Trauma | Resonance | Resilience
Hosted by Dr Lisa Cherry, this podcast is a multi-agency, inter disciplinary resource for those who work in education, social care, criminal justice or health and to listen to conversations that make a difference. Utilising the wisdom of lived experience, academic research and practice knowledge, we will support you in your work of developing trauma informed, relationally focused practice developing safe, supportive and healing environments. Our collective focus is threefold; preventing harm, not adding to harm, seeking to mitigate harm when it has already happened.
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Trauma | Resonance | Resilience
Season 7, Episode 4, Dr Cathy Malchiodi on Art and Trauma Informed Practice
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Join Dr Lisa Cherry and Dr Cathy Malchiodi, expressive arts therapist, challenge the idea that trauma-informed practice is a set of tools you can apply without relationship, culture and context. They explore how the arts can restore joy and capacity when the world feels stuck in long-haul distress, distraction and performative “quick fixes”.
RESOURCES:
Cathy Malchiodi, PhD, LPCC, LPAT, REAT www.cathymalchiodi.com
Director, Trauma-Informed Practices and Expressive Arts Therapy Institute
Author, Trauma and Expressive Arts Therapy: Brain, Body and Imagination in the Healing Process | Guilford Press
Handbook of Expressive Arts Therapy | Guilford Press (October 2022)
Contributing Writer, Psychology Today Online | Arts & Health, 6.5 million readers
LinkedIn (39,000 followers) and Facebook (400,000 followers) for resources, articles and community networking in the fields of trauma, expressive arts therapy, sensory integration and neurodiversity
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Welcome And Guest Introduction
SPEAKER_00All right, we continue with this uh for the dilution of forum-informed practice theories, and I'm really, really thrilled to have Kathy Malchiotti on the podcast Expressive Arts Therapist. Is that right? Is it an expressive arts therapist? Is that right? Yes.
SPEAKER_01Psychologist, mental health counselor, you know how we gather things, you know, along the way. But probably the core is the expressive arts. Yeah. It's the central piece. And everything else went
What Expressive Arts Therapy Means
SPEAKER_01around it.
SPEAKER_00What does it mean? What does it mean to be an expressive arts therapist to you?
SPEAKER_01Um, I think probably for me it's it's a little bit well, it might be more universal than I think, but for me, I think it's idiosyncratic that I always was involved in the arts and the arts. I immediately saw that they were beyond something that you went to a concert or you went to a gallery to look at, that there was something deeper about it, and very much a healing factor and a stabilizing factor and a way to express when you didn't have words. And also the body feeling in a different way through those kinds of experiences. So I think I always knew that. And then when I got through art school and didn't really want to be a studio artist only, I wanted to work with people, those connections started to fall into place, which was really interesting because I came of age into a time period where people were talking about, and they were not very well formed in terms of what they were, but these graduate programs in art therapy, in the arts therapies, expressive therapies, that was kind of just starting. There wasn't a lot of information about it, but I knew, I knew this is what I wanted to be involved in. But then that started that long road of learning about how do you be a mental health practitioner, how do you be a psychotherapist and integrate that. But I really started with the arts as the core, and I think that was a good thing because that's very natural to me now in the work of working with people. And of course, for all these decades, it's been a trauma-focused lens that I fell into that immediately. Um, just by the first job with domestic violence and shelters, child abuse, interpersonal violence, all the things we know so well now, decades ago, still a lot of questions about what those were. We didn't use the word trauma. People talked about crisis or distress or you know, things like that. Trauma became a word probably in the 1990s. So there's kind of I've dated myself.
