Jungian-informed, trauma-aware journey work. Use dreams, story, art, creative writing and embodied awareness to claim what's been packed away.
"Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Our life journeys often keep us traveling the same roads, encountering the same obstacles.
The people who find their way here are not beginners. They are therapy-literate, spiritually attuned, carrying a great deal for others and for themselves. They can name their patterns, speak the language of trauma and archetype, and lean into their growth edges. And yet, they find themselves at this threshold because something essential still feels unclaimed.
In the destabilizing currents of this moment, our disorientation is very real. And so is the longing underneath it: for life to feel ensouled again, not just managed. For re-enchantment of our ordinary life through our inner life.
Red Suitcase is for the gap between knowing yourself and actually feeling with yourself. This is a space where the right questions can finally be asked; slowly, carefully and with someone who treats your dreams and imaginal life as sacred artifacts.
The Ancient of DaysWilliam Blake · 1794
OpheliaJohn Everett Millais · 1851–52
The EmpressPamela Colman Smith · 1909
The work we share
Three Threads We Follow Together
I.
Retrieval & Integration
We work with what you are already carrying, like dreams, images and embodied knowing, because the psyche doesn't waste anything. What has been packed away is not clutter. It is the very material that, once retrieved and tended, becomes the most reliable guide you have.
II.
Adventure into the Psyche
This is not self-optimization. Jung believed the psyche has its own logic and its own timeline, and that wholeness — not efficiency — is what it is moving toward. Our work together follows that current: an expedition in search of what is most essentially you.
III.
Beauty as Medicine
Reverence for the imaginal is key, and an active ingredient in the work. We work with the premise that what moves us artistically is the unconscious trying to get our attention. What you find beautiful and mysterious is pointing somewhere.
An invitation
Claim your suitcase.
Are you ready to wade into the liminal with a fellow traveler? Let's talk and see if this feels like a supportive and generative relationship.
We individuate with others. Becoming more fully ourselves is not a solitary climb. We grow into ourselves in relationship, in the presence of someone willing to witness without fixing, to walk without directing.
The unconscious speaks in symbol and story, and art is reverence. Long before you can form a clean sentence about something deep and necessary within you, dreams, images, poems, and myths are pointing you in that direction. When we take them seriously, something shifts, and creative practice deepens our self-understanding.
Soul work is collective work. When you show up for your own becoming, you are resourcing the movements, communities, and kin that need you awake and aligned. Your healing is not meant to exile you from the world. It is meant to return you to it with a clearer center, a sturdier suitcase, and a renewed capacity to serve.
Formation & Training
Deb is a Jungian-trained coach and writer whose work lives at the crossroads of psychology, creativity and the sacred. She holds a Certificate in Jungian Studies from the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago, a Certification in Jungian Coaching from the Jung Platform, and accreditation from the International Association of Coaches, Trainers and Mentors, alongside university degrees in art education, educational leadership, and human development and learning.
A longtime advocate for the arts and underrepresented voices, Deb is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose trauma-informed creative nonfiction has been recognized in Best American Essays. Grounded in depth and archetypal psychology, she offers transformative support to those seeking greater wholeness, integrity and a deeper connection with the sacred in everyday life.
Informed by the work of C.G. Jung, James Hollis, Marie-Louise von Franz, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Thomas Moore and James Hillman
Certifications & Credentials
Certificate in Jungian Studies (C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago), Certification in Jungian Coaching, Accredited Member, International Association of Coaches, Trainers and Mentors
Writing & Publications
Pushcart Prize-Nominated and Best American Essays 'Notable' Writer, Presenter, Writers Forum: Dreams—Thinking Outside the Box of Conventional Narrative, Creative Nonfiction essays published in various literary journals
Education
M.Ed. in Educational Leadership: Human Development and Learning, B.A. in Art Education
Professional Experience
Educator, Administrator and Youth Advocate
My Journey
"The heroine's journey is not a linear path upward. It is a descent — into the body, into feeling, into the places we've been taught to fear."
— Maureen Murdock, The Heroine's Journey
Act I: Before the Threshold
My origin story begins with braided bloodlines and lovelines. I was an adopted child who found her truest home not in any fixed place, but in the imaginal realms of art, dreams and story. Something in me always knew that what lived in those spaces was real, perhaps more real than what the waking world insisted upon.
