Elizabeth Nelson (She/Her)

My Approach to Helping

As a therapist, I seek to foster healing in action, play, imagination, wholeness, meaning making, connection, courage, authenticity, a sense of belonging, transformation, agency and resilience in the lives of the individuals I work with. My work is grounded in attachment, trauma informed, and anti-oppressive/anti-racist orientations, but draw from other orientations as the need arises. I am trained in talk therapy and as an art therapist. Art therapy is a powerful, experiential, expressive arts therapy that helps address that which is difficult to put words to. It focuses not necessarily on the art product, but rather using art in the process of therapy as a lens to access parts of the brain, body and psyche that talk therapy may not fully reach. Humanity has turned to various types of art for millennia to heal, long before therapists in the modern sense existed, and this type of therapy engages in this phenomenon.

My Values as a Therapist

I have made a commitment to engage in ongoing anti-racism/anti oppression education, examining my biases and how I have been conditioned as a white, U.S. born, cisgender, queer woman. This involves the commitment to actively take steps to examine and dismantle oppression within myself, all the ways in which I practice therapy, the therapy space, and the systems in which we all exist; practicing reconciliation when I make mistakes and working alongside various communities that liberate and restore us all so that we can collectively thrive. I attend a monthly consultation group for white therapists, led by Richla Davis, a Black therapist/anti-oppression consultant.