[Self-Study] Belonging is Being Seen

Recorded On: 08/27/2024

About the Event

Join Magdalena V. Karlick, M.A., Phd-c, ATR-BC, LPCC, on Tuesday, August 27, 2024, 7 – 9 pm ET for a virtual Continuing Education session.

Community care is a fundamental human need. It is with our chosen families and communities that we find common language, experience, acceptance, and celebration. The visceral sense of belonging reduces anxiety and increases the sense of being seen, being safe, and having purpose. It offers connection, guidance, mentorship, relief, and mirroring.

When we lose our inherited communities – whether based on how we dress, who we love, or the life choices we make – it is a deep rupture. For our clients, this loss is complicated. They may lose their family network they grew up with or the cultural communities they relied on. Or they may feel hurt and betrayed, for example, when a dear family member refuses to use their pronouns or doesn’t respect their existential belief systems.

The loss may also be compounded by outright hate or violence. Or it may be followed by a continuous barrage of confusing mixed messages (“I love you” and “Your being is wrong”); or unrealistic expectations, like conversion. These responses are complex and traumatic.

In this continuing education session, we will explore the experience of belonging and some of the factors that limit this internal and interpersonal experience. We will discuss practices of inclusivity as it relates to representation, language use, and nervous system regulation. We will use somatic awareness techniques and art supplies to explore our felt sense of belonging. In addition, we will explore the relationship between cultural humility and the experience of belonging as it pertains to the facilitation of art therapy in a variety of settings.

Learning Objectives

This session describes and discusses cultural humility as a foundation for community success in a variety of settings where Art Therapists work.

Outline the relationship between nervous system responses and the experience of belonging.
Assess community needs and inclusive practices of one’s professional environment.
Identify 3 ways to increase the experience of belonging in one’s professional environment.

Registration Information

Attendees who have paid for the session will receive 2 CE credits.

Magdalena V. Karlick

M.A., Phd-c, ATR-BC, LPCC

Our Imaginal World

Magdalena V. Karlick, M.A., Phd-c, ATR-BC, LPCC, (she/her) is an art therapist, educator, and doctoral candidate in the Expressive Arts program at the European Graduate School, focusing on exploring the “aesthetic responsibility of the facilitator to the group” through various methods of arts-based research.

Her new podcast “Belonging & Boundaries: An Arts-Based Approach” launched February 2024. It features interviews with educators in the art therapy, creative arts therapy, and expressive art therapy fields.

Magdalena is the owner of Our Imaginal World, an organization that provides individual and group therapy, arts-based supervision, post graduate education, community health consultation for agencies, as well as commissioned art installations.

Magdalena has been an educator in the art therapy, expressive arts, and counseling fields since 2012, focusing on cultural humility, somatic awareness, ethics, group dynamics, and creative arts techniques. Currently, she teaches for the Kint Institute in NYC, a post-graduate creative arts therapy and trauma training in-person program. For a number of years, she was the Art Director for Tomorrow’s Women, working with Palestinian and Israeli youth during an international summer camp intensive in New Mexico, and co-created a trauma therapy support network for staff and alumnae of this program during the most recent outbreak of violence. She also offers arts-based supervision to art therapy interns, dependently licensed art therapists and counselors who are pursuing independent licensure in New Mexico, as well as art therapists in training around the country who are completing their hours towards the ATR-BC.

Magdalena has received training in Somatic Experiencing, Sandplay, and Psychodrama, and weaves these understandings of group, symbol and body into her classrooms, work with clients, and supervisees. In her workshops, Magdalena tailors content and experience to meet the needs of the community or organization that has contracted her services, including stress reduction, relationship building, conversation strategies, cultural humility practices, equity and inclusion, and rebuilding group norms.

Since 2006, she has lived in O’Gah P’Ogeh Owingeh, the unceded territory of Tewa-speaking people, also known as Santa Fe, New Mexico. Magdalena is passionate about social justice, responsibility in leadership, and using the creative process to communicate stories and integrate understanding. She has been involved in multiple cross-cultural global art exchanges and plans to continue to collaborate globally. She is a cis-woman and queer mama with two children.