Growing up in a working-class family, I learned the indisputable value of hard work and resilience, but the wilder, interior life, the life made of image and myth, was gradually crowded out by familial, religious, and cultural expectations. Still, it persisted beneath the surface, the way all true things do.
A long career teaching art in urban schools and holding space for the stories of underserved youth and communities returned me again and again to the power of the mythopoetic world—and to the quiet devastation of what happens when we're cut off from it. Those years sharpened something in me. They clarified what I had long intuited: that art, literature and dreams carry truths that ordinary life too often fails to honor; truths with the power to shape, reveal, and transform.
What I hadn't yet fully understood was that the stories we carry in our bodies are just as urgent as the ones we commit to the canvas or page. Something else wanted to be lived. And slowly, insistently, it began to make itself known.
Act II: The Crossing
The work of Carl Jung found me at the right moment. Which is to say, at the hardest one. In Jungian terms, my 2018 cancer diagnosis was a dark night of the soul—a night sea journey. It was a life-defining, crossroad moment characterized by fear, doubt, and, eventually, a reckoning. Ultimately, it was an invitation to return home to greater authenticity and to the truth that had been present from the beginning.
As I healed, images arrived in dreams. I connected with stories that suddenly illuminated my own. In the second half of life, I began to write and formally study depth psychology at the C.G. Jung Institute in Chicago, with the realization that psyche has its own logic and timeline.
Jung's work, with its emphasis on self-realization and individuation, and the expanded work of generations of post-Jungians, has offered a rich roadmap toward wholeness.
Act III: What the Suitcase Holds
The work I offer now is the work I needed then. Jungian-informed, trauma-aware, rooted in the creative and imaginal, and always in service of the person in front of me instead of a method or a modality. I'm a lifelong educator, a Best American Essays Notable and Pushcart-nominated writer, and a depth practitioner who believes that art, imagination, and story are some of the oldest and most powerful forms of medicine we have.
Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead (Third Version), 1883
Whatever brings you here, our journey together is about listening to the deeper story that wants to be told.
Find Your Compass
We've all packed away life stories that keep us traveling down the same road, revisiting well-worn patterns and encountering obstacles that are, ultimately, calls to adventure. When we're willing to embark upon a new journey of deep listening, we begin to connect with a sense of re-enchantment and honor the higher calling of our soul's wish. We return home to our most authentic selves.
Mapping Your Journey
What's your call to adventure? Maybe you're feeling stuck, out of alignment, or are facing an uncomfortable dilemma that feels like a familiar pattern. During our time together, I'll walk alongside you. We'll use your dreams — those songs, poems, or stories you just can't stop thinking about — as well as myths, fairy tales, and embodied awareness to uncover the wisdom that lies beneath conscious awareness. Ultimately, our work together becomes an invitation to embrace greater freedom and a clearer understanding of the big and small adjustments you can make to better align with your life's meaning and purpose.
Your Passport — Art, Imagination, and Dreamwork
The founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, believed that each of us has an innate capacity to engage with unconscious material through the creative process. Jung believed that in doing so, we're continually guided through a process known as individuation, or becoming whole. Invitations to greater wholeness occur throughout the lifespan, but in the second half of life, they often involve asking ourselves the big questions, searching for meaning, and feeling our way toward what this season of life is actually asking of us.
A Jungian approach to addressing life's challenges often centers around art, movement, sandplay, dreams, and other techniques to access our capacity for transformation. Dreamwork, in particular, offers many individuals a direct path to guidance about what needs to be brought into consciousness and, in many instances, released. On the path toward individuation, as we notice the previously unconscious patterns and beliefs that have shaped our lives, we begin to make wiser, more soul-centered decisions that invite us to move through life with greater purpose, passion, and aliveness.
How the Work Moves
Sessions are held by video or phone for 60 minutes, at a cadence that makes sense for you. Between sessions, you may be working with a dream, sitting with an image, keeping a journal, or following a small creative experiment. There is no required homework. There is only what calls to you.
I.
We Create the Container
We begin by establishing a safe, gentle, nonjudgmental space. One that can hold inherited patterns, core beliefs, embodied memories, and whatever else has been quietly waiting for air.
