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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I had a client who just wanted to entertain me the whole time, that is a defense against going deep, in my mind. What happens when the jokester is not allowed to deflect with humor? You then have to feel the pain, and learn that you can survive it. It makes you more resilient and stronger in the long run, and your sense of humor will always be there. Being able to see the funny is deep.