Approach

Emmy’s approach is warm and inviting, encouraging you to bring your whole self to sessions. She sees your personal concerns and struggles as opportunities for growth toward a more fulfilling life. Bringing aspects of parts work and mindfulness therapies together, Emmy supports you in developing self-compassion and the ability to move through the difficult parts of life with greater ease.

Together, Emmy helps you evaluate whether you are living in alignment with your deepest values and she helps you learn to soothe the effects of the stress response. Honoring your personal wisdom and autonomy, Emmy weaves in her skills and training as you shape your own theory of change and healing.

Areas of Focus

  • Fat liberation and internalized oppression—using Body Trust®, Health At Every Size®, Intuitive Eating, and Anti-Diet approaches

  • Challenging relationship with food, body, and movement

  • Trauma and PTSD

  • Neurodiveristy and its challenges

  • Loneliness, alienation and isolation, friendship loss

  • Chronic stress and burnout

  • Family of Origin conflict and boundary development

  • Chronic pain

  • Grief and loss

Best Fit

Emmy works with folx who desire to not only seek relief from mental health concerns but also deepen their understanding of themselves at their core. She recognizes that it takes tremendous self-compassion, stamina, and courage to grow, change, and heal when therapy is not always quick, linear, or clear. She is honored to support her clients on every step of their journey.

Experience

Emmy Volkar brings 15 years of experience in social services and community organizing. Starting in Special Education with wrap-around services for youth, Emmy learned the importance of building community and familial support for clients as part of their care plan. As a case manager in Early Intervention, she held space for caregivers of children with developmental delays and developed an even stronger lens of disability justice. Most recently, Emmy has worked with unhoused youth to create changes to the homelessness management system on a county-wide level. This experience has highlighted the importance of family therapy as a prevention of youth homelessness.

Emmy has studied the way racialized trauma can live in our bodies at the Cultural Somatics Institute. Because offering a weight-inclusive approach is vital to her, she has also received training from the Institute for Body Trust. Emmy studied Buddhist psychology, Depth Hypnosis, and dream interpretation at the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, which has equipped her to support emotional, spiritual, and physical healing.

A lover of reading and writing about the human experience, Emmy earned a B.A. in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is currently working toward her M.S. in Mental Health Counseling at Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania, Lock Haven.

Intern Services

Individual Therapy

  • In the first session, we’ll talk about your concerns and I’ll ask questions to get to know you and your situation.

    ~ 60-90 minutes

  • Each subsequent session will address the goals we develop together and help you make meaningful changes in your life.

    ~ 55 minutes

Relationship Therapy

  • We’ll discuss the concerns in the relationship and I’ll learn a little more about what changes you want to make.

    ~ 90 minutes

  • We’ll develop a plan to help you reach your goals for your relationship and discuss tools and strategies to help you get there.

    ~ 55 minutes

Group Psychoeducation

  • Embodied Journeys periodically runs educational groups, such as book clubs, skills groups, or support groups, on topics relevant to all variety of people.

    Check out our group listings and check back periodically to see what we’ve got going on!

Interested in working with Emmy?

The waitlist for Emmy is currently full.