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Wednesdae Reim Ifrach, "Queer Expressions: Expressive Art and Somatic Therapy Practices for Healing Body Trauma" (North Atlantic Books, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello, this is Helena Wissing, your host on the New Books Network. Today I am talking with Wednesday Reem Ifrak about their new book, Queer Expressions, Expressive Art and Somatic Therapy Practices for Healing Body Trauma, published by North Atlantic Books. Welcome to the show, Winsy.
- [00:28]
A
Thanks for having me, Helena. This is exciting.
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B
Yes. So would you please start by introducing yourself, maybe talk a bit about your work, your background, and also how it led you to writing this really unique book.
- [00:43]
A
Sure, sure. So I'm an expressive arts therapist and a clinical counselor and a somatic practitioner for. For getting to close to 15 years, which is wild to say out loud. A lot of my work has been with the LGBTQ community, specifically gender affirming care, eating disorder treatment, which has been true my entire career is an overarching topic and a lot of my work focuses on body liberation and harm reduction. So a lot of my work has been figuring out how do I take the things that we know work for trauma in a population that naturally comes with trauma because of socio political climates and kind of gear it towards the needs of those bodies and those experiences. And that's kind of how all of this happened, was figuring out through research of other art and expressive arts therapists that have done this much longer, how much expressive arts and somatics naturally go together, almost like intrinsically, to the point where sometimes you can't weave one out of the other and how adaptable that could be to the queer population. If I just did a little research, did a little work, altered some of the things that I do. And that's kind of what landed us with this book. And I was really lucky because an editor at North Atlantic Books had seen an interview I did on this topic with eating disorders and had reached out and we talked about kind of like my goals for this field and what I wanted to see in the field. And the big thing I wanted to see was more research and more writing from practitioners with lived experience who were doing this specific book and could help other practitioners and students and also clients that are more invested in reading the books that we're reading and making it accessible to them on kind of what this work looks like and how to do it and the deeper meaning behind it. So not just here's a skill, this is how you do the skill, but where it comes from, how to integrate different cultural practices, how to practice that cultural humility. And then this is what we came up with and now two years later, it's here.
- [03:03]
B
Yes. And you're already kind of talking about for my next question, because I was going to ask you about this integration of expressive arts and somatic therapy, because you weave them together really naturally, and you make it clear how they're so woven together because of the way you write about, like a framework. It's a framework. It's not just a technique. It's a framework you present for us. So I was curious about your. How you have, in your career and all your experience, how you have. How you come, how you came to see the way the two fields are so connected and how they. Like in your own training and your own experience, you also. One of the things you present was really helpful was this. You talk about the expressive arts continuum as a way of also understanding these. So I wonder if you could speak a bit to that.
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A
Of course, of course. So the expressive arts continuum has actually been around a long time. So when I was learning specifically art and expressive arts therapy, this was kind of the foundations of before you go in the field, what do you do? And was reading a book by specifically Kathy Malchiotti on trauma and express arts therapy. And she kind of goes over this, and she's the somatic and expressive arts practitioner and researcher. So she did a really good job of teaching us how these work and how actually each of these levels in the continuum are somatic by nature. Right. Sensory is somatic. So if we're talking about that initial kinesthetic sensory level, we're talking about the sensory experience of somatics. Right? What does someone feel tactilely? What does someone feel in their body? How does that physical touch and movement that they experience build a foundation? And so I think for. For me, it was learning that not having yet put the somatics component together and then doing a lot of dance movement and psychodrama with clients. There's a big overlap with dance and the arts and athletics and eating disorders and being queer, which is very complicated. And I was seeing things naturally happen in therapy that I wanted to know more about and I wanted to intentionally facilitate instead of letting naturally happen. The biggest moment for me was I had some clients that were dancers that were really struggling to kind of externalize, that they understood there was an intersection for them of rejection related to their queerness and the trauma that their bodies had experienced and how the eating disorder really sublimated that for them. And they asked to dance. That was their, I don't know how to. Can I show you? And they showed me. And I cried and they cried, and there was a shared catharsis, and there was a moment of why don't I know how to intentionally facilitate this specific experience? And what does their reaction tell me about when art and physicality come together to make something that was more healing than any talking or even painting or things of that nature that we were doing? And that's when I dived into this research and really realized that there needs to be a framework where expressive arts, somatics, body liberation and harm reduction come together to figure out how to offer something to a client that isn't just person centered and kind of like a formula of what to do, but that we can easily alter for each client based on who they are, what they're good at, what they're going through. So it's looking at that expressive arts continuum and the