Expressive arts therapy

Expressive arts therapy uses movement, vocals, writing, art and drama inside psychotherapy. It is an established modality with its own body of research and training, and my PhD is in expressive arts psychology, which is why I can use it lightly rather than ceremonially. Nothing you make is judged, kept or interpreted as a test of talent. We are not producing work. We are giving something in you a route out that does not have to pass through the part of your mind that has already explained the problem eleven times.

That is the actual mechanism. Insight lives in language, and language is where you are strongest, which is precisely the trouble. You have a well-built account of why you are like this. It is accurate and it has not changed anything. When you hum the note of a feeling, or let your posture show the shape of your week, or write for four minutes without stopping, the explanation gets bypassed and something arrives sideways — often something small and unmistakable, and often something you did not plan to say.

Each door opens a different room. Movement reaches what the body has been holding while you talked — grief in the shoulders, vigilance in the jaw, a want that shows up as leaning forward. Voice reaches volume and permission: how loud you are allowed to be, what happens in your throat when you say the true sentence. Writing outruns the editor if it is fast enough and unread. Visual work gives a feeling a size and a color when it will not take a name. Drama, which is simply speaking as, lets you say the thing to the person who is not in the room, or hear the part of yourself that has been arguing for years.

It suits certain people very particularly. People who have talked about a problem for years without shifting it. People who go blank when asked how they feel and are not being difficult — the words genuinely are not there. Highly sensitive people, whose systems take in far more than language carries. And grief that has no words yet, which is most fresh grief, because the loss is too large for a sentence and a sentence is all anyone keeps asking for.

It is offered as part of the work, not instead of it, and it is always optional. Most sessions look like careful conventional therapy. When the talking has stopped moving, I will offer five minutes of something else. You can decline it, every time, and the work will still go somewhere.

We start with a free 20-minute consult, and you can ask directly what this would involve for you. Sessions are 50 minutes by secure video anywhere in California. Bring nothing; if you want something at hand, paper and a pen is plenty.

In practice a session begins in conversation and stays there until it stops going anywhere. At that point I offer one small experiment, we do it for a few minutes, and then we talk about what shifted. Nothing is performed for me and nothing is analyzed as art. You keep whatever you make, or you throw it away in front of me, which is sometimes the useful part.

This sits inside the rest of my work rather than beside it: Internal Family Systems, somatic and mindfulness practice, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and my own Positive Re-Narrative and Repatterning. I am EMDR certified and I am a certified hypnotherapist. My PhD is in expressive arts psychology.

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I do not treat bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, and I am not a crisis service. If you are in crisis, call or text 988, or call 911.