SPEAKER_00Pre-the time of using the word trauma. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I guess it's good to sort of mention actually that you are in the States, um, which is uh we have a lot of cultural differences. I'm just back from Chicago myself, and some of the models around how we work with distress are quite different culturally. And I was very interested in that, and it's quite a medicalized model, um, in a more extreme way than it is here in the UK. And I guess therefore that places using art as a healing modality in a in a quite tricky space.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think it must be. I, you know, I know people in the UK that identify as art therapists, and actually it's more recognized in the UK, I think, in a more defined way than it is in the US, because we have 50 states that have a lot of different practices going on. But just to back up again into my history, when I first started the work after getting out of graduate school and finding my way, and what do I do now? Uh, and the first job that was presented to me was in a domestic violence shelter. And of course, I took it, I had bills to pay, I had to get a job. But I was like, wow, this is really interesting. Wow, what do I do though? But it's a community setting, it's a community kind of agency, not a typical mental health type of clinic or hospital. So I started there, which now I look back and I think that's really interesting because there were a lot of people that were pursuing similar things that I was pursuing and did work in hospitals in a more medical model. Now that's all shifted quite a bit in the US. Um, yeah. So I think it is a bit different than the UK or anywhere in Europe, or even in, of course, other parts of the world. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00So this series is very much about trauma-informed practice and thinking about how that has been diluted and how we resist that dilution while at the same time being really excited about the fact that we are now we talk so much about it, maybe too much, some might say. Um, but how does that show up differently in art therapy compared to or expressive arts therapy compared to other
Early Trauma Work Before “Trauma”
SPEAKER_00perhaps talk-based therapies or the medical model? You know, how does it show up differently?
SPEAKER_01Well, again, I'm probably really opinionated, but also cheeky about this because I think that expressive arts therapy, which is the use of, let's give it a definition, in a therapeutic setting in psychotherapy, the use of movement, of sound. I call it sounding because it doesn't just have to be singing, it can be making sounds or listening to sounds, image making, enactment, playfulness, curiosity, imagination, all these things are not new. They're thousands of years old. So I always say, again, being a little cheeky here, that expressive arts therapies, the original psychotherapy, it came long before we started formally exploring psychiatry and psychology and all these different approaches in mental health. So, in a way, I would extrapolate from that and say it's kind of the original trauma-informed care, because it really gave people a very culturally resonant way around the world and all the different cultures and communities, a way of expressing and processing things that were crisis-oriented, that were traumatic, that involved loss. That's where those rituals and ceremonies and actually all the arts came about in that context. It wasn't, you know, in the beginning about, oh, let's make some art and sell it. It wasn't about that. It was about all these other rituals and ceremonies and procedures that developed. You know, and fast forward now we have in this century some of the research that validates why those approaches really do work. But I always say the research has been there for thousands of years. Why did people keep doing these things and still are doing them around the world in different cultural communities? So that's one of the bases to me, when I think about it, in the definition of trauma-informed work, it addresses the cultural and personal needs of the individual and the group or the community in some way. So I think like sometimes I sit back and think again, that talk therapy doesn't always do that. It doesn't always reach people in that way. Now, even if you just break that down into another issue, which is a little bit of a tangent here, but the neurodivergent community, say we look at that, you know, and how do we provide trauma-informed care for them? Um, language may not be the most comfortable way to work. It may be in some of these other forms of expression. I'm just picking that one out. There's certainly others, but I think about that a lot too. You know, we're not just talking about an ethnic culture, we're also talking about the cultures of how we all feel comfortable expressing and what feels healing or reparative to us.
