Coming Home

Written by Mitchell Kossak, LMHC, on 9/12/99

It was 1978 and I had just graduated from College as English major. I didn't really know what to do with my life. What exactly did an English major do? A year earlier, I had visited a friend attending the Expressive Therapies Program at Lesley College. I had never heard of such a program before. I was struck by the idea that there was a place where all the arts were combined into one idea of Expressive Arts. At the time I didn't know much about the therapy part. I saw her in a class moving, making art, making music. It all flowed flawlessly from one to the other.

I had been playing the piano since I was five years old and at the time I was studying more seriously. I was also playing in several bands, and I was also very active in local theater and particularly interested in experimental forms of dramatics and I had a small children's theater group. Also as an English major I was writing a lot, especially poetry. So when I saw this group of Expressive Therapy students on the stage of Welch Auditorium, something inside began to click.

But time steps in and takes us on other journeys. So it was about a year later that I was again in Boston, this time for an audition at one of the local music conservatories. The audition went badly. I left confused and down and found myself wandering the streets. I wound up on a bus that landed me in Harvard Square. As I stepped off the bus a little disoriented I literally bumped right into Paulo Knill, one of the founders of the Expressive Therapy Program. I had met him briefly the year before, when I was visiting my friend. And there he was. Bang! Bing! Was this fate? He was carrying a box of supplies and hurrying off to a class. But I guess you could say we made a connection. For the next 20 minutes or so we walked toward his class. For some unknown reason I began to tell him my story; the bad audition, my visit last year, my interest in the arts. He listened deeply like an old friend and smiled a lot. He gave me this deep feeling of being seen and understood. And then he was gone, just like that. He left me with a warm smile and to my surprise a gentle hug of encouragement.

The next year was 1981 and I found myself at Governor Dummer Academy in Andover, MA. I was sitting at the piano. Paulo was on my left and we were playing a very deep and rich spontaneous improvisation while 15 or so other members of my new Core group were sitting and moving around the new space. I was at the Colloquium, which begins the new year of training for all Expressive Therapy students. I felt like I was at home. Not the home I grew up in, but the lost home I had been searching for.

The next two years took me on a fascinating journey. The combination of Intermodal Arts opened me in ways I had only dreamed of. In my training I began to work with troubled adolescents using music, art, and psychodrama. I worked with elderly populations, using music and movement. I worked with autistic and retarded children and at my second year internship site in an elementary school art room, I would play the piano while children painted and sculpted in clay. This time was very exciting and deeply enriching.

When I graduated I continued to work with troubled youth in a self-contained school that was part of New England Memorial Hospital. There were no Expressive Therapies at this school. I began introducing music into the program. Soon after I was running several psychodramatic video groups that were like music videos. Personal stories would come out in these videos in ways that never emerged before. I would show some of these at staff meetings, and the results were overwhelming.

From here I began working at Danvers State hospital in a locked ward unit for psychiatric adults. This program was known for the work that Shaun McNiff, the first dean and founder of the Expressive Therapies Program at Lesley had begun many years before. So I was carrying on in a long tradition that stretched back to the roots of this profession. It was here that I continued to hone my skills as a clinician.

In the years that followed I began a private practice and went on to do post graduate work at Cambridge Hospital in couples and family therapy. The work I was doing was challenging and exciting, yet I still felt like something was missing. In 1995 I got a call from a friend asking if I was interested in teaching in the four-week Expressive Therapies intensive given each summer. At the time students would come mainly from Israel, but also from Canada and Ohio to study at the now well known Expressive Therapies Department at Lesley College. Boy was I interested in teaching. It was again as if I had gone off and was now returning home. I had been away from the program for about 12 years, but the minute I stepped back through the doors, it was as if I had never left. All the excitement and connection came rushing back.

I have been teaching in the summer program ever since. I particularly like the intensive work where whole semester classes are crammed into one week. For five whole days, I get to immerse myself in the work I love so much. I get to gather what I have learned and begin to put it out in a way that will begin to mold a new generation of Expressive Therapists. I get to meet fellow 'tribes people', the teachers, the students, as we dance and draw, and sculpt, and sing, and make music together, and enact, and role play, and write, and dream together, and envision together, and discuss deeply what it means to take this work out into the world. These four weeks are always exciting times.

Most recently I have taken on the position of Academic Coordinator of International Expressive Therapies. The program that started twenty years ago in Israel has now officially become an extension of Lesley College. In April I will be flying off to Israel to teach Expressive Therapies to the first class of Holistic Studies students in Israel. The work is spreading. There is now the International Association of Expressive Therapists. This is an exciting organization that reaches to many parts of the world.

Of course today there are also many Expressive Therapy Programs across the globe. But I am glad I was here in Cambridge to study with some of the pioneers: Paolo Knill, Shaun McNiff, Norma Canner, Peter Rowan, Mariagnese Cattaneo. These were my teachers and I only hope I can be as dedicated and creative as they were. In my life I have come to trust fate more and more. I am grateful that fate had brought me to Boston that late fall day, where I stumbled off a bus and bumped into a man who called me back to the place I now call home.

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