About Us
Meeting You, Wherever You Are
Providers of transformative evidence-based individual therapy, organizational consultation, clinical education, and supervision.
What We Believe
At Modern Mind Institute, our work is rooted in core values that guide everything we do:
Every Person Deserves Dignity. We believe every individual is inherently worthy of respect, compassion, and top-tier care—without exception.
Evidence Meets Empathy. Scientific rigor and compassionate care aren’t opposites—they’re partners. We ground intervention in research while honoring the human experience.
Lasting Change Requires Personalization. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work. We use trauma-informed, tailored strategies that meet you where you are—literally and figuratively.
Collaboration Creates Thriving. Whether you’re an individual, clinician, or organization, growth happens in partnership. We build environments where everyone can flourish.
Why Choose MMI?
Choosing us means receiving compassionate, evidence‑based care from experienced providers who truly listen and tailor treatment to your unique journey.
Our supportive environment, flexible scheduling, and proven therapeutic outcomes ensure you feel heard, understood, and empowered to achieve lasting well‑being.
Areas of Expertise
Stress & Anxiety Management
Regain Harmony and Reduce Reactivity
We guide individuals using evidence-based techniques to reduce overwhelming anxiety, chronic stress, and depressive symptoms. Therapists employ structured approaches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to help clients identify and reframe distorted thought patterns that fuel these conditions, while introducing mindfulness practices that ground them in the present moment to lower physiological arousal. By strengthening coping skills and fostering self-compassion, clients learn to regain emotional balance and improve daily functioning, including work/life harmony. Ultimately, this process transforms the relationship with one’s inner critic into one of supportive observation, allowing individuals to navigate challenges with greater stability and reduced emotional reactivity.
Managing Relationships
Break Patterns and Build Deeper Connections
We assist clients in identifying and breaking harmful relational patterns, enhancing communication, and cultivating healthier attachment styles. Through guided self-reflection, therapy helps individuals trace recurring behaviors back to their origins, often rooted in past experiences or family dynamics, providing insight needed to interrupt automatic reactions before they escalate. Targeted interventions empower individuals to build stronger, more fulfilling connections while reducing conflict and emotional distress by teaching specific skills such as active listening, emotional regulation, and assertive expression of needs. The therapeutic relationship itself serves as a corrective emotional experience, offering a safe environment where clients can practice new ways of relating and receive immediate, constructive feedback on their interpersonal style.
Holistic Women’s Health
Support Through Every Stage of Life
Women’s health encompasses a wide spectrum of physical and emotional experiences that evolve throughout every stage of life, often requiring specialized care to navigate complex hormonal shifts and chronic conditions. We provide tailored therapeutic strategies for perimenopause and menopause, addressing mood fluctuations, sleep disturbances, and body-image concerns through evidence-based approaches. Our support extends to PMDD, PCOS, endometriosis, and fertility-related stress, empowering clients to navigate hormonal and physical changes with greater emotional resilience. We collaborate on lifestyle adjustments and stress-reduction techniques that complement medical treatments, creating a comprehensive plan for holistic health and renewed well-being.
Grief & Loss
Integrate Loss and Honor Your Journey
Our compassionate approach supports individuals navigating the full spectrum of grief, encompassing both death-related bereavement and non-death losses such as divorce, job changes, or health declines. We provide a safe space to process diverse grief experiences—including anticipatory, disenfranchised, traumatic, and complex grief—helping clients honor their emotions and integrate these profound losses into a new narrative. Through evidence-based techniques, we guide clients in developing adaptive coping strategies for adjusting to a new normal while validating the unique timeline and expression of their mourning. This work fosters resilience and creates space for meaning-making, allowing individuals to carry their losses forward without being defined solely by them.
Life Transitions
Navigate Change with Confidence and Clarity
Whether navigating divorce, co-parenting, career shifts, college enrollment, retirement, or caregiver stress, we provide practical tools and emotional support. Through individualized therapeutic sessions, clients learn to process complex emotions like grief, guilt, or anxiety that often accompany major life transitions, allowing them to move forward without being weighed down by unresolved feelings. We help clients develop concrete coping strategies—such as stress management techniques, communication skills for difficult conversations, and boundary-setting practices—that build sustainable resilience during periods of change. Additionally, therapy offers a safe space to explore shifting identities and expectations, helping individuals clarify their values, set realistic goals, and ultimately adapt to change with greater confidence and self-awareness.
