Healing Approaches

I use the Expressive Arts, Parts Work, and a Person Centered approach for my coaching sessions and group work. 

Expressive Arts Therapy

I am trained at the Masters level in methods for using any and all of the arts therapies as a support for soul work.

Expressive Arts is a form of psychotherapy that uses tools, methods and attitudes sourcing from creative practices including visual art, music, performance, dance, creative writing, and play.

As fits for a person, we may bring in elements of visual art making (drawing, building things out of clay, painting and so on, what I would call roughly “making things”), dance (expressing with the body through its natural language of movement), drama, play, sandplay, music, storytelling, and writing.

Talking and reflecting is also a part of the work. We weave between these modalities as a natural process unfolds from the wild within you.

Parts Work

Parts Work, or Internal Family Systems, was developed and articulated by Richard Schwartz, but Carl Jung, James Hillman, and Roberto Assagioli are all important figures in the development of a way of working that understands the inner world is populated by many characters. Many ancient healing practices and shamanic traditions work with this natural truth as well. 

Our sub-personalities are often archetypal in nature, meaning that all human psyches have some version of this archetype working inside them. However even if universal in some ways, it is a joyful, sometimes scary, and fascinating process to get to know all the unique and highly personal versions of inner selves that exist inside of us. 

Symptoms and troubles are more amenable to treatment, if held with positive regard, recognition, and an attitude of curious compassion. Symptoms are communications from split off parts of ourselves who are calling out to get our attention because they need love, support, witnessing, understanding of their experience and point of view before they can move on, and before we can be expected to drop our entanglement with them. Once a part's story has been fully uncovered, told, heard, and empathized with, the part can unfreeze and will often dissolve into reunification with oneness or evolve into a new, higher-vibrational form.

It is a general truth that inner and outer troubles need attention, understanding, forgiveness, and our recognition before they can move on from “bothering us”. I therefore engage with troubles as though they are alive beings, sides and parts of a person whose belonging to the inner tribe of self must be restored. Like outcasts and scapegoats who need to be brought back into the fold, many of our symptoms are merely the distorted expression of natural parts of our psyches that have been severely marginalized, and as such, forced to live in isolation and misunderstanding that has caused them to degrade and digress into "shadow forms". 

I like to work with people to activate their true benevolent Self as leader of their inner community of parts. This work is profoundly liberating, touching, and fun, and works perfectly with the arts.

Person Centered

The Person Centered approach rests on unconditional positive regard, and is a way in to purpose-actualization that prioritizes self-alignment and self-connection over any method or technique.

One of the personal experiences that I have had which has been validated in my professional experience is that the single most powerful healing factor is for a person to develop a connection to their own healing power, whatever that may be. It does not have to be religious, in fact my personal opinion is that religion has done much harm in giving people the idea that there is one specific Father God (and one that's often a bit tyrannical, judgmental and difficult, if the truth is told) and that you aren’t allowed to have your own personal experience of it/him/her/them/yourself.

We all have the right to connect with our Source (or whatever name fits for you) in our own unique way, and I will always work in a way which holds the idea that your Source and your Source-assigned guardians (benevolent forces working within the law of one) know best. That means that I see my role not as healing you myself per se but more like facilitating you in connecting with them.

Coaching

My Masters in Counseling Psychology Program at California Institute of Integral Studies prepared me to be license-eligible according to legal and ethical requirements to practice psychotherapy as a Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT) in the State of California. Throughout years of clinical internships and practicing in different states I completed more than the 3000 supervised clinical hours typically required for licensure by state psychology boards. I worked with children, families, couples, the homeless, dual diagnosis, severe and chronic mental illness, addictions treatment, juvenile justice, and in private practice.

However, I do not now work as a clinician, which means I do not work under the governance of the Board of Psychology, but rather independently as a coach. This is both because the healing work I do (which spans contexts and no longer takes place within purely clinical structures) is more accurately called coaching than psychotherapy, and also because of my preference for autonomy from the medical model.

The coaching frame allows me to work in a way that is a more natural and authentic fit to my true healer identity in congruence with what I personally have found to be true in my journey of healing and working with others.

If you have questions about my education, training, certification, and whether my healing approaches will be appropriate for you, please do not hesitate to ask.

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Thumbnail image reverently appropriated from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, illustrated by Nancy Ekholm Burkert