Tell me More!

What is Drama Therapy?

Drama therapy is a modality that centers your intuition, the imaginal realm, and the wisdom of creativity. In Drama Therapy we dissolve the limits, reminding us that health and wellbeing are to live in the transformative spaces beyond the binary. We transform the limiting idea of “I only have one role to play in life” can become “I have MANY roles I can play, and I have agency on when/where/how I do this!”.

We examine what roles we have adapted to in resilience, the roles lost and forgotten, and the roles we dream to become. This can include discussion of family systems/trauma, expressive arts (writing, music, imagery), embodied somatic process, and more! We will utilize the foundations and therapeutic aspects of theater based practices including metaphor, story telling, role theory, movement of the body, imaginative visualization, ritual, and humor. A lot of the time we will dialogue about the many experiences of your life and build our own relationship.

Who is Drama Therapy for?

Folx of all identities and experiences can benefit from the creative arts, which offer a variety of “ways in”, channels, to our pain and joy. Humans are innately creative through distress to foster resilience. Evoking expressive arts as a conduit can open up many connections and resources we never knew were here for us. Myths of capitalism, racism, abelism, etc. attempt to hold us captive from imagination, connections, empowerment, and spirit. Creativity is alchemizing and offers us ways of seeing our truth and finding one another. I especially enjoy supporting queer folx and non conformists to heal attachment challenges & ancestral wounds, resist oppression, and reconnect with authenticity. May we all find peace in a life beyond binaries and harmful conditioning.

I work well with healers, teachers, empaths, organizers, artists of all kinds, and anyone queering the path to belonging!

SOMATICS

As a student of somatics, I will often offer a blending of embodiment practices, movement, gesture, and language of the nervous system through our explorations & trauma healing. This is to amplify what may be transpiring and integrating in your body through our work and to offer alternative vocabulary for the experiences of human distress, change, and healing. This includes study of Generative Somatics, IFS, Polyvagal Theory, Somatic Experiencing, my own ancestral spiritual eco feminist practices and more. This will always be with your consent, and oriented towards your preferences. For more information about my somatic trainings and approach, see below!

Focus areas

  • Creative Process

  • Life/Career transitions

  • Developmental Trauma & Post Traumatic Growth

  • Empaths

  • Family Conflict & Attachment

  • Recovering Caregivers/Codependency 

  • Anxiety & Depression

  • Spiritual Exploration

  • Adults who were parentified children or had to “grow up too quickly”

  • LGBTQQIP2SAA experiences of joy and grief

  • Body Liberation & Healing Shame

  • Neurodivergent Affirming Wellness

WHAT I DONT DO

  • Diagnose/treatment plan

  • Provide psychotherapy

  • Manualized sessions or regular homework assignments

  • Explicit protocol like you would experience in EMDR, CBT, or DBT ( though I am DBT/CBT/ACT informed)

    You should know this space is…

    Queer! Playful! Strength-Based! Abolitionist Informed!

    In our work together we will get curious about binaries, how the mental and relational sorting of good/bad harms us all. This healing space is politicized. We will build endurance towards nuance and ambiguity to cope with the impermanence that constitutes our lives. The world may be chaotic and uncontrollable, however we can use practices to find more joy, ease, and loving justice.

  • I am deeply influenced and in awe of the courage in the recovery and peer communities, that more often do not hide behind white supremacist professionalism and title hierarchies. I am not an expert and I am not the only person you’ll need on in your web. I do my best to show up with all parts of me in our work together, seeking to co-create boundaries around your care needs and mine. Together I hope to disrupt the inherent power dynamic that can be loaded onto the title “healer” or “therapist” by practicing negociations of care and earnest movement through any rupture. May we be anchored to clear and kind boundaries.

    It looks like you’re a Drama Therapist and a Coach… What does that mean, and what are you really?

    I am both! I definitely use my clinical training with a MA in Drama Therapy to support my capacities as a coach. My practice is coaching-focused as rather than specific treatment for “functioning”, diagnosis, or mental illness, my guidance is about intuitive healing, narrative processing, integration, and strength-based holistic care. As a Somatic Experiencing student, this falls under my coaching domain as this is not a licensed discipline. Creative Arts Therapists in CA, are not goverened by the Board of Behavorial Sciences. If you are seeking diagnostic clarification, medication management, or other psychotherapy or psychiatric services, this is outside of my scope of practice and I would be happy to support a referral process.

