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.

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.

Creating safety is your first job [as therapist], and then once that's established, you can use many tools to help someone see the folly in their thinking.

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."

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.

With regard to how I chose Pacifica, my story is interesting. I did not go to Pacifica to specifically become a therapist. I went to Pacifica to study Jungian psychology and archetypes and mythology and there were many different programs there.

I had a mother complex going on and I was projecting all my negative mother stuff onto her and all of my need for her to love me and to make me whole and to approve of me.