kind of art a client is naturally kind of geared towards. So for a lot of my clients, originally it was movement and psychodrama. Currently for a lot of my clients it's more collage and painting, which I'm naturally more comfortable with. Those are my art forms. And then translating the joy of that into, well, what's the sensory experience? What does your body do when you do that? And what's the smell that you smell? What is that kind of holistic experience? And then bringing into that that interceptual, introceptive awareness. English is hard sometimes to kind of create that safe physical grounding experience where trauma can be externalized and they can start to express how the body is releasing it through movement or bilateral stimulation or the other pieces that we layer in. And that's where I often talk to my clients about what is too much, what are their boundaries, how do we harm, reduce potential flooding, or the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, other words, we've added to that list as time's gone on so that their body can experience not just the intellectual, but the physical experience of having their oppression dismantled in a way that feels contained and safe. In a session where we know we get an hour, maybe an hour and a half at most at a time. Which I think is the hardest part about this is we get such short time in a session with a client to do something so deep and complicated.
- [08:27]
B
Well, there's so many rich things here that you're bringing up. I have tons of questions about it because this I think I want to jump to that part about. Yeah, we just have the one session, right? Often 50 minutes or so or however long, right? And that's it. So I really appreciated how throughout the book it's really clear that the way you work is that you really see the work going beyond the Therapy room, like the therapy room obviously remains important, but it's really clear how you see that as like one space within this, like much larger context where you have community, culture, art identity, the political movements and everyday embodied action. And also the way, in the same way parallel you describe how you work with your clients, where you really want to foster a variety of expressive arts formats and combining and also seeing how the different art forms have each their own advantages for processing the different elements of the work. I thought that was really powerful. I wonder if you could speak a bit about that.
- [09:45]
A
Sure. Well, first, thanks. This is my actual favorite part of my work is it took a lot for me to learn and understand that like you're saying, a 50 minute session in the grand scheme of someone's week or even lifetime is really nothing. Like, we get such a short period of time to facilitate deep, meaningful change that addresses potentially years of trauma. And that's if someone isn't in active trauma. And most queer people are in active trauma right now, which makes the work harder. So I started to look at the world as like, I don't know if it's my favorite term, but I use it like the whole world is this somatic laboratory where science and art happen together and it happens naturally. And it can be in art studios, it can be in street performance. I know one of the big things I write about because it's a big part of queer culture, is ballroom dancing, voguing, kind of the whole kind of black, trans, queer movement of creating chosen family in a really beautiful artistic way. Especially when we look at the 80s and how many people from those communities actually had no family except for each other. And how we can kind of subvert trauma through different kinds of performance as a group. And how I think the best somatic healing actually happens collectively, not individually, in session with us. When we are in a public space and we experience the release with people that look like us and understand our background. It's such a different healing experience than when we're alone in a therapy room. And you know, I'm lucky. Most of my clients are queer and trans. And so we have enough in common that I think there's that extra lived experience layer that gives that to them. But the reality is nothing feels better than being seen and witnessed by your own community and your own people. And I think that it also helps all of us, myself included, to remember that like, trauma is never this isolated existence or experience. And I think that a lot of traditional therapy and a lot of the way trauma used to be talked about is you have your individual trauma, but there's also that collective micro or macro level trauma that people have to break down. And I think this is the best way to do it is to see the world as every interaction could easily be a healing opportunity. And that I think that there's. There's ritual in the experience. I actually think a lot of the things I enjoy about the different forms of art is everything comes with a ritual in a pattern that can be soothing while also be different each time. I tell people I love to paint, I specifically love to paint circles because I find bilateral stimulation really calming. So that's something I'll offer to my clients in process painting, which is what does it feel like to stand in front of something and tell you there's literally no agenda. I just wanted to know what somatically comes up in your body when you do this. What does this remind you of? Would you go home and do this with your family? And then seeing people go home and have this experience with their loved ones and then instead of coming back to session and just working on the same painting and talking, they're bringing in that collective experience and that hope and that connection that that gives them. And it makes that so much more, in my opinion, so much more like sublimated into healing in the body and very embodied as a pair to that, like, intellectual experience. Excuse me. And I think a lot of these different art forms help people learn boundaries, funnily enough, right? The canvas has a natural boundary. You make the circle too big, it goes off the canvas. What can that mean to someone? What does your body do when you cross a boundary? And it can actually help people kind of like learn how they want to have community, not just to have it or that healing happens in it, but what is that going to look like for them?
