When I am ever in any situation that's getting too heavy, I lighten it up with humor.

I was supporting other people's creative dreams and I wasn't supporting my own. I didn't feel like I could really serve people having that kind of process within me.

I knew that I was naturally good at [therapy] because I was kind of that person in my circle of people in my life.

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

Being successful as a creative person is a crapshoot, but it's essential if you feel drawn to being creative that you express it.

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

The unconscious mind is way bigger than the conscious mind. Using tools to access its wisdom and self-organizing features is powerful medicine.

With regard to how I chose Pacifica, my story is interesting. I did not go to Pacifica to specifically become a therapist. I went to Pacifica to study Jungian psychology and archetypes and mythology and there were many different programs there.

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.

If my artist life didn't work or if I needed to work in some capacity part-time in something, I knew I'd have a real life skill [become a therapist].

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.

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 didn't think I'd be a good therapist. I didn't think I could do both at the same time. Maybe some people can, but I wanted a bigger spotlight and I don't think that's right for clients to have a therapist who wants that kind of life.

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 mother complex going on and I was projecting all my negative mother stuff onto her and all of my need for her to love me and to make me whole and to approve of me.

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.

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.