SPEAKER_00Does that make sense? Yeah, well, I was thinking a lot about well, we met in Australia, so where you have you know, a lot of exposure, certainly from a UK perspective, to indigenous culture and thinking about storytelling, and that really comes to the fore in such beautiful ways. So I was thinking a bit about that, and then I was thinking about I was actually thinking about how did we go from that to Instagram, you know, like to this kind of culture of endless kind of well, there's a lot of cultural appropriation for a start. Um, people who are not being uh clear and open and honest about where many of these healing modalities have come from. In particular, I'm thinking storytelling, you know, which I feel really passionately about, um and and and art and all of those ways that that communities have healed. Um I I feel really a bit uncomfortable about all of that. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, and then what gets promoted on there as well, I always see cultural practices
Arts As Original Trauma Care
SPEAKER_01taken and turned into various ways that influencers can get more followers. I mean, that's what it seems to be about, is influencing. But I was going to back up into this, which has to do with social media in general. See, I think the interesting thing for me right now about trauma-informed work is what is trauma? You know, we've had working definitions of that that we've all been able to agree on. And I see over the last 10 years, now again, I may be speaking a little bit from living in the country that I live in, but I think the world is also a generally shaky place right now, politically and economically in a lot of other ways. Um, we've had a lot of things come together really quickly. Social media is one of them. Artificial intelligence is another. We have political, however you want to frame that, political upheaval, unrest or questioning. We've got economic stresses. We have, I'll just speak for the US, what I see, uh, a degree of incivility and inhuman kinds of communications that have happened really quickly and have gotten to be part of the culture. All of that has created what I call, right now, I'm just giving it kind of a name, a working name as I think it through, uh long-haul distress. Because we came from a time in 2020 when we had the pandemic. I think some of the a lot of this was going on before that. The pandemic threw us into isolation, lockdowns, fear. We've never rebooted from that. And then we have all these other threads coming into the picture.
SPEAKER_00Now we've never talked about it, Kathy. That that was the we've never talked, we've never had certainly in the UK, we've never had a national conversation about it. We've never talked about the impact of people dying on their own, of um, you know, what happened to children, what happened to children trying to become adults, what happened to women birthing children, what happened, you know, we've never talked about any of that. Right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Here we had over a million people die from it. And there never was, except for I think one moment when the previous president was in office, a moment of memorial for that, but there never has been. And we wanted to all put it in the rear view. And I'll say this is an interesting example. In 2022, uh, conferences started up again in the US, face-to-face conferences. Uh, of course, we always have virtual now as well. A lot of people do choose to be virtual still because of some of the fears around that. Uh, but that was the first year that we all kind of started come back as speakers. So I came to my first big conference, decided I'm not wearing a mask, even though the area that the conference was in was identified as a hot zone. There was a COVID outbreak, you know, so there was a certain amount of risk, whether or not you had a vaccination, there was still risk. So we had a lot of people in the audience with masks. I had about a couple hundred people in a large workshop all day. And I was the only one at that conference, there were probably 40 speakers at that conference, that offered people an opportunity to use one of the experiences we were engaging in that they were learning, to use that if they wanted to, to express something about the impact of the pandemic. Something either they wanted to hold on to that they learned from it, or something they wanted to let go. And I made mine kind of clear and simple about, you know, how happy I was to be there. I want to hold on to being with people again. I appreciate it so much more at this point and what things I wanted to let go. I was the only one out of 40 speakers who even brought up the pandemic at a trauma conference. Amazing. People were like, they were like, thank you for giving us this opportunity. This standing up and saying, I don't know if I know the answer to this yet, but thank you for opening up the conversation. And I said, I'm just, you know, being in the here and now. And that I that I think is being trauma informed. Like you are trying to open up and empower people to choose that it's okay to talk about this. But you're right. I mean, I think I don't know how many countries have had the same experience of just wanting to put it, as we say, in the rearview mirror. You know, it's gone. It's not gone. And even if it's diminished, that fear response is still in the back of our heads. We've never rebooted completely from that, I don't think. And so we have to think about these multidimensional things, right? That's one of them. And I'm saying there's all these others too: the social media, the Instagram, the you know, all that stuff, the artificial intelligence, which is, you know, nobody knows exactly where that's going, but it's in there.
SPEAKER_00One end of the spectrum is it's going to keep people alive, and the other end of the spectrum is it's going to obliterate humankind. I mean, it's just like
Social Media And Long-Haul Distress
SPEAKER_00juice from a menu Air. What's it gonna be? Yeah, yeah. Uh it's really quite crazy. So when you think about um uh I'm sure you'll have a view about this, but what what do you see when you're thinking about art-based interventions being used in, you know, used as a kind of PR exercise or used to make sales, or they're not, you know, just not kind of what you would hope being used. I mean, do you see that in your art space?
