A THERAPIST CIRCLE
The Therapist Circle was a virtual conversation that took place amongst 5 Music Therapists, moderated by staff from A Home Within---FYPC wanted this project to include the perspectives of artists/therapists, those in the field witnessing the true healing potential of creative self-expression.
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The photographs that accompany this therapist circle are Instax/Polaroid film and a few disposable cameras we used behind the scenes of the production for We Are Healing, Ch. 2: Healing Through Music.
Therapists present for this conversation: Eric Reyes, ACSW (volunteer); Megan Hedges, LPC (volunteer); Denise Galford-Koeppel, LMHC (volunteer); MereAnn Reid, LPCC (volunteer);
Sarah Kliman, LCSW (non-volunteer).
Chrissy Arlen, AHW Staff: Hi everyone! I will introduce myself, I’m Chrissy from A Home Within, I’m the Program Coordinator. Mia, do you want to introduce yourself?
Mia Lewis, AHW Staff: Sure! Hi, I’m Mia, I’m the Director of Communications here at A Home Within, and we are excited to continue our partnership with Journey House through this conversation.
Chrissy: Yes, we are getting started on We Are Healing, Chapter 2, which focuses on healing through music, and we’re so excited to talk to A Home Within volunteers and A Home Within-affiliated folks in the community that are here with us today, so thank you all so much for being here. If we could just start with going around and introducing ourselves by your name, your license type or kind of therapy you practice, and what made you volunteer with A Home Within if you do, and if you don’t, what your affiliation is with A Home Within. I will just get started with the person to my right on my screen, which is Eric.
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Eric Reyes, Volunteer: Hello everybody, my name’s Eric Reyes and I’m an associate clinician with A Home Within. I’m an Associate Clinical Social Worker and I recently completed my hours towards taking the exam for my licensure, actually by volunteering through A Home Within—but that isn’t the main reason! I’ve been a social worker for about 13 years and I’ve always felt called and drawn to helping relieve people’s suffering. You know, I fight for social justice and I think that’s why we all got into this business—for improving lives and communities. So, as a therapist I like helping direct people manage and overcome problems. At least with A Home Within, I’ve experienced clients that have seen a lot of abuse, they’ve experienced a lot of trauma, some have addiction issues and mental illness, and I like empowering clients to create change in their own environment and in their own life by recognizing their own strengths amid whatever diverse experience they’ve gone through—their anxieties, depressions, traumatic life experiences. Again, I think that generally speaking that’s why many of us get into this, but I’m drawn to A Home Within because of its mission statement of recruiting and training therapists specifically to serve current and former foster youth who maybe have slipped through the cracks, if you will, and have not received appropriate treatment for what they were experiencing. That really drew me. More specifically, I’m also impressed with the idea that they’re committed to honoring and recognizing racial and ethnic identities and that there are a lot of disproportionate disparities among people of color. I identify as Mexican-American. And that’s why I’m here!
MereAnn Reid, Volunteer: Hi, I’m MereAnn Reid and I’m an LPCC in Oregon, and I got involved with A Home Within after being a CASA for several years. I’ve really had a long-time interest in adoption and foster care for some of the same reasons that Eric was talking about—just being aware of the disparity that is part of the way our systems of particularly child welfare work, or don’t work, as the case may be. The idea first of being a citizen volunteer really appealed to me, and then on top of that, using my clinical skills with the same populations and issues has really been an easy “Yes!” for me. I don’t currently have a case—I’ve had several over the years, but right now I’m shifting my role to be more focused on assessment. I’m training right now with Dr. Bruce Perry from the Trauma Academy to do the neurosequential developmental assessments that are used in emergency rooms, residential treatment centers, and institutional care centers all over the world. That’s something that’s really missing in Oregon, and something that I want to see more of and help more clinicians learn about.
Sarah Kliman, Non-Volunteer: Hi there! I am Sarah Kliman, I’m an LCSW and a board-certified music therapist in Rochester, NY. I do not volunteer with A Home Within, but I have a very dear friend and colleague who does, and when she heard that there was this conversation happening about music therapy and the therapeutic use of music, she was like, “Hey, maybe you want to be part of this conversation.” So as for my background, I’ve spent 15 years working with kids and families in all sorts of settings, but the last 10 or so years have really been focused on kids here in Rochester in the Monroe County area that are navigating our child welfare systems. I’ve worked in therapeutic visitation, I’m currently in a Child Advocacy Center co-located role working with really young kiddos. I’m doing some program development and really supporting and nurturing some best practices around working with really young kids that are really impacted by and navigating the child welfare system. So I’m happy to be here and be part of this conversation!