- [13:55]
B
There's so many rich connections here. Because I was. One thing I really loved was the threats you have. There's so many strong threads. For example, the element of storytelling for healing, right? That, that the storytelling not. Not as an abstract, but really as an embodied practice, which is where also the expressive art comes in. Because it is storytelling. Even if it's the storytelling of like you say, the soothing, soothing impact of, of coloring, right? It has like that there's a story even there of doing that. And then you link that to collective storytelling. And there's something there that I found really, really important around the way that community links with expressive arts and somatic work that we all have individually. But then when that comes together in the community where the story, the storytelling medicine of it, can become collective. I wonder if you could speak a bit to that piece.
- [15:06]
C
Sure.
- [15:07]
A
So it's so interesting. Storytelling was my first form of therapy as a queer person. For myself, what I learned in my own work, that I then learned in research and in practice, was all of our bodies have a narrative. All of our souls, all of our experiences have a narrative. And we can't make meaning of those and how it plugs into the collective until we allow ourselves the experience to actually have it. And that our story is both that cognitive, verbal story, but it's the story that our body tells us when we're sharing it or when we're writing it or creating it. And I think that that is super important because I think that often, you know, we have nervey therapy and logotherapy, and they're really, really beautiful, in my opinion, forms of therapy. But I think that there's allowing someone the creativity to craft their story in that expressive arts way that is all about that reclaiming their body narrative piece that I write about. And I think that's important because I think unless you're a somatic practitioner or you do a lot of training, even if you don't see yourself as one, we forget how much the body's actually the story. It's not actually the words. And it's everything from. Not just the trauma that you've been through, or your gender identity or sexuality. We're talking the lineage of the cultures that you're from, the foods that you ate, what you had access to growing up. The biggest one I think I write about is whether or not you had other queer people growing up to even know who you were or what that looked like, or that you could see your body's story in somebody else. And so I think that that mirroring and modeling in our work is equally important. And I love that in this, we bypass that whole verbal process, because we're not just telling a story, we're embodying it, and then we're creating it through art. So whether it's coloring or painting or movement, we start to remove the default cognitive, well, A happened to me, and so I behave like B, and then C happened to me because behave like B. If it was that easy, everyone would be better. We'd all be, well, we wouldn't be here, Right? So this is about giving that story meaning and having someone decide what their story even looks like. Because I think often in trauma work, the story is trauma, but the story is actually who you are outside of that. That really matters. And that's where I really love things like metaphor and symbolism. Right. Are we making a map? Are we making a dance? Are we just making symbols in a sand tray? If you do sand tray therapy. And I think that that helps people really cultivate their autonomy and their ownership of their journey in a way that just writing something down doesn't always work. And then I love moving into that collective piece, that collective story that I think we all share depending upon what communities we're from. You know, obviously working with queer clients, often the shared story starts as that, like, deeply tied systemic oppression that we all have historically. And if you're lucky enough to have queer elders in your life from the 80s and 90s, that comes with such a rich and sordid history of loss and trauma as well. But what it does is it helps us move out of that isolation and secrecy, because that was a very 80s and 90s queer history thing in that collective story was secrecy. And the younger generation is actually sharing the story that there is no secrecy. So bodies start to share this community of witnessing and resistance and rewriting and retelling that ends up being really healing for everybody involved. And I think when, especially my younger clients, when they start to learn about the shared history from others rather than from me. And I mean, it's cool because I'm queer, so I can share some of that. And again, it has a different meaning. But, you know, I have clients where, like, locally, they have. It's really cool. They have ballroom and voguing classes once a week here at one of our centers. And I'll send the teens and the, you know, my clients in the early 20s. And I'll say, there's some queer elders. I want you to go. I want you to hear about the meaning behind this. If you feel called to it, I want you to try it out, and I want you to come to session. I want you to tell me, what did your. What did your body learn about the story about where you're from? And what was it like to share that story with other people and to witness theirs and to know that it all exists in the same space in the same timeline?
