Interview with Lou Lim on Creating
Background photo by Yannis Papanastasopoulos on Unsplash
My name is Lou Lim. I am an expressive arts therapist (a mental health counselor who specializes in using the creative arts in a therapeutic/clinical context), visual artist, musician, performer, and ART-ivist. I am ethnically Chinese, nationally Filipino, and culturally an intersection between the latter mentioned and American. My parents are both Christians and I was raised in a Christian home with my elder brother. I attended a Baptist school, a Pentecostal church, and a Pentecostal college. As first generation Americans, my family desired for us to have access to an education and the opportunity to thrive in a society where I had freedom to choose a lifestyle I valued that afforded me access to financial security. In the throes of pursuing this definition of “the American dream” I cross this written threshold to wonder how faith and creativity intersect in my personal and professional growth.
At age thirty-six I ask myself, “How did I get here?” I found this path through personal ambition, rejection, and spiritual reflection. From the world of pursuing martial arts as a child, I found movement to be essential in self-expression and engaging the world around me. As I was finishing high school, I developed the passion to pursue performance arts—to become a Broadway actor. I was interested in this vocation because I found that performing, storytelling, and expressing myself with my body and voice with others on a stage was enlivening and, frankly, fun. When I told my parents about this ambition, they disapproved because they thought the vocation would be financially unstable and not a positive environment for me. They thought of the theater industry as an irreligious community. Hearing this from them was very disappointing. However, I was a person who commonly tried to see positives and new possibilities. As a result, I pressed deeper into prayer - a part of my Christian formation that I fostered since the age of eight when I first professed my faith as a Christian.
In prayer I asked God, “What do you want me to do?” As I said this prayer to myself as an eighteen-year-old in my school’s parking lot, I felt God talk to me. He said, “Work with children.” After some internal deliberating, I decided to pursue becoming a mental health counselor. Even though my parents preferred that I become a dentist like my father, they were more supportive of this vocation than full-time stage acting. From there, I began reconciling my passion with my desire to integrate art into my everyday life, and began working toward becoming an expressive arts therapist.
As I pursued my degree in expressive therapy, I desired to hone my passion for the creative arts. Expressive therapies expect practitioners to be able to use numerous modalities of self-expression like art, music performance, dance/movement, theatre, and creative writing, among other forms of creativity, to enhance and deepen therapeutic, verbal discourse. Concurrent with my academic pursuits and seeking these creative outlets in my personal time, I found great value in seeking a Christian faith community that would nurture me spiritually. Through a Christian faith community I find a cross section of people who show me love and care. They might show that through a phone call seeing how I am doing, a Bible study where we can discuss Christian concepts and find ways to apply the text we are reviewing on a given night, or in the community through doing a shared activity. These experiences nurture the love that God has for me—a kind of “Jesus with skin on” experience where through other Christians I can physically grasp and conceptualize how God loves me.
Mental health counseling values the role of holistic health, and in my own growth as a person I recognized how having a relationship with God through Jesus Christ was vital for my own wellbeing which fuels my creative pursuits. This does not mean that all of my art has an explicitly religious overtone. Rather, my faith orients me to be the kind of creative person who does their craft well and who creates pieces that model my religious values as a Christian such as to “love my neighbor as myself” and “love the LORD my God with all of my heart, soul, strength, and mind” among other values.
Fast forwarding to June 2020, I believe that my faith certainly informs my clinical, therapeutic, and creative practice. As a registered expressive arts therapist through the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association, I allow my relationship with God to help me exercise compassion and love towards those I work with while allowing the use of creativity to guide my verbal engagement and creative approaches in helping clients learn more about themselves. A directive I commonly use in private practice is asking clients to close their eyes, breathe, and imagine what their stressor looks like. For example, if someone is talking about anger issues, I ask the client to imagine what that anger looks like such as the size, shape, or color of such. I try to guide the client to give their emotion a visual form so they can draw it and discuss their experience. In discussing and exploring their experience, the client commonly comes to new conclusions and perspectives that aid in relating to their emotion in a new way, a way that leads them to change their mindset or outlook or re-frame a difficult circumstance.
I wish I could have received this tip back when I was eighteen years old: God is in control and has a plan for me. I was a child who became a teenager who became an adult who has the propensity to worry. I’m the person who commonly comes up with a “Plan B” and a “Plan C” when addressing day-to-day scenarios. As cliché as it sounds, being reminded that the world is bigger than a test I failed or whether I did the right thing in the right moment would have been grounding and reassuring. Even if I heard this, I imagine that practicing this would still have been rather difficult.
In practicing expressive therapy, I heavily rely on the role of the Holy Spirit to guide my conversations with clients, many of whom are not Christians. When I relate to my clients, I simply sit with them, listen to them, and engage relationally and therapeutically in a way that aids the clients to understand themselves. As I make art or music with my clients, I trust the art-making process believing that what comes out is what is needed for the session. Thus a saying I acquired in expressive therapy that I will apply with a spiritual lens I say to you, the reader, and to my past/present/future self - “trust the process...for God is in control.” A hope I have for the body of Christ with the intersection of art and faith is that I would want to see more and more Christian-identified artists of all genres to engage art in light of current events. In a world that wants direction and answers to hard questions and a listening ear to painful experiences, I believe Christians have a perspective and value that could bring light into unclear places.
Lou Lim, LMHC, REAT is a licensed mental health counselor and registered expressive arts therapist. You can find his artwork and current projects at www.facebook.com/freshpickin and through Instagram (@ldlim83). He is part of a group private practice in Somerville, MA called Looking Glass Counseling (www.lookingglasscounseling.net). His art is currently on digital display through Everett City Hall and Lesley University.