Megan Hedges, Volunteer: Hi, so I’m Megan Hedges. I live and practice here in Fort Worth. I’m in the process of transitioning from my LPC associate to fully licensed and also to fully certified art therapist. I started in a creative arts program where we had the opportunity to have classes with dance movement therapists and music therapists, too, so I really love the expansion of creative expression. Even though my main area of expression is visual arts, I’ve been interested in expanding that recently. I currently volunteer with A Home Within, I have one client right now and we meet virtually. That has been great, I started as a case manager in the foster care system and I really love working with kids. Play therapy, too! I offer a lot of play therapy to the kids I work with. And my husband and I are actually in the process of deciding whether or not we want to be foster parents, so this is near and dear to my heart!
Denise Galford-Koeppel, Volunteer: I’m Denise Galford-Koeppel, I’m a LMHC here in the Boston area in MA. I’m also a registered play therapist, I serve on the Board for play therapy for the New England Association for Play Therapy, I’ve been a volunteer with A Home Within for about a year. I have one younger client who I see—I tend to work with younger kids. In my past lives and work, I’ve done a lot of work with children who have been adopted or are in foster care, so it’s just a really important interest to me and I’ll always do something sort of pro bono to help with that until we have a system that does support the neediest kids who actually need the best trained and best therapists. I use music as one of the avenues for play therapy, and I’m glad to be here!
Mia: I’m just going to open the floor—anyone can jump in as they would like to. I want to start by posing the question, what does the term “music therapy” look like to someone who has no familiarity with it? How do you integrate music into your practice, are there certain techniques or modalities, anything at all that you think would be helpful for someone who isn’t familiar with that term?
Sarah Kliman: So, I think I would be remiss—I can hear the voices of many music therapists behind me—to not to start by saying, to say that you’re doing “music therapy” would require that a board certified music therapist is present, so that’s sort of first and foremost. But, music therapists don’t own the therapeutic use of music—there are lots and lots of ways that anybody can therapeutically use music, whether it’s just for themselves in their own self-care practice, or as clinicians working and providing therapy with others. It can look like any number of things, and that’s one of the things that’s so so cool about music, because it’s so universally accessible and can mean and look like lots of different things to lots of different kinds of people. But again, I could just feel the invisible pressure and voices of thousands of music therapists behind me just making sure that it’s really clear that to say you’re doing music therapy, you have to be a board certified music therapist.
Eric: I’m going to piggyback on that because, you know, I’m not licensed to practice music therapy per se, and I did recognize that and I thank you so much for saying that, Sarah, because music does play a big part in many of our lives and our experience. We hear it every day, it’s in everyone’s experience, whether there’s trauma or not. And to those who say they’re not familiar with music therapy, since we know that it’s everywhere and that it’s something that’s understood as therapeutic, I think that all humans and living creatures, no matter where or who we are on our life continuum and development span, it still serves a purpose. For me, and you’re going to provide the evidence, but I think that music therapy’s clinical use is to help somebody achieve their clinical goals and improve their relationships or whatever it is that they are working on. It’s therapeutic in the sense that it helps a person emote, and that’s how I like to use it. When I use music, I like to use it as a form of engaging and rapport with a client that I see may be a musician or may have said in our introductions that they like music, they sing, or they play an instrument. And that’s okay, because that helps them express something that maybe they’ve not verbalized in the past. With music, you’re able to do that, and I have experienced that.
Denise: I would just add that one of the first things that we play with as infants is our voice and vocalization, so we start off playing sounds from the very beginning, and then not soon after that, a lot of child’s play is making sounds—hitting on things, tapping things, shaking things. So I like having things that kids can use to make music, both instruments and non-instruments. I just recently did a training about using family play therapy, so I had shoe boxes and empty containers and Mardi Gras beads, and we made like 15 different sounds just using those little objects. I also really think it’s important to reach all families, so families who don’t have English as their first language have music from their own culture they can share with us so that we can understand them and they can feel like they belong. And also it doesn’t mean that you have to buy instruments—you can use your body and many different things, so that means we can reach even more people who might not have the resources.