SPEAKER_01Because obviously I don't write outside the field, which is almost excusable because it's people that don't seem to to know about the depth of it, but inside the field, I'll say there there are so many people producing what I call their activity books and their intervention books and their exercises and projects that people can do and that will remarkably alleviate you of your trauma, depression, anxiety, and any number of things. Regardless of what's going on in the world, regardless of what's going on in the world. Put this other layer on there of the long-haul distress that I'm gonna call. And that, you know, people can make that up their own terminology for that, but I say there's another layer. And then there's also the personal traumas, distress or stress that people carry. What happened to the relational piece? That's a really core part of trauma-informed work. We are co-creators with people of what is going to be helpful to expand their capacity. And this is not present in the idea of a recipe for oh, do this doodle, you know, and make these marks, and this will, you know, help you regulate. Regulation is also about co-regulation, that's the purpose of you know, the trauma-informed work as well, whether you're a psychotherapist or any other number of workers, it's it's being with each other and supporting that process. So, yeah, I uh that's a really interesting thing. I always see that a hundred times a week, that the art can do the work. No, no person need it. It's a it's uh we call it do-it-yourself.
SPEAKER_00I've seen you on LinkedIn, Kathy, and you do call it out when you see it, don't you? I mean, I've seen you call it out. I mean, you're quite gentle. Your big bug bear at the moment, which is also mine, um, appears to me to be um AI images. Yeah. Yeah. And you always put, oh, can I just ask? Is that an AI image? Yeah, well, you know it's an AI image because it's of course because they look so I'll say, soulless.
SPEAKER_01They don't have there's nothing behind the curtain. I mean, they all have all the words and everything correct about whatever it is a person wanted to get across, but AI picks the imagery and how to put it together. This is astounding. I mean, it's astounding on a lot of levels because I think one thing people do not realize is when they go in and use that, they give up a lot of personal information to that platform. And where does it go? That's a whole big question we have no answers to yet. But we'll find out. Um, but yeah, and why is that? And then I find my own colleagues in the expressive arts world using that when they've proposed that the hands-on is actually what is the reparative and restorative factor, not a third party creating the images.
SPEAKER_00It's cognitive dissonance, isn't it? In that context that you've just described, yeah, that is cognitive dissonance. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So yeah. But the other thing is people need to declare. It's interesting, like in a lot of publishers right now, they do make people sign a form and say, I didn't use AI to generate, you know, this information. It should be the same with anything that we post. This was AI generated, just to let people know. But it is pretty obvious right now because all the images look exactly the same. They do.
SPEAKER_00They do. That's that's kind of frightening. I I every time I see one, I'm just I want to say, please don't do that. Please don't use um AI to make make that image. I think to be honest, I think they're great for like graphs and things like that. But that's an entirely different. Well, there's been tools to help you make graphs for a long time. I think that's entirely different than trying to create art pieces that are meant to generate something from in the song. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I think some people are starting to realize that I'm seeing a little less of it, unless the algorithm is is picked up on the fact that I don't want to see those images. We don't know for sure. Yeah, that's part of the whole thing too. Yeah. So yeah. Uh yeah.
SPEAKER_00What risk what risks do you think arise when people assume that doing art is automatically a trauma-informed practice?
