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

Today’s Guest: Dr. Jamie Marich began her career as a humanitarian aid worker in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 2000 to 2003, primarily teaching English and music. Jamie now travels internationally teaching on topics related to trauma, EMDR therapy, expressive arts, mindfulness, and yoga, while maintaining a private practice and online education operations in her home base of Akron, OH. She is the founder of the Institute for Creative Mindfulness and the developer of the Dancing Mindfulness approach to expressive arts therapy.

She is also the author of several books, including EMDR Made Simple: 4 Approaches for Using EMDR with Every Client (2011), Creative Mindfulness (2013), Dancing Mindfulness: A Creative Path to Healing and Transformation (2015), and Process Not Perfection: Expressive Arts Solutions for Trauma Recovery (2019). Her latest release, Dissociation Made Simple: A Stigma-Free Guide to Embracing Your Dissociative Mind and Navigating Life, came out in January 2023. She also has three more projects in the works, including her personal memoir about surviving spiritual abuse called You Lied to Me About God, due out in Autumn 2024. She has been featured in several publications, including The New York Times and the Huffington Post, as well as receiving several awards for her advocacy work.

SHOW TOPICS

• The reasons people may be scared of creativity and how to encourage them through that fear
• The beauty of grounding in EMDR techniques while also finding room for expression and adaptation
• How creative clients can find a therapist who is a great fit for them
• As a therapist, how much should we reveal about ourselves to clients and in public forums?
• Breaking the stigma around mental illness as therapists by finding and accepting support for ourselves within the therapeutic community

Today’s Guests: Tracy Sondern is a therapist and creator of the group Ageism and the Creative Professional. She spent over 30 years working in the world of fashion, celebrity and advertising photography in both New York and Los Angeles. Much of that time was spent as the creative partner to her husband, a successful photographer. Her interest in therapy for creatives stems from supporting her husband through the emotional ups and downs of the business, through several reinventions, and helping him stay creatively alive. 

Alyce Waxman is currently training for licensure as a Marriage and Family Therapist and Professional Clinical Counselor at Southern California Counseling Center, where she sees individuals as well as run two groups: Ageism and the Creative Professional and the Relational and Support Group. She is earning her master's degree at Antioch University in Los Angeles and also holds degrees in art history from Carleton College in Minnesota and graphic design from Parsons in New York City. Prior to training to become a therapist, she had a 25-year career as a creative director for brands. Alyce is interested in working with the creative population as well as work that is collaborative and relational. As a former creative professional herself, she can relate to the unique needs of a creative.

SHOW TOPICS

• The effects of aging on creatives’ identity and self-worth
• Facing the prevalence of ageism in creative industries
• The power of collaboration and community to inspire and uplift
• Similarities between the creative process and the therapeutic process

Today’s Guest: Dr. Reji Mathew is an award-winning intermodal artist, thinker, neuroscience-informed psychotherapist, expressive arts therapist, advocate, and educator. Her therapeutic expressive arts philosophy is grounded in the narratology-narrative therapy lens. Her understanding of a person begins in the context of time, place, and culture. This intersects with a commitment to understanding people's complex identities, including class, culture, location, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and accessibility. She is an arts reporter for Disastershock.com, a humanitarian psychological first aid organization. In this activism series, she interviews global innovative expressive arts advocates on the power of the arts in healing and restoring communities in the aftermath of trauma. She is also an arts accessibility advocate and partners with Anti-Racist Art Teachers (ARAT) and the Rockland Conservatory of Music (RCM). 

​SHOW TOPICS

• Finding a lifelong allyship with the arts integration for physical and mental health & resilience.
  
