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.

My mother used to say, "When you can learn to laugh at yourself, a lot of healing comes from that."

I knew that I was naturally good at [therapy] because I was kind of that person in my circle of people in my life.

I didn't have a calling to be a therapist. I really went to Pacifica for a very specific kind of life experience, to really kind of find my path in a deeper way.

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."

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.

I used to be a person that wasn't able to laugh at myself easily.