Kathy J. Hoppe has spent over thirty years in rooms where people are suffering—a hospice, an eating disorder program, a residential facility for adolescents, an employee assistance program, a church lay counseling ministry. She is a licensed marital and family therapist since 1991 & holds two doctorates, an EdD in community care and counseling with a trauma focus from Liberty University and a Doctor of Ministry from Oral Roberts, plus a Master of Divinity, a Master of Science in Psychology, and postgraduate training in family systems. She is currently the Chair of Behavioral Sciences at ORU and the author of 14 books and articles.

She sees the shape of a problem before other people have finished describing it. One colleague said, "You're so good at seeing the problem, analyzing it, and making things happen." Another called her a visionary; several administrators commend her work. She is the sort of person other people start borrowing.

She holds two things at once that usually don't travel together—clinical depth and administrative competence.

Her signature move is refusing to reduce a person to a category. That's the through-line from the hospice work to the trauma textbook to the current book. Her calling statement—"I am here to witness suffering, to walk with those who suffer, and to point the way to hope and healing"—is a sentence she arrived at after burning out on the belief that her job was to fix people.

What people say after reading her. A licensed psychologist compared her argument to an orchestra building to a crescendo and then resolving into a "diminuendo melody of solutions," and said her readers realize within minutes that they're reading "an artistically formulated creation that fully understands the human condition." A ministry director who reads her as a wounded healer in Nouwen's sense.