Kindling in the Kint Institute

“Honor your timing, honor your feet”: Atara Vogelstein, Drama Therapist, LCAT

“I am honoring my feet,” Khary Green reflects to the group. We are practicing “moving from
stuckness into your own embodied resource” with the guidance of Brian Harris. Brian is
inviting us to consider “sound as touch to the body,” and in this moment, it moves gently.
Amber Gray has reminded us that “in trauma work, there’s no demand for change” and to
“honor your timing.” We are pacing ourselves with attention to breath, rhythm, and sound.
Craig Haen tells us that “secrecy is at the heart of trauma,” and quotes Dori Laub who said
that trauma is “an event without a witness.” I don’t want to tell you the dates Khary, Brian,
Amber, Craig or Dori spoke these wise words because trauma obliviates time and
disillusions chronology, confuses ecosystems and ruins meaning. Instead, I want to invite
you to take this in. To sit with. To allow room for pause. To honor your timing.

How often do you sit barefoot on the floor during a professional training? As a drama
therapist, this is something I got used to in grad school, but how good it feels to come back
into a barefooted space with a room full of therapists and explore our mass disconnection.
We are coming from different disciplines–drama therapy, dance/movement therapy, music
therapy, art therapy, poetry therapy, somatic experiencing, clinical social work–and we all
share a hunger to delve deeper. To establish a communal space for resourcefulness in a
profession that carries the heartbreak, the brokenness, the collapse, the grief, the anxieties,
the abuses, and the hopes/dreams/expressions of the world.

The more resourced we are as clinicians, the more of a resource we can be for our clients,
becoming our “own embodied resource” (Harris). To be resourced, to have a well to draw
from, when hydration is needed, when our nervous systems are thirsty and crave osmosis,
when destabilization threatens our cores. This well gets deeper and the water clearer each
weekend that we gather. As we explore the complexities of trauma and the intricacies of
central and peripheral harm, we are reminded by Amber to “shift your bodies to comfort,”
embracing “microshifts” in the ventral and dorsal vagal systems in our bodies. We sing
through grief with Brian and play through anxiety with Craig, Heidi Landis, and Magdalena
Karlick. We sit with the systems of harm against Black and Brown and non-white bodies,
and “reimagine routes toward collective liberation in mental health treatment” (Williams)
with Britton Williams and Kat Lee. We fragment poetry and embody words and roles, and
discuss the duality or multiplicity of realities of dissociation and imagination. We play as an
anxiety antidote with Craig, Heidi and Nancy Scherlong. We make art, and sound, and
movement, over and over and over again. We roll and pound clay, our unconsciousness
alive, (trans)forming somatic experience conscious. In the room, there is life, there is
vitality, there is the essence of connection that many of us as creative arts therapists intimately know can happen with a client or a group of clients when space is offered to take
risks and, as Amber offered us, “micromobilizations” are explored.

How do we navigate in a world cracking, re-abandoning unhoused individuals on streets,
targeting and privileging certain bodies, trashing the lands we walk on that were stolen to
begin with? How do we show up in a room of clients and say “this is a safe space” when
there is no safe space; while we can say “safe enough,” “brave enough,” “safer,” yet nothing
is guaranteed? Can we show up and say “this is not a safe space, how can we make it safer?”
And how do we?

In the world of theatre, an actor can take risks, and those risks may impact the audience
and fellow actors or collaborators in a multitude of ways. As psychotherapists, therapists,
clinicians, we are contracted to take care of our clients or provide the support we can
within our scope of care. To care for, as to love, is to take a risk. I witness members of my
cohort risk-taking, stepping into bigger shoes and taking up more space. Vocalizing softly
and loudly, echoing and mirroring one another in moving attunement. I find parallels
between my risk-taking with the group and my own healing journey from interpersonal
trauma. I sit with gratitude from the expressed and the unexpressed, and the capacity of
this group to witness, reflect, and hold. I consider the importance of humor and of the
therapist as playful and unfixed, an agile, welcoming witness. How fluidity can relieve
stuckness. How movement shifts, shifts, shifts. How grieving requires a degree of
movement that trauma stifles; how grief is stale, how grieving is restorative. How trauma
doesn’t have verbs other than traumatize(d) and traumatizing. How immersion in natural
resources can become natural resources. On our last day of training, we are comfortable in
silence. We know this is not our last day, as becoming who we are as individuals and as
therapists is an ongoing practice.

