Dr. Kathy McMahon

Previous Work Experience

I’ve trained doctoral students in Human Sexuality and Couples Therapy at Antioch University and taught Gender & Ethnicity, Psychotherapy Techniques, and more at multiple graduate schools over the years. I’m a Certified Gottman Therapist and a Discernment Counselor. For three years, I supervised pre-doctoral psychology interns in an inner-city clinic—overseeing over a hundred active cases. It taught me humility, perspective, and how to do serious work without losing heart.

I didn’t become a psychologist to stay on the sidelines. I’ve supervised therapists, taught sexuality to doctoral students, trained hundreds of clinicians, and carried caseloads of multi-problem families through the worst years of their lives. I’ve also held couples together who thought they were finished, and I’ve been honest when I believed they truly were.

I’ve spoken to international audiences about sex therapy, neurodivergence in marriage, and how couples therapy must adapt to new generations. I’ve been told I make hard concepts digestible and awkward topics engaging. I take that as a compliment.

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Hobbies and Obsessions

I have a range of past pleasures including chickens (yes the real kind that lay eggs. I once had 50), jewelry making, and sewing. But now I spend my time singing in a rock and roll choir. Singing has always been my greatest love, and now I do it with 40 other people, singing songs I grew up listening to.

Family and Community

I’ve lived all over—Northern California, Keene, New Hampshire, and a tiny, time-capsule town in Western Massachusetts with 800 residents and no stoplight. I can cook on a propane stove and clean a meat bird. But at heart, I’m a city girl. Boston is my hometown and where I’m most at home.

I was raised one block from where my mother grew up, in a Cape-style house built by my father and grandfather’s hands. My father worked two full-time jobs, one of them as a firefighter, and my mother raised five kids with more grit and humor than most sitcoms. They had an inter-religious marriage that, at the time, scandalized the extended family—because one side said the Lord’s Prayer differently. That tiny theological rift taught me early how deep prejudice can run, and how absurd it can be. It also sparked my lifelong love of cultural anthropology.

When I later married a Jewish man, my parents showed no bigotry at all. They loved him. They just worried—genuinely—that if our daughter wasn’t baptized, she might not get into heaven. It wasn’t hatred. It was inherited fear.

And it motivated me to create differently. I’ve dedicated my life—and this practice—to being intentionally multi-everything: multi-faith, multi-racial, multi-orientation, multi-cultural. Not just for tolerance, but because it enriches.

It’s interwoven—so without one thread, it wouldn’t be whole.

These days, I live just 15 minutes from the airport, downtown, and across the bay, that brilliant little hub called Cambridge. Two of my four siblings live nearby. And I’m also five minutes from my daughter—which, according to research, should help me live longer.

Honestly, I think the researchers just realized what daughters are like: part guardian angel, part project manager. She keeps a close, loving eye on me. And I love her for it—even when she groans at how I hang pictures or try to operate my phone.