SPEAKER_01Well, again, I'm gonna go back to it's interesting, you know, in twenty in 2020, I guess I wrote it in 2019, trauma and expressive arts therapies got published. But I want to go back to 2019, the part where I was writing it, because I did not have what I think is just. Chapter four in that book, which is about the relationship. And I just was sitting there at the computer one day, and I'm thinking, like, wait a minute, there has to be a whole chapter here before everything else that I'm going to unpack about the human relationship and how key that is in all of this. It was just like I was hitting my head against the wall. How did I, you know, miss that one? I think we take it for granted, but now we have a generation, it's interesting, of arts therapists I'm seeing come out, at least in the US, and I can't speak for other countries, that seem to think it is the art that does the work on its own. And I don't think anybody's been role modeling to them what the relationship piece looks like. And again, you know, we can compare that again to the whole AI thing with people using it to generate images that are, you know, quite well put together. All right. Uh and relationship, when you bring that in, it's a messy thing. It's not so easy. You really have to invest yourself in that. And that's what I think, you know, is falling a little bit off the radar in the trauma-inform work in general. People are doing a lot of even the verbal, more language-based therapies, are very psychoeducational and not dropping down into the relational piece as much, like giving people, especially when they lean into the somatic stuff right now, giving them ideas about how to hack your vagal nerve, you know. All these really, you know, which are not bad things. They're not, you know, terrible things, but they're all about, you know, here, here's tools for you to do it yourself to reduce your anxiety. Of course, people need those kinds of things when they're in rough moments. But then there's another piece beyond that that I'm seeing a little get a little bit lost. You know, where do we get in and engage with the person to support and help them expand their capacity in a way that's resonant with them? And that's that trauma-informed piece again. It's trauma-informed to give them the psychoeducation as well. That's one of the principles, but we have to have the other piece.
SPEAKER_00Why do you think that's happened? You know, what what do you think has caused that to happen? And what does it actually look like to step into that artwork with relationship?
SPEAKER_01Um, well, it involves actually a lot of different principles that we know about with mirroring and attachment work, um, rhythm, all these kinds of things come into the expressive work. And I think talk therapists know a little bit about that because they might use prosody and their languaging to you know make relationships. I think what's happening is I think therapists are overwhelmed. And when they find a nice
DIY Interventions And Lost Relationship
SPEAKER_01set of techniques that seem to be workable that maybe bring about some kind of relief, they go with that. That there's there are a lot of technique-oriented things out there right now that are not bad. I'm not saying that they're incorrect, but you know, EMDR, the very uh kind of some people do not really use it as a relational thing, they use it as a phase approach, go through the eight phases in the session. There are other things that have come about, you know, neurofeedback, uh, things that involve uh different kinds of uh techniques and things you learn to do with someone and just keep evaluating. So that piece that I think has been the core of psychotherapy, the human relationship, could be being altered by a lot of the things that are going on around us, too. Right? I mean, again, with the social media, which has made us supposedly more connected than ever, but has disconnected us more than ever, isolation from the pandemic that we never have recovered from fully, even though a lot of us say, yes, I want to be with people and engage with them, it may not be completely true for everyone. Um, yeah, and then just the layers of stress in society that seem to be I feel them. I mean, I feel like if I go back to before the pandemic, the world didn't feel as overwhelming as it feels now, and I keep wrestling with that. Is it a generational thing, or is this something that's really happening with everyone?
SPEAKER_00No, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, no, I'm I'm with you. I think it's an incredibly overwhelming experience. You actively have to remove yourself, you actively have to take face, you actively have to withdraw, you actively have to stop watching the news, you act, you know, you you you have to be really intentional. And of course, for children and young people, that isn't likely to happen. They're not likely to be very intentional about what they're ingesting. So, of course, that's causing all sorts of complications for for for those uh generations before. Um well, you have to put the cell phone down too.
SPEAKER_01That would help. That would help. I don't know. I mean it's a it's a real factor, and I think now you know I can go back to I'll go back again to because I have a uh a good working memory of that, working on that book, all that 2019 for the 2020 publication, being on a deadline. I don't feel like in 2019 I had as many interruptions or things that got my attention as I do now. I mean, I can because I'm trying to work on, well, you're very prolific with your writing. Um, I'm struggling right now. Again, like I have the ideas, I know the things I want to say, and it's finding the time without the distractions to just sit there and do it. And I think, wow, back in 2019, that wasn't that long ago. I was able to go sit at the table in my office here and just get immersed in it. Feels like there's more email, there's more this, there's more that, there's more something. And it could be the cell phone, it's one of the things, more text, more this.
