Why Experiential Learning
My commitment to experiential learning has a specific beginning. In 2014, I attended my first in-person EMDR basic training. That experience shifted something fundamental in how I understood this work — not just as something to learn cognitively, but as something that has to be felt, practiced, and integrated over time. My intellectualizing parts were usually in the driver’s seat back then. EMDR was my first real introduction to a process that engaged both my analytical mind and my nervous system simultaneously.
That foundation led me into deep, in-person training within the Internal Family Systems model. All three levels were in person, which matters to me — there is something about being in the room, in your body, with other people doing the same vulnerable work, that cannot be replicated online. Level 1 with Pam Krause. Level 2: Trauma and Neuroscience, with Richard Schwartz and Frank Anderson. Level 3 with Chris Burris. Each one asked something different of me, both professionally and personally.
Throughout my career I have pursued opportunities to do my own inner work alongside my professional development — believing that the two are not separate. Two of the most significant of those experiences were the Healing Circles training with Chris Burris and the Healing Exiles retreat on Molokai Island with Richard Schwartz and Jeanne Catanzaro.
Healing Circles was a different kind of learning. To complete it, I participated in a group therapy experience — not as a facilitator, not as a clinician, but as a member of the group. It asked me to get in touch with my own burdens around relationships, community, and how I show up with others. That was not comfortable. But it was profound, and I will forever cherish what that experience opened in me. It changed how I understand what is possible when a group is held with real care — and it changed what I am willing to ask of the people I work with, because I had been willing to ask it of myself.
Molokai and the Healing Exiles Retreat
Molokai was something else entirely. I called it Exile Island for the entire year leading up to the trip — half joking, half genuinely bracing myself. I was right to brace. My own session with Dick during that retreat helped me access parts of myself that had been abandoned long ago. Reclaiming those parts was a defining experience — not just professionally, but in the most personal sense. I carry it still.
Alongside formal training, I have remained committed to my own ongoing healing and personal development. That work continues to shape how I show up as a therapist, trainer, and facilitator. I do not think it is possible to ask others to do the inner work without being willing to do it yourself.
Experiential learning, for me, is not an add-on. It is central. The most meaningful growth happens when knowledge is paired with presence, when newness is tolerated with support, and when learning unfolds within relationship rather than isolation.
Those experiences shape how I teach and how I design learning spaces. I know what it feels like to step out of the expert role and be a learner again — uncertain, stretched, supported. I try to create that same environment for the therapists and leaders I work with.
