AUTHOR | POET | POLITICIZED HEALER

CRISTIEN STORM

I believe in the power of poetry and the magic of stories as critical ingredients for individual and collective healing.

LATEST BOOK

MY HEALING APPROACH

AUTHOR | POET | POLITICIZED HEALER

CRISTIEN STORM

I believe in the power of poetry and the magic of stories as critical ingredients for individual and collective healing.

MY LATEST BOOK

HEALING APPROACH

WRITER + ARTIST + ACTIVIST

ABOUT CRISTIEN

I am a writer, artist and activist. I believe art is foundational to healing, wellness and social change.

Curiosity and imagination are key elements in healing and necessary ingredients for creating paths towards collective liberation.

My book, Empowered Boundaries: Speaking Truth, Setting Boundaries and Inspiring Social Change captures the community-based self-defense and boundary setting curricula I co-developed with other artists and musicians in the 1990’s.

I also created the online anthology Once Upon A…Portals of Imaginal Practice, a collection of stories, poems, artwork, songs, incantations and fairytales exploring and cultivating practices of imagining beyond white body supremacy culture and colonialism.

My healing work, poetry, and activism all support one another and while they are at times separate threads, they weave together to make the tapestry of who and how I am in the world.

MORE ABOUT MY WORK

No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.

–Gabor Maté

LATEST BOOK

WOMEN, MADNESS, WHITENESS

Awakening from collective psychosis and healing familial and ancestral trauma.

As a young girl, Cristien witnessed her mother slip from reality, her suffering shaped by trauma and interpreted as mental illness by a world that mistook pain for pathology—answering distress with institutionalization and heavy medication.

Women, Madness, Whiteness is a fiercely intimate and incisive exploration of the cultural, social, political and intergenerational roots of mental illness. As an adult, Cristien became a politicized therapist, movement organizer, and spoken word performer, discovering that her mother’s madness was not an isolated story but an inheritance—echoing through ancestral lineages and entangled with the enduring violence of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and modernity.

Women, Madness, Whitenesss is a powerful, embodied and poetic treatise about the collective and cultural inheritance of madness. Weaving together poetry, essay, creative nonfiction, and memoir, Women, Madness, Whiteness celebrates the tenacity and creativity of trauma survivors and illuminates the painful, gritty process of individual, familial, collective, and ancestral
healing.

MY WRITING

MADNESS IS NOT BIOLOGICAL; IT IS CULTURAL.

–Cristien Storm

ANTI-RACIST AND COLLECTIVE LIBERATION CENTERED

WHAT I BELIEVE

I believe in a strength-based, embodied, and politicized approach to therapy that integrates anti-racist and collective liberation centered sensibilities to psychology and counseling approaches.

I believe that people do not live nor do we heal in isolation. Our families, society, personal experiences, work environments, home life, and the economic, social, and political systems we live in all inform who and how we are in the world, our experiences, access to various resources, and approaches to healing.

HEALING

Breathe in…breathe deep…a life time is too long to sleep.

–Steve Von Till

INDIVIDUALS + RELATIONSHIPS OF ALL CONFIGURATIONS

HEALING

There are many ways to begin therapy. We will work together and explore your goals and hopes for engaging in counseling and make a decision on how best to start our healing work together. I will work with you to find ways to embody healing that meet you where you are at and support you and your process.

In my practice I work with individuals, relationships of all configurations (married, partners, poly, open…), families (bio and chosen), and various groups (work, activist, communal living, bands, art based collaborations, collectives).

I integrate an embodied approach to counseling. This can look very different for different people in different contexts and there is not one single way to engage in embodied healing work.

HEALING

Love is the big booming beat which covers up the noise of hate.

–Margaret Cho

in-person sessions & events

SAFTEY PROTOCOLS

I offer both telehealth and in-person sessions, interviews, and group facilitation. I will work with you to address safety protocols that align with your practices and values for in person session and events. Please contact me and we can determine what works best for you.