- [19:59]
B
And it's beautiful, this interaction between the different generations, like the elders, where there was actually a. There was this dynamic and exchange, which I'm. I mean, we will see more and more, which in a way you can say that that is the gift that time offers, is that then the different generations come on, and each generation has their own unique insights and wisdoms and own challenges, of course, I mean, you're speaking to that thing about that's the collective thread and how also liberation there is is. You really anchor that into the collective and the collective context. I mean, that also connects with how you talk about the affirmative approach and harm reduction and liberation like they are, they're tied in together. There was one, there was one quote I underlined I thought was really beautiful. You say that liberation is not merely the absence of harm. It is the ongoing presence of joy, agency and creative possibility. Possibility. And I think this is what I'm seeing more and more that we have had a lot of conversations about with the trauma informed and trauma responsive approaches and to really reckon with the difficulties. But it seems clear also in your work that there needs to be this full on integration with faith in the joy and create the joy of the creativity. And then they need to be like fully. It can't just be one or the other. There needs to be this full on connection between that for liberation. You also say that career liberation is inextricably linked with trauma healing. So I wonder if you could speak to that. And the way you sort of integrate and balance the joyfulness with also the seriousness of the work for liberation,
- [22:12]
A
I think that that is a hard one I'm still mastering despite having written about it. So I like to be super transparent with people. And it's hard because every day is kind of a guess for us right now. Right. I think when I sit with a lot of my queer clients, what we talk about is there. There is a level of joy and magic and wonder in being a queer person and figuring out your sexuality, figuring out your gender, figuring out how you want to be seen in the world and recreating yourself in a way where you feel affirmed and euphoric and like you actually want to be here. Because for so many of my clients, the big thread in the beginning is I don't even want to be here. And it can be because of individual or only collective issues. It's usually both. And so for me, the initial joy is when a client is finally like, well, now I want to be here, so what do I do? Because it's all a mess. And I'm like, okay. The initial joy is actually people want to live, which you know, as therapists and humans. That's the most amazing thing in the world to me. When a queer person wants to exist and wants to hold on to joy. And simultaneously we can't ignore the world we're in. And depending upon what state we're in or what their other intersecting identities are Depends upon also trauma and risk that someone might experience. So a lot of that work for me at this point is kind of, how do we change individual joy to that collective justice? There are limitations of positivity and body positivity in particular, because if we weren't in the culture or the world or the climate we were in, I would like to believe it would be easier, especially for queer people, but it's not. So instead, this joy has to become this radical, like, act of liberation where we exist in the face of all the reasons why either we're not wanted, feel we're not wanted. Our culture says things that we know not everybody believes. And as someone who did a lot of political activism before this part of my career, I've always said that joy is like our greatest act of resistance is to exist unapologetically as ourselves and then to translate those concepts into therapy without also kind of like putting them on a client that might not even want that. And I think that's the other hard part is I know joy as an act of resistance is actually really healing for people. And not everybody is in that place. They just need it for themselves. And I think that's where it ties back into that collective thread and that reauthoring of someone's narrative. Because when joy becomes the collective thread of the narrative and not trauma, that inextricably changes the way that we see ourselves. We no longer see ourselves through the lens of trauma or political oppression. We start to see ourselves through the lens of we got to discover ourselves, we get to exist, we want to exist, we get to be ourselves in a way that a lot of us never dreamed and those before us didn't get to. Which again, that collective kind of historical, ancestral narrative of queer people then all plays out together. And it kind of all of our joys become this kind of like, living archive of what it means to be queer and to be creative and to share the arts and to share almost like that living breath. You know, like when you go into a museum and a group of people are staring at the same painting. And if you. If you watch this, my favorite thing, you watch people and their breath naturally sinks up and their lean into the painting naturally sinks up. I'm like that, to me, is queer joy. When we all kind of almost like communally co regulate without intentionally doing it, it just becomes part of what joy feels like in our bodies. And what I. What I love, at least in my work, is when I ask clients what joy feels like in their body as queer people, I often Get a lot of the same responses. Which really speaks to me about how much for all human beings of all backgrounds, often it's our shared experience that our bodies respond to most, which is just like, I don't know that to me that's the most joyful thing in the world is that our bodies can respond to the same experience in similar ways without knowing each other. Which is such a connecting, grounding experience for people.
