Meet Meagan Ku (she/they)

Hello! I’m Meagan Ku, and I’m a licensed therapist with over a decade of experience working in mental health, helping others heal and move forward towards a future full of peace and inner fulfillment. I get excited waking up each day knowing that I get to support people healing through their deepest and most vulnerable feelings and I enjoy the challenge of creating a tailored approach to help each person get there.

I cherish creating a space where we can be both silly and methodical, and more importantly, creating a space where we can be real. With me, you can take off that persona of “having it all together” and be seen, with all of your challenges and traumas, and know that you are safe with me.

In actively creating a felt sense of safety, I readily explain what I am doing and why, in order to collaborate with you on your healing journey. I believe that you are the expert on you, so I will seek out your input, and I actively embrace feedback! (What better sign of progress is there than getting a people-pleaser to bring up their own needs?) How you feel is key to all of this actually working, and everyone is different.

While I am often smiling, maybe making a dad-pun here and there, I also take my job to help you very seriously. If I see that something isn’t working, I view it as my responsibility to change my approach to fit your needs. You don’t need to guilt yourself or feel like you aren’t doing enough to heal. In choosing to work with me, you can stop taking it all on yourself and have someone you can trust to do their part. Here, you can finally have someone to be there for YOU.

Education & Credentials:

Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT-16080) in the State of Arizona

Master’s Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy (Northcentral University, 2018)

I am trained in Accelerated Resolution Therapy at the highest level possible (beyond becoming a trainer) & I’ve completed training in Internal Family Systems Therapy, having practiced both for several years now.

I really encourage you to take some time to see if we might be a good fit. Your comfort is important, and so I am open to any questions you may still have about me or my work.

My Approach

When we first meet, we’ll talk about what you want therapy to help with, explore your past and what have you already tried, and we’ll come up with a plan for how we want to work together. Below are some of the therapeutic modalities I have trained in and prefer to use, but everyone I meet has unique needs and preferences, and so they benefit from their own combination of approaches.

  • ART is a fast-paced therapy that uses bilateral stimulation to change the way memories and sensations are experienced. It works similarly to EMDR but goes faster, often taking only 2-5 sessions to significantly reduce symptoms. It is also a lot more directive, body-based, and leaves you going home in a good mood.

  • IFS is a gentle approach to therapy that revolves around the idea that we all have parts of us that try to protect us from getting hurt. It involves spending time connecting with those parts by feeling them in your body, visualizing them, and talking to them from a curious and compassionate voice.

    As we help you build that trust within yourself, we move towards helping you release those emotional burdens. When that is done, you shed those long-held deeper feelings like “I’m not good enough”, “Everyone leaves me”, “I can’t protect myself”, “I’m unlovable”, etc. You begin to embody qualities like confidence, patience, connectedness, and courage.

  • You might have seen examples of therapists having a child put miniatures in a tray of sand to explore their inner world. Well, it isn’t just for kids! In fact, it can be especially helpful for anyone who has trouble knowing what they are feeling or who finds it difficult to describe the feelings.

    This type of therapy helps you connect with your feelings, and then as we process it together, you might find new insights about what is going on within yourself. This can also be useful for relationships where there is difficulty not talking over each other, as visually seeing what the other person feels might help you to connect with them on a deeper level without getting triggered.

  • This type of therapy can feel a lot like traditional talk therapy. The difference is that we spend time separating you from the problem to help give you agency over it.

    We might have conversations about where you learned a certain viewpoint and ponder whether or not you wish to keep those meanings and values. A lot of time is spent noticing when the problem wasn’t a problem, in order to better understand what has already helped so that we can harness it intentionally. Big picture: we view your life like a story, and work to give you back to pen to author it!

Meagan the Person

Just to help you get a better idea about whether or not we would connect, I want to share more about who I am as a person:

LGBTQ+ Identity: I’m on the bi/asexual & non-binary spectrums (she/they), and I am in a fairly CIS/hetero-presenting marriage. If you can imagine, I can definitely understand the inner conflicts around having a less visible identity.

Chronic Illness: Type 1 Diabetes, POTS, PCOS (So a lot of experience with invisible illnesses…)

Neurodivergence: My own neurodivergence tends to show up most in my sensory preferences (food and tactile especially) and how I think (I lack an inner monologue and I have aphantasia). I’ve made my office fairly sensory-friendly with different options for self-soothing, and I encourage anyone there to notice and take care of their needs. I believe in the validity of self-diagnosis, because having a way to communicate an experience and to find a sense of community is important, and I believe that the person who knows you best is YOU.

Spirituality: I’ve never participated in organized religion, but I can respect the power of belief and taking time to cultivate a relationship with the unseen aspects of the universe, with whatever names, ceremonies, or metaphors resonate best within each person’s spiritual journey

Mental Health: I’ve been in and out of therapy as needed, actively seek out my own support, and I’m a mostly healed member of the deep-down feeling “not good enough” club

Fun Facts:

My favorite holiday is Halloween (it is also my birthday), I have two rescue dogs, I enjoy playing Pokemon and The Sims 4 in my free time, I love to collect fossils and crystals (notice the name of my practice), and while I bounce around between different hobbies, I tend to reliably come back to some form of jewelry making (loom beading, wire wrapping, metalsmithing, rock polishing, etc).