Perinatal Mental Health
Support From Preconception Through Parenthood
We support individuals and families through the emotional and relational transitions of preconception, pregnancy, postpartum, and early parenthood. This includes care around miscarriage, infertility, abortion, stillbirth, and other forms of grief and loss. Our work is grounded in compassion and respect for the complexity of these experiences, offering space to process layered feelings that arise during this season of life. We help clients navigate adjustment to parenthood, including shifts in sense of self, body image, career, and partnership. We also focus on strengthening the parent-child bond, supporting secure attachment, and building confidence in caregiving instincts while honoring the full range of reproductive experiences.
Athlete Mental Health
Wellness and Resilience for All Involved in Sport
No matter what sport or level of competition, athletes and their allies face unique problems and experience mental health and wellness in distinctive ways. We help athletes manage anxiety, depression, perfectionism, performance pressure, injury recovery, and career transitions, including retirement from sport. We also understand the unique needs of athletes experiencing substance use and addiction, working collaboratively to help move toward recovery and building resilience—all in view of the long game. Our approach extends to coaches and parents, recognizing that the support system surrounding an athlete plays a critical role in sustained mental wellness and performance success.
Family Business Therapy
Navigating the Intersection of the Personal and Professional
We focus on the “why and how” the individual functions within the family business, exploring the unique psychological pressures of blending professional roles with deep-seated familial bonds. We guide clients in resolving interpersonal conflict, emotional distress, and relationship issues, working at the intersection of mental health, emotional dynamics, and generational transfers in family businesses. Our specialized approach helps leaders and family members navigate succession planning, role ambiguity, and the emotional weight of legacy, ensuring that business decisions are made with clarity rather than reactive emotion. By fostering open communication and establishing healthy boundaries, we empower families to sustain both their enterprise and their relationships across generations.
Trauma Recovery
Reclaim Safety and Restore Your Power
Through safe, collaborative modalities, we help clients process painful memories, rebuild a sense of safety, and develop resilient pathways toward healing and post-traumatic growth. Specialized trauma work may address religious trauma, childhood adversity, complex PTSD, military and first-responder experiences, and sexual trauma by utilizing evidence-based approaches like EMDR or clinical hypnotherapy to release stored tension and reprocess fragmented memories without overwhelming the nervous system. This tailored approach allows individuals to gradually reclaim agency and trust in their bodies, transforming the narrative of their past from one of victimization to one of survival and strength. Therapy provides the consistent, non-judgmental support necessary to integrate difficult experiences, fostering renewed capacity for connection and deeper understanding of one’s resilience.
Addiction Recovery
Build Resilience and Restore Autonomy
We work with individuals and loved ones affected by addiction to develop sustainable coping mechanisms, address underlying triggers, and foster healthier relational dynamics. With a focus on autonomy and empowerment, we guide clients toward authentic self-care and improved wellbeing. Our approach integrates evidence-based modalities to treat co-occurring mental health conditions, ensuring a holistic path to recovery that addresses the root causes of substance use. We facilitate family therapy sessions to repair trust and establish clear boundaries, creating a supportive environment that sustains long-term sobriety. By prioritizing relapse prevention planning and community connection, we help clients build a resilient foundation for a meaningful life beyond addiction.
Our story
Modern Mind Institute was founded in May 2025 by Dr. Stacy Kratz and Dr. Amber Ford to provide solution-focused, evidence-based support that helps clients navigate specific challenges and achieve meaningful life goals.
Co-Founder and Lead Clinician | Pronouns: She/Her
Stacy Kratz
Ph.D., LCSW
Co-Founder and Lead Clinician | Pronouns: She/Her
Amber Ford
Ed.D., LCSW
Meet Stacy Kratz
Stacy is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Professor with over two decades of clinical expertise, bridging high-level research and compassionate, individualized care. She has received multiple awards for helping patients navigate life’s most difficult transitions and remains grounded in the belief that every individual possesses the capacity for profound meaningful change.
Areas of Expertise
Mood, Stress, Depression & Anxiety Management: Evidence-based treatment for anxiety, depression, and work-related stress using trauma-informed approaches. Stacy helps clients break cycles of emotional distress and builds psychological flexibility needed to reclaim a sense of self-control and purpose across the lifespan.