SPEAKER_00Very intentional about my writing. I mean, tomorrow, I'm getting off for the rest of the week to go and sit in a library for a week. I'm sleeping there, I'm writing there, because I've got to get a trunk a manuscript in, and I can't, I just can't do that at home without, you know. I I I mean, I probably could, but it would be hard, it would be really hard. Whereas if I'm in a library, I'm away from everything and everyone, then I've got an opportunity to because I'm at the editing stage of the latest book, and I find that the hardest. You know, when you're reading back the stuff that just really needs rewriting. I know exactly. That never ends, does it? You know, you get your book out and then you read it again, you're like, oh god, I didn't know I meant it like what was I thinking? So difficult. But if you could change one thing that you think would be really, really a good thing to change in the trauma-informed space from any angle, what do you think that might be? What's the one thing that you think would really shift?
SPEAKER_01Okay, so I have a uh personal one, and I also have a larger issue for the trauma field right now in general. But the personal one is I keep telling people that come to our classes and you know, or people that end up mentoring in some way that you know really have a passion for the work that I've been in. Um people so need this right now to be connected to each other in another way through the senses. That's the other thing that's being impacted here by our focus on devices and our misdirected focus on so many other things. These are things, again, thousands of years, people have done these things. People still do them. People go to church, chant, pray, sing together. Uh, we're talking about Australia. I mean, where the culture is really immersed in that, in the First Nations, in the storytelling, and and the, you know, all the art. I always say to them, you don't need to go get an expressive arts degree. You're already doing it. This is it. This is the ground zero that all the rest of this came from. So, you know, that's that's one thing I wish the trauma world would see this more clearly, because, you know, I get invited to speak at these conferences, but I think, okay, everybody nods their heads, but this is really important stuff to work with the senses. Our colleague Ruth Lanius is one who realizes that, who writes, has done that marvelous book now with her co-authors on sensory processing and trauma. That's a really important piece for humans in general. To get in touch with the senses is a lifelong thing that's helpful not only with trauma processing, but with a lot of other things in our lives. We're sensory people, and that's who we are. But the other piece is really interesting, and I don't know if this is true around the world, but it certainly seems true in the US. We've developed
AI Images And Ethics In Practice
SPEAKER_01a whole um, I don't know, a whole group of what I call celebrity therapists. Now, I don't think we're gonna get into that. I didn't know I mean it's a hard conversation to have because these are our colleagues too. You know, and I again I time travel and go back and think like, okay, turn of the century, I was involved in working with the trauma institute then. We did a lot of things nationally, and especially after 9-11, 2001. So I can go back to that memory of going around and giving talks and working with people and talking to people on the ground, working with children, working with first responders, all kinds of people. It was very informational what we did then. Now there's been a change. There is conferences are more performative. There's performance involved, there's staging, there's spotlight, there's all kinds of bells and whistles, and um a whole change in kind of what goes on. There have been people that are promoted into that realm of being performers on stage talking about trauma. Now, what they're saying is not bad. What they're saying is a little bit repetitive now, though, because I think we have a lot of things going on in the world that are not getting addressed. They're giving the talks that people come for from whatever books or presentations that they've done that, you know, have been very popular. This is not, I don't think it's moving the field of trauma ahead. Conversations are not happening the way they used to, when people would get even up on a platform and um and have conversations together. I have to give credit to the Australian Childhood Foundation for having those kinds of panels. We had a wonderful panel there um in August with uh on neurodivergence and a good 90-minute conversation, a really great conversation where a lot of things were said and and brought out that were difficult topics. That kind of conversation doesn't happen when we do the celebrity therapy staging. Yeah, there's the speaker, don't you know, this this is this is what it is, and and uh yeah, it's presented uh on a main stage and spotlighted, and yeah. Male, very male space. Yes, it's always a very male space. There's a once in a while female that gets in there. Yeah, yeah, but it's very male, it's very white, it's very white male, it is. Yeah, yeah, and it continues and um it's it's impacted the trends. There's there are a lot of things. Well, well, you're on LinkedIn, there are a lot of good conversations on LinkedIn by people. I'm I'm very grateful for that because they're people that I wouldn't know or ever be exposed to because of the way the big US conferences are staged. So you don't hear those voices, but at least I get to read them and see them, you know, on a social media platform once in a while. Yeah. So I don't know, like, what does this mean for the field of trauma in general? Maybe it's this way in a lot of things, but I certainly, you know, have had this trauma-focused work all these years and seen that change sometime over the last 10 years.