MereAnn: I think I come from a different angle, because I live with musicians, but I didn’t grow up listening to music really at all. We had a stereo that was covered with dust, it never got turned on. I don’t have musicians, it was really just like television and not even the radio! We listened to the news, we didn’t listen to music. So I’m just illustrating that it’s not a thread that I recognize in my own body or regulation or way of navigating the world. Even now, I would listen to a podcast before it would even occur to me to look for a song, or a playlist is not something that I’ve ever created. So that’s my context.
But, I have developed a fascination with how our nervous systems respond to rhythm, repetition, and patterns, and I’m really experiencing a lot of growth in myself, in my parenting, and in my clients, through being aware of regulation, and music is a source for that. So I use a music-based listening program that is built on a theory of the nervous system as a part of us that is always aware of our surroundings and our internal landscape, and always scanning for what’s happening between me and you, what’s happening inside, outside, and in-between. So, understanding that that’s what the nervous system needs for input and organization is the way that I’ve come to use music, and so we can use what we know about neuroscience and pair that with all of these threads that everyone is talking about with the power of music, and those can amplify each other. So, I’ve had an experience of using this filtered playlist of music built on the polyvagal theory to stabilize my nervous system, help me with anxiety, and reduce auditory sensitivities. I can now be in the same room with instruments that are being played—I would have had to be two or three rooms away because it would be too overwhelming for my nervous system. That’s not explicitly because of trauma, but that’s because my nervous system doesn’t know what to do with that kind of input—it’s too intense.
So that really relates to the developmental trauma that a lot of my child clients have experienced. We’re just seeing amazing shifts for autistic kids, and for children who have experienced physical abuse and neglect and didn’t get that kind of relational mirroring from their caregivers early on. They didn’t get the signals of safety in their environment as infants, toddlers, and young children, and our nervous systems build on our experience. So music is a way to go back and restore, reorganize, and retune our systems so that we can more accurately engage with the world around us and perceive signals of safety instead of assuming that everything is too much or overwhelming or possibly threatening. So it’s been really powerful.
Sarah: I love that, MereAnn. I feel like the neuroscience piece was a big part of what led me to music therapy initially and the fact that music, unlike any other clinical modality that I can think of—and it’s even slightly different than some of the creative arts and expressive disciplines—music impacts all areas of the brain simultaneously, while also activating our nervous system. So there’s something so powerful about this bottom-up, reparative quality that can happen. Even a lot of my work when I worked in therapeutic visitation was music-based crisis intervention—so, using zero words to de-escalate a situation, help regulate a kiddo, help ground them and give them an opportunity to express what was really coming up for them because words were not accessible.
Chrissy: Thank you so much, those were already such rich answers and such good discussion. Whoever wants to answer—and again, you can play off of each other’s answers—how do you use music in your therapy practice and how do you determine whether music would be the right intervention with a particular client?
Eric: I’ve experienced in every agency that I’ve worked in that music has had a big impact on the healing of the kids that I was serving, and so one of the examples that I wanted to share was providing mental health services for unaccompanied minors. They were migrant minors from countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and other countries. They were apprehended by immigration at the US border. These minors suffered so much trauma in their home countries and on their journey here to the United States, and while being here in the United States. I worked at a place called Arc Homes, and it was an agency that was like a milieu and it provided different types of services including education, meals, and resource families for them to stay with before they were reunified with their families before they got here to the country, but they were stuck in this milieu.
So I was able to use music—I remember requesting donations from social media for used instruments and whatever, and I was given all kinds of used instruments! Some of them were broken, some of them needed repair or new strings, and I remember after doing intakes with some of these kids that a lot of them enjoyed music, or they were singing to themselves or they were doing things where music was just a big part of their culture, and yet they weren’t able to express it formally or comfortably unless it was done in group therapy. So I remember just reaching out and just saying, “Hey, ¿Tù cantas? You sing?” I said, “Why don’t we put a choir together? Why don’t we fix these instruments and put some strings on them, and I’ll teach you how to play. If you know how to play, great! Do you know how to play?” I just like engaging that way. I found that just awesome—it was good for me, it was good for them. I think it was [like you said] Megan or Sarah, there were pots and pans involved! We were actually able to make music with all kinds of different stuff—harmonicas, flutes, recorders, these broken instruments that were actually working and these kids were singing music from their church or their home environment, and they were singing all kinds of stuff.
