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.

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.

[Humor] could be dicey for a therapist and needs to be used very deftly.

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

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.

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.

When I did my first solo show and it made my dad uncomfortable, I wasn't quite ready for my spotlight moment in my life yet. I didn't have enough sense of myself and self-esteem and confidence: this is when I started looking to get my master's in something.