Self Realization and Self Actualization for Artists
Therapy for Artists and Creatives | San Francisco
Integrate the process of meaning making in your art and in your life. Create a synergistic flow state that facilitates clarity, insight and inspiration. Individual psychotherapy can help you understand yourself more fully so your work reflects a multifaceted, authentic & visionary perspective.
Depth Psychotherapy for Artists & Writers
A Rigorous Process of Self Examination for Sensitive Souls
Emotional sensitivities can offer exquisite openings for experiencing and translating one’s unique perspective of the world in a way that is transformative for both the artist and the viewer.
The work of self-understanding is critical to making impactful work and requires the inner strength to proceed with confidence. Creative blocks arise when the essential work of self examination is neglected and the issues that most need attention require confrontation that feels too difficult, disruptive, or painful to attempt.
We may feel a void - that sense of “nothingness” that comes up when the one thing we really need to address is ignored but refuses to go away, occupying the space where ideas would otherwise freely travel. We can’t get to a place of creative flow because something is in the way, demanding our attention, even as we attempt to turn away.
Because the creative process is so deeply personal and often intimately linked to an individual’s sense of self worth, perceived failure or lack of productivity can feel devastating.
Depressive tendencies and poor self-esteem can make accessing and manifesting one's innate talent a challenge that might seem insurmountable.
Therapy for artists is an opportunity to engage in self reflection that allows your authentic creative spirit to come to light in all of its multiplicity so you can manifest the work that is uniquely yours, however it takes shape.
Invest in Your Work
Integrating Therapy and Art: Symbolic Interpretation
Finding Your Voice & Clarifying Your Creative Vision
Learning to listen to oneself is crucial to identifying and exploring one’s artistic voice.
By understanding ourselves better, we come to understand our creative potential and expand our capacity to produce work that feels authentic, unique, and impactful, which in turn makes our lives more fulfilling and meaningful.
Confronting our wounds as individuals, artists, writers and thinkers is a necessary precursor to the subsequent opening of inspiration.
For people who are drawn to create and invent, share their stories, and translate the world via their unique perspective, the intersection of personal and professional is the place where innovation comes to fruition.
To know ourselves, our histories and our potentialities, is to know the future direction of our work as thinkers, makers, and writers.
The more personal the depths to which we delve, the more universal the work becomes.
During the analytic process, there will be moments when an image, a thought, a fragment of a memory or a dream will show up without effort, appearing almost of its own accord. Slowing down to listen to and explore the meaning of this new material can be an expansive process for the spirit and intellect through which we come to know ourselves better, making the work of art an endeavor of enlightenment.
The deeper our understanding of ourselves, the richer our work becomes. The more nuance with which we see our work, the fuller and more dynamic the picture of our humanness becomes.
Meaning Making: From Artist to Therapist for Artists
The Dark Night of the Soul & The Journey of Self Discovery
I am a psychodynamic therapist with an academic and professional background in fine art.
Prior to becoming a psychotherapist, I earned an MFA from Bard College in a graduate program at the International Center of Photography that emphasized photography as conceptual art.
I spent the years that followed as a struggling artist working in contemporary art galleries in New York City. My sense that my work was in vain; that IT didn't mean anything, and that as a result, I didn't mean anything, was the wall I repeatedly came up against as my productivity slowed to a halt.
When I arrived in San Francisco to begin the work of my own personal healing, one of the most transformative things that happened was the realization that my creative insights had the power to help others heal.
I trained as a therapist for emerging artists in the counseling department of the San Francisco Art Institute, where I once was an art student myself. I worked with painters, photographers, filmmakers, conceptual artists, sculptors and new media artists transgressing disciplines to facilitate personal exploration, healing, self awareness, and insight all with the goal of contributing to an art career that is vibrant and meaningful.
I love nothing more than to work with clients who want to use words and images to think deeply about who they are and what their work means to them, to their audience, and to contemporary culture. Integrating the process of personal exploration with the creative process has the power to exponentially improve the quality of your work.
It is my honor to walk with you along the circuitous and magical path of the artist’s way, uncovering your hidden or forgotten talents, finding integration and breathing new meaning into your work. I offer individual sessions as well as private workshops for small groups of collaborators in written word, visual arts, interdisciplinary studies and new media.
My office is in Tiburon, CA with easy proximity to Mill Valley, Sausalito and San Francisco. I see clients for therapy in person and online.