Concepts | Arttherapyalchemy

How I work

There are many concepts I draw from and work with in my practice to create a process that is tailored to your healing needs.

Each person is unique, and I believe individuals have their own intrinsic knowledge of what is helpful and healing to them.

I take an Adlerian approach of walking alongside my clients as a guide in their personal process. To me, this means I blend a positive, person-centered and strengths-based approach in my style. I pair this with social justice work, cultural aspects, art, creative conversation, and blend in kind and thoughtful care and humor with my clients and students.

Below are a list of ideas and concepts that often come up in my work with clients and in art making.

Art Making

Art allows the unspeakable to be spoken. Through art making we can enter into a flow state, which has a myriad of health benefits for all individuals, regardless of confidence or the myth of talent.

Strengths-based Resourcing

In knowing what we are capable of, we discover more agency and fluidity to move through challenges, interpersonal relationships, and nervous system responses finding more ease.

Spiritual Grounding & Magic

Core values are essential for healing and growth. No matter your spiritual background or status, your beliefs are a part of your healing path and when explored can offer new supports and internal infrastructure.

Coaching Transitions

I endeavor to have an open, non-judgmental stance to life changes and transitions of all kinds. Movement is how we know something is alive and breathing, and curiosity helps us find what is true and deeply needed.

Creating Deeper Meaning

Through metaphor and meaning-making we can develop a concept of what is possible in our grief, loss, and painful past and feelings. This also can be a place for resourcing.

Identity Forming

Hard earned and often forged in fire, core identity leads to more ease and fluidity in the internal and external worlds and struggles, including decisions.

Honoring Lineage

Part of our anti-discrimination, anti-racist & anti-ableist orientation work is in understanding our own lineage and DNA ancestry. Part of this for many Americans is repairing ancestral debts and honoring ancestral blessings left behind. I endeavor to integrate decolonial, anti-oppressive, and liberatory praxis into our work.

Trauma-informed Psychodynamic Approach

Using psychotherapy and psychodynamics, we identify emotions, behaviors and challenges together using an intersectional systems awareness and trauma-informed approach. We will consider resources create to do difficult things in our decision making for greater ease in life.

Storytelling

Storytelling and narrative is part of trauma healing, reparation and integration. This expression can use metaphor to enhance resilience and transform trauma narratives and allows us to explore, restructure, reframe and re-story loss.

Ritual Arts

Non-verbal creative personal practices can be empowering and life-affirming. Working with creative expressive art therapy we foster creative experimentation, expansion, and discover a new way of coping, relating, and thriving.

Queer Cross-cultural Approach

All people are impacted by the systems in which they (we) live and we balance risk and resilience factors in all paradigms outside of the dominant pervasive culture. We take action and derive brilliance from our strong and ever-growing community until "your very existence is an act of rebellion" [A.Camus].

Wayfinding

Our histories and DNA offer many truths and insights into our gifting, our needs, and our desires. Through acknowledging and honoring what is true in our bodies, preference arrives, and way-finding helps us orient to our environment and create lives and pathways that make sense for us.