- [26:56]
B
Yeah. What you're talking about here reminds me of throughout the book. There are lots of really good exercises. And I was struck by something I appreciated about the exercises is that they are, they're not like overly complicated. You seem to have this way with the exercises are very sort of grounding to help the person focus in on, become present to the experience of the exercise. Because of also like you say, the joy of like you say, just drawing a circle, for example. Right. Like to really again and again come back to that where it's the somatic experience of doing it and staying really present to that. And with that then staying present to what is being expressed. What's the story being told through the exercise. So I, I, I thought about that and I really appreciated that. And kind of like where you're, you're speaking to now, Is that something you had thought about or some other things, some other considerations when you develop the, the exercises? Yeah.
- [28:07]
A
Honestly, I thought about the amount of books I had read even as a therapist and been like this is really complicated to explain to someone. This feels like a big expectation. Yeah.
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B
The pressure.
- [28:19]
A
Right. Like, and then there's pressure to perform as the therapist and the client. And I feel like that gets really messy, especially in somatic and expressive arts work where so much of our body is present. I feel like that pressure can be very activating. So I wanted to figure out how to give, offer something to people that a they could do if a therapist wasn't in the room and they wanted to just try something different and that therapists could offer clients without that shared pressure for success or performance or even to do it right. Whatever that means. Perfectionism is a thing for everybody. And honestly I thought about when I was in a place where this was a book I would have wanted. What would I have wanted someone to offer me in my own self discovery with my body. And then I looked at every case I've ever had that I had to get my hands on and I kind of looked at what worked, what was overwhelming for people and what was honestly ethically appropriate to put in a book. Knowing people would do things Themselves. I always feel really, I think, protective of that because I never want to be, and I will be because we're human. But I never want to be intentionally responsible for someone having an experience that is overly activating at home alone. And so that's kind of how the foundation for these started. And then, honestly, every single one of these I did at home alone, multiple times, without a therapist or supervisor or another person to figure out what felt like it worked or didn't work. The last one in chapter six, the grounding rituals are my favorite. I'm a really big person that's into different grounding rituals, and I love using contrasting art materials. What I love about that specifically is, for example, like, I think I talk about watercolors, right? So watercolors can be really activating, but collage can be really grounding. And when we experience them together, we allow a ritualistic balance in the body and in the brain. And I was like, what a great way to end something to figure out. Way to provide someone balance that feeds both the brain and the body, helps someone feel aware, helps someone understand their own autonomy and their own affirmation. And so I think I actually worked backwards. I think I was like, this is number six. How do I work from here? If we're going to ground, what do we build on that? Right? So then I think it was drawing and movement. I know there's a bunch of collage. We can tell. I like that a lot. There was some trauma informed breath work, some stress management.
- [31:02]
B
Yep.
