Catherine Taylor Hickem, LCSW
Psychotherapist. Family and executive coach. Author. Founder of Parenting Adult Children Today.
Catherine has spent over forty years as a psychotherapist and more than twenty as a family and executive coach, sitting with families in their hardest moments.
She created the P.A.R.E.N.T. Method for mothers and fathers whose grown children have pulled away or gone silent. It is practical and psychology-based, and it starts with what is inside your control.
"I was the child on the other side of the silence."
For the first five years of my life, I had an amazing dad. He was a minister. Tender, sweet, gentle. Bedtime stories every night.
Then one Sunday evening, five-year-old me quietly walked a visiting little girl to the bathroom in the middle of his sermon. He stopped. And in front of the whole congregation he said: "Cathy Taylor, you sit down and don't you ever do that again."
My heart had been to help somebody. But in that moment, my relationship with my father changed. The bedtime stories stopped. He became distant and hard, and for the next ten years, my goal in my own home was to be invisible.
At fifteen, I made an appointment with his church secretary, four o'clock on a Monday, to talk about our relationship. He said, "Get out of here. Go home." We didn't have that conversation for another ten years.
At twenty-five, after college, marriage, graduate school, and years of my own therapy, I tried one more time. I told him: "I want a relationship with you, but it can't be the way we've always had it." And my father looked at me and said:
"Cath, I made a lot of mistakes with you. I can't undo those. The only thing I can do is give you my word that I will be the dad that you need, and not the dad that you had."
For the next thirty-three years, I had the most amazing father. Interested in who I was. Respectful of my boundaries. Fully present.
Two truths her work is built on
- 1It is never too late to grow and change.
- 2It only takes one person to change a relationship. Since you're the one reading this, you get to be that one.
Her work
- Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW)
- Over forty years as a psychotherapist
- More than twenty years as a family and executive coach
- Founder of Parenting Adult Children Today (PACT)
- Creator of the P.A.R.E.N.T. Method
- Author of Regret Free Parenting, Heaven in Her Arms, Welcome Home, and It's Never Too Late To Be A Great Parent
- Guest on parenting podcasts including Families of Character, Where Parents Talk, and Parenting Teenagers Untangled. See the interviews
For press and event organizers
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Hear it from Catherine.
The free class is about 90 minutes on the six patterns that keep parents stuck. No cost.