II.
We Listen to Images
Your sacred artifacts become our guides: the dream you can't stop thinking about, the song on repeat, the poem you've carried for years, the image that keeps returning. The unconscious speaks in symbol long before it can form a clean sentence.
III.
We Locate You in a Larger Story
Myth, fairy tale, and archetype offer mirrors that the personal story sometimes cannot. When we recognize our threshold in a larger narrative, the isolation lifts, and the path forward often becomes visible.
IV.
We Trace Patterns with Care
Together we notice the previously unconscious patterns and beliefs that have shaped your life. Not to judge them, but to see them clearly enough to choose what to release and what to carry forward with more intention.
V.
We Design Small Creative Experiments
Between sessions, you are invited (never required) to engage: to write, to draw, to notice, to dream more deliberately. The work is not confined to our hour together. It moves through your days at whatever pace your nervous system can hold.
Melencolia IAlbrecht Dürer · 1514
The ThresholdRed Suitcase · Line Drawing
The Girl by the WindowEdvard Munch · 1893
On Red
In the alchemical tradition, red (rubedo in Latin) marks the final stage of the great work. It is the color of transformation complete, of gold and the philosopher's stone, of what has been refined through fire and is now, at last, fully itself. The suitcase is red for a reason. This work is not about the beginning of the journey. It is about arriving, at last, within your own nature.
Dreamwork · Delving into the Dreamscape
Our Dreams as Invitations
Odilon Redon, Silence, c. 1911
The dream is the oldest form of inner guidance we have. Long before coaching, long before therapy, long before self-help books, there were dreams.
Jung believed the unconscious speaks most directly in the symbolic language of dreams. Not because dreams predict the future, but because they reveal what conscious awareness cannot yet hold: the pattern beneath the pattern, the image that knows what you do not yet know you know.
Dreamwork, in particular, offers many of us a direct path to guidance about what needs to be brought into consciousness and, in many instances, released.
"Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered..."
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
The Red Suitcase Dream
A shoreline at night in Greece. An ancient stone temple, quiet under stars. Red suitcases floating on dark water, waiting. A small group standing at the edge.
I was standing among them and invited them, one by one, to wade into the water and retrieve what was already theirs.
That dream is where Red Suitcase began. And it still describes what I believe this work is: guided retrieval. A walking alongside. The companion at the threshold who says, I'll walk into the water with you.
Dreams in Our Work Together
You do not need to be a vivid dreamer to bring dreams into our sessions. A fragment or image is enough, or even just a feeling that lingered after waking.
We work with dreams by staying close to the image rather than rushing to interpret it. What does this figure want? What does this landscape feel like in the body? What story does this dream seem to be telling?
The goal is not to decode but to deepen into the images and sensations, and to let the dream do its work in you, with a witness to facilitate your exploration.
Offering
A dedicated dreamwork session
For those who want to work directly with a specific dream or a series of recurring dreams, this session is an unhurried, Jungian-informed exploration of what the psyche is offering. We approach your dream not as a puzzle to be solved but as a living image to be entered: staying with its atmosphere, attending to its figures, and following the threads it offers toward deeper self-knowledge.
No prior experience with dreamwork is needed; only a willingness to take the work seriously.
Writing to Unpack · Myth as Medicine
Writing Is How My Soul Finds Its Way Home
Odilon Redon, Closed Eyes, c. 1890
Writing as a ritual is a way of marking what matters, giving shape to the shapeless, and moving through grief, wonder and transformation at the pace the body can hold. Myth, fairy tale, and personal narrative are medicine: containers for the parts of the story that need to be witnessed before they can be released.
In this work, we write not toward publication but toward truth. The invitation is to use language as an instrument of depth to circle the wound, to enter the myth that most closely mirrors your life, to write yourself toward the clarity that other forms of reflection sometimes cannot reach. This is trauma-informed creative writing as a journey home to your most authentic self.
The Writing We Do Together
In our sessions and between them, writing may take many forms:
Free-writing from a dream image, or from a line of a poem that won't let you go. Writing toward a pattern you've been circling and giving it language for the first time. Responding to a myth or fairy tale that seems to know something about your life. Simply keeping a record: what you noticed, what appeared, what shifted.
