THE RELATIONSHIP CENTER
JINGER KINNER
My Focus Areas
Neurodivergence: Life is hard. People are mean. It's easy to beat ourselves up. In a world where we often feel pressure to fit neatly inside a box, it helps to have someone in your corner working with you to unmask. To understand your true self. And to help you share it proudly with the world. For people like us, traditional approaches to therapy are often confusing or not helpful. I’ve taken my training in evidence-based approaches and adapted them to fit a neurodivergent brain.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: I am trained in a couple different treatment options for OCD, including Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). However, standard ERP can be confusing and triggering for neurodivergent brains. Likewise, OCD often co-occurs with other conditions such as trauma. As a result, we have to get creative. At the end of the day, the goal is the same: to change your relationship with OCD and to live your life fully according to your values.
Anxiety: It’s normal to feel anxious, like that feeling you get before you’re about to have a difficult conversation or give a public speech. Even if it's an exciting or positive event, we tend to latch on to the discomfort of anxiety, trying our hardest to get rid of it. Likewise, having a neurodivergent brain in a neurotypical world can be a breeding ground for anxiety. My goal is to help you understand your anxiety and reduce avoidance so that you can more confidently live your life.
Approach
I believe that there is a level of accountability as a therapist. I wouldn't give my clients ideas and options that I wouldn't do myself. I believe anyone can change but that doesn't mean it is easy. I am neurodiverse affirming, meaning that instead of pathologizing cognitive differences, I aim to help others work with "what they got". I use evidence-based approaches while also believing in the importance of lived experience. I primarily focus on helping you understand yourself better, to be kinder to yourself, and to live your life according to your values.
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Jinger Kinner
They/She
Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor
Marriage and Family Therapist
Qualifications
I received my Master of Science in Education from The University of Akron and have been licensed as a professional counselor in Ohio since 2012. Early on in my career, I worked in community mental health, primarily helping children in foster care. I then moved on to the field of employee assistance programming where I’ve helped an array of people, from those on the front lines of various industries to those in the C-suite. As the need for mental health treatment continued to rise, I saw it as the right time to get back into clinical work and start to specialize in helping those who struggle with anxiety, OCD, and traumatic stress - areas where I not only have clinical training in treating but in which I also have lived experience.
Personal Information
Outside of the therapy room, I highly value movement. You can find me frequently running, biking, or picking up sort of heavy things and dropping them while jamming out to really loud music in my ears. When I’m not doing that, you can find me with my significant other either traveling or cuddling with our hedgehog, Reggie. We met doing stand up comedy but that doesn’t mean we’re funny.