Therapeutic Art Certified Facilitator (Trauma-informed)

 

 

I help Christian women who have suffered trauma, who want to strengthen their identity, who want to understand and express their emotions in healthy ways, who want to explore their spirituality, who want to experience inner peace and walk in that peace consistently, and are aged 25 – 50 (if you are not within this age range, that is OK – this is just a starting point). Other groups/persons I love to share with are pastors, pastoral counselors, women’s group leaders, and other artists and art facilitators.

 

I formalized my use of art in therapeutic settings in 2022, completing Youhjung’s Visionary Art Therapist program – you can check my listing on her site HERE

 

 

 

To book an appointment, head over to my “Services” tab and choose which option fits your needs. I look forward to working with you to renew and restore your heART!

I am a trauma-informed, therapeutic art facilitator. My calling is to work with people, especially adult women, who have lived through traumatic events. I absolutely LOVE to make a work of beauty, a piece of art that speaks a unified message through of the many smaller stories (pieces) that make up the whole. Every media I work in has that same quality…mixed media, collage, assemblage, quilting, stained glass, mosaic work, hand work. That is what I do when I work with clients as well – I help them find the story of who they are through piecing together the fragments of their life, exchanging beauty for ashes. I share creative and practical ways to apply scriptural principles and cutting edge neuro-science to many of the challenges people face today. I guide my clients to find direction in their healing, to get “unstuck”, or make a small adjustment in a course of action they have taken. We work on regulating and processing intense emotions so that the trauma can be resolved. Many times, buried traumatic experiences are fueling today’s problems. Each person has learned to live with their painful experiences in unique ways – requiring a unique path toward healing to be found and followed. It is my passion to help you find that path for yourself or your loved one…and to be a guide along that healing path – and art and other creative modalities are wonderful ways to bring regulation and healing to the total person.

 

If you’d like to know more about me:

I am a woman, wife, mother, and grandmother(!). As a pastoral counselor and trauma-informed therapeutic art facilitator, too, I work with people, especially Christian women, who have lived through traumatic events. I have always loved art, and through using expressive therapeutic art activities with some of my trauma survivor clients, I reconnected with the value of art in the counseling arena and more so, I reconnected with the importance of art to the total well-being of each of our souls. I have a passion, a calling, an anointing, and a purpose to help people understand God’s ways and how to apply them to their lives…

I am a guide, an explorer, a fellow traveler – helping people find paths of peace and healing as they journey through life, piecing the broken places together again, moving out of woundedness and towards a restoration of the heart.

Having a list of credentials is good, but what really matters to me is what God says…I love this passage from the Old Testament:

Thus says the LORD, “Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches; but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the LORD who exercises lovingkindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,” declares the LORD.                                                                                                                  Jeremiah 9:23-24

It is important to me that I know Him better each passing day, and that I can help others find a close relationship with Him after trauma and/or spiritual abuse has crushed their heart, soul, and spirit.

 

How did all this begin?

Snapshot from the past: I am working in corporate America in the 80’s (picture suit jackets and high heels!) My job required lots of interaction with other employees. After our business was done, many would stay and converse, soon sharing troubles or personal matters that had them perplexed. In the course of conversation, I would share insights and plans of action – and these snippets of advice would work…causing the people to come back to my desk for more! I started getting the hint that something was going on here!

Fastforward: In the 90’s I pursued the counseling degree that I believed God was leading me into! The first class touched on so much that I had already written about in my quiet time journal, that I actually used my journal to prepare my homework and papers. God was making His point! Professors and fellow students told me I was “a natural”. I could sense that the work stirred up the Spirit within me – I was clearly pursuing what God had created me for. And since I am somewhat shy, it was/is very comical that He would fashion me to work with all sorts of persons! Additionally, people would continue to come to me (as if God was sending them) and even strangers would share personal pain which I could address (that is how God’s anointing works…I have even been talking to people on the phone and they gradually start to share, catch themselves, and apologize for getting into personal issues…I just smile and say, “It’s OK, it’s my anointing. It happens all the time!”) With this sort of activity continuing, I started my internship midway through my counseling studies and finished my hours before I was finished with my degree!

Today, I love guiding others through art activities. The symbolic nature of art is a great way to work through traumas, helping clients identify experiences that are deemed “unsafe” to reveal using traditional talking types of interventions. Art is a “safe” way to access information that is still triggering to the client. It is a way to process emotional intensity, to process non-verbal or even pre-verbal type trauma. Art can also become a vehicle for creating healing strategies, to conceptualize new, healthier tools for living, and to bring regulation into both the body as well as the mind.

Truly, as Picasso declared, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”