Kelly Carlin-McCall Quotes

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].

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.

When I am ever in any situation that's getting too heavy, I lighten it up with humor.

Working with the body and the imagination - non-verbal ways especially - tap into our deepest wounds and our highest potentials as humans.

My mother used to say, "When you can learn to laugh at yourself, a lot of healing comes from that."

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.

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.

I took everything really seriously and was overly sensitive about things, and I think that's rooted in perfectionism.

Being successful as a creative person is a crapshoot, but it's essential if you feel drawn to being creative that you express it.

Being a therapist can be very serious though. There are people's lives in your hands. For me, it was too much.

Going through these academic programs, your job really is to learn how to be a therapist. They're training you to sit in front of clients and it's a serious matter. You're holding people's psyches.

[Humor] could be dicey for a therapist and needs to be used very deftly.

The unconscious mind is way bigger than the conscious mind. Using tools to access its wisdom and self-organizing features is powerful medicine.

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 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.

I knew that I was naturally good at [therapy] because I was kind of that person in my circle of people in my life.

I used to be a person that wasn't able to laugh at myself easily.

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.

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 had a mother complex going on and I was projecting all my negative mother stuff onto her and all of my need for her to love me and to make me whole and to approve of me.