- [31:03]
A
I love a body scan. Those are so fun. And just kind of tried to look at what someone was learning from each chapter and be like, in an ideal world, if you were sitting with me, this is something that we would do together. If this was the topic we were focusing on, that we would build on. So what I love is you can take one of these and do them with a client and continue to build on them for sessions on end. If you want to. You can do all six. You can do them at home. They can be homework or. Honestly, a lot of times I'm like, sometimes creativity is fun and the secondary gain is therapeutic release. And I think that that's okay too.
- [31:40]
B
Yeah, yeah. And you also have a lot of case examples where. And I think the cases really demonstrate how to work with this huge variation. Because the different art forms and how to work with it, it all comes back to the person and who they are and what they're working on and the different elements in their situation and their lives and who they are and the mediums then come from that, like how they're reaching for that. So I think for people who are in training, therapists and therapists who are a little overwhelmed by how do I pick, you know, among all the different art forms, I think the cases are really helpful because it really shows your, your approach to it because it is a, it is a client first approach. Right? It's about the client first in that way. But I also just wanted to say what you're just talking about here, I think it's such a beautiful example of the way this connection between somatic work and expressive arts work, because this is like you early on talk about the importance of therapeutic distance for trauma work. We need that distance where we use the medium and the medium creates. And that's where the symbolism of the therapeutic distance so that it becomes safer to work through something, process something, because you have the medium. And it's such a beautiful example also of how you can also work with, from that principle also with somatics, because I agree with what you say. I think we have sometimes an issue in somatics where there is this enormous pressure. You know, it's this classic, it's almost like a meme by now. Where do you feel that in your body? And it's like, and we should make fun of it because it, it is too much. Right? And it does produce pressure. And it's so important for people to be able to say, no, I'm not going to go there right now. I need something different. But then when they're then doing some, for example, artwork, they are attending to, attending to what they're feeling in their body, but it's in a, in a very different way. So just really appreciated the way you are demonstrating these, these things.
- [33:58]
C
Thanks.
- [33:59]
A
I mean, I, I try to, I say this often to clients. I really don't like asking someone to do something I'm not willing to do. I actually think that that's really important, especially in body related work. So a lot of that therapeutic distance actually came from, wow, if I feel flooded learning this, how is someone without my training, years of therapy and clinical supervision going to feel doing this? And all I can compare that to is clients with similar identities and even more marginalized intersections. And that's when I was really like, oh, therapeutic distance is actually really important in some of this work with marginalized people. How do I not only integrate it, but then write about it in a way that hopefully people will understand the importance of its existence and how to execute it? Because I don't think that's something that we're taught as often as I would like to believe. It wasn't something that was ever brought up in my training when I was in grad school and I went to a very traditional art therapy program that I loved. But there was a lot we didn't know then that we know now. So there are a lot of practitioners out there with a wealth of experience who. I haven't learned about this yet.
- [35:10]
B
Yeah, hopefully we'll have more and more focus on it. And also the. The case examples. I wanted to ask you about those. And here if you could speak a bit about that because, I mean, it's clear that you've worked for years and worked with many people. And in our work with people, it really impacts us. We were very tight. You know, it's. It's relational work. So I wonder if you could see. Speak about. About your experiences of the people you've worked with and how. What you've learned and how it impacted you and, and. And the cases you wrote up.
