Virginia Bunnell (Bunnie) Graham

Ph.D. Depth Psychology
Art Therapist

Virginia (Bunnie) Graham, Ph.D., ATR-BC, is a Depth Psychology graduate of Pacifica Graduate Institute and Registered Art Therapist, Board Certified. A Spiritual Director, she is a Sandplay Practitioner and hosts an annual Dream Study Group. Bunnie has worked as art therapist 8 years at PCC, and at Journey into Wholeness, a Jungian Christian retreat group.

Dr. Graham is a member of St. James Episcopal Church in Ormond Beach, FL and has lived locally for 35 years. She and her husband Dick have two grown sons and a daughter-in-law.

Art Therapy is a method of creating images to find resolutions to life's hard questions and discover your potential for healing. Art skills are not needed. Visually expressing troublesome feelings, and creating a symbolic synthesis between opposites can allow you to respond to painful symptoms and recover vitality.

The client and therapist relationship is confidential. In our free and protected space, we can talk about fears, problems and resiliency. You can explore anxiety and depression, or investigate lifelong questions. Sometimes we do not have words for what is causing unease: working with an image or a symbol of the problem helps you to find a synthesis that reconciles painful conflict. Using imagination and a hands-on process with ordinary art materials, you can reflect on your life's experiences and discover your individual creative resources.

We all can use companionship on our journeys to emotional resilience. In my office, you can work with the sandtray, using miniature figures. Drawing a circular mandala is another way to imagine your feelings in color and form. A picture can look messy or pretty or weird. However it presents itself, we can begin to explore it. We can also look at your dreams to discover unknown helpful aspects of yourself. Dreams serve as a gyroscope, telling us things about ourselves that we ought to know but don't know.

Life's transitions can be difficult because we all naturally resist change. We fear letting go of what we are used to, even if it does not work any more.

Personal Growth: Sometimes one's inner self chafes at the ego's decisions, and a person feels tense, struggling with painful issues.

Finding meaning in ordinary life is basic to living. Learning some methods to deal symbolically with life can transform inner conflict, and rejuvenate relationship to the divine. A personal experience of the sacred in ordinary life links one with God and enriches one's soul.

How do religion and psychology mix? Jung writes, "Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life." (CW11) He means that through careful attention to mysterious feelings and symbols, a person can recognize the divine within and find deeper meaning in living.