapeutic Work
Step 3: Ongoing Support
Sessions may include conversation, reflection, creative process, and relational exploration. Over time, patterns become clearer and new ways of understanding, communicating, and responding can develop.
The work evolves as new insights emerge and needs change.
Who We Work With
ADOPTION CONSTELLATION
We support adoptees, adoptive parents and families, birth/first families, partners, and the professionals who walk with them through complex emotions and relationships.
NEURODIVERGENCE
Katy works with individuals whose brains process information in diverse ways, including people with ADHD, sensory processing differences, and other neurodivergent profiles.
Neurodivergence is not treated as a deficit to correct, but as a different pattern of perception, attention, and processing. Therapy focuses on understanding how a person’s nervous system, environment, and relationships interact with their natural ways of thinking.
Art psychotherapy can be especially supportive for neurodivergent individuals because it allows thinking and communication to occur through visual, sensory, and experiential pathways, not language alone.
Creative process can help:
• externalize fast or overlapping thoughts
• organize ideas spatially and visually
• regulate attention and nervous system activation
• explore emotions without requiring immediate verbal explanation
• reduce pressure to communicate in only one way
Sessions adapt to each person’s processing style, sensory needs, and pace, allowing therapy to work with how the brain naturally functions rather than forcing it into a single format.
FAMILIES & CAREGIVERS
Katy works with families and caregivers to better understand the relational and communication patterns shaping everyday life.
Family work often explores how development, identity formation, communication styles, and nervous system responses influence interactions within the home.
Support may include helping families navigate:
• communication breakdowns and misunderstandings
• parent–child relational dynamics
• developmental and identity transitions
• caregiver stress, overload, and burnout
• supporting neurodivergent or complex-needs individuals
• shifts in family structure or roles
Through conversation and creative process, families can observe communication patterns, clarify needs, and strengthen connection, while building more sustainable ways of relating and supporting one another.
Openness Makes Understanding Possible
Conversation + Creative Process create the conditions where understanding can emerge.
- Identity
- Nervous systems
- Grief
- Relationships
- Development
- Adoption
Support for people navigating complex experiences & adoption constellation across the lifespan.
About Katy
Katy’s work focuses on how people make meaning of their lives when experiences are layered, unresolved, or difficult to explain.
Her approach integrates multiple areas of understanding:
- Developmental Psychology
- Nervous System Regulation
- Somatic Awareness
- Attachment and Relationship
- Symbolic and Creative Expression
- Existential Reflection
These perspectives allow her to recognize when behavior, emotion, or communication reflects deeper processes within the nervous system, identity development, or relational experience.
The aim is not simply emotional expression – it is greater understanding, regulation, connection, and participation in life.
A Practice Rooted In Openness
Everything in Katy’s work begins with openness.
Openness is not passive.
It is the willingness to remain present with what is real rather than forcing experience into a predetermined explanation.
People arrive with questions, emotions, histories, and nervous system patterns that may not yet have language.
Parents arrive with expectations, hopes, fears, and assumptions about what therapy should accomplish.
Openness allows those realities to be explored rather than defended.
Children are often asked to examine themselves deeply, then use words to satisfy adult inquiry.
This work invites adults to bring that same willingness.
When openness is practiced consistently, people begin to recognize what their nervous systems are communicating and families begin to see what each person in the relationship is carrying.
Openness does not remove complexity – it allows complexity to be approached with an honesty and steadiness for transformation.
Understanding the Nervous System
Human behavior, emotion, attention, and communication are shaped by how the nervous system organizes around safety, threat, connection, and meaning.
Experiences such as loss, medical stress, developmental differences, relational disruption, or chronic overwhelm can shape how the nervous system interprets the world.
These patterns may appear as:
- overwhelm
- shutdown
- intensity
- withdrawal
- difficulty regulating emotion or attention
Rather than treating these responses as problems to eliminate, Katy treats them as signals from the nervous system.
Understanding the signal changes how support is offered.
Work often begins with regulation vs interpretation—creating conditions where curiosity, reflection, and learning can occur.
Art Psychotherapy
Art psychotherapy introduces another way of thinking and communicating within the therapeutic process.
When creative materials are present, multiple neural systems engage simultaneously:
- Sensory Processing
- Motor Coordination
- Emotional Networks
- Memory Circuits
- Symbolic Meaning
Experiences that may not yet have words can appear through image, form, and gesture.
For some people the art becomes the conversation, for others it supports conversation.
Art is always optional.
Creative process allows experiences to become visible and observable, making them easier to understand and reflect on.
Communication & Neurodiversity
People communicate in many ways. Individuals relate to language differently and use words subjectively for expression and communication.
Katy works with individuals whose communication styles may include language, imagery, movement, materials, assistive communication systems, or relational interaction.
Her practice experience includes individuals navigating experiences such as:
Neurodevelopmental Differences
Autism
ADHD
Developmental Delays
Sensory Processing Differences
Genetic and Developmental Conditions
Down Syndrome
Prader–Willi Syndrome
Neurological and Physical Conditions
Cerebral Palsy
Traumatic Brain Injury
Sensory and Communication Access
Blindness and Low Vision
Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Speech and Language Differences
Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)
Relational and Developmental Context
Attachment Disruption
Early Relational Trauma
Complex Medical Needs
Creative process can help expand communication beyond verbal language, opening additional pathways for expression, understanding, and connection.
Adoption and Identity
Adoption is not a single event, it is a lifelong unfolding and identity experience.
Katy’s work is informed both by clinical training and lived experience navigating closed adoption and reunion.
Adoption stories frequently contain multiple truths at the same time:
- Love and Grief
- Belonging and Curiosity
- Connection and Loss
This work allows those realities to exist together without forcing a simplified narrative.
Grief, Loss, and Relationship
Grief appears in many forms.
- Loss of people.
- Loss of certainty.
- Loss of expected futures.
- Identity disruption.
Much of this work occurs within relationships, particularly parent–child relationships, where both people may be carrying experiences that have not yet been understood together.
As understanding develops, communication and connection often change.
Real-Life Integration
Understanding becomes meaningful when it connects to the environments where life unfolds.
For some individuals the work remains within the therapy room.
For others it intersects with family life, school environments, community contexts, medical realities, or developmental transitions.
The goal is not to separate therapy from life – it is fuller participation in life, relationships, and identity.
A Note to Parents
Adoptees are often asked to explore themselves deeply. Katy asks parents to bring that same openness.
Parents working in this space are willing to examine:
- assumptions about adoption
- family narratives about identity and belonging
- responses to grief, anger, and uncertainty
Children absorb what families leave unattended.
When adults participate in reflection, children no longer carry those realities alone.
Working With Katy
Katy works with:
- All ages across the lifespan
- Family System
- Siblings
- Dyads
- Teams
Support may involve conversation, creative process, identity exploration, relational work, or nervous system regulation depending on the person and situation.
The structure of the work adapts to the individual rather than requiring people to fit a predetermined method.
Philosophy
Human experience is layered. Love and grief often coexist. Belonging and questions can exist together.
This work creates space where those realities can be explored honestly so people can move forward with greater clarity and connection.
Openness makes understanding possible.
Legacy is not what we explain, it is what we practice repeatedly.