None of this writing needs to be 'good' by anyone else's standards. It just needs to be honest.
Coming Soon
[ Module title — e.g. 'Wounds as Invitations' or 'Myth as Medicine: A Writing Journey' ]
For those who want to use writing as a form of healing. No prior writing experience needed.
Module details — sessions, format, and investment — coming soon. Reach out to be notified when enrollment opens.
There is a notebook — substantial, precious, open to the right page. A pen, placed with intention into its pages, holding the place for what wants to be written next. The practice has already begun.
About My Writing
[ Deb writes this section in her own words — what writing has given her personally, how her writing life informs the work she does with clients, and a line that connects the creative act to individuation. ]
Mary Cassatt, The Tea, 1880 · Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
I offer a complimentary 30-minute introductory call so we can meet, talk about what you are carrying, and sense whether this work, and this particular coaching partnership, is the right fit for this season of your life. There is no obligation and no sales pitch, just a chat.
If it feels right, we'll talk about what working together might look like. If it doesn't, I'll do my best to point you somewhere that might.
Book a Conversation
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Primary Offering
1:1 Soul-Centered Coaching
For people who are ready for a sustained, relational, depth-oriented companionship, and an unhurried journey alongside someone who knows the terrain.
Session length — 60 minutes
[Frequency — e.g. bi-weekly or monthly]
[Minimum commitment — e.g. 6 sessions, rolling monthly]
Investment is offered on a sliding scale, in the spirit of regenerative exchange. I believe soul work should be accessible to those it is meant for. If you are uncertain whether the investment is possible for you, please reach out. We will find a way.
No. This is coaching — a different kind of container, oriented toward meaning-making, depth exploration, and soul-centered growth rather than clinical treatment. Many clients work with both a therapist and a coach and find that the two practices move together beautifully. If you are in active crisis or need clinical mental health support, I am happy to help you find it.
Not at all. What you need is curiosity about your own inner life — the rest will unfold. I will bring the framework; you bring the material.
Yourself, and whatever is most alive for you right now, be it a question, an image, a dream, a dilemma, or a longing. There is no right way to arrive.
Readiness rarely announces itself clearly. Most people arrive at a threshold before they feel ready. If something in you is drawn here, that impulse is worth following, if even just to talk it out and see. Come as you are!
Client Agreement
Before our first paid session, I ask that clients read and sign a brief client agreement that outlines the scope of this work, confidentiality, cancellation policy and the peer-to-peer coaching nature of our engagement. This document will be sent upon scheduling.
A Note on the Nature of This Work
Red Suitcase Soul-Centered Coaching is coaching, not psychotherapy. I am not a licensed mental health professional, and our work together is not a substitute for therapy, psychiatric care or crisis intervention.
What coaching offers is a different kind of container: one oriented toward meaning-making, depth exploration, creative engagement and soul-centered growth. Many of my clients are already in therapy and find that this work moves alongside it beautifully.
The Library
A Few Things Worth Carrying
Books, words, and resources that have traveled with me, and that I return to again and again.
Splendor Solis, Plate 21: Women at the Fountain, c. 1582
Words That Have Stayed With Me
"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."
— C.G. Jung
"We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge – even wisdom. Like art."
— Toni Morrison
"Because enchantment, by my definition, has nothing to do with fantasy, escapism or magical thinking: it is founded on a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world; a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life."
— Sharon Blackie, The Enchanted Life: Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday
"I've never heard of any community that failed because it lacked material resources. Communities fail because they lack imagination and spiritual contact and soul and a sense of others and staying power and courage to move together and to live together."
— Daniel Berrigan, The Raft is Not the Shore: Conversations toward a Buddhist/Christian Awareness
"If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough — sustain it, be true to it — we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality."
— Marie-Louise von Franz
"Creation, and so creativity, is the act of giving life, the nourishing and enhancement of life, in whatever way you choose to do it. And when we find our individual creative power, we can harness it and use it to fight for what we care about, to remake the world in our own image. But what might such a creative woman look like, and how might she do such a thing?"
— Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging
"…There is a secret love hiding in each problem."
— James Hillman
Tosa Mitsuoki · Autumn Maples with Poem Slips · c. 1675
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