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."

I took everything really seriously and was overly sensitive about things, and I think that's rooted in perfectionism.

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

I have known know many therapists who come out of Pacifica Graduate Institute and love being both artists and therapists at the same time, like Maureen Murdock. They are photographers and dancers and other kinds of things and therapists at the same time. I think it really makes them a much more interesting therapist because they're so engaged with the imagination and the creativity and the depths of who they are.

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."

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.

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.