I am walking up the east side of lower Manhattan as I write this, passing hospital row, and
am reminded of the magnitude of stories and bodies and aggressions that these walls hold,
these sidewalks shadow. I am in New York but cohort members have traveled from near
and far, and I think of the metaphorical suitcase of strength we packed together with Craig
this morning. I shoveled in dirt, noting its weight, the mess it creates, voicing permission or
acknowledgement to the group that we can return to the earth, our roots, and be messy, be
dirty; that it’s messy and dirty and that’s okay; and then I threw in some dirt with my
hands. It is our hands, our feet, our ability to be grounded or re-ground as the earth shakes,
and create a cocoon of care where butterflies are going extinct, that harbors us as
embodied practitioners, soulful healers, wholesome guides. How we anchor or armor
ourselves is in the release of constriction, and the breathing in of expansion. We are fire
and rain to a torched earth, so we come together to harness the water amongst ourselves.

What makes the Kint Institute training different?

What makes the Kint Institute training different from other training programs?

The Kint Institute certificate program evolved out of a serendipitous gathering of faculty for a two-day trauma conference presentation several years ago. At the time, the group of presenters did not know one another, and only a few had worked together for a special issue on trauma for The Arts in Psychotherapy. And yet, what they discovered was a shared sense of what effective trauma treatment looks like and how the arts can support change, as well as a set of shared values about teaching, learning, and humanitarianism. Those shared values are the core of our training program and include the sense that people grow in safe environments where they are both held and challenged, where their clinical experience is valued, and where they feel part of a thriving community of like-minded practitioners.

When we conducted interviews for our first cohort, what applicants most spoke about was a sense of isolation in the work. Trauma, by its very nature, creates fragmentation. Therapists who treat traumatized people are often doing so in systems in which they too are exposed to elements of trauma, including a lack of institutional support, a disconnection between what they know and what they are told, and productivity goals that undercut a sense of dignity and value for therapists and patients alike. At Kint, we want to not only engage together in clinical learning, but also to provide a professional community that counteracts the qualities imbedded in unhealthy systems.

The mental health field itself continues to mirror trauma dynamics in that it remains siloed, so that therapists often spend time in professional communities in which they are only gathered with people who share their clinical approach or are from their discipline. In our program, art therapists learn alongside dance therapists, drama therapists talk about song while music therapists speak the language of theatre. Psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and social workers engage with the arts and contribute their clinical knowledge of trauma.

We teach an integrative approach that distills each creative arts therapy modality to its core elements so that students are not just learning one method, but walk away with a set of tools that they can then implement with their patients, in their own way. As such, our program is a rare integrative one that sees value in a range of arts modalities and frames these using theory and research from the wider fields of trauma, neuroscience, and attachment studies. In this sense, all our students bring something important to the table, and find they re-affirm what they already know while internalizing new knowledge.

Making a commitment to training at Kint is making a commitment to yourself and to your patients. It is an opportunity to participate in a group of talented practitioners and thinkers. And it is a chance to join a growing community at the ground level. What are you waiting for?

From Theatre to Therapy and Back Again

“At any one moment in our lives we are all in the middle of a multiplicity of stories, all of them being spun out at the same time and woven together to form its fabric.” (Fugard, 1997, p. 3)

I was 16 when I first encountered the writing of playwright Athol Fugard. I was perusing the monologue choices available for cold reading at an audition for Into the Woods and picked up one from the play My Children! My Africa! (Fugard, 1990). After performing it at the audition—for a part that ultimately went to my best friend—I sought out the script at the library. I was hungrily reading plays at this time, but hadn’t ventured beyond the canon of established American playwrights. But this singular show, a beautiful and fierce elucidation of South African apartheid told through the relationship between two teenage students (a white girl and a black boy) and the boy’s male teacher, opened up a world to me—of the consequences of government-sanctioned racism and of the potential of theatre to reach across cultures to provoke emotion in service of understanding the plight of human beings.

Fugard, a South African artist who is now 85 years old and has been writing for the better part of six decades, quickly became my “favorite” playwright. I continued to read his scripts, lectured on him in college, and maintained an interest in the politics of his country, particularly as they shifted rapidly in 1994 with the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I turned back many times to his published notebooks (Fugard, 1983), a collection of life observations that served as source material for some of his early plays. I hold a certain reverence for books, so it’s telling that this volume is the only one in my collection that is totally battered, and in which passages are furiously marked and underlined. So many of Fugard’s thoughts echoed my own life experiences despite the separation of half a world’s distance and 30 years’ time.

I eventually got to meet Fugard in 1999 following his production of The Captain’s Tiger at Manhattan Theatre Club, in which he made his last appearance as an actor in his own plays. He was entirely kind in taking the time to listen to my proclamations of how much his work meant to me, and generous in not making me feel foolish about the emotion that poured out as I fell all over myself to try to formulate words.

