Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg Ferrell) and Speaker 2 (Chenai Mupotsa Russell)
Episode 111: Showing Up in the Therapy Room With Our Whole Humanity: Art, Attunement, and Radical Care
[Introductory music]
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast, a place where we explore research, amplify Autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Ferrell from learnplaythrive.com, broadcasting to you today from unceded Tsalagi territory.
Meg:
Hey, welcome to the episode. Learning from Chenai Mupotsa-Russell will absolutely transform you, and I’m so glad you’re here. Chenai doesn’t just teach us how we can use art of every kind to support well-being for our clients, she also embodies everything she teaches — art, liberation, anti-colonial practice, and so much more. In today’s conversation, we explore the role that art can play in our work as providers with concrete examples, and ideas, and stories from Chenai that you can use right away.
I’ll tell you a little bit about our guest. Chenai Mupotsa-Russell is an art therapist, community builder, advocate, and PhD candidate in community psychology. She’s the founder and co-director of Rainbow Muse Collective, which is a neuro-affirming, intersectionally-driven practice. Chenai is passionate about creating spaces where healing, creativity, and radical belonging thrive. She draws on both lived experience and professional expertise, centering cultural safety, sensory attunement, and relational care. Her research reimagines mental health through decolonial practice, collective care, and intersectional justice.
I think you’re going to love this episode, and if you do, you do not want to miss Chenai’s 90-minute talk in our upcoming continuing education Summit, where she’s speaking alongside other podcast favorites like Kelly Mahler, and Dr. Mel Hauser, and so many others. The summit starts February 3rd and is available for ASHA, AOTA, NBCC, and NASPC use. Grab your spot at learnplaythrive.com/summit. Here’s the talk with Chenai Mupotsa-Russell.
Hi, Chenai. Welcome to the podcast.
Chenai:
Hi, thank you for having me.
Meg:
I’m so excited to sit down and talk to you. Before we get started diving into everything we can learn from you and together with you, can you tell us a little bit about your personal story and about the work that you do?
Chenai:
Well, yes, of course I can. Personal story, when I’m asked that, I always think, like, where, how far back do I go? I guess, yes, I was born in Zimbabwe, starting from birth, then lived in Botswana, then back in Zimbabwe, then moved to so-called Australia in my teens, and that is where I’ve lived the past 20-something years. As we speak, I’m currently in South Africa visiting family. My journey has really — it’s been kind of like following a lot of breadcrumbs to finding where I am now. My first ever school was an international school with, you know, people all over the world where we learn lots of languages.
So, from very young, diversity was a very kind of natural thing. And then, when I moved to so-called Australia, you know, studied initially international studies and disability studies, and my first ever job was in East Arnhem Land, which is up North in remote Indigenous communities. So, I learned how to be in the workplace by being in communities, sitting on mats with, like, mob and being silent and listening to elders. Like, I didn’t learn how to put on a pinstripe suit and fake it till I make it. I learned starting, like, in community development with real cultural humility in a day at work. Actually, first I was at the Tiwi Islands, and I would take a little four-seater plane to Tiwi, and we’d go, you know, catch fish, and set a fire, and cook it on the beach with the community.
And by the time I came back to Melbourne and got an office job, I already had been set up to, I guess, first observe, learn, rather than imposing my ideas on people. And that, sort of, is something I carried out throughout even once I started doing sort of more therapeutic work. And that just sort of evolved. Like, I’d be in a sort of more community development, community engagement role, and people would be like, “Oh, but we want to talk to you about how you feel, as opposed to the people back at the clinic that you’re representing.” So, I keep sort of adding little bits of study on.
And then, I discovered art therapy while working at a youth service. A colleague of mine brought in an art therapist to run a program, and I saw these young people sort of open up. And I was like, oh, this is something I want to study and learn how to do more. So, yeah, that’s just how sort of things kept evolving. Later on, I, you know, I worked in an early intervention program for young people who, like, had first contact with police. And then, from there, I went to a youth mental health service, where I ran a lot of LGBTQ+ programs. So, it’s always been being in non-normative environments as my norm.
So, when I sort of started Rainbow Muse as my own practice, which is now like a collective, it was just sort of a space for people who are other — because in all the services I’d work, a huge part of my role had been, you know, cultural diversity, or, you know, the DEI type kind of components were part of my portfolio. Whereas, I was like, what if we didn’t have to include those who are the — what if the normative was just whoever you are, whatever your journey, whatever your background, and can that just be the standard? And can we have spaces where we don’t assume things? And, yeah, places where we walk alongside humans with curiosity, and where we don’t impose standards that are based on one way of being, one standard way of being human. And it all just unraveled. And I hope that answers the question.
Meg:
It does. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing. You know, to meet you now by first seeing your website with its incredible aesthetic and all of the different things you’ve put together, and offer for folks, and then before I’ve spoken to you face-to-face, I’ve watched your Summit course, which I mentioned to you before we started recording, was such a very embodied and moving journey; which is tricky to pull off through, like, a recorded training, right, where you’re not interfacing with people.
So, it was really meaningful for me to listen to you trace that back through your life. And I think your story is probably very different than the entry point a lot of folks listening have — where they’re learning later, we’re learning later, a lot of us are learning later — cultural humility, and curiosity, and all of these things that you have described as sort of a whole life journey, that has always been part of your journey. So, really appreciate you sharing that.
As you know, most of the folks listening are OTs, SLPs, mental health providers, who support Autistic people in some capacity. And after I watched your Summit talk, I was thinking so much about the opportunities of creating art into every kind of our work with Autistic clients, gender non-conforming clients, anybody, really. I am not a particularly artistic person. I’m the least crafty OT you’ve ever met. And I watched your talk and thought, “Oh, wow, like, not doing this is such a missed opportunity.” Can you talk a little bit more about the role that art can play in our sessions and in our clients’ lives?
Chenai:
I firmly believe everyone is an artist. And my older sister often jokes that, because we’re three girls, and she says she’s the least arty one, but we were doing Christmas decorations, and she did these, like, beautiful bows on the door, and I said to her, like, “That’s incredible art.” Like, art is not necessarily, like, drawing a picture. It’s in your cooking, in your gardening, in so many — in how people dress, how people tablescape. So, how we define art needs to be more expansive.
Yeah. I see so much, like, creativity around me that isn’t always labeled as creativity. And I think OTs in particular are very creative from what I’ve observed, and use a lot of, I guess, creative methods. I guess, knowing the rationale or evidence base behind why something’s happening might make it seem less so, but those things can sort of coexist at the same time. What I love about art is that so much of what we know as humans or what we feel or what we need to express, we — it’s not a cognitive process. We do not yet have words for it. We cannot access it through language. So, having other modalities for self-expression allows, you know, alongside the meaning, the overt meaning-making we make through language and through other means, it works alongside it as this in-depth process that’s quite magnificent.
And I know there’s so much, like, sometimes I work with little humans and their parent might want to know how they feel, and they repeat these words. And I’ll be like, they can learn to mimic that word, but that word really doesn’t do how they feel justice. Can we, like, scribble on a piece of paper? Can we make motions with our hands? Can we do a little dance? And can that dance eventually become a word? Because then we get the true essence of what they’re trying to express, not them enacting approximation to a meaning based on the limited vocabulary they’ve been given and told that’s what they must use.
So, it’s definitely something I think is for everyone and it’s also really embodied, and present, and in the moment. Art sort of allows us to, like, just pause and, like, co-create, co-regulate, and it’s not just about what’s happening between the two parties. So, I can think of humans I work with where I couldn’t articulate things I know about them or things we’ve shared because it wasn’t language-based, but it’s in there. And it’s also part of what becomes our toolkit for co-regulation, knowing when I observe this sign of distress or dysregulation or whatever, this is a way we are together and there is a way we create together that brings some ease. Yeah.
Meg:
Thank you. I feel like that really invites us to get curious about what is art to our particular client and what does help them access those parts of themselves. And thinking broadly about that, we have a Summit talk from Kim Clairy who’s an Autistic OT and she does a lot of work around interoception, and really articulates some of the same things that you’re saying, of ‘I don’t have words for how I feel, but it is red blobs on the paper with purple swirls around it’. And I think when I hear that, part of me gets it too, right? Like, oh, I’ve felt like that before. I think about when I watch people dance, I have this feeling that you just described of, I didn’t have the words for what you just showed me.
