Wellness for Artists + Creatives.
Do any of these feel familiar?
• You're struggling with creative blocks, perfectionism, comparing yourself to others, an intrusive Inner Critic, or overwhelm—and wondering now what?
• You're wanting to cultivate your embodiment and emotional range to serve you better personally, artistically, and professionally
• You're wanting to better understand and tend to your creativity—including its cycles, seasons, and what lives underneath the creative blocks, stalled projects, and creative impasses
• You're looking to process experiences of harm in creative ecosystems—academic, training, professional, or systemic
• An artistic teacher or mentor has suggested therapy to explore something that working at your craft has surfaced
You deserve a therapeutic space that understands your world. Really.
My performing arts education, specialized clinical training, and lived experience as a musician, writer, and interdisciplinary artist all influence how I work with clients who are artists and creatives. (You can learn about my background and how it informs this area of specialization on the About page.)
You deserve a therapeutic space tailored to the unique concerns and mental health needs of creatives. This is true whether you're an actor, performance artist, musician, filmmaker, playwright, clown, photographer, choreographer, painter, illustrator, designer, dancer, writer, poet, scriptwriter, or sculptor—or a person simply interested in connecting with your innate creativity.
Traditional psychotherapy can either underrecognize artists completely or hold romanticized attitudes toward the creative life that downplay its real difficulties and demands. This can leave artists undertreated as a result.
There's no shortage of conventional approaches, surface-level tips, or well-meaning advice for artists. Some of it may genuinely serve your creativity, productivity, or performance.
But some may do so at the expense of your well-being—or put you in the position of working against your unconscious rather than with it. In depth psychology, the unconscious is understood as the crucible of creativity and inner wisdom. We seek to work with it, not suppress it.
This is where specialized therapy for artists and creatives comes in. I work with artists to help them develop sustainable ways of relating to themselves and their art—with well-being now part of the equation.
Creative blocks as doorway.
From a depth psychology perspective, a creative block is not a wall to be smashed through. It can be a doorway—a meaningful adaptation with a crucial message about where you are and what you're needing. It can even contain vital information about the direction your art or a particular project is wanting to move towards.
Creativity has its source in the unconscious. When the channel between the conscious and unconscious becomes congested, creative work stalls. This congestion can come from an unprocessed experience, fear, an inner critic that's taken over, or a creative identity that no longer fits who you're becoming.
Creativity also has its seasons—periods of planting, blossoming, and harvesting, as well as periods of fallow ground. Our productivity-oriented society has very little patience for the latter. Part of how I work with artists is to help them locate what creative season they're in, and learn how to tend to it, just as one tends to a garden throughout the seasons. This is one way to develop a relationship with your creativity that is sustainable rather than extractive.
I also draw on myths and archetypes to help guide artists through creative blocks—connecting to something bigger than the block itself, lending a sense of hope and a roadmap pointing a way forward. Working with the shadow—the cast-off parts of oneself—can also help alchemize creative blocks into renewed creative energy and direction.
How I work with artists + creatives.
My approach draws on depth psychology, somatic work, expressive arts therapy, and nervous system education to work with the whole artist—not just the presenting concern. When I work with artists and creatives, I draw upon the following:
• Mapping your creativity—Locating yourself in the season of your creative process and distinguishing psychological from practical blocks
• Working with the Inner Critic, perfectionism, and self-comparison—Understanding what drives these patterns and forging a different relationship to them
• Developing embodiment and emotional range—Expanding your access to your own interior life, both for personal vitality and well-being, as well as a resource for your art
• Processing harm in different creative environments and systems—Trauma work calibrated to your pace and needs to support the processing of harmful experiences
• Somatic therapy and nervous system work—Tending to how the body and nervous system hold creative anxiety, performance stress, and the accumulated demands of the artist's life, including:
Somatic Experiencing®—A gentle, body-based modality for developing deeper embodiment, expanding emotional range, and processing trauma that may be stored in the body and affecting creative work and performance
The Fox Method—An approach to nervous system education and the arts pioneered by Ruby Fox that reframes the nervous system as the artist's primary instrument. This method helps artists understand and work intentionally with their nervous system in greater support of life and art.
• Expressive arts therapy—Using different art forms, including ones you may be less familiar with, to approach the work from new angles: making art for its own sake, exploring parts of yourself that rarely get expressed in your professional creative work, or moving through blocks by switching up art forms entirely
• Engaging the unconscious—Using dreamwork, symbol, and imagery to engage the unconscious as a creative collaborator rather than an obstacle—the same wellspring that depth therapy understands as the true source of creativity and inner wisdom
• Tending to your creativity as a living thing—Developing a more conscious, sustainable, and soulful relationship with your creative life over time
A note on working together.
Depth work of this kind requires consistency to be effective—which is why I see clients weekly. Therapy is also a financial commitment, as my practice is private pay. If you're looking for a reduced-fee option or a less frequent cadence, I'm happy to point you toward resources that may be a better fit. For those who want to engage with this work in other ways, I also offer therapy groups and a newsletter (scroll to the bottom of this page to sign up).
