We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kieri Olmstead. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kieri below.

Kieri, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Setting up an independent practice is a daunting endeavor. Can you talk to us about what it was like for you – what were some of the main steps, challenges, etc.

Establishing Simple Empathy

I didn’t start Simple Empathy because I wanted to be a business owner. I started it because I couldn’t not.

Because I was burning out inside systems that rewarded detachment and disconnection. Because I was tired of holding sacred things in sterile rooms. Because people deserve more than symptom management and forced neutrality when they’re fighting to stay alive.

So I built something different. Something real.

The early days were survival.
I was seeing 35 to 40 clients a week just to stay afloat — and building websites on the side after bedtime to keep the lights on. I was mothering a toddler, navigating my own unraveling, and somehow still holding space for others. Every ounce of Simple Empathy was bootstrapped through grit, exhaustion, and love. There was no blueprint. Just vision and the refusal to abandon it.

I said yes to the mess of it. I said yes to healing on a human scale.

Some of the hardest parts?
• Letting go of the polished image of what a “real practice” should look like.
• Learning how to charge what the work was worth without letting capitalism gut the soul of it.
• Rewriting every policy to center trust instead of fear.
• Saying no to burnout culture when I was already bone-weary.

And the loneliness — oh, the loneliness — of doing something differently before it had language or applause.

What I’d do differently now?
I’d ask for more help.
I’d trust that rest is part of the work.
And I’d remind myself that pace is not proof of worth.

To the young professional standing at the edge of that leap:

Build slow. Build honest. Build something your nervous system can survive. Let your values lead. And remember that your practice isn’t just a place for clients — it’s a home for you, too.

Simple Empathy is therapy done differently because it has to be.
It’s not a brand. It’s a rebellion.
And it’s just getting started.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

About Me, My Work, and Simple Empathy

I’m Kieri Olmstead — a trauma-informed therapist and energetically sensitive human who works at the intersection of truth, complexity, intimacy, and sacred rebellion. I’m also the founder of Simple Empathy, a practice rooted in the belief that therapy isn’t just psychotherapy — it’s anything that tends to the soul.

I didn’t take a straight path here. My work was forged in the fire of my own trauma, awakening, and healing. I’ve lived the kind of life that doesn’t fit into easy categories — one that taught me early how to read energy, hold space, and find meaning in the messy middle. Those experiences became the heartbeat of everything I do.

At Simple Empathy, we serve people who are done with surface-level support — folks navigating trauma, spiritual awakenings, grief, body reclamation, relationship wounds, abuse recovery, and the quiet ache of not knowing where they belong. Many of our clients are highly sensitive, neurodivergent, queer, or untamed in ways the world has never known how to hold.

We meet them with reverence, not repair. We help them come home to themselves.

What sets us apart? We’re not afraid of the dark. We don’t pathologize your pain or sanitize your story. We name what others won’t. And we trust your body and nervous system as wise, even when they’re in survival mode.

Our services include:
• Individual therapy rooted in somatic and intuitive healing
• Custom guided meditative journeys for nervous system repair and inner wisdom retrieval
• Consulting and mentorship for clinicians, creatives, and helpers who want to build work that aligns with their soul
• Creative offerings that explore taboo themes with clarity, depth, and emotional resonance

There’s also something quietly brewing behind the scenes — a project centered on intentional connection and emotional readiness. That’s all I’ll say for now.

What I’m most proud of?
That we built all of this without selling out our values. That we’ve created a space where people can exhale for the first time in years. That my daughter gets to watch me build something true.
And that our clients feel seen in a way that makes them weep — the good kind.

If you’re looking for healing that honors your story and makes room for your whole self — the messy, sacred, sexual, grieving, beautiful parts — this is your place.

Because at Simple Empathy, we don’t just offer therapy. We offer the kind of presence that reminds you: You were never too much. You were always just waiting for the right kind of witness.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Resilience, for me, never looked like perfect balance or polished grace.
It looked like white-knuckling through the week. It looked like crying in my car between sessions. It looked like seeing 35 to 40 clients a week, raising a baby, and building websites at night just to keep the lights on.

It looked like working out of a doctor’s office one day a week, holding therapy sessions in a sterile exam room, begging the front desk for a lamp so we didn’t have to sit under fluorescent lights. Just trying to make it feel human.

I started Simple Empathy on my own — fueled by exhaustion, instinct, and this relentless belief that therapy could be more than clinical boxes and detached nods. About a year in, I brought on a co-owner. I was hoping for support, for shared vision. It ended in disaster. Messy. Costly. Painful. I almost walked away.

But I didn’t. Because even in the hardest seasons, people kept showing up. And so did I.

It wasn’t hustle that saved me. It was connection. It was people like Ashley, who literally forced me to take lunch breaks, who reminded me that I couldn’t pour from an empty body, an empty heart. It was the clients who exhaled for the first time in my office. The colleagues who held me when I couldn’t hold myself.

Resilience is not just surviving. It’s learning to receive. It’s being broken open and letting the right people help stitch you back together — not with fixes, but with presence.

Simple Empathy wasn’t built in balance.
It was built in burnout and slow repair.
It was rebuilt in relationship.

And that’s why it still stands.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I had to unlearn that being good meant being easy to carry. That if I was palatable, agreeable, low-maintenance — I’d be chosen. Kept. Safe. That if I could read the room fast enough, shrink my needs small enough, make other people feel comfortable enough, I’d finally be loved the way I craved.

That belief ran my nervous system for years. It shaped how I moved through relationships, school, motherhood, even the therapy room. I became a shapeshifter — always mirroring, always attuned, always disappearing just enough to avoid being too much.

But the truth is: I was always too much for the wrong people. And not nearly enough for myself.

Simple Empathy forced the mask off.
You can’t ask someone to come in and bare their soul — and pay you to hold it — if you’re hiding. You can’t lead with integrity while performing safety instead of embodying it. And you sure as hell can’t build a healing space while betraying your own truth.

So I had to start telling the truth. All the way.

That I’m not always regulated.
That I’ve walked through trauma and rage and dissociation. That I am still learning what it means to take up space in a world that taught me my softness was dangerous and my power was inconvenient.

Simple Empathy would only ever be as successful as I was willing to be authentic. Not just curated, poetic, or palatable — but honest.

Even my branding had to shift. My original colors? White. Cream. Caramel. Gold. Pretty. Safe. Polished. But I’ve since learned — neutral doesn’t have to mean beige. My neutrals are earth tones and flowers and truth. Moss, mud, wild bloom. The real kind of soft. The kind you have to earn.

I had to stop pretending I had it all together. I had to stop modeling over-functioning as healing. I had to unlearn the very myth that built my survival: that being small is the price of being loved.

The real work — my own and what I hold space for in others — is learning to stay present in the bigness of who we really are.

And no, it hasn’t been graceful. But it’s been sacred. Because every time I choose authenticity over ease, something cracks open — in me, in my clients, in the collective space we’re trying to heal.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.simpleempathykc.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/simple_empathy
• Facebook: https://Facebook.com/simple_empathy
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/company/simple-empathy

Image Credits

All professional photos are done by @Shots.with.Rach- Rachel Green. The Instagram post is in collaboration with Fetch KCMO