You will be faced with facing all the things in yourself that keep you from knowing who you are, you'll have to stand up to roles and definitions that your family and culture have given you.
My mother used to say, "When you can learn to laugh at yourself, a lot of healing comes from that."
When I am ever in any situation that's getting too heavy, I lighten it up with humor.
I have known know many therapists who come out of Pacifica Graduate Institute and love being both artists and therapists at the same time, like Maureen Murdock. They are photographers and dancers and other kinds of things and therapists at the same time. I think it really makes them a much more interesting therapist because they're so engaged with the imagination and the creativity and the depths of who they are.
The unconscious mind is way bigger than the conscious mind. Using tools to access its wisdom and self-organizing features is powerful medicine.
If you can see yourself more than just a victim, aha, now you've got the place to move into that is much more vital and creative and is resourceful than being a victim.
Working with the body and the imagination - non-verbal ways especially - tap into our deepest wounds and our highest potentials as humans.
I had a client who just wanted to entertain me the whole time, that is a defense against going deep, in my mind. What happens when the jokester is not allowed to deflect with humor? You then have to feel the pain, and learn that you can survive it. It makes you more resilient and stronger in the long run, and your sense of humor will always be there. Being able to see the funny is deep.
I remember going on vacation for two weeks once and one of my clients who was very clinically depressed really could not handle it, really unraveled himself. That scared me. I didn't want to be in that position.
Coming into Pacifica I knew that I wanted whatever I was going to learn there, I knew I wanted to integrate that into my art no matter what.
Going through these academic programs, your job really is to learn how to be a therapist. They're training you to sit in front of clients and it's a serious matter. You're holding people's psyches.
[Humor] could be dicey for a therapist and needs to be used very deftly.
I didn't have a calling to be a therapist. I really went to Pacifica for a very specific kind of life experience, to really kind of find my path in a deeper way.
If you're never called, then you don't know any better. If you are called and don't answer the call, then that is the most difficult and painful. If you are called and do answer the call, it is the adventure of your life.
The work is important and essential and I've had a therapist myself for decades and it's important work, but I knew that I wanted to work with people who are more functioning and that's when I decided to pursue my performance career full-time.
Being successful as a creative person is a crapshoot, but it's essential if you feel drawn to being creative that you express it.
This has been my struggle for years - the pull between wanting to be in the spotlight and yet also to make a difference in the world. Lately I've come to conclude that I can be a "selfish" artist that focuses on issues of individuation, power, and freedom.
For me, psychology and art interact and overlap in so many ways. Psychology is the study of the inner life and creativity comes from the imagination and a response to the environment, as you know. So they're both very similar in that way because it's about one's inner life interacting with the environment and what comes from that.
There's a grip we sometimes some of us get on our pain and suffering and our past and our wounding that we over-identify with it. If we laugh at it, we're saying, "Oh, I'm laughing at myself, which means my victimhood isn't all of who I am."
Right before I went to Pacifica, I had written and performed a one-woman show and I consider that to be my original art form. Spaulding Grey and Karen Finley and other spoken word artists and performance artists really very much interested me, that art form.
I took everything really seriously and was overly sensitive about things, and I think that's rooted in perfectionism.
I used to be a person that wasn't able to laugh at myself easily.
There's a real careful line you have to walk there because your first job [therapist] is to create safety for the client to feel safe enough to turn their vision in towards themselves and their experience in the moment and to reveal things that usually carry a lot of shame or that kind of stuff around.
When I did my first solo show and it made my dad uncomfortable, I wasn't quite ready for my spotlight moment in my life yet. I didn't have enough sense of myself and self-esteem and confidence: this is when I started looking to get my master's in something.
I didn't think I'd be a good therapist. I didn't think I could do both at the same time. Maybe some people can, but I wanted a bigger spotlight and I don't think that's right for clients to have a therapist who wants that kind of life.