SPEAKER_00It's become, yeah. Yeah, I had another conversation with somebody else in this series, and we were talking about that, you know, and I was very much saying the same thing. We are not living in the same way as we were 10 years ago. And we've still got people saying the same things, repeating the same stuff, but we're not living in the same environment. And so that's it's that's um again, it's it's not helpful.
Sensory Connection And Celebrity Therapists
SPEAKER_00I I don't know what's going to shift us. Something will shift us, something will change us. I don't I don't know what that's going to be. But I suppose that leads me to, you know, a final question, really, which is where where do you see hope? Where do you see hope? And what does that look like? And how do you think that well?
SPEAKER_01Even though I was, you know, I sounded negative about that last topic, which uh, yeah, I agree with you. Something is going to shift here. We just don't know what it is. It's always exciting to think. So there's hope there, I think. But you know, being in expressive arts therapy, and I've I've compared this before to the window of tolerance, which is a lovely model developed by Dan Siegel. But I always have questioned as a trauma-informed principle, the word tolerance. Why do we have tolerance in there? I think he really meant to say capacity, the window of capacity, but somehow it came out tolerance. And I've had that question even come up with clients over the years because we get into conversations and they're, you know, a lot of them have said, Kathy, um, why do we have to expand our ability to tolerate more? We've tolerated enough. And I said, Yeah, you're right. I mean, this is a you know really interesting question. Uh and I think that's also dominant in a lot of our literature to think about some of the languaging that we've used with people and do listen to your clients or ask them how do they feel about that? Because you'll get a lot of good feedback. And that was one of the best pieces of feedback that I've gotten over the years. And I started to think, you know, expressive work. I'm I'm really fortunate in the fact that it really is about building capacity. People start to feel it, they're sensing it, they find something that's expressive for them that they really resonate with, and they start to enjoy it, and they start to feel pleasure and joy in their body, and they start to be curious. So all these things that are not in that window of capacity, which again, I just think this is a complement to that. The window of tolerance is about expanding your capacity, else, the capacity for being able to tolerate, you know, uh the physiological things like hyper alertness, hyper-arousal, and or hypoarousal, you know, those, and sometimes it's both at the same time. We're thinking in the expressive work about how we bring back joy and resilience and mastery and confidence and all these things that trauma rob people of. And I think I get goosebumps when I always say that every single time, because I think how fortunate to be able to bring that sensory experience to people. But that's where kind of I came up with, I had to come up with another model, a circle of capacity, just to show that to people. Like, okay, here's this model that's been going on since 2009. And, you know, people use that. A lot of psychotherapists will use it in their, you know, work with people who've experienced some kind of traumatic event or lifelong trauma. And here's another idea. This is where we're headed, because this is what trauma maybe robbed you
Hope Through Capacity Joy And Co-Creation
SPEAKER_01of. And, you know, hopefully we're going to start to notice those moments in our work together and capitalize on that. And again, going back to the trauma-informed principle of how do we co-create these moments together? Because that's that's the important piece here is the co-creation and the empowerment, you know, of your expression of these kinds of experiences and also the restoration of them.
SPEAKER_00I think that's uh beautiful. I mean, that's what it's you know, uh what a gift to be able to bring that into the work and to bring that to people. And um, so I think that's a great place for us to finish. So thank you so much, Kathy. It's been an absolute joy talking to you. Yes, you too. I'm so glad to see you. I know, because I'm alone.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you for this. This is wonderful.
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