Heal the Healers Profiles: Elena Hull and Rebekah Windmiller

Elena Hull

Elena Hull is a licensed creative arts therapist, a licensed marriage and family therapist and the clinical director of Midtown Marriage and Family Therapy center. She is also a Retreat Specialist with Joyful Heart and helped to create the Foundation’s retreat model.

“Working in a healing profession, your greatest capacity is how you respond to something. If you’re stressed out or anxious or you don’t have the time, you’re not responding to what is happening; you’re cutting off from it because it is too much. So much of working with suffering is having the spaciousness and the time to be fully present for what is happening. As healers, we have to hold our own wellness as our number one responsibility.”

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Rebekah Windmiller

Rebekah Windmiller is an Expressive Arts Therapist, a licensed Creative Arts Therapist in New York State, and the Director of the New York Expressive Arts Studio Community Workshop.

“Expressive Arts Therapy is a unique, philosophical approach to healing. It is the only form of art therapy that works to integrate all the arts and encourages interplay between them.

My work is very life-inspiring and life generating, despite the trauma and addiction and illness I encounter. The arts are the intermediary between the struggle and the emergence from trauma. Art is a place where beauty can arise from torment. And artistic expression brings a sense of wonder to the therapeutic experience that is deeply restorative.

This is true not only for my patients but for myself. I have been a dancer and choreographer for 30 years. During that time, there were periods when I wasn’t dancing or expressing myself in this way. I found that, during those times, I would begin to absorb way too much trauma from my work. Vicarious trauma happens slowly, over time. You don’t realize that it is happening until its effects have taken root. For me, dancing is sustenance, it allows me to move, not to get stuck. It is a real mind/body experience.

For anyone contemplating work in a trauma-related field, I would most definitely encourage you to keep your own creative life alive. Whatever moves you—even if it is just 10 minutes a day, doodling in a sketchbook—that creativity will sustain you and allow you to approach your work, and your life, from a healthy place.”