Kelly Marie Carlin-McCall (born June 15, 1963) is an American writer, actress, producer, monologist, and Internet radio host.
If you're never called, then you don't know any better. If you are called and don't answer the call, then that is the most difficult and painful. If you are called and do answer the call, it is the adventure of your life.
There's a real careful line you have to walk there because your first job [therapist] is to create safety for the client to feel safe enough to turn their vision in towards themselves and their experience in the moment and to reveal things that usually carry a lot of shame or that kind of stuff around.
If my artist life didn't work or if I needed to work in some capacity part-time in something, I knew I'd have a real life skill [become a therapist].
One of the reasons I picked Pacifica was because, for a lot of classes and for your thesis, you could do artwork because of the Jungian slant of it all, and that really called to me.
I have known know many therapists who come out of Pacifica Graduate Institute and love being both artists and therapists at the same time, like Maureen Murdock. They are photographers and dancers and other kinds of things and therapists at the same time. I think it really makes them a much more interesting therapist because they're so engaged with the imagination and the creativity and the depths of who they are.
If you can see yourself more than just a victim, aha, now you've got the place to move into that is much more vital and creative and is resourceful than being a victim.
I knew that I was naturally good at [therapy] because I was kind of that person in my circle of people in my life.
Creating safety is your first job [as therapist], and then once that's established, you can use many tools to help someone see the folly in their thinking.
I didn't have a calling to be a therapist. I really went to Pacifica for a very specific kind of life experience, to really kind of find my path in a deeper way.
When I did my first solo show and it made my dad uncomfortable, I wasn't quite ready for my spotlight moment in my life yet. I didn't have enough sense of myself and self-esteem and confidence: this is when I started looking to get my master's in something.
I remember going on vacation for two weeks once and one of my clients who was very clinically depressed really could not handle it, really unraveled himself. That scared me. I didn't want to be in that position.
You will be faced with facing all the things in yourself that keep you from knowing who you are, you'll have to stand up to roles and definitions that your family and culture have given you.
I used to be a person that wasn't able to laugh at myself easily.
Working with the body and the imagination - non-verbal ways especially - tap into our deepest wounds and our highest potentials as humans.
With regard to how I chose Pacifica, my story is interesting. I did not go to Pacifica to specifically become a therapist. I went to Pacifica to study Jungian psychology and archetypes and mythology and there were many different programs there.
For me, psychology and art interact and overlap in so many ways. Psychology is the study of the inner life and creativity comes from the imagination and a response to the environment, as you know. So they're both very similar in that way because it's about one's inner life interacting with the environment and what comes from that.
My mother used to say, "When you can learn to laugh at yourself, a lot of healing comes from that. "
I was supporting other people's creative dreams and I wasn't supporting my own. I didn't feel like I could really serve people having that kind of process within me.
When I am ever in any situation that's getting too heavy, I lighten it up with humor.
Coming into Pacifica I knew that I wanted whatever I was going to learn there, I knew I wanted to integrate that into my art no matter what.