High-Performance Support: Tailored interventions for professionals in high-pressure environments. Stacy addresses the unique intersection of perfectionism and burnout, providing tools to dismantle imposter syndrome and establish healthy professional boundaries.Her work focuses on shifting the definition of success from “exhaustion” to “sustainability,” ensuring career growth never comes at the expense of mental health.
Trauma & Recovery Clinical Specialization: Targeted guidance reducing symptoms of PTSD and Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) using a phase-oriented approach emphasizing safety, emotional regulation, and trauma processing. Key evidence-based approaches include TF-CBT, DBT, and ACT. Specializes in intergenerational trauma, sexual assault, domestic violence, and high-demand religious or spiritual abuse.
Expert in Addictions & Recovery: Certified Addictions Professional (CAP) and International Alcohol and Drug Counselor (IADC) offering recovery strategies for substance-related and behavioral addictive disorders. Stacy also focuses on therapy and strategies for family members and loved ones of those struggling with addiction.
Reproductive Mental Health Across the Lifespan: Comprehensive perinatal care including preconception, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, grief and loss, abortion (including medically-necessary terminations), and parent-child bonding. Also specializes in perimenopause / menopause, addressing emotional, cognitive, and psychological changes from fluctuating hormones.
Additional Specializations: Athlete mental health pioneer (co-founder, Sport Social Work Journal), family business therapy for resolving interpersonal conflict and generational transfers, and organizational training for sustainable social responsibility initiatives and mental health training systems.
Education
- PhD, University of South Florida
- MSW, University of South Florida
- BSW, University of South Florida
- BA, University of Southern Illinois; L’Université de Haute Bretagne (elle parle français à un niveau intermédiaire)
Certifications
- Certified Addictions Professional (CAP)working with individuals and families
- International Alcohol and Drug Counselor (IADC): Certified through the International Certification & Reciprocity Consortium (IC&RC)
- Certified Social Work Supervisor-Clinical Supervision & Leadership, Professor, and External Field Liaison
- Specialty training and research in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, Solution Focused Therapy, and Problem-Solving Therapy
Licensed states:
Meet Amber Ford
Amber Ford is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over two decades of experience serving adults and their loved ones across the lifespan. Drawing from a rich breadth of experience in medical social work, higher education, and private practice, she brings deep expertise to her collaborative approach. Her warm, non-judgmental style creates a brave space for clients to explore themselves and move forward with confidence. As a Mayo Clinic-trained Health & Wellness Coach, she integrates evidence-based approaches with comprehensive health strategies to support overall well-being.
Areas of Expertise
Life Transitions & Professional Challenges: Guidance through relationship changes, co-parenting, career shifts, and retirement. Clients clarify priorities, set realistic goals, and develop practical coping strategies for stress and identity shifts. Focuses on communication skills, boundary setting, and work-life harmony to empower resilience and purpose.
Chronic Illness & Medical Trauma: Support for navigating chronic illness, life-limiting conditions, and medical trauma. Therapy helps process emotional distress, develop coping strategies for symptom management, and empower clients to self-advocate and utilize available community resources. Addresses grief, adjustment challenges, and the psychological impact of medical experiences, fostering resilience and improving quality of life.
High-Achieving Humans: Targeted strategies addressing perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and burnout in demanding roles. Interventions focus on building self-compassion, setting healthy boundaries, and cultivating sustainable success without sacrificing well-being.
Caregiver Support: Trauma-informed support for family, friends, and professional caregivers managing chronic stress, compassion fatigue, and role overload. Focuses on establishing boundaries, enhancing self-compassion, and creating sustainable self-care routines. For professionals, addresses workplace burnout and vicarious trauma to maintain well-being while delivering high-quality care.
Grief & Loss: Compassionate, evidence-based therapy for anticipatory grief, death-related loss, and non-death losses. Helps clients safely process intense emotions, honor unique mourning rituals, and rebuild a sense of continuity and hope.
Relationship Abuse & Trauma Recovery: Collaborative treatment for complex PTSD, relationship abuse, religious trauma, and workplace toxicity. Therapy focuses on stabilizing the nervous system, processing fragmented memories, dismantling maladaptive beliefs, and rebuilding healthy relational patterns.
Education
- Ed.D. University of Southern California Rossier School of Education
- MSW, Eastern Washington University
- BSW, Azusa Pacific University
Qualifications
- Neurodivergent-Affirming Clinician
- National Board Certified
- Health & Wellness Coach
Certified Grief Educator