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I also was able to apply the same kind of method with one of my clients through A Home Within, and it just worked. We actually had a jam session one day and it was beautiful because I asked him, “Can I accompany you?” and I did. I play bass, guitar, a lot of different stuff, and it was just good because, after that we just had this reconnection and he felt a lot better and he’s still my client.
Mia: Thank you for sharing that. I hadn’t really thought about how music allows an extension of communication or conversation between two people. It’s not just one person using music—it can be a band or a duo. It’s super collaborative, so it’s really awesome to hear that.
Eric: Yeah, it’s beyond verbal expression sometimes. It’s a different type of language that we’re using, even if we’re both just standing there listening to a concert doing this [swaying].
Yet we’re expressing something by doing that, right? Whether it’s self-soothing or whatever it is, but we’re not focused so much on our feelings of worry, anxiety, pain—or maybe we are! Maybe that sadness comes up, but at least there’s a collective understanding of those emotions, feelings, and thoughts and a sense of hopefully peace if it comes, or an expression of something angry. You know, it comes up! It’s beautiful.
Mia: Yes, exactly!
Megan: Yeah, I was just going to say, Eric, what you mentioned about your client—asking if you could accompany them—sometimes in art therapy if we’re doing a group session, we might take a walk around the room and really bear witness to each other’s art. That made me think about it in that way, too, that you were really communicating to your client that you really saw them in a different way by responding musically to them, too.
Eric: Yes, Megan, yes. And it’s joy, isn’t it? It gives us a reason, a purpose, a passion somehow. But yes, to say, “I’ll accompany you,” those are three powerful words packed with a lot of meaning, in therapy in my unprofessional, non-board certified opinion. In my artsy-fartsiness!
Chrissy: Anyone else want to chime in on that question, which was, how do you use music in your therapy practice and how do you determine it’s the right modality for a particular client?
Denise: I tend to use a couple of different modalities that are fairly child-centered, so child-centered play therapy, I also use DIR floortime, which is a particular methodology of working with kids with disabilities, many of whom have autism. And in all of that, we follow the child’s lead. So the child comes in, and they pick what we’re doing or the youth comes in and they start things.
So, instruments are just something that’s available. One particular girl whom I met and later got a diagnosis of autism really couldn’t communicate and was only using Gestalt speech, which means it was, “It’s ok, don’t worry!” but that was what she would say over and over again without really understanding what that meant. Music was the way that I connected with her and we were really able to build a relationship. Now it’s to the point where she comes in and she can say to me, looking right at me, “Ok, I’m going to play this. Don’t clap, don’t sing, and don’t join until I tell you to.” So this is this amazing power that this kiddo couldn’t self-regulate, couldn’t verbalize words that were meaningful, and now she has this amazing therapeutic relationship with me and is doing fabulous.
And for my A Home Within client it’s similar, it’s a choice, and so when that client has chosen to use it, we use it. I think of it a lot as externalizing internal states, so whatever’s going on inside gets externalized through the musical instruments and through the actions of the play, and what happens and doesn’t happen with it. So, I just feel like I couldn’t do anything without having the music as an option for the kids.
MereAnn: I would say, too, that I’m always looking for any clues even from intake about, “Does this child have issues with regulation? Are there sleep issues? Eating issues? Getting dressed issues? Transition issues?” And I’m using that word “issues” or “concerns” intentionally because all little kids have trouble with transitions. All little kids need help from time to time with tasks that they seem to have been perfectly capable of doing last week. So, it doesn’t necessarily have to be trauma that’s interfering, but there can be these lags in development or these patterns of needing an external regulator when they can’t call it up from inside, and that’s developmentally normal and also a really good opportunity to use something that’s rhythmic and repetitive and sensory to help them organize in their bodies and in their worlds. So, even something like toileting issues or sleep concerns could be a clue that something like a musical activity or picking up or creating a rhythm could help them build a ritual around the tasks that they have a hard time with or develop a call-and-response kind of exchange that they can practice in the therapy room and that they can do at home. It’s a really great opportunity for parents and kids to spend time together that doesn’t involve a screen or the parent being a taskmaster. It lets the child lead. There are so many openings for music, especially when we think of it in terms of rhythm, relationship, and sensory, and then add the relationship piece. It’s really everywhere.
