Christine Kwon is a licensed social worker and Staff Therapist with the Mindfulness & Behavior Therapies team at The Family Institute at Northwestern University. Her understanding of this work comes from years spent professionally embedded in the same systems many of her clients have encountered. Before becoming a therapist, Christine has previous experience within the legal system through public defense, helping humanize her clients within the court, and later in crisis and case management at the Cook County Sheriff's Police Department. That experience taught her how easily people can be reduced to one moment in their life, and it's part of why she brings so much care to seeing the whole person in front of her.

Christine's approach is grounded in radical humility, transparency, and respect. She takes a deeply relational approach to therapy, believing that healing and change begins with presence and connection – creating an environment of being seen and understood. She invites individuals to hold their history alongside her from the very start. As she puts it, “if all else, my job is to be a witness to who you are.” She doesn't rush toward resolution. Instead, she holds space for complexity, helping clients learn from their own experience so they can decide, with clarity and confidence, who they want to be and the lives they want to create.

She has a passion for working with individuals who have engaged in behavior that has caused harm onto others, such as in contexts of intimate partner violence or domestic violence. Christine is drawn to this work as she has spent years witnessing how cycles of harm have been shaped by experiences of adverse experiences and interpersonal violence. Much of her work is with men, although she also works with women, children, as well as survivors of violence.

Christine earned her Master of Arts in Clinical Social Work from the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at University of Chicago, and her Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her clinical training includes a fellowship program training in Contextually Focused Dialectical Behavior Therapy (C-DBT), and her clinical work draws from third-wave behavioral approaches, including DBT, C-DBT, and ACT-informed practices.