I’m Katie Blackthorn: Wise Woman, advanced herbalist, tarot reader, and California Licensed Clinical Social Worker. My work lives where the clinical and the soulful can be held with discernment—without collapsing one into the other, and without asking you to split yourself into acceptable pieces before you arrive. I am not here to hand you a brighter story before we have told the truth about the dark.
Why the Underworld
I have watched people learn the language of their wounds and still remain unable to feel their own lives. I have watched insight become another place to hide. I have watched systems ask people to manage symptoms while ignoring the body, the context, the lineage, the shadow, and the conditions that helped shape them.
The Underworld Journey begins with a refusal: we do not bypass what is asking to be met. We descend toward what has been pushed down. We tend what we find with patience, skill, reverence, and honest boundaries. We return—not as someone perfected, but as someone more able to inhabit their own life.
How I hold the work
I bring clinical training, folk herbalist lineage, intuitive listening, earth-rooted practice, and lived experience to the room. The shape of the offering matters: a Wise Woman Consultation is not psychotherapy; a seasonal gathering is not a clinical session; education is not medical treatment. Clear scope is part of care.
I will not promise certainty, force a timeline, or turn your pain into a marketing story. I will ask for honesty. I will honor choice. I will name when something belongs with a different provider, a different modality, or a different kind of support.
What I believe
The symptoms are the doorway.
Awareness and tending can take us further than ignoring and suppressing.
We choose our hard.
The body, mind, spirit, relationship, and context cannot always be separated cleanly.
Insight matters. Integration determines whether it becomes lived.
Sacred work still needs concrete expectations, boundaries, consent, and scope.
No one should be asked to perform transformation in order to deserve care.
Training, credentials, and lineages
Clinical training and experience
Master of Social Work, University of Southern California, graduated with honors in 2014
Master’s degree in War Studies, University of Glasgow
Bachelor’s degree in History, University of California, Santa Barbara
More than a decade of experience as a mental health provider, including work across multiple VA locations with a focus on trauma and PTSD
Experience with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE), and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), among other evidence-based approaches
Certified Psychedelic-Assisted Therapist through the Integrative Psychiatry Institute, as currently stated on Katie's public About page
EMDR Certified Therapist badge currently displayed on Katie's public About page
California license
KA Blackthorn · Licensed Clinical Social Worker · LCSW 76317
Herbalism and Wise Woman tradition
Advanced Herbalist training under Marysia Miernowska of the School of the Sacred Wild
Initial herbalism apprenticeship completed in 2023
Advanced Herbalism certification completed in 2025
Training rooted in the Wise Woman tradition and incorporating study of Western Herbalism, Ayurveda, and Traditional Chinese Medicine
Tarot and other influences
Katie has studied tarot since 2012 through formal courses, independent study, and sustained personal practice. Her broader influences include curanderismo, pre-Christian Irish practices, earth-honoring traditions, and the role of psychedelics as sacred teachers. This language should remain grounded in study and influence; it must not imply a credential, lineage authorization, or lawful service scope that has not been specifically confirmed.
Next step
If something in you knows it cannot continue like this, begin with the doorway that feels true