 

Current Trainings and Influences…

EARLIER EDUCATION AND WORK:

I hold a MA degree from New York University (2020) in Drama Therapy and a BA in Theater Arts Performance from California State Uni of Long Beach (2014). Prior to private coaching, I have extensive experience as a Drama Therapist and Counselor in acute psychiatric hospitals, partial hospitalization/outpatient groups, community settings, older adult care facilities, and residential treatment centers for co-occurring mental health and substance recovery. I have worked with individuals and groups across the life span navigating trauma, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, mood challenges, experiences of hearing voices/seeing visions, and life transitions often compounded by social and cultural dislocation. I have a special passion for supporting 2Slgbtqia+ folx who come in contact with these systems through a liberation focused lens. I am greatly in awe of and influenced by models of co-care in recovery community and peer communities. I do my best to disrupt professionalism (not hide in it), and navigate co-created boundaries with people I support.

Disability Justice:

At this time I identify as a non-disabled person (in the context of physical ability) and neuroqueer within what is perceived as the neurotypical/neurodivergent binary in colonial westernized psychiatry. I relate mostly to ADHD type experiences of energy, attention, thinking, creative process, organizational capacities, processing speeds and some more traits I am still exploring. I also recognize many overlaps within complex trauma experiences, and I am always unpacking this and striving to be a co-conspirator for the movement of disability justice and madness. I hold an open inquiry about my ongoing changing abilities/capacities. My connection to supporting disabled people is informed by engagement as an advocate within disability community in a variety of artist, community, and mental health spaces. My life experience also includes being a loved one, a family member, and in relationship to many folks who identify as living with a disability, as disabled individuals, and/or oppressed by abelist systems (all of us!). I have much room for growth and invite all dialogues here. I believe in supporting your needs as they arise and transform. I will do all I can alongside you to accommodate diverse participation and access needs. We will discuss this when we meet for a consult call. If we work in person, we will discuss our COVID needs and work together accordingly with masking & testing. The office has windows, fans, and air purifiers. running in the office and waiting room.

Yoga and MOVEMENT:

I hold a Trauma Informed Yoga Teacher certificate from Exhale to Inhale (non profit bringing yoga to survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault). I am also a certified yofa instructor. When facilitating yoga practices I move from this trauma-informed frame. I spent 6 years working as a performer, yoga instructor, and leading arts enrichment classes throughout NYC & Brooklyn. My most recent training with Alchemystic Studio focused on yoga philosophy rooted in social justice practice and re-indiginzing yoga in the West. I recognize that Westernized appropriated Yoga is bound up in white supremacy and caste supremacy. It is the responsibility of anyone who engages in these practices to be acknowledging history and present harm, particularly the supremacist politics embodied in yoga spaces and trainings. I am taking up the intention in how I practice and who I learn yoga practices from to be in liberatory spaces re-indiginizing yoga. There is much to be learned and more to be done to mitigate the harm of my former trainings which de-contextualized yoga from caste and supremacy culture.

Other movement influences I draw from include psychophysical theater technique, sensorimotor theories, somatic attachment, and my background of theater and dance practice.

Affiliations:

Psychology Today

Inclusive Therapists

Certified on OPEN PATH COLLECTIVE & HEALING ARTS COLLECTIVE

Queer Healers

Registered Drama Therapist (#822) with the North American Drama Therapy Association

NYU MA in Drama Therapy 2020

The Space

ID 2 : a panoramic photo of a therapy office with white walls and bordering sunlit windows. In the center of the room is gold coffee table, grey couch and lots of plants. Abstract art hands on the walls.

ID3: scrabble letter squares that spell out the word “Zoom”, referring to the virtual platform for online sessions

I acknowledge that my practice is located on the ancestral homeland of the Chochenyo Ohlone peoples. As a non-Indigenous person occupying this land and benefitting from that, I pay Shuumi Land Tax from business profit as a small way to support Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.,