Drama Therapy & Somatic Coaching for Queer Liberation
While psychotherapy tends to look at humans through a vocabulary of deficit, symptoms, and disorders to treat, I offer drama therapy and somatic work that expands beyond these clinical formulations. We begin with the radical premise: You are already whole. Our fragments are what make us human.
I partner with artists, careworkers, empaths, and queer folx who stand for collective justice - honoring your complexity, creativity, and wisdom as sources of power, not problems to fix.
You Care Deeply for Others But Struggle to Show That Same Love to Yourself
Maybe you're:
An artist feeling burnt out while trying to sustain creativity through oppression
A careworker stuck in cycles of giving without receiving, trapped by old relationship patterns and childhood wounds in shame and dissatisfaction
The only one queering the path to belonging, craving "mutual flourishing" (Robin Wall Klimmerer) but not sure how to navigate it all
Wanting to be more self-trusting and sustain relationships through conflict. You want to build lasting chosen family - but afraid that if you actually tended to yourself, took up space, stopped performing perfection, and set boundaries, you'd risk losing what's most dear to you
Someone who believes you have to choose between caring for yourself OR your community - worried that self-devotion means betraying the collective work you care about
You've been begging for love in a language you didn't choose, and it's leaving you exhausted, hopeless, and alone. You're swallowed by critique, crushed by systems that profit off your disconnection, cut off from the mutual relationships your heart craves.
What if there's another way? What if becoming more authentic while keeping your empathy for others could bring deeper intimacies, more creativity, and fewer lonely days?
You Can Learn to Tend to Yourself, Too
As a Registered Drama Therapist and a Somatic facilitator, I believe healing is about retraining your capacity to listen, attend, and witness what already is so - that you are whole. You have beautiful medicen to offer the world, as you are. Instead of performing wellness for others, we'll practice authentic being together. Rather than asking "how can we fix you," this space asks: "How might we honor your truth?"
This is about remembering who you were before the world told you to be smaller, quieter, more "normal ". It's about finding the supportive relationships that help us to resist within violent systems and sustain what is joyous about being alive. We will navigate the nuances of sometimes needing to strategically protect against structural harms, masking or being stealth, while also deeply honoring your authentic being, voice, and truth. No part of you doesn't belong here.
We'll work together to help you:
Stop begging for love in languages you didn't choose and start speaking your authentic truth
Shift from patterns of abandonment toward genuine being and belonging
Reclaim your creative spirit without burning out
Build lasting chosen family and sustain relationships through conflict with skill and love
Trust your body's wisdom and nervous system's organic impulses
Connect your personal healing to collective liberation and justice
Discover that self-care strengthens rather than threatens your community bonds - learn how defining your own gifts and truth serves both you and the collective
When you honor your queerness as wisdom and your sensitivity as strength, you discover that caring for yourself doesn't diminish your care for others—it deepens it. Self-devotion becomes a gift you give back to your community.
What This Actually Looks Like
Instead of analyzing your "issues," we'll work relationally and creatively with your strengths. Most of the time we'll talk, connect, and build relationship. As a drama therapist and somatic coach, I will support you learning to listen for embodied cues emanating through your nervous system. Often times, unintegrated trauma patterns are waiting to become resource for us to follow. In the midst of brave and steady company, our body knows the way home. Much of my work is about the somatics of relationship. We'll honor the wisdom of your body and imagination as our roadmap towards the growth and change you wish to see.
Here are some things you might hear me say in a typical session:
Creative Expression
as Medicine
"If that image could speak, what would it say?"
"It seems this is hard to articulate, do you have a pen nearby? Try taking 2 minutes to draw an image of this experience"
"Let's take that feeling and try to feel it backwards, inside out, upside down. What did you learn?"
Working With Your Many Roles
"It sounds like this is multifaceted! Let's take a look at each role coming forward within you and give them all a chance to speak"
"What if you traded roles with the other person in this situation, sit in their seat... what do you imagine they're feeling?"
“Let's explore the roles you've adapted to in resilience, the roles lost and forgotten, and the roles you dream to become.”
Following Your Body's Wisdom
“I’m noticing some movement in your shoulders as you tell this part of the story, can we explore the energy there?”
“Lets track that impulse to run away, is there any image, sensation, or emotion accompanying that?”
“Could we create a movement or gesture that could represent that boundary physically? Lets practice!”
Connecting Personal to Collective
"Does this experience feel only yours, shared, or connected to a greater community or identity?"
"Did anyone or group in your lineage grapple with this challenge before? What worked? What didn't?"
"Is there an ancestor, plant, person, place, or being we can call in to be with you to hold this feeling?"
This Space Is For You If...
✔ You're an artist feeling burnt out trying to create under oppression
✔ You're a careworker stuck in cycles of giving without receiving
✔ You're queer/trans and tired of spaces that don't truly see you
✔ You're neurodivergent and done with being pathologized
✔ You're an empath who needs to learn sustainable boundaries
✔ You're justice-minded but struggling with despair or burnout
✔ You describe your gender as "a garden or a galaxy"
✔ You're ready to stop performing perfection and start living authentically
I'm a white-bodied, nonbinary, queer, neuroqueer, Ashkenazi anti-Zionist Jewish creative facilitator living on the unceded ancestral lands of Huichin and Ohlone peoples.
My credentials: Registered Drama Therapist, Somatic Experiencing intermediate student, trauma-informed yoga teacher, with extensive training in liberation-focused healing approaches.
My practice approach: I do not offer traditional psychotherapy. Creative Arts Therapists in CA are not governed by the Board of Behavioral Sciences, and I've intentionally chosen to work outside the clinical model that pathologizes and diagnoses. When we refuse to participate in systems that reduce us to disorders and symptoms, we create space for collective healing and resistance. My guidance centers intuitive healing, narrative processing, integration, and strength-based holistic care. Often folks find it useful to work with me alongside other clinical providers for things outside of my scope of practice when needed.
My truth: I'm not healed - I'm healing. Forever. I believe healing is a collective field we all participate in, not an individual achievement or destination. I believe our healing is inseparable from collective justice.
When I'm not supporting folks in practice, you'll find me dancing, tending relationships, rolling on the floor with cats, finding delicious bites in the city, organizing in community, and voraciously learning ADHD-style.
I show up as my authentic self with the hope of inviting you to do the same.
This work has been shaped by liberation teachers and communities who understand our freedom is interconnected—some of those teachers and guides are dean spade, adrienne maree brown, alexis pauline gumbs, andrea gibson, alok vaid menon, taya ma shir, bayo akomolafe, leah lakshmi piepzna samarasinha, staci haines, travis alabanza, robin wall klimmerer, and so many others. For more on what informs the spirit of my work, head to the education tab!
About Sye (they/them)
Ready to Try Something Different?
Book a free 20-minute consultation and let's see if we're a good fit to work together.