Meet Jenn Kerns

As a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor (LCMHC-VT), Depth Psychotherapist (Jungian-oriented, Pacifica Graduate Institute), and Certified Integrative Medicine Mental Health Provider (CIMMHP), I specialize in guiding clients through post-traumatic growth, life and identity transitions, and the “messy middle” of personal transformation.

I have been in private practice since 2014, and in the field of mental health for over 20 years.

I often experience my therapeutic work as an evolving arc that goes something like this: first, creating refuge and cultivating self-awareness—the early groundwork of all conscious healing; then entering the alchemical space of transmuting wounds into wisdom, where we learn how to foster the soul and turn love inward; and finally, bridging our gifts to the world—connecting inner transformation to a sense of purpose, contribution, and meaning.

As someone whose work is deeply rooted in the tenets of Buddhist studies and Positive Psychology, I believe that healing comes not only from doing “the work,” but also from experiencing our interconnectedness with all of humanity through giving back and being of service.

My lived and clinical experience suggests that healing is incomplete when it becomes one-sided or overly hyper-individualized, reinforcing self-centering and loneliness. Research shows that part of what moves us toward wholeness, fulfillment, and human flourishing is orienting our lives toward others—through service, community-building, and a felt sense of our shared humanity.

A Lifelong Commitment to Transformation

For more than 20 years, I have immersed myself in the study, practice, and teaching of psychology, neuroscience, spirituality, meditation, and the healing arts.

I hold a BA in Psychology from Saint Michael's College with a concentration in Buddhist Studies, and an MA in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. My undergraduate research took me to Bodh Gaya and Darjeeling, India for four months of independent fieldwork on Buddhist theory of mind, supervised by Georgios Halkias of Oxford University. My published graduate work, "Degendering Psyche," explored queering Jungian and archetypal frameworks through the lenses of Deep Ecology, Queer Theory, and Engaged Buddhism.

Before entering private practice, I worked across a range of clinical settings — Latham Centers Inc., the UVM Psychiatry Department, Middlebury College's Counseling Center, and Spectrum Youth and Family Services. My interests in spirituality and contemplative practice have also taken me to India, Sri Lanka, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia for field study and research.

Over the past six years, my own reckoning with traumatic brain injury and acute/chronic illness has shaped a deep research focus on spontaneous healing and near-death experiences. My next professional steps include training in EMDR and completing death doula certification through UVM.

What Life Has Asked of Me - why i do what i do

I grew up in foster care and was adopted at age ten. That fact shaped everything. I knew exile, displacement, and the particular grief of a child who belongs to no one before I had language for any of it.

By five I was already asking the questions that would organize my entire life: Who am I? Why am I here? What is this all about?

I understand now that those questions were not symptoms of disruption. They were the beginning of a pilgrimage.

I have come to see my life as an arc from Orphan to Pilgrim — from a child on the outside looking in to a woman who has done the slow, hard interior work of building a home inside herself. Learning to foster the exiled and abandoned parts of my own psyche, my inner child, and over time, to self-adopt them back in. That is the work I have spent my life doing, and it is the work I now hold space for in others.

Sports were my first sacred container. Years of soccer, lacrosse, and endurance training gave me a body I could trust, a discipline I could lean on, and a bone-deep understanding that healing does not happen in isolation. Teams taught me that.

In my early thirties, a disabling health crisis left me bedridden for two years, and housebound for five. I closed my businesses and entered a six-year medical sabbatical. That passage stripped me of all of my “plans” and everything I thought I was—my work, my independence, my identities — and asked me to meet what remained.

Many of my beliefs about healing and renewal were stress-tested during those years, and I am thankful to say that not only did most of them hold up but have been enriched.

Those years were not only initiatory. They were deeply spiritual and sacred. On a level that was not abstract or theoretical, I was given an answer to the question I had been carrying since childhood.

The people I have walked alongside who have come through their own dark passages — illness, loss, spiritual crisis, the dismantling of everything familiar — are often the most alive and resilient souls I know. I have been there. Thankfully, today, as I emerge from my own fires of transformation, it is clear to me that it is my life's work to hold the container for others on that same path. Not to fix or rescue, but to reflect back what is already there but possibly forgotten or not yet cultivated - their light, power, and value.

Outside of the therapy room, I am a youth soccer coach, a multidisciplinary artist, a Buddhist practitioner, a gardener, a proud auntie, momma to my 3 fur babies, and a lifelong student of what it means to be human.

On the journey with you.

— JLK

👉 [View Jenn’s Qualifications & Certifications]
👉 [Jenn’s Psychology Today Profile]

In their Words:

Client Reflection