What originally drew you to the field of art therapy? Can you tell us about your academic journey?
I've always been someone who has loved the way art--all forms of art--helps us see ourselves more clearly and make meaning from our experience. From my earliest experiences of seeing my own feelings on the faces of children in paintings at art museums and making art to express myself, I have been drawn to art-making as meaning-making. Also from an early age, I've been fascinated by human psychology and relationships, but just studying those things has never been enough for me. I earned a B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Art History in college and began a Psy.D. program in Clinical Psychology a year after graduating, but I quickly concluded that a research and assessment focus was not for me. I felt the program I was in lacked the soul and creativity I hadn't known I would want in my training and, ultimately, in my career. I wanted depth, creativity, even spiritual connection in my work, something that was more humanistic and existential than what I saw in my first semester of grad school, and definitely something less medical model. I had done an independent study on art therapy with children as part of a self-directed practicum I did at McLean Hospital in Boston during my senior year of college at Brandeis University, so I had an idea of what else I might want to try if not clinical psychology.
As I floundered through a personal and career identity crisis at the age of 23, it began to dawn on me that the artistic creativity and uniquely flexible, relational, and transpersonal elements of art therapy were what I was missing. I left the Psy.D. program I was attending in the San Francisco area after a semester and began an Associate's degree in Studio Art, with the goal of starting a Master's in art therapy after getting the A.A. and completing the pre-requisites I needed to apply to art therapy programs. I returned to Boston for graduate school and in 2004, I graduated from Lesley University's M.A. in Mental Health Counseling and Expressive Therapy program with a specialization in Art Therapy. It was a tough decision between Lesley and Naropa, but I knew Boston and I was drawn to the intermodal expressive arts therapy focus at Lesley. Who knew I would get the chance, years later, to move to Colorado and eventually become friends and colleagues with Naropa grads and supervise Naropa art therapy students in their practicums and internships?
While at Lesley, I wrote a thesis on using Day-of-the-Dead inspired interventions in expressive therapy for grief work. I lost my mom 2 years before starting grad school and I was deeply motivated to find ways to use art therapy to help others navigate the grief process, as I had done. During the program, I did a practicum on an inpatient unit for adolescents and an internship at an inner city day program for seniors. I loved working with the seniors there and those I worked with as a Bereavement Coordinator at a Boston hospice a few years later. Today, some of my favorite work is with the older adults I see in my practice who want to use art to review their life stories and explore how they want to live the last chapters of their lives. After grad school and several art therapy and counseling jobs in New York City, I moved back to Boston again and earned my counseling license and art therapist registration in 2007. I've been working as an art therapist and psychotherapist since 2004 with a range of populations in a variety of settings, including private practice. I will have been exclusively in private practice for 5 years in June of this year.
Can you talk about the power of art therapy in your life and your work?
Art therapy has been critical to not just my professional development but my personal development. For those familiar with the Enneagram, I'm a Type 4, which is a personality type characterized by depth, intimacy, and creativity. I'm so grateful that my personal and professional trajectories led me to art therapy, because it allows me to be and understand my authentic self, as well as integrate and heal what is painful and difficult in life. When I was 24, shortly after I left the Psy.D. program I had begun, my mom died of Myelodysplastic Disorder, after years of remission from Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. I saw a social worker for therapy before and after her death, which was supportive, but it was through working with a wonderful art therapist named Wendy Miller, (check out her book, Sky Above Clouds: Finding Our Way Through Creativity, Aging, and Illness!) that I began the deep healing that has shaped my personal and professional life since. I'm a thinker--I easily get caught up in the world of mind--but art therapy has allowed me to connect with my feelings, intuition, body, and spirit--all of which balances me out and allows me to be the kind of person and therapist I want to be. I returned to art therapy with another art therapist while living in Brooklyn, New York a few years later, and then with a third art therapist here in Colorado, to work through a miscarriage and fertility challenges. Art therapy is a little bit like a religion for me; I believe in it, I practice it, it puts me in relationship with others, and it connects me to the depth and beauty of Life. It brings me so much meaning and joy to guide and companion others in making art to understand themselves better and make meaning of their own experience.
From your point of view, what is the most important thing to keep in mind when working as an art therapist?