For further reading, check out these blog posts:
Frequently Asked Questions
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Artists and creatives navigate a particular kind of inner and outer terrain that general therapy doesn't always know how to meet. The blurring of identity and work, the specific pressures of creative ecosystems—academic, training, professional, and commercial—the vulnerability of putting creative work into the world, the psychological demands of accessing deep emotion as part of your craft: these aren't incidental to being an artist. They're central to it.
Traditional therapy can either underrecognize this terrain entirely or romanticize it in ways that downplay the real difficulties and demands of the creative path. Specialized therapy for artists and creatives takes your world seriously—and brings clinical training, lived experience, and a genuine understanding of what this life asks of you.
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Yes, expressive arts therapy isn’t just for professional artists. While I specialize in working with performing artists and those whose creative work is central to their professional or vocational identity, the work is also open to anyone who identifies as creative or who wants to develop a more conscious, nourishing relationship with their creativity.
The fact is, creativity is our birthright—for each and every one of us. It is a fundamental human capacity, one that often gets neglected, suppressed, or distorted by life circumstances, cultural messaging, and unexamined inner patterns.
If any of the experiences described on this page resonate, that's reason enough to explore whether this work might be useful for you. -
The difference lies primarily in depth, specificity, and the integration of creative modalities as part of the therapeutic work itself. General talk therapy addresses psychological concerns through conversation. Therapy for artists and creatives does that too, but it also brings expressive arts, somatic work, and depth psychology into the room in ways that speak directly to how artists think, feel, and process.
It also means working with someone who understands the specific landscape: what it's like to train in a conservatory or arts program, what it means to perform or exhibit, the particular dynamics of creative relationships and communities, and the ways that artistic identity can become both a profound resource and a source of vulnerability.
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A creative block is any experience of being unable to access, sustain, or express your creativity in the way you want or need to. It can show up as stalled projects, an inability to start, a persistent inner critic that shuts things down before they begin, a loss of inspiration or enthusiasm, or a more diffuse sense of creative stagnation.
From a depth psychology perspective, a creative block is rarely just a surface-level obstacle. It is often a meaningful signal—from the nervous system, the unconscious, or the soul—that something needs attention before the work can move again.
Therapy can help you decode that signal, understand what's underneath it, and find your way back to your creative life in a way that is more sustainable and authentic than simply pushing through.
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The connection is significant and often underappreciated. Trauma can leave a mark, whether it’s a single overwhelming event or the cumulative weight of difficult experiences in training or professional environments.
This mark is experienced not only on the body, but the psyche, the nervous system, and the creative process as well in ways that aren’t always obvious.For performing artists especially, trauma can show up as difficulty accessing certain emotions in performance, a body that freezes or shuts down under pressure, a persistent sense of unsafety in creative or professional settings, or a loss of spontaneity and aliveness in the work.
These aren't character flaws or signs of insufficient dedication or talent. They are the body and psyche's adaptations to experiences that left their mark.Somatic Experiencing®, depth therapy, and expressive arts therapy can all be valuable in addressing this. By working with the body and unconscious as well as the mind, a sense of safety, freedom, and aliveness in the creative process can be restored.
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Embodiment refers to the quality of being fully present in and connected to your body—that is, able to sense, feel, and respond from the inside rather than performing from the outside.
For performing artists especially, embodiment is not just a personal well-being concern. It is a craft concern. The degree to which you can inhabit your body, access your emotional life, and stay present under pressure directly affects the quality and authenticity of your work.Emotional range refers to your capacity to access the full spectrum of your inner life. Not just the emotions that feel safe or familiar, but the ones that are more difficult, more tender, or more unfamiliar.
Depth therapy, somatic work, and expressive arts therapy all contribute to developing both. This is not as a performance technique; rather, it’s a genuine deepening of your relationship to yourself. -
Creative and training environments such as conservatories, acting programs, dance companies, music schools, film sets, and professional creative industries, can be sites of significant harm. This includes intrusive or demeaning direction or instruction, boundary violations, sexual harassment or abuse, the normalization of extreme physical or psychological demands, systems of criticism that damage rather than develop, and the broader cultural dynamics of an industry that can be exploitative, unstable, and deeply inequitable.
The effects of these experiences can be lasting: a disrupted relationship to the art form itself, difficulty trusting teachers or directors, shame, and a body that carries the memory of being treated as an instrument rather than a person.
Specialized therapy can offer a space to process these experiences at your own pace, with someone who understands the specific dynamics of creative environments and doesn't require you to explain or justify why it affected you the way it did. -
This framing comes from the work of Ruby Fox and The Fox Method, a pioneering approach to nervous system education and the arts. The core idea is that the nervous system is not just something to manage or “regulate.” For artists, it is a primary instrument, as central to the work as the voice, the body, or the imagination.
Understanding how your nervous system works, what activates it, and how to work with it intentionally rather than against it can transform not just your well-being but your creative process and performance.
This is particularly relevant for artists who find that anxiety, shutdown, or unpredictable emotional responses interfere with their ability to do their best work. It’s also useful to artists who simply want a more conscious and sustainable relationship with the demands their creative life places on them.
All creativity is a cycle.
“All creativity is a cycle, not a singular event with no past and no future. But a cycle that has that quickening and rising to a Zenith and begins to decline and falls into a death and then an incubation, a holding or waiting period, and once again a quickening and then a rebirth. And this process continues over and over again. And it is this cycle that is right, and proper and cohesive and sacred.”
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés