Our Stories
Heidi's Story, Spring 2025
Kathy reflects on her journey to becoming a nurse practitioner, shaped by early aspirations to be a doctor and barriers such as her father’s belief that higher education wasn’t necessary for girls. Despite challenges, she pursued nursing, continued her education, and eventually entered a nurse practitioner program with encouragement from mentors. Her career focused on working with individuals with intellectual disabilities, where she found purpose in serving marginalized populations and navigating the complexities of real-world care. Looking back, she feels deeply fulfilled and proud of her path, valuing both the impact of her work and the personal growth it brought.
I've always danced. I never considered myself a dancer because I didn't take, you know, strict dance classes, all my life. However, wherever there was an opportunity to dance, I was there, including when we got our first TV, and I would look in the reflection, and I would dance in front of it. And I had tap shoes, and we had this tile space in front of the fireplace, and so that's where I would go to tap. In high school, I took once a week, jazz and always participated in the talent shows. I was always on stage. And when I listen to music, I love music. I've loved musicals all my life and sometimes – and I still do – if I close my eyes, a whole, you know, performance comes that I've never done in my body, but I've seen it in my imagination.
After college, I took four hours of class a week even though I was working full time, and, you know, gravitated still to dance performances, other people who were dancers. I worked at Omega Institute in the Berkshires one summer, and they had, every day they had a dance class, and I was the dancer, and I had my own drummer. It was helping people feel okay and doing different movements across a huge floor. I really found a way of uniting my interest in communication, which I got my master's in, and movement.
So through that, I connected with the beginning of the dance therapy community that is still around. It's a dance therapy association. And I, you know, became a registered dance movement therapist, and it's a blessing to meet other people who honor the body and movement in, in a professional way. And I found my groove, you know. I never, like, fit in with a straight speech therapist, and I actually liked working with the mystery kids because there was no right way and what wrong. So I used movement that was co-created between the child, or the other person's natural movements, and mine, to join it to create a common language, so that the verbal language didn't need to be the way of connection. Because a lot of people I worked with didn't have it.
I was one of the first seven people to learn authentic movement, which now is a worldwide practice. And actually, dance movement therapy is part of the expression of arts therapy. But because the body is the most intimate, it's the hardest one for people to accept. You know, if you're doing a musical therapy, you have an instrument in the song. If you're doing art therapy, you have art materials. But movement is of the body, and our culture doesn't wanna deal with that.
People think it's a no-brainer, you know, like, “Of course, dancing is therapeutic.” Yes, it is, however, if you really dance therapist, you learn why. It's not just like being dancing around and getting happy, which is great. I mean, I love to do that, but it's different. It's about connecting, communicating, and then creating. And again, it's more improvisational, and it's not a dance technique or movement technique.
And, my love of movement and belief in the body, and that it was my intention to make a connection through a language that didn't exist except in the body that would come from our relationship, from the movements.