Most of Fugard’s plays contain no more than three characters. In their interactions, they struggle to connect across lines of color, politics, generation, or gender. Difference is always a key factor, that which causes conflict and also pushes relationships of closeness into areas of deep hurt. Fugard so often successfully captures the beauty that exists within ugliness, as his characters pursue personal missions at the expense of others (and often with the certainty that they are, in fact, doing what is right). As such, these plays are instructive about the ways that trauma can be borne out of the erasure of one person’s humanity by the force of another’s will.

It is not surprising to me that Athol Fugard’s work compelled me as an actor, but now I can clearly see how many of the lessons in his plays also inform my work as a therapist. In his writing, Fugard often functions as “a witness on behalf of the silenced” (Shelley, 2009, p. 84). By working with traumatized clients, I too have aimed to give witness to their silenced stories, but also to venture with them down the road upon which it is inevitable that they journey, sometimes painfully so. In a time of ongoing manualization of treatment that threatens to rigidify the human encounter within clinical work, it is perhaps redemptive that we turn to artists for inspiration.

Fugard never viewed his scripts as complete, nor the movements and words on the page as the performance itself, but instead saw the texts as requiring action to illuminate them. In other words, he located the potency of his art in “the line which needs the actor’s gesture to complete it” (Fugard, 1983, p. 176). And so it is with therapy, where the words traumatized people speak come alive when coupled with action that counteracts the fragility of the victim experience. By engaging with their stories, my hope is that my patients find that, while the particulars of their traumata are bounded by circumstance, the emotions are shared. Their suffering need not be shameful and isolating, but instead might be part of the greater canvas of human experience—something that can connect them to others.

As we engage with the arts in trauma treatment, we have the hope of co-creating a place where the synergy of word and action have the power to transcend circumstance. By working through them, trauma stories can perhaps be filed away, not as the singular narrative that defines a life, but as part of a larger repertoire. As such, we might find a way to hold this multiplicity of stories—both our clients’ and our own.

References
Fugard, A. (1983). Notebooks 1960-1977. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group.
Fugard, A. (1990). My children! My Africa! New York, NY: Samuel French.
Fugard, A. (1997). Cousins: A memoir. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group.
Shelley, A. (2009). Athol Fugard: His plays, people and politics. London, England: Oberon.

“Bella Rose Arts Centre’s stage” by Ryan.brownell is licensed under CC BY 3.0

Creative Arts Therapies for Refugees and Survivors

Seeking Refuge:  The Heart and the Art of Healing for Survivors of Violence and War

I am writing this as I listen to the non-stop roar of fireworks on the 4^th of July—Independence Day in the United States. Independence is a term that is often associated with freedom. Yet while many Americans celebrate freedom, many who come to the U.S. as asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants do not know freedom from fear. The June 26^th decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to partially lift lower court-ordered blocks against the travel ban threatens those who hope to join their family members who are already resettled here.

Amnesty International’s Executive Director Margaret Huang said, “Rather than keeping anyone safe, this ban demonizes millions of innocent people and creates anxiety and instability for people who want to visit a relative, work, study, return to the country they call home, or just travel without fear.” For refugees and asylum seekers, these inhumane policies threaten to undermine any sense of relative safety. A sense of belonging—a birthright for each and every one of us—is hardly possible when the environment is laced with intolerance, disrespect, and fear.

I believe it is now more essential than ever that those of us working therapeutically with immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers find ways to connect that are culturally and contextually congruent. The arts have long been a universal voice for all aspects of human experience. The majority of the world is socio-centric, where more collective and integrative healing processes are commonplace. Rituals, rites of passage, celebrations, and communal gatherings often use creative processes and practices such as dance, drumming, music, storytelling, and art to support and invite healing, grieving, celebration, mourning, acknowledgement, and humanity. The creative arts provide a pathway that may be more familiar and safely engaging to our global community members who are displaced by violence and persecution.

The arts offer us avenues to give voice to a broad range of human experience—from the most unspeakable horror to the most celebrated joy—in ways that no other form of communication can. With the number of refugees and those displaced by human cruelty and environmental change steadily increasing, and the search for a place to land becoming more difficult and hostile, we need more imaginative and creative ways to connect across the seemingly pronounced divides of race, religion, ethnicity, political affiliation, gender, and socio-economic status. We need the connection, compassion, and creativity that the creative arts—the heart of our humanity—uniquely offer.