Integrative & Creative Approaches in Therapy

For some clients, traditional talk therapy is supported and enriched by additional ways of exploring inner experience. Integrative approaches offer gentle, creative pathways into emotional awareness, regulation, and self-understanding.

These approaches are always optional. Many clients engage fully in therapy without using any integrative or creative practices at all.

My Orientation

Before becoming a therapist, I spent more than two decades working as a vocal and expressive arts coach. My Master’s thesis, “Rising Into Song: Voicework in Psychotherapy,” explored the use of singing, songwriting, and voicework as tools for emotional processing and healing.

Over many years of working with clients, I consistently observed how outward creative expression, particularly through the voice, often opened unexpected pathways to inner awareness, emotional insight, and self-connection. This experience continues to inform how I listen, attune and support clients in therapy.

What Integrative Approaches May Include

Depending on your interests and therapeutic goals, sessions may incorporate:

  • Mindfulness practices to support presence, grounding, and awareness

  • Somatic approaches that attend to bodily sensations, nervous system responses, and stress patterns

  • Creative or expressive practices, which may include optional voicework, singing, songwriting, or imaginative exploration.

These tools are used in service of emotional awareness, regulation, and meaning-making, not performance or artistic outcome. You do not need any musical experience, and there is never pressure to engage in any activity that does not feel right for you.

How These Approaches Are Used

Integrative and creative approaches are always:

  • Client-led and collaborative

  • Adapted to your pace and readiness

  • Grounded in clinical judgment and therapeutic goals

  • Offered within a safe, supportive therapeutic relationship

One of the benefits I have witnessed in using music as a therapeutic approach is that it can help us access emotions that feel difficult to put into words. You know when you listen to a certain nostalgic song that brings you to tears? Well that’s music working it’s magic. Music can open our hearts and help us feel connected to expressing our sadness, joy, frustrations, and longings.

Choice, Safety, and Consent

Your sense of safety and agency is central to this work. Integrative approaches are never required, and you are always free to pause, decline, or change direction. Therapy is a collaborative process, and we decide together what feels supportive.

Let’s Work Together