Today’s Guest: Not a stranger to struggles and possibilities from decades of life and career changes, profound loss, and personal reinvention, Kelly Hutton, LMFT, is a queer anti-racist ADHDer who specializes in queer grief, loss, and trauma recovery in the unique grief experiences of neurodivergent LGBTQIPA2+ people. Her passions include hospice care, EMDR, and talking about death, dying, bereavement, and neurocognitive decline with teens, caregivers/partners, and older adults while bearing witness to their grief journeys. Kelly grew up in a blended multicultural family of artists, educators, and entrepreneurs who strive in their own ways to think like Leonardo da Vinci. Kelly is glad that she isn’t dead yet because she can still experience and learn pluralistically, including being on a podcast for the first time ever, and remembering that those who laugh, last.
 
SHOW TOPICS

• The importance of considering different perspectives and taking an interdisciplinary approach to therapy
• The benefits of remaining curious and asking questions rather than resorting to “I don’t know”
• Getting back to the “why” of going into therapy and what is alive for us as therapists now
• Using lived experience to hold space for grief and sadness within the queer community

Today’s Guest: Valerie Ellis is an artist and former psychotherapist with a studio near west London. She uses paper to represent human experience and intrapersonal dynamics. Valerie gained her psychology degree from the prestigious University of Queensland, Australia. After 20 years in private practice, she moved back to the UK, where she'd lived as a child. In September 2023 she will begin attending the Royal College of Art for a master's degree in painting. With a psychological lens, Valerie’s artwork uniquely reflects themes like childhood, stress, and disguise through the medium of paper minimalist artworks and post-impressionist oil paintings.

SHOW TOPICS

• Facing the disillusionment of the idea that therapy can save everyone
• The importance of meeting people’s basic needs before being able to address further needs in therapy​
• Merging psychology and expression to create art pieces that reflect viewers' life journeys

Season 3, Episode 6

Today’s Guest: Katy MacRae, LCSW, is a psychotherapist based in New Haven, CT.  She has been working in private practice for over a decade, and she also works for the psychiatry department at Yale New Haven Hospital. Katy focuses on using artmaking and creativity to help people learn and remember DBT and CBT skills.  

SHOW TOPICS

• How art-making can help clients remember DBT and CBT skills
• What do you do with all of the art your clients create in therapy sessions? What about your own creations?
• Cultivating a private practice that sustains us as therapists 

Season 2, Episode 2

Today's Guest: Nattan Hollander, LMFT, was an artist first and became a psychotherapist along the way. He made art as a child in Israel, where he grew up, and later moved to the US to train in art and get his fine arts degree at CalArts in California. He was living in a Zen Center during that time, where he spent many hours meditating and learned to cook great soups for Zen retreats with a woman who soon became his wife. He earned his MA at Pacifica Graduate Institute, a school that emphasizes care of the soul as being central to mental health. This aligned with his own sensibilities as an artist. For Nattan, art and spirituality are inseparable. When he works with artists as a therapist, he treats their creative life as sacred.

SHOW TOPICS

• Wrestling with creativity and making within an institutional space
• Reconnecting with creation through writing an experiential thesis centered around meditation and imagination
• The importance of treating a client’s creative life as sacred and helping them find value in creation in a society that doesn’t always lift it up
• How lacking opportunity for expression and creativity can be a matter of life and death​