• Breaking down what thinking and living intermodally is to help clients better cultivate their expressive range and process complex emotions
  
• Using the power of therapeutic play to bring clients into the here-and-now
  
• Advocating for inclusion and accessibility paths toward the arts

Today’s Guest: Dr. Kirsten Ramey, or "Doc," as her clients refer to her, is a board-certified telemental health provider. With a background in entertainment, she used Frank Sinatra's famous line, "If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere," to influence her choice for her grad school internship placement with the department of corrections. Although Dr. Ramey has worked within the community, in the department of juvenile justice, in private practice and in academic settings, her most enjoyable work has been with creative folx. As a mother of five, one of whom is a former Broadway star, Doc uses a creative approach to help clients rewrite their own stories.
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SHOW TOPICS

• The connection between filmmaking and therapy, and how Dr. Ramey’s transition between the two made perfect sense
• The concept of bringing everything we are and everything we are not into a client relationship
• Seeing things your client may not be aware of, like an audience often does with characters in a story, and allowing your client to reach their own “aha” moment at the right time

Today’s Guest: Ruby Rose Fox is multi-award-winning musical artist who charted #8 on the Heatseeker Billboard charts, has over 2 million Spotify plays, and has music featured in the game Rock Band. Over the past 4 years, Ruby has become a mental health pioneer, starting with her nervous system state-shifting class for performers, based on cutting-edge research by Dr. Stephen Porges, and then with MuscleMusic, the #1 trauma-informed app for artists. Ruby has an Acting BFA from Emerson College and studied jazz and classical singing at both New England Conservatory and Berklee College of Music. She was trained in polyvagal theory from the Polyvagal Institute by Deb Dana. She is also trained in Linklater technique, Alexander Technique, and Qi Gong. She has also coined her own performance training method, The Fox Method, which combines Integral Theory, Polyvagal Theory, and decades of experience on the stage.

SHOW TOPICS

• Peeling back layers of generational shame around mental health
• Bringing polyvagal theory, the science of safety, to the performance art industry
• Is it worth it to suffer for the sake of art? 
• How our relationship with creativity changes once it becomes a job

Season 3, Episode 10

Today’s Guest: Connie Glenn, LMFT, is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice in Solana Beach, California. She specializes in trauma and EMDR and is an EMDRIA Approved EMDR consultant. She also trains and works with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, including ketamine and clinical trials for psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT.
 
SHOW TOPICS

• Breaking down the different types of psychedelics currently used in therapy and clinical trials
• Mystical experiences and striving for a feeling of awe
• The stages of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
• Working with psychedelics at the intersection of clinical psychology and shamanic practice​

Season 3, Episode 9

Today’s Guest: Dr. Kimberly Dwyer, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist in suburban Denver, Colorado, and provides telehealth throughout Colorado and other PsyPact states.  She excels at empowering her clients to manage stress and anxiety. Dr. Dwyer works primarily from mindfulness-based cognitive-behavioral perspectives, including MB-CBT and ACT. She also works with mental health providers and similar helpers/healers in private practice to launch, build, and refine their businesses through coaching and consultation services.  
 
Dr. Dwyer’s book credits include Mindful Mondays: Transforming the Everyday to Claim Calm and Decrease Stress, the companion Mindful Mondays Journal, Intentional Private Practice Workbook, and Rocky's Christmas Journey, a children's book with themes of individuation and separation that includes a caregiver talking-point guide. 
 
When she's not at work, you might find her enjoying the beautiful Colorado outdoors with her husband and three children, playing with her dogs and foster dogs, or with a paintbrush in hand.

SHOW TOPICS

• The human drive to tell stories and the power of stories across mediums to connect, inspire, and heal
• The creativity of applying your therapeutic knowledge to each client as a unique individual
• The ways that laughter shows up in therapy

Season 3, Episode 8

Today’s Guest: Jon Steele, LMFT, specializes in the treatment of anxiety, trauma, and grief for athletes and professionals. He runs and operates his own private practice, Jon Steele Therapy. He considers himself an active sports enthusiast and also enjoys the outdoors. He is an avid learner and is currently focused on practicing meditation and grounding. 
 
​SHOW TOPICS

• How both artists and athletes face the challenge of the inner critic
• Breaking down and addressing feelings of shame, guilt, and regret
• Shifting our inner dialogue from self-criticism to self-compassion