Season 6, Episode 9

​Today’s Guest: Zach Meyer, MA, LPC, is a licensed professional counselor who likes to say he has worked with students since he was one himself. From coaching high schoolers and working as a camp counselor to clinical positions in inpatient and outpatient settings, Zach has spent his career supporting teenagers and young adults to navigate the many challenges that accompany this developmental stage.

Zach has also spent his life in the arts, growing up in choirs and theater productions from grade school through college. He continues to write and record music, and he released his first full-length album last summer. At the intersection of these two interests lie Zach's greatest passion: the relationship between art-making and our mental health.
He and his wife — a psychologist — have a private therapy practice in the Milwaukee area. When not doing therapy or making music, Zach is probably hanging out with his wife, three kids and two dogs, or working on the restoration of their historic 1913 home.
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SHOW TOPICS

• Doing preventative work with teenagers while they’re in a more malleable stage of life
• The power of stories in therapy and music making
• Helping teenagers discover their own narrative to uncover their goals, passions, and intrinsic values beyond what outside sources are telling them to believe
• Striving to take the pressure off artists so they can create something meaningful in the moment

Season 6, Episode 8

Today’s Guest: Dr. Madeline Ofina is a speaker, community educator, Clinical Psychologist, and Mental Health Consultant. Her training focused on program evaluation, the Wellness and Recovery model of mental health, and serious, persistent mental illness. After her clinical training and work in the hospital system, she realigned her work and decolonized her mind and practice through training and studying decolonizing mental health and liberation psychology. She founded MO-fina Wellness and Education, an education and spiritual business, and separately owns a Private Practice working with predominantly BIPOC adult children of immigrants on healing from intergenerational trauma, racial trauma, and oppression through decolonization.
 
SHOW TOPICS

• The marriage between creativity and spirituality both in and out of therapy
• Pushing back against the idea of using spirituality to avoid pain and suffering
• Dr. Ofina's journey to decolonize her work and align it with social justice and liberation principles
• The tug of war between wanting to work inside or outside the field of therapy
• Framing the insidious nature of colonization within the framework of mental health

Season 6, Episode 7

Today’s Guest: Kristy Snedden, LCSW, has been a Brainspotting enthusiast since 2013 and is a Brainspotting consultant with a specialty endorsement in Brainspotting with children and adolescents. She runs “Brainspotting Through the Poet’s Eye” which is a monthly group for Brainspotting therapists/writers and offers online webinars and writing retreats. 

​Kristy lives in the Appalachian Mountains of northeast Georgia where she maintains a full-time private practice. She specializes in working with trauma, attachment, and creativity, with a special interest in Brainspotting and Creative Writing. 

In her spare time Kristy is a poet, and her poetry appears or is forthcoming in a variety of national and international online and print journals and anthologies. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2023 recipient of the Small Orange Press Emerging Woman Poet prize. She serves as the Book Review Editor for Anti-Heroin Chic and studies at Phillip Schulz’s Writers Studio. When not working or writing, she can be found hiking or hanging out with her husband listening to their dogs tell tall tales. 

SHOW TOPICS

• How Brainspotting helped Kristy open up her creativity and strengthen her determination to help clients unlock their creativity as well
• Encouraging Brainspotting clients to get curious, compassionate, and nonjudgmental
• What it’s like doing Brainspotting with kids
• Busting myths around what it’s like to work with creative clients

Season 6, Episode 6

Today’s Guest: Barry Hill is a now kinda retired LMFT clinician and Rady Children's Hospital AAMFT-certified Clinical Supervisor. He was adjunct faculty at San Diego State University in the Department of Counseling and School Psychology for eleven years. He has had over 500 counseling students and trained 70 MFT and Psychology interns. His speciality is Post-Modern approaches to Family Therapy. He has always played guitar, composed, and sung in some format. From early bluegrass bands, through electric blues and hard rock in the 1970s and '80s to original indie rock in the 2010s to now acoustic singer songwriter. He recently completed an album of original acoustic material. He is now 74 years old and the name of the new album is "74." He performs around San Diego, mostly at songwriter showcases and circles. He also sometimes performs with his multi-talented musician son, Matthew Hill. Barry tells us he is filled with gratitude for his "place in the world" at this time of his life.   

SHOW TOPICS

• Bringing an interactive and collaborative approach to educating and training new therapists
• What to do or say when we don’t know what comes next in the therapy room
• The freedom and out-of-the-box nature of working with “difficult” clients
• Shifting to focusing on solutions rather than problems in therapy by asking clients who they want to become and what small steps they can take to achieve that

Today’s Guest: Laura Lewis-Barr was a graduate student in clinical psychology but eventually switched majors and earned her M.A. in theatre. In 2019 Laura began making stop motion films focused on fairy tales. Laura is now an award-winning filmmaker and educator. Her focus is on animating fairy tales and mythic stories for personal and collective transformation. She is inspired by the works of ML Von Franz, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Michael Meade. Laura's films are made in her basement in Chicago, and her screening events are filled with heart and questions for the soul.

SHOW TOPICS

• How fairy tales can give insight into how our psyches are working and resonate with our daily lives
• Laura’s experience as a storyteller through stop motion film
• Pursuing the crafts that we love within a capitalist society