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.

I remember going on vacation for two weeks once and one of my clients who was very clinically depressed really could not handle it, really unraveled himself. That scared me. I didn't want to be in that position.

Coming into Pacifica I knew that I wanted whatever I was going to learn there, I knew I wanted to integrate that into my art no matter what.

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.

The work is important and essential and I've had a therapist myself for decades and it's important work, but I knew that I wanted to work with people who are more functioning and that's when I decided to pursue my performance career full-time.

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.

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.