Sarah: Yeah, as I’ve been listening to everybody I’ve been thinking about this quote from a pretty well-known music therapist who’s a music psychotherapist, her name is Diane Austin. I don’t have the quote in front of me, but it’s essentially that through music therapy—and I think this is really true with music or with art—that the relationship field is enlarged. It’s no longer just the therapist and the [client], but it’s the therapist, the [client], and the music, or the art. So then it just becomes this kind of environment that’s rich for transference and countertransference, and having this container to explore things that might be unspeakable. It’s kind of this enlargement of the therapy space and container. I think, Eric, there’s something that you said in particular that really made me think, “Oh, Diane Austin!”
Eric: Oh, wow! Well, I was going to say, “Great point about the transference/countertransference you used, Sarah!” And also what MereAnn was saying about the call and response, I was thinking, “Man, that’s jazz.” Because that is what it is to me, and it is therapeutic for both of us. I’m not sure what that means, but what I think it means is that it’s really good for the therapeutic relationship. It’s a very positive, powerful reality, if you will.
Sarah: Well, it helps foster compassion satisfaction, right? Compassion exists on a spectrum. We talk all the time about compassion fatigue, but we don’t often talk about the other side of that spectrum which is what helps buffer against the fatigue. I think when we have these moments where we feel attuned to our clients and we’re having this shared music-making or -listening experience, I really do think that it helps foster that compassion satisfaction, which is really important to making the work sustainable. If it’s all fatigue, then you’re just going to burn out and you can’t do it anymore.
MereAnn: This idea of a container is an important part of that because that’s what protects us from burnout, and that’s what helps to titrate, or offer them just small doses in a manageable container, which is a really great way to harness intensity. You compound clay, and you compound a drum. You can throw things across the room, or you can ring bells. It’s this idea that hitting is not dangerous; hitting another person is not safe. But what can we hit? What can we smack? What can we slam? What can we shake? What can we do with that energy? Music gives us a place to aim that energy. And it’s not the same as sublimating it. It’s not the same as putting a lid on it and making it come out the sides. That’s what behavior management tends to do. But this is like, “I invite you to go this direction with that energy.”
Eric: Hit that pot with that spoon, go!
MereAnn: Yeah!
Eric: You know, let’s do a 2-3 clave!
MereAnn: Yeah, show me another way! How mad, how frustrated, how overwhelmed, how joyful, how proud. What does that sound like? What does that look like?
Megan: And to give permission to actually express yourself in a way that isn’t harnessed in the way that we usually make kids and adults express themselves. Just really letting out the intensity.
Denise: I really like having caregivers and kids play music together, and I use it to work on modulation—the same kinds of things that we do when we go from a lower intensity, to medium, to high and coming back and forth. You know, kids love freeze-dance. But I tell people, “What we want to do is do freeze, do a little bit in the middle, and then do dance!” and practice that modulation of intensity. I also love using drama, like where we might do, “Show me a little bit happy, medium happy, big happy, the biggest happy,” and the biggest happy always has a song or a sound or something. Including those is that bottom-up stuff like you guys were saying, that it’s actually how you do it with your body with another person, not just “Okay, what number of intensity are you at?” which is so cognitive.
Sarah: One of the first things that you learn about in music therapy school is something called the Iso Principle, and the idea with the Iso Principle is, if I’m really mad and I’m having a hard time and somebody sings kumbaya at me, that does not make me feel calm, that makes me more mad. So with the Iso Principle, you’re meeting somebody and matching where they are musically and then helping them modulate to a different emotional, affective state. So if somebody’s really mad and upset, how do we help them move through that so that they’re then calm? If we start by singing kumbaya at them, that doesn’t make anybody calm. It really feels like that's what we’re getting at, this Iso Principle idea.
Mia: Our final question that we had posed, and several of you have already touched on examples of music therapy in your practice or times when it’s really had a positive effect or just been really effective in your practice, but just as a way to close, if anyone would like to share a particular moment when you saw music having a significant impact on the healing of a client, or in your personal life—music having an impact on yourself.
Megan: So I’ve been trying not to say a whole lot because I can think of all these different moments where I’ve observed music being so powerful, especially in a play therapy context—giving kids permission to use their voice and make noise, because in so many ways we discourage kids from being too noisy or from really expressing themselves the way that they need to sometimes.
