About Kodie
Therapy is a relationship, too.
I'm Kodie Mobbs, LCSW (Idaho) / LICSW (Washington). I'm a therapist, a lifelong horse person, and someone who believes good therapy requires both clinical skill and genuine human connection.
I don't see my role as being the authority on your life. I bring years of clinical experience, training, curiosity, pattern recognition, and a willingness to stay with complexity. You bring the experience of actually being you. Good therapy makes room for both.
I tend to be curious about the things people do rather than immediately deciding those things are problems to eliminate. Our ways of coping, connecting, protecting ourselves, achieving, withdrawing, caretaking, controlling, or pushing through usually developed in a context. Understanding that context matters, even when those same patterns are no longer working particularly well.
You don't have to tell your story perfectly, have the right insight, or perform therapy correctly here.
Horses were meaningful to me long before they were clinically meaningful.
I began riding in sixth grade, initially with a neighbor's mules, and eventually entered the worlds of local mule shows, gaming, and barrel racing. Later came Jazz, a young Arabian mare. Neither of us knew everything we were doing.
We learned a lot together.
Long before I had words like attunement, nervous-system awareness, or relational patterns, I was learning to pay attention to another living being. I was learning how communication could happen without words, how much could be noticed through movement and response, and what it felt like when connection seemed to click.
Some of my strongest memories with horses are much simpler than any clinical explanation I could give them: moving across an open field, wind in my face, hoofbeats underneath me, and the feeling that for a moment nothing else mattered.
Horses were also a consistent presence during difficult and destabilizing parts of my childhood and adolescence. My experience of them was grounding and meaningful before I ever imagined that relationship having a place in my professional life.
By around 2010, I had begun imagining becoming a therapist and somehow bringing horses into that work. The idea behind Whispering Winds grew from that early sense of connection—connection with the earth, with ourselves, with other living beings, and eventually with one another.
At the time, I didn't have a clinical framework for any of it.
The language came later. So did the clinical understanding. The experience came first.
The dream started finding a professional shape.
During graduate school, I completed my second-year internship at Yellowhawk Tribal Health Center, serving the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. I later returned to Yellowhawk as a staff clinician and remained there until my family moved out of the area.
During my time there, the community was exploring what bringing Horse Medicine into the reservation, clinic, community, and culture might look like within its own cultural context. When invited, I had opportunities to participate in parts of that process, including a weekend of demonstrations and experiential learning with Indigenous therapists from other communities who were incorporating horses into therapeutic work with the populations they served.
It was the first time something I had imagined for years began to feel as though it might actually have a professional place.
Their work wasn't mine to replicate, nor were their cultural practices mine to take. What the experience gave me was permission to recognize something about my own path: the relationship between horses and psychotherapy didn't have to remain an idea I carried privately.
Whispering Winds Therapy began in 2020, and I moved into full-time private practice in 2021. My clinical work later also included several years within the VA, where I worked with Veterans in an integrated primary-care setting while Whispering Winds continued alongside that work.
In 2026, I left the VA and returned my full professional focus to Whispering Winds.
Across those settings, my understanding of trauma continued to deepen. So did my understanding of how much human experience exists beyond what we can explain cognitively.
My relationship with horses kept teaching me, too.
My adult relationship with horses has not been a tidy story about overcoming fear.
I experienced a significant horse accident when I was 18, but that accident did not create the riding fear I experienced later. Fear showed up during entirely different seasons of my life—after having children, following significant medical experiences, during periods of anxiety, and at times when I felt less connected to myself.
That distinction matters to me because our responses don't always fit into neat cause-and-effect stories.
There were times when horses still represented freedom to me while fear was present too. I became more interested in what happened when I stopped treating fear as something I needed to defeat and instead became curious about what my body was communicating.
As my training in trauma, somatic work, and nervous-system responses deepened, I also began recognizing something else in my relationships with horses: I could become so focused on being attuned to the horse that I stopped being attuned to myself.
Patterns I noticed there were relevant elsewhere in my life, too.
The question became less about whether I could connect and more about whether I could remain connected to myself while being in relationship.
That understanding now influences how I think about connection in therapy. Connection doesn't require sameness, constant closeness, or abandoning your own needs in order to understand someone else. It can make room for boundaries, difference, fear, agency, movement toward and away, and the possibility of staying present with yourself while another person has an experience of their own.
Clinical experience across very different lives
My clinical experience has taken me across the lifespan—from work involving pregnancy, parenting, and very young children through adolescence, adulthood, and later life. I've worked with people as young as two and as old as 102.
That breadth has reinforced something I continue to believe: understanding a person requires curiosity about the world in which their ways of being developed.
My work has included community mental health, Tribal health, private practice, integrated health care, and several years working with Veterans. I've worked with trauma, anxiety, relationships, parenting, childhood and family experiences, identity, life transitions, crisis, and the complicated ways people adapt to what has happened around them.
My current practice focuses on children age 6 and older, adolescents, and adults.
Culture and context matter.
Clinical training can teach us a great deal about human behavior. It can also make it very easy to look at someone through a framework before we have taken enough time to understand the world they live in.
My work in Tribal health deepened my awareness of the importance of culture, history, community, identity, and systems in understanding a person's experience. Working with Veterans reinforced that lesson in a different context; military and Veteran communities have their own language, expectations, experiences, values, and ways of making meaning.
Cultural humility, to me, includes recognizing the limits of my own perspective and remaining willing to learn. That can mean talking directly about culture, race, identity, power, difference, belonging, or disconnection when those things matter to you. It can also mean understanding that someone's relationship with their own culture or heritage may be complicated, distant, evolving, or difficult to name.
I don't assume that knowing something about a group means I know what it means to be you.
What it's like to work with me
I'm warm, curious, relational, and generally pretty comfortable with complexity. I'm also direct when directness is useful.
I'm not interested in sitting across from you as a blank clinical wall, and I'm not going to pretend I don't notice patterns because naming one might feel uncomfortable. Sometimes I might call you on your shit. I'll try to do it with care, curiosity, and respect for the fact that there may be a very good reason the thing I'm noticing exists.
You also get to call me on mine.
Therapy is collaborative, which means there should be room to tell me when something doesn't land, when I've misunderstood you, when you need something different, or when you disagree with me. I don't expect you to protect me from your experience of our work together.
I take the work seriously. I don't believe that requires taking myself seriously every minute we're doing it.
Training and professional background
I earned my Master of Social Work from Walla Walla University and hold clinical social-work licenses in Idaho and Washington. I also provide clinical supervision. My continuing clinical training has focused on trauma, attachment, somatic and nervous-system-informed approaches, relationship work, and psychotherapy across a range of settings and populations.
My more specialized training includes Somatic Experiencing Foundations training, EQUUSOMA® Horse-Human Trauma Recovery, Gottman Method Level I training, and Strength at Home. I am an EQUUSOMA® Level 2 student who has completed all Level 1 and Level 2 training modules and is working toward the program’s Certificate Track requirements. My broader clinical work has also drawn from CBT, DBT-informed interventions, Motivational Interviewing, attachment-based approaches, play, art, and trauma-informed care.
I don't believe a long list of acronyms tells you whether you'll feel understood by a therapist. Training matters. So does the person using it.
Outside of work
Horses remain part of my life outside of work. I've also spent plenty of years being a horse and rodeo mom while watching my children develop relationships with horses of their own.
I enjoy making art in more forms than I probably need, listening to music, reading, good food, and the parts of life that have absolutely nothing to do with psychotherapy.
Whispering Winds grew from a long-standing belief that connection matters. My understanding of what healthy connection actually asks of us has become much more nuanced over the years.
For me now, the question isn't simply whether we can connect.
It's whether we can be in relationship without having to leave ourselves behind.