16+ years after graduating from my Master's program, I still return to the maxims I learned at Lesley, things we hear again and again in the field: Meet the client where he or she is. Trust the process. Do self-care. The longer you do this work, the more you understand about how all of that works and how important these ideas are. We all want to use what we know and feel comfortable with to help our clients, but sometimes the particular intervention or even modality we're practicing doesn't fit the client, at least not then. It's crucial to have other ways of working than art-making and verbal therapy to meet people where they are, and to know when to shift the pace, the approach, or even the therapist. Flexibility is key--flexibility to change course, listen and use what's arising in the moment without attachment to agenda, a need for authority, or narrow notions of what therapy is and isn't. Non-verbal communication is a huge element, as is mindfulness of our internal and external states. We can partner with our clients only when we meet them where they are, not where we want them to be. WIthout this, there can be no trust and without trust there will be no process of growth. The process of growth is the process we mean when we say, "trust the process," as well as the creative process and the therapeutic process. When we trust that a process of growth will unfold if we let it, we can release ourselves from an unrealistic expectation to control the process and do the work for the client. When we trust the process we practice faith in art itself to reveal what is needed and faith in people to create their way to growth.
What are some important self-care practices you recommend or practice?
I try to devote some time to my own art-making once in a while, but to be honest, writing poetry and singing are my preferred creative and expressive outlets. I consume art more than I create it when I go to museums and galleries, watch movies, and listen to music of all genres. I have children, so I need to shift my attention away from my clients to my family throughout the day, which, ironically, allows me to have good boundaries. Even if I wanted to spend more time thinking about my clients or doing more research and training than I already do, I can't if I'm going to have the time and energy I need for my family. I also need movement, especially when I'm doing lots of teletherapy. I do yoga, workout, hike, ski, and go see live music (in normal times). I'm in a book club and watch a fair amount of tv and movies. I have lots of interests, and I need to shift my focus to other things, away from the intensity of therapeutic relationships and clinical issues, to stay balanced anyway. I love traveling, and spending time with my husband, cat, kids, friends, and other people outside the field is important to me, but I also have 2 consultation groups to keep me grounded and supported in the work. I also highly recommend devoting energy to creating a home that feels like a nest: comfortable, safe, calming, and reflects your authentic self. I love interior design, so shopping and designing for a big home reno is my current self-care (and stress at the same time).
Are you working on anything now that you’re really excited about?
As some of you know, I wrote a chapter for the recently-published book Art Therapy and Childbearing Issues: Birth, Death, and Rebirth, edited by our own Nora Swan-Foster here in Colorado. My chapter, "Motherhood Rounds it Out: Art Therapy with Mothers Without Mothers," was both a personal labor of love and a reflection of one of my professional specialties, "motherless daughters" and "motherless mothers." The book went to publication within a few months of the 20th anniversary of my mom's death, so it felt like an important milestone in my ongoing grief process--a tribute to my mom and a way to connect with her, as well as a reflection of my post-traumatic growth, a way to transform personal pain into a means of helping others to whom I can relate. It was so meaningful to be able to use what I've learned through years of personal art-making, art therapy, doing art therapy with others, and engaging with the grief process to help students and other art therapists working with these therapeutic issues. Right now, I'm looking for opportunities to continue to share this work with other psychotherapists, art therapists, and motherless mothers themselves. I'd love to do more writing, develop resources for motherless mothers to use outside of formal therapy, and increase my focus on this specialty in my private practice, Focal Point Art Therapy + Counseling in Wheat Ridge.
How important is it to collaborate with your art therapy colleagues?
Art therapy can be a lonely field; it is small and little understood by the general public and our mainstream healthcare colleagues. It's been important to me to stay in touch with colleagues, especially since opening my own practice, so I don't feel isolated and have a source of moral support, clinical consultation, and client referrals specific to our field. And I want to offer all that to others in our community, especially to new art therapists trying to navigate their way through entry level jobs, getting credentialed, opening practices, and learning how to blend art therapy with other modalities. Early on in my career I worked in a large department of expressive therapists in an urban psychiatric hospital, and it was great to start out in the often difficult field of mental health with other like-minded therapists, several of whom were much more experienced than I was. They helped me learn how to work with non-art therapists and seriously ill patients in a challenging environment. Mid-career now, I feel comfortable on my own in my work and business, but I'll always value learning from other art therapists, collaborating on projects that advance our field and serve our clients, and mentoring art therapists who are new in the field.
How would you like to see the field of art therapy evolve in the coming years?
I would like to see somatic, trauma-informed interventions incorporated into art therapy and art therapy education more consistently across populations and clinical issues. This is the future of mental health care and deserves to be embraced by our field. We also need to be a visible, committed part of the movement to be a fully inclusive society with truly equal opportunity for all. In doing our part to help dismantle systemic bias and discrimination, we need to diversify our field and find ways to connect clients of all backgrounds with art therapy. I would like to see art therapy programs recruit BIPOC and LGBTQ+ professors and students, and agencies and art therapists in the field do what they can to increase representation in clinical settings and reach underserved populations. I would also like to see art therapists licensed in every state in the U.S. and our modality treated as the profession it is by state regulatory bodies and insurance companies.