- [35:45]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think on a very deeply personal level, I was doing this work before I was publicly out. So a lot of the somatic work I did with clients actually pushed my own journey. And there was that what I think is such a beautiful parallel process where with good therapy and good supervision, we avoid the transference countertransference and instead have, like, we talk about that community thread like that that happened after that time in my life, in my career. We've gotten to a point where, you know, I think of one of the cases in the book is about a nurse in mannequin art, which is a bunch of my research now. So that has stayed with me for a very long time. And I look at that, and I think about how something that was a single session, a single moment, has now become years of research and a dissertation, thanks to this one client being willing to be vulnerable enough to explore body image in a completely different way than they had never been asked to before. I also think a lot of my clients that have had multiple marginalized identities have really held me accountable, not just as a provider, as a human being, to really committing to understanding the ways in which not just bodies and their stories exist, but when we think about somatics and we think about activation. If I know what it's like to be in my body, in the world, can I imagine what it would be like to be in a body that much more oppressed and marginalized and what that's like? And then therefore, what do they need when they're with us in a way that I couldn't have understood without their vulnerability to kind of share what that kind of lineage for them is even like. I think there are stories that we can all share that we can't all always understand. I think about the few teenagers that I wrote about, too. I love teenagers. They actually teach us so much about ourselves. And there was so much that in that work, I had been like, ooh, these are like, little traumas I never named as traumas, or these are traumas that other adult clients have brought up that we've never labeled as traumas. I wonder what it would be like to bring that back. Like, now we understand how traumatic bullying is, but when we were all growing up, everyone just got bullied, and that was life and deal with it. Right? For a lot of queer people, that's actually a really big trauma that's actually become incredibly dangerous. And so having even my bias and misconceptions based on the culture I was raised and challenged through someone's art and somatic experience, through someone's own processing, I think is such, such a gift that I think often, again, like therapists, we don't talk about because we're not supposed to learn from our clients, but we're supposed to learn from our clients or else we'll never be better. I often say to people I supervise, like, secondary gain is real regardless, so we might as well just honor that it exists and learn from it. And I think that was a really big one. I also think prior to a lot of these cases, I didn't know the things that I know that I'm writing about. And so I often reflect on the clients I worked with before, when I initially, like, worked in eating disorder treatment, where there are lots of rules and really rigid boundaries, and so many things, quote unquote, aren't allowed. And at one point in time in my career, we didn't even get to talk about queerness. That was like, a, no, no. Especially with teenagers, which was so wild to me because half of them were queer. And I literally had to shut people's stories down. And now we know. A, that was harmful, and no one should have asked me to do that as a new clinician. But B, there's actually a lasting trauma that I might have participated in. And how do I reckon with that? And I think for me, some of this book and these cases were how I made my own meaning out of those clinical experiences was a look. It shouldn't have been like that. Look at what happens when we do things in a way that is more client centered and harm reduction based and also admitting we're not perfect and we're going to harm our clients because that's unfortunately part of being human. I think this really humanized my work. I think it made me really grateful for my clients. Not that I wasn't before, but I think in a new way when you start to write about someone's life and experience in their body and their identity, it really shifts your perspective about how much clients have given you.
- [40:23]
B
Yeah, yeah. And you know, this also leads to my next question around what you are seeing happening in the field. Where, where do you see our field going? Because I think, I think your book is a very important contribution to what's happening and what like you were speaking to from your clinical experiences and realizing these things and how it's now evolving and changing and how you can make an impact and work on the things that are the most pressing issues that we need to work on, this we need to change or feel from within in that way. So what do you see happening in our field like? And that could be your most, at your most, your most optimistic thoughts about the field. And it could be also your most pessimistic, your biggest concerns. What are your hopes and concerns about what's happening in the field and what the future holds?
