Living Arts Counseling Center

Katrina Curry, MA, DVATI Marriage and Family Therapist Intern #56814 Certified Art Therapist (916) 458-5630, extension 32 Web: www.katrinacurry.com Email: katrinacurry@livingartscenter.org   Originally from Canada, Katrina has over 10 years of professional experience as a clinical counselor supporting children, youth, adults, and families. She offers goal-oriented counseling and coaching for people of all ages, through words as well as through art, play, somatic approaches, and movement.

Katrina is passionate about crafting developmentally-attuned child and youth-oriented services, as well as offering individual and group counseling tailored to meet the needs of women and young women. She provides skilled guidance to help parents understand and respond effectively to their developing children, from infancy through young adulthood. She also works with families and blended families to resolve conflicts and develop nourishing, growth-fostering relationships. In addition, Katrina has developed clinical expertise in tending to grief and loss, body and food issues, addictions, shyness and disconnection, and trauma recovery. Katrina is attuned to issues of diversity in ethnicity and culture, religion, and sexual orientation.

Katrina holds graduate degrees in art therapy (Vancouver Art Therapy Institute) and in child and youth clinical practice (School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria). She has pursued further specialized training in marriage and family therapy, supporting women and young women, counseling young people, child and adolescent development, infant mental health, play therapy, mindfulness in therapy, somatic psychotherapy, improvisation, movement-based expressive arts therapy, group counseling, and trauma recovery. She is currently training in dance-movement therapy.

Katrina is a mother of twin infants and a stepmother of a teenager.

Katrina Curry is an intern at the Living Arts Counseling Center, in Folsom, supervised by Kathy Campbell MFT, MFC #44525.

Why the creative arts, mindfulness, and somatic practices in counseling?

Sometimes it can be difficult to put words to experiences that are emotional, visceral, dense, or tangled. Spontaneous, creative expression can offer shape, form, and texture to the material we are not yet able to voice verbally; this provides the relief of deep release in a form that we can integrate. Through creative expression we can also workshop new approaches to familiar problems, developing creative solutions to move through the places where we feel stuck or unclear. In this way, image, play, movement, and metaphor can assist us powerfully in creating and integrating change in our lives.

Playful creativity also sparks and liberates our aliveness, lifting our spirits while helping us workshop change. Creativity supports our vitality while fostering our resilience in the midst of uncertainty, crisis, and the turbulence of change.

The use of mindfulness in counseling offers us a means to slow down to truly witness our experience, to approach our hearts and minds with a deeper kindness, recognize our needs and deeply held dreams, appreciate and respond to possibility, and there-by sculpt a life rooted in that which supports our fullest health.

Somatic practices include a wide array of tools, running a continuum from gentle to challenging. These may include the use of breath, mindfulness, simple experiential exercises (such as exploring and setting physical boundaries), and exercises for deepening presence and embodiment (which may be done sitting, standing, walking, or moving), such as authentic movement. We can also learn from the physical impulses, reactions, and responses that echo beneath our stories, thoughts, and emotions. A somatic approach can be invaluable for people who have struggled with body image or weight and shape issues, shyness and disconnection, as well as those who tend to live in their minds/thoughts, and those who are recovering from psychological, physical, or sexual abuse and feel disembodied. In addition, somatic psychotherapy in trauma recovery work helps us to finally process layers of physiological arousal that get in the way of daily life when we are triggered; this method offers a gentle and focused way both to release and integrate that material and move on with our lives (Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute).