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

One of the reasons I picked Pacifica was because, for a lot of classes and for your thesis, you could do artwork because of the Jungian slant of it all, and that really called to me.

There's a real careful line you have to walk there because your first job [therapist] is to create safety for the client to feel safe enough to turn their vision in towards themselves and their experience in the moment and to reveal things that usually carry a lot of shame or that kind of stuff around.

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.

This has been my struggle for years - the pull between wanting to be in the spotlight and yet also to make a difference in the world. Lately I've come to conclude that I can be a "selfish" artist that focuses on issues of individuation, power, and freedom.

Being a therapist can be very serious though. There are people's lives in your hands. For me, it was too much.

If you can see yourself more than just a victim, aha, now you've got the place to move into that is much more vital and creative and is resourceful than being a victim.