How A Deep Understanding Of The Patriarchy and Women’s Issues Is Integral To The Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program

THE COLOUR OF RESILIENCE (2024) – An Art Therapy Short Film

January Soulful Musings

Nicholas Galanin Hews Visions of the Present From Indigenous Knowledge, Land, and Memory : By Kate Mothes

The Wild Heart Expressive Arts Teacher Training Program begins in just a little greater than two weeks on April twenty ninth and as Tim and I are getting ready and refining the curriculum it’s additionally making me take into consideration a few of the psychological, religious and philosophical roots and influences that inform what and the way we train.

Over the following week or so I wish to share with you the assorted elements of my lineage by way of how I strategy this expressive arts work. And what you may study from me by collaborating on this program.

One other main affect in my early explorations into what’s therapeutic and what does it take to heal additionally got here by way of one thing referred to as Radical Psychiatry. This was an idea and a motion developed by social activists who have been additionally therapists that I used to be launched to in the course of the late 70’s and early 80’s by way of being mentored by a girl named Hogie Wyckoff. Hogie was the writer of quite a lot of books together with Fixing Issues Collectively and Fixing Girls’s Issues By Consciousness, Motion and Contact.

Radical Psychiatry proposed that an individual’s psychological wounds and struggles are the direct results of the affect of bigger social and political methods and isn’t a private downside or failing. Their motto was “Remedy means social, political and private change, not adjustment”.

It explored points just like the inherent energy construction of a standard therapuetic relationship and the way it creates a high/down, patriarchal, infantilizing dynamic the place the therapist is the knowledgeable who diagnoses your issues by saying “I do know you higher than YOU know you.”

It tried to rectify that dynamic by way of training but additionally by instructing strange folks counseling abilities that they may use with one another. These abilities took the thriller out of remedy and put everybody on an equal footing, permitting people to regain a way of energy and company when it got here to their very own psychological and emotional therapeutic.

Hogie Wyckoffs work centered very particularly on girls’s points and the way the dominant therapuetic paradigm as mirrored by the tradition at giant contributed to girls’s oppression, by way of patriarchal attitudes that worth capitalism ( i.e. cash), male energy and suppression of emotions over authenticity, equality and real relationship. However that this oppression in most ladies was nonetheless very unconscious and contributed to an ongoing sense of isolation, alienation and a scarcity of self price.

Hogie did most of her work in girls’s teams the place her focus was on making that oppression aware by way of instructing girls to acknowledge that every one girls are handled the identical method by the dominant tradition and that working collectively to get up to that oppression results in deeper connection, optimistic motion and finally a way of liberation.

This mind-set about psycho-therapuetic dynamics and the way dominant tradition values associated to the patriarchy and misogyny have been typically acted out within the remedy room affected me deeply and influenced how I labored after I grew to become a therapist myself. And continued to tell my mind-set and dealing as soon as I stepped into the position of intuitive portray facilitator.

It’s at all times been vital to me to acknowledge that regardless that I could have expertise and even experience in the way in which I work with others, what’s most vital is valuing, listening to and trusting within the deep knowledge of my shoppers and college students, and supporting them to belief themselves. To at all times remeber that they know far more than I do about what their souls must heal. And that my job is to easily be a a conduit to assist them hear and heal themselves.

The second factor I realized on a deep degree from Radical Psychiatry and Hogie Wyckoff was how insidious the patriarchy is and the way it contributes in 1000’s of the way to undermining womens energy, confidence and company. So one other a part of my life lengthy dedication as a trainer, chief and information was to confront and dismantle these patriarchal constructs at each flip.

I realized that the political IS the non-public. They’re one and the identical factor and ladies’s struggles, points and traumas should be addressed on each ranges for true therapeutic to happen.

I additionally realized concerning the virtually magical energy of working in neighborhood and the way sacred circles of fact and vulnerability are like miracle develop for the spirit that results in inventive and societal soul freedom.

I used to be in a position to weave all of what I realized about energy, girls’s points, and systemic cultural oppression into the practices of intuitive portray and the expressive arts. And located that inventive expression freed from expectations round issues like perfectionism, productiveness, success, approval and management is an extremely efficient instrument for liberation on all ranges.

Using these political and therapeutic views and mixing them with intuitive portray is definitely fairly distinctive to how I do that work.

And is one thing that I’ll fortunately train and share with you should you come into my Wild Coronary heart Expressive Arts Trainer Coaching program!!!

So if this manner of making and therapeutic sounds attention-grabbing and thrilling to you take into account becoming a member of us for the following spherical of the Wild Coronary heart Expressive Arts Trainer Coaching Program On-line starting Saturday, April twenty ninth!!