Hi everyone welcome to your self-helpless snack we give you a taste of the self-helpless

podcast with a mini episode I'm Delaney Fisher and I'm chatting with Lucy Sherman who is a licensed professional counselor EMDR therapist and founder of Perceptive Counseling based out of Portland Oregon and

Lucy helps people process trauma through creative expression and EMDR she

offers longer sessions and several day intensives in order to help people and she uses a lot of creative tools like imagery art, oracle cards, all kinds of cool stuff. Lucy actually walked me through some of these

oracle card exercises on a different episode of self-helpless. So you can check

out the episode we did together about unblocking yourself using oracle deck prompts. I enjoyed those processes so much. But for this episode,

I thought it would be helpful to ask Lucy about how she decided to use these tools in her practice in the first place when it's not really common to do so in a therapy setting.

Also why these methods are so powerful for processing trauma.

She shares a really fascinating fact about the brain

around why nonverbal communication is so important and she also shares about her own

creative process and self-care practices and offer some really helpful

tips for therapists and other practitioners by giving us a peek into some of the systems inside

of her own practice. So whether you're feeling stuck in your client-facing career,

whatever that might be, perhaps this will spark some ideas

for you for how you can breathe new life

into your service by incorporating a new tool or a different approach,

or maybe it'll inspire you to prioritize creative or artistic expression for fun in your daily life all I know is that

tuning into this episode really made me crave scribbling on some paper and

lighting a candle so here is my chat with Lucy I love the way that you do what you do. It's so interesting. You don't really hear about those tools being used much in a therapy setting. How did you decide that you are going to bring these into, you know, sessions with your clients because it is not something that everybody's doing?

You are daring to be different or kind of opening yourself up to potential criticisms or from peers and things like that. So tell us about that experience for you.

Yeah, so I mean I feel like imagery and art has always been something I'm just so powerful and the feeling of for me I would lose my voice a lot, you know, just feel like, oh, do I have the words?

But if I have an image, I can just instantly talk from that image.

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