Notes from The Well
Thoughts, stories, and things we’re still learning about therapy, creativity, community, and the work of being human.
We Were Never Meant to Heal Alone
We Were Never Meant to Heal Alone Healing happens together. It’s another phrase you’ll hear a lot around The Well. It’s on our walls, woven into the way we talk about our work, and underneath much of what we’ve built here. Because for all the ways our culture talks about healing, we tend to make it a remarkably individual pursuit. My therapy. My boundaries. My coping skills. My self-care routine. My healing journey. And of course, there is deeply personal work that belongs to each of us. No one else can tell the truth for us, make our choices, grieve our losses, or do the internal work of paying attention to our own lives. But we were never meant to do all of that [...]
You Can’t Hustle Your Way Into Wholeness
You Can’t Hustle Your Way Into Wholeness If you’ve spent much time around The Well, you’ve probably heard us say this before: you can’t hustle your way into wholeness. It’s language that has found its way into a lot of what we do—from the Anti Self Help Club to the way we think about therapy, art, community, and gathering together. The Well has always been about more than what happens in a therapy office. We are a community-based counseling and art therapy practice built around creativity and connection, because we believe healing happens in relationship. So when we say you can’t hustle your way into wholeness, we aren’t just trying to come up with a good phrase for a t-shirt. We mean it. In [...]
The Part of Therapy You Can’t Find on Instagram
Therapy has become more popular—and maybe even a little trendy—over the last few years. As social media has grown, a new wave of therapy has come with it. Therapists are writing books, hosting podcasts, making videos, and translating complicated ideas into language people can actually understand. A lot of this is good. Some therapists on social media are hilarious. They are a breath of fresh air. They offer language, humor, connection, and the profound relief of realizing that you are not the only person who does that weird thing. I enjoy them too. They normalize therapy. They give people words for experiences they may have carried alone for years. They offer access to many different therapist voices, which also shows us how unique therapists [...]
More Than Words: How I Found Art Therapy
Before I was an art therapist, I was a high school art teacher in Mesa. I had recently moved back home after finishing my bachelor’s degree in studio art in Chicago. I was teaching teenagers how to paint, draw, experiment, and make things. But somewhere along the way, my classroom became more than an art room. It became a safe place. Other teachers knew that if a student was having a hard day, they could send them to Mrs. Johnson’s room. The students who came weren’t all artists. Some of them probably wouldn’t have described themselves as creative at all. They just knew that when they walked into the art room, they belonged. They could sit quietly. They could take a breath. They could talk—or [...]
