Kelly Carlin-McCall quotes:

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

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.

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

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

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.

Right before I went to Pacifica, I had written and performed a one-woman show and I consider that to be my original art form. Spaulding Grey and Karen Finley and other spoken word artists and performance artists really very much interested me, that art form.

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

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.

Coming out of graduation, I didn't immediately know what direction I wanted to do so I decided to just stay as an intern until it really kind of dawned on me and I felt more compelled one way or the other. So I gave it a few years and then after two years it was really clear that deep down I missed being a full time creative artist. Ironically, I started getting clients who were all in the entertainment industry and a lot of them were in comedy!

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.

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.

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 didn't think I'd be a good therapist. I didn't think I could do both at the same time. Maybe some people can, but I wanted a bigger spotlight and I don't think that's right for clients to have a therapist who wants that kind of life.

I had a client who just wanted to entertain me the whole time, that is a defense against going deep, in my mind. What happens when the jokester is not allowed to deflect with humor? You then have to feel the pain, and learn that you can survive it. It makes you more resilient and stronger in the long run, and your sense of humor will always be there. Being able to see the funny is deep.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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].

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.

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

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.

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

The work is important and essential and I've had a therapist myself for decades and it's important work, but I knew that I wanted to work with people who are more functioning and that's when I decided to pursue my performance career full-time.

There's a grip we sometimes some of us get on our pain and suffering and our past and our wounding that we over-identify with it. If we laugh at it, we're saying, "Oh, I'm laughing at myself, which means my victimhood isn't all of who I am."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This has been my struggle for years - the pull between wanting to be in the spotlight and yet also to make a difference in the world. Lately I've come to conclude that I can be a "selfish" artist that focuses on issues of individuation, power, and freedom.

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.