After thousands of heART-centered therapy, workshop, classroom, and one-on-one conversations grounded in solid research and science, Marilyn is more convinced than ever that transformation is possible!
She is a Professional Art Therapist with a Bachelor’s degree in Education and a post-graduate diploma in Art Therapy… and married, widowed, remarried, mother, grandmother, teacher, and friend. So many life experiences have added up to years of witnessing transformation: teaching children and adults, facilitating therapeutic and narrative writing workshops, designing curriculum, life and business coaching, workshopping, personality typing (Myers Briggs and Enneagram work), grief counseling, and now establishing a face-to-face private therapy practice in South Surrey-White Rock, British Columbia and an online therapy platform serving heart-seekers from around the world.
Marilyn was drawn to art therapy after teaching her last high school class with too little support, where almost half her students were “high needs” with below-grade academic skills. So she used art to help kids learn – not textbooks or blackboards -and witnessed incredible transformations in their academic abilities, confidence levels, and respect for the Other. She came to discover, after resigning her teaching positions to attend CiiAT, that art-making in the classroom was what heART-making is in the therapeutic studio, transformation. After hundreds of direct client hours, she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that limitations, anxieties, depression, relationship challenges, loneliness, confusion, poor self-esteem, etc., when companioned by therapeutic art-making and safe conversation, can be transformed into joy, beauty, and healing. Marilyn now commits her “retirement years” into refirement hours, where she both gives and receives time and space for safe conversations, expression of raw emotions, self-care and creativity, growth and, of course, transformation.