On our podcast, on our Patreon episodes in January, we have Brittany Soltani, who is an OT focused around social prescribing, which isn’t what it sounds like. It’s prescribing clients time to be creative, whatever that means for them. And she lives in Asheville where I live. And I said to her recently, do you know that your experience of drawing and painting as restorative feels like work to me? Like, that that wouldn’t be restorative for me, but running in the yard and playing is a creative, restorative, joyful practice, right? It’s sport.
Like, anything with my body that’s active and gets my heart rate up is where I access that. And my husband said, “You know how I always want to cook when things are stressful? Cooking is making art to me.” And I had no idea. I thought he was dutifully cooking. We have two little kids and he’s just like, “I got it.” And it transformed how I look at those moments when everything’s chaotic, and he’s like, “I’ll cook,” I’m like, oh, he’s in there regulating and creating. And it’s so — it opens a lot of doors when we think expansively about it.
Let’s see. One of the barriers for some of us is our own expressions of art, right? Like, if I think of myself as not somebody who has a lot of ideas around visual arts, I might be in the room with a client who would really have a lot of meaningful experiences through the opportunity to engage with creating visually. So, some of us, I think, need a little bit more help with a bridge there, just like others have trouble accessing play. And when they watch examples and take courses around play, it’s a little easier to get in and play in an embodied way with a client. So, in your Summit course, you give all of these really accessible, and open-ended, and meaningful examples of what an art-based prompt or opportunity might look like. Can you share an example of an art-based prompt that a provider could use, even if they don’t think of themselves as artistic or creative?
Chenai:
I think the best sort of prompt is working with whatever the interest of the person who you’re with has. So, like, there’s some ways that I’m artistic, but there’s many art modalities I don’t know how to do, but I still do them if that’s what is required. And sometimes, especially for younger people, it’s not necessarily tangible like a paintbrush, pen, whatever. Sometimes it’s something digital. So, like, one of my least favorite creative things is, like, I know lots of humans who build entire worlds on Minecraft. And I say it’s my least favorite because I’m not good at, like, I’m not even good at walking in the game. Like, I get nauseous. But for some humans, when the world out there is too much, there is an entire expansive magical world that they create, entire servers where other people come and find safe spaces.
It’s phenomenal, and that’s a form of creativity that, you know, my young clients often have to teach me and be patient with me as I navigate those things. Sometimes I have clients that have these ideas in their heads of things they want to build and create. So, we don’t start from, “A point of the goal is to work on this goal or blah, blah, blah.” They come in and they say, “I want to make this,” and then I think, oh, based on some of the things going on in your life, let’s co-regulate as we do that. And if I can, like, pop in a question here or there about this thing that I know is tricky at school or this or that, I will, but let’s be guided by you.
And sometimes me and little humans go on YouTube. So, a little client of mine and I were making a complete suit of armor using cardboard. So, there’s a YouTube channel. I forget what it’s called, but it’s Cardboard Armor Smith or something. So, we have to watch step-by-step. There’s no way I’ve ever been equipped in my entire life to know how to make an entire suit of armor out of cardboard, and it takes patience. And you have to use a box cutter. So, if you’ve got, like, a 10-year-old, 8-year-old, you can’t just kind of give them.
So, there’s a lot of negotiation, a lot of, like, hot glue stapling. It can become quite — it can take weeks and weeks and weeks of, like, co-creating and co-constructing, managing expectations. I also, my own humanity turns up in the room because sometimes it’s really difficult making things. And sometimes I’m like, “Oh, can we just do something easy?” And it’s like, no, we’ve got a mission, and we focus, and we collaborate, and we work together. Sometimes little humans have a dream, and I can’t, I actually can’t make it possible, like, the mechanics of what they’re describing. So, all I can relay is, “This is what is possible that we can try and make together. And we can’t do it in an hour today, but this is what we can do in an hour today, and then we can do more,” and so it’s a lot of, yeah, a lot of negotiating.