The example that I can think of for me at least is that over this past year there’s just been a lot of things that have been really difficult, and I’ve been wanting to expand my creative expression from visual artmaking to music. I’ve always wanted to play the piano, and this year I finally decided to start doing that. It’s just been amazing. I’ve started from the bottom, and as an adult, it’s so weird starting to learn how to play the piano because when you go to a teacher they’re teaching kids. But then it makes me think about some of the kids and adults that could be impacted by music, and learning as an adult it takes a lot of humility to say, “Okay, I’m going to start learning this all over again.” But, again, like you guys have been saying, the regulation. It’s been helping me to regulate myself as I’ve been learning, and I’ve just developed this sense of mastery—not that I actually know how to play the piano yet, but as I’ve been learning, it makes me feel like I have some sense of control when a lot of these other parts of my life feel like they’ve been very out of control. So that’s been my experience right now with music.
Sarah: Throughout this conversation, I’ve found my mind just sort of drifting back to an experience I had in 2015 when I worked in therapeutic visitation, and I was actually working with a different client, and we could hear a kid somewhere in the building having a very hard time. Screaming and crying, you could hear crashing sounds. I was finishing up with my client, and I was sort of “tapped” to try and intervene with this child that was in crisis.
So I come into this room, he was probably 7 or 8, and he was there for a visit with his parent and siblings who he lived separately from. I don’t know what happened in the visit, but something happened and he was having a hard time, and he had been in this room by himself for 45 minutes just destroying the room. As I walked in, he was on the ground just kicking with every fiber of his being this plastic play kitchen. He’s just destroying this thing. So I come in with a buffalo drum—just this big, round drum that’s very durable—and I first sit on the floor with him and I just hit it as hard as I could. And buffalo drums are very loud, very resonant, so it just stopped him dead in his tracks. He kind of looked at me, and he kicked the kitchen and I hit the drum, and he kicked the kitchen a couple of times, so I matched his rhythm, and then we sort of had a little bit of a game for a minute and then there was just a moment where I thought, “I think I’ve hooked him.”
It was the first time that I said anything, and I said, “Hey, do you want to kick the drum? It makes a really cool sound. I bet it would feel cool if you kicked it.” So he shifted and he’s kicking the drum. And I give him the drum, he’s kicking and hitting the drum and no longer destroying the room. We were together in this room for about 90 minutes, and we went from him destroying the room to then taking it out on the drum, to wanting to play a call-and-response musical game with me, and then eventually he wanted to write a song, and it was all sort of led by him and I was following his lead. He wrote a song about the Hulk and how the Hulk has big feelings—and it’s important to note that when I walked into the room, this kid had no shirt on, he’d thrown his glasses, he’d taken his shoes and socks off, so he just had pants on. And he wrote this whole song about the Hulk and how he’s raging and stomping, and it was just so clear that he was talking about himself.
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After 90 minutes of being in this room, playing the drum, playing a musical game, and writing this song which we played together a couple of times, he then put his shirt, shoes, and glasses back on and said that he wanted to perform his song for all of the center staff. So everybody came into this room and he played this song, and then he just very calmly said, “Okay, I’m ready to go home.” And he did, and it was just this very beautiful experience, I think, for him. It was reparative for the staff, because I think they were actually a little afraid of him because of how violent he was being, and it was honestly one of these highlight moments of my career.
Everything came together just right, the music-based crisis intervention worked just the way that you would want it to, he wrote this beautiful song… It was just such a cool moment, and again, I have just felt myself drifting back to it over and over throughout this conversation, so I figured it was a good one to share.
Chrissy: So powerful, oh my gosh! You all mentioned all the different relationships that music brings: his relationship to the music, his relationship to the people around him, his relationship with himself—you can see how it touched on all of those. Thank you!
Eric: I have nothing else to say!! I have a lot of fun playing music with kids, and I loved what you were saying, Sarah, about the drum and how the child transformed back from the Hulk into a band and then he was able to play a song about I guess himself. That’s how I was listening to that, and I guess I’ve had similar experiences. I hate rap music, and yet there I was creating rap music with somebody that was saying words that were offensive to other people, and yet there was so much meaning in those words. The beauty of therapy is that I was able to really listen to what they were saying and appreciate their experience as a result of that. So I just think that allowing somebody to express themselves is just powerful, and it’s good for them and it’s been good for me to incorporate that allowance.
