Susan Belitsky, MEd, MSW, CAGS, Israeli Teaching License
MSW is a Masters in Clinical Social Work, MEd in Recreational Therapy, Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study in Expressive Arts
I call my practice The Hollow Path as a way to express the way I walk and work in the world. I provide the place; and together we find the path. I am a Clinical Social Worker and Recreational Therapist with a sincere determination to help bring relief from trauma and to inspire Social Action. I love the natural world and what it has to teach us. I love neuroscience and the ways in which the theories can help us figure out that kindness and social engagement come with a calm nervous system. I’m fascinated with the ways the body reflects our experiences and waits for healing. My practice is creatively based on trauma-informed therapy.
My approach is relational and experiential and offers ways to approach the hollow spaces within us and our lives that hold the treasures of once again becoming of whole, integrated and true. These foundations enable us to approach these places with a sense of adventure. With the help of animals, expressive art and adventure and choice, along with the offerings of nature, I intend to create opportunities to build trust, claim some mastery, foster connections and help the body and mind to integrate the experiences life has given us.
Hollow is a word that “conjures”. It is also the name of my old companion husky. She’s the gorgeous dogwolf on the photo above and she taught me how to be in the world and how to become a better therapist and a kinder human. Hollow is an empty space. A space between.
It’s the space between notes; the pause in a poem. It’s the place where wolves sleep and bears look for honey inside the hollow of an old tree. The hollow space is where critters live and which many of us fear. It is also an open space. Or dark space…where the answers lie or the bear sleeps. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer and there is nothing to hold onto. Hollow is also a long tunnel of a wood-carved flute and it is the path I most cherish as the therapeutic place into which we must peak and enter to find answers and return to our true selves.
Trauma and hardship can narrow us, and overwhelming experiences can cause us to restrict and avoid the empty spaces of not knowing or being in between. I believe the hollow spaces are wholeheartedly worth entering; slowly, with support, one toe or one moment at a tolerable time. Each of us has our own way of accessing those precious, lost and guarded places within us. Experiential therapy provides the gift of reflection to come as we use activities to access what we need.
See Hollow’s story here