- [41:31]
A
I'll start with my concern because my hope fixes that. I think my concern continues to be like, we know all of this, right? We, we, you and I, specifically. Right. Are, are privileged enough to have this education, to have these trainings, to do these things. And I think about when I was in grad school and was on food stamps, when education in the world was much cheaper and easier to be in compared to now? And I have to sit back and ask myself, how accessible is what we quote unquote, call expert level knowledge and certification going to be to students that have far less privilege in a world that is far more stacked against them? And is that fair of this field to make things inaccessible? Yes, we all deserve to be paid. Please God, we all deserve to be paid. And at what point do we go? Well, if we want our field to do better, if we want our clients to feel better, and if we want our future clinicians to do better than us, we have to start looking at ourselves and the ways in which we offer this to the world. And so at least with this book, one of the things we talked about is we could have put all that artwork in its big, beautiful, bright colors in a beautiful pamphlet in the middle of the book. And Charged you twice as much. And that didn't sit right with any of us. And the idea that I want one of my students, for example, or yours to be able to afford to get the book, whether it's in a curriculum or not, because they want to know more. And the training costs $2,000 and the book is under 20. So I think things like that are really important. And I think it's the part of the field that I actually struggle with the most, because then we judge people for doing things without certification and yes, their scope of practice and training. But we have to ask ourselves, why do people do that? And often it's inaccessibility, or that training is only geared towards one type of identity and one type of body. And who wants to show up to a training with someone that has never understood a clinician or a clinician's community or their clients? You know, like, for all the workshops that I do, I think the part that, again, this is where the field is disappointing is I have a lot of bipoc people that show up because they're queer. And while I'm not black, they at least get queer competence. And what's sad is they have to settle. And I'm. That's no offense to me, but that is a settling, right. That we have a field where clinicians are generally white in general, in mental health. Right. But my hope is that in books like this and others that I know are coming out actually from my publisher, which is amazing, most of whom are writers of color and queer, that we are all being given the platform to put our work and our research and our lived experience out there so that those gaps slowly close because people will learn more and there'll be more of us doing trainings. And my hope is we all become minimally competitive and just start thinking about accessibility. I think my other hope in all of this is I'm seeing more and more clinicians embrace lived experience, including those that have been practicing a long time, whether it's someone's own self discovery about their own narrative journey, or their own identity. My favorite is seeing a lot of older clinicians realize they're neurodivergent and how much their careers have really been based on, like, things that they do that were actually just neurodivergent, that they've done with their clients that have worked because their clients also were. And no one was diagnosed back then. So I see a lot of hope in the ways in which, Right. As a queer person, I could write a book about my clients, but I'm in here. Like this is. My stories are woven in here too. My experiences are in here too. A lot of these frameworks come from personal and professional experience. And I think that there's something really special about being in a field where that is starting to be recognized and welcomed and that we're talking about therapeutically appropriate ways to do more than just use of self. Self disclosure, but to let our lived experience our bodies, the bodies we lived in honestly existence so that clients find us because they're actually validated by our actual existence, not just the skills that we have. And I think that that's really important to have people that look like us to model for us what it means to be in the world in hopefully a joyful way.
- [46:10]
B
Yeah, that's the clear shift happening that the old, old model of being like this sort of neutral, blank slate, sort of default therapist is just not working anymore. It is fully acknowledged now that we do need therapists based on like specific needs for people we can relate to. Yeah. And what you were speaking to here about your, both your concerns and your hopes I think also will link us to our final question here because I. We're coming up on time and I'm. I don't want to take any more of your time but your, your. Your work in the world. Now with the book coming out, maybe you can share about that. How people can find you, the. The work in the world, the. The opportunities to connect with you and your work. What are some things you could share about that?
- [47:09]
A
Well, this book is new, but I know our hope is to build on this with some more clinical resources and training. My workshop isn't active right now, but I did create a three hour CEU certified workshop that actually goes along with this specifically for new clinicians that are newer in the field. So when that goes out I usually try to make it affordable so that students and those that have just graduated can access it. Everything for that's through my website, which I know you're going to have in the notes. I think a lot of my other work right now is I teach full time at Moravian University and we're talking about starting our own expressive arts therapy program. So I would say 2027 ish if that's something that people are interested in. It'll be the low residency model. So mostly online with those live components and somatics. And a lot of this work with marginalized communities would be part of that. I still see clients, I still supervise people in my private practice, Rainbow Recovery. And then I have other work that actually isn't clinical at all. I'm a poet. I just came out with two books. I'm a painter. In fact. This is fun because it is somatic. At the end of August locally I'm in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. They do for the very kind of end of summer, an End of Pride event and there's community painting and people can come watch us make art in the community and share in that experience. So really, after this book, I'm diving into like the obviously academic, clinical piece of it, but also just embracing it and living it and welcoming people into that space to come to community spaces that I'll be in to make art together and just kind of experience what it is like to embody this practice in reality, not just like in a therapy session.
- [49:07]
B
Wonderful. That sounds really good. And is there anything else you said on your website is where people can find your work related and of course, more information about the book Wednesday thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for writing this book.
- [49:30]
A
Of course. Thank you for having me.
- [49:33]
C
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