Season 5, Episode #45 (Revisited) – Art Heals

And I love that you found each other in one role and have continued to foster the incredible art and healing that you are sharing with the world through the various work that you both do individually and together.

So I love it.

So for this first

part, I would love to kind of talk to Wanda for a minute.

You talk about this incredible support that you do through healing-centered engagement.

And clinically, we understand what that is, but I would love for our listeners to get a little bit of a breakdown on what you mean when you say healing-centered engagement.

Yeah.

Megan taught me about healing-centered engagement through her research and her PhD.

So I feel like nervous doing the explanation.

You can tag team.

You can tag team each other.

Okay,

good.

We'll tag team.

Healing-centered engagement through art therapy and community work for me is really looking at people who've gone through hard experiences need a different approach.

And that's also what I learned with TBRI, trust-based relational intervention, is is that it's bottom-up care.

Healing-centered engagement takes that clinical term away.

Like people don't want to be like, I'm traumatized, right? So instead of saying trauma-informed, healing-centered engagement, first of all, looks at people who've gone through hard experiences and looks at their strengths.

And that's what I love.

It's like no longer pathologizing, like you're traumatized.

It's more like, okay, a hard thing happened, right? That doesn't define you.

Now let's come together And look at the strengths that we all share.

And as a clinician, like I'm not going in telling you what you need.

Yes, I have a specific tool set that I'm going to share, but you guys have a million tools too that we can come together and use.

And that's what I love about it.