I know, particularly during, we had a lot of lockdowns in Melbourne, and we had to do a lot of Zoom, and not only did we play a lot of games like on Roblox, or this, or that, we created versions of them based on those things. They had whole entire worlds that might be based on an interest like, you know, Five Nights at Freddy’s, or dressing little people on Dress to Impress, so then once we’re reunited, we make Dress to Impress paper dolls, and we laminate them, and we cut them out, and we make houses out of boxes. And there’s a lot of world creating, whether it’s like in preparation of an event coming up, “Oh, I’ve got to go to a birthday party, I’m anxious.” Where is it going to be? “It’s going to be at the roller rink.”
In Toca Boca world, we create the roller rink, and we rehearse over and over again, and then we get a box. So, we have a digital version, we get a box, and then we do the floor plan, and then we polymer clay the people, and then we make them, and every variable of what might happen at the birthday party, we enact. But it’s not really a prompt that’s in a book, it’s a prompt that comes from the little human if you say — if you kind of allow them to shape it. And even when they shape it, if it seems really, really big, what they’re asking, it’s doable, it just might take multiple sessions. And a lot of whatever you’d put in the recycling is your friend. Boxes, the little things that you — the toilet paper rolls, all of that can be used to make anything. Whatever a person expresses interest in, whatever lights them up, just start there, and then go from there.
Meg:
I love this. Thank you for sharing those concrete examples. I really appreciated when you said that your own humanity shows up in the room, because it does take some courage, and vulnerability, and authenticity to not show up with a plan, and the materials, and ‘This is something I know how to do, I’m good at doing’, but rather co-creating what happens with the child, and trusting that process, which includes saying, “I don’t know how to do this yet,” or, “This part’s really hard for me, can you show me?” or, “I notice I’m getting frustrated, hang on a second,” and being brave enough to say, “I can’t make your idea happen,” and go with that real disappointment, or frustration, or whatever happens in the room.
One of our other talks in the 2026 Summit is from Susan Ehlerman, who talks about how historically, we’ve tried to, quote, unquote, ‘teach social skills’ by contriving all of these situations. And she points out that when you have interest-based social groups, tricky things come up, and you can help kids navigate them authentically and with what’s actually happening in the room, or even between you and your client, right? Like, “Wow, what just happened here? What do I need to do? What can you do? How do we move through this together?” So, when we’re brave enough to really show up with our full humanity, we don’t have to contrive or really plan much, because it’s already there, unfolding together. What other values or practices do you center in your work? Why are they important to you, and what do they look like in practice?
Chenai:
I guess, values, things like, yeah, you know, decolonial practice. And I practice in so-called Australia, so, like, honoring the, you know, owners and custodians of the land I work there. And based in Melbourne, that’s the Wurundjeri people. So, understanding whose land I work on, and the significance of that, I think, is one of the core principles. I guess, being neuro-affirming, of course. And I, you know, I myself am Autistic. And when I first started doing this work, I didn’t know that. I got diagnosed, you know, in my 30s, and it’s because I was — like, the hard part is in understanding what’s happening for my little clients, it’s translating it into something their parent will understand, like, having this epiphany of where is the work actually happening.
And sorry to — I’ll come back to my values, but I had a little client in particular who was really struggling with going to school. And I said, okay, let me come, and I’ll meet you in the car park, and we’ll walk from the car into the classroom, and as we’re walking to the classroom, I could almost anticipate when it was going to be too much, and we needed to stop and sit down, and this and that. And we finally made it into the classroom. And as I was driving home, I was like, how did I know? And I was, like, I know because I felt the same. Like, I understand the experience. And, you know, at the time, we’ve come to know a lot about especially people assigned female at birth, and late diagnosis, and that kind of stuff.
But I remember saying it to people, “I think I’m Autistic,” and them saying, “Oh, but you’re a social butterfly,” and this and that, and whereas now, I have friends who are like, “Of course you are.” But at the time, it seemed like a very odd thing, and it felt really important for me to tell my clients that, especially when they’re in systems that are deficits-based, and they feel like, “Oh, I’ve got to be pulled out of school for speech and OT because I’m different, and I’m this, and I’m that.” And I say, you know, “Well, I am too,” or I say to parents when parents are so overwhelmed by all this messaging they’re getting, their narrative is like, “Let’s fix my child.” And I say, “The person you’re having this conversation with, I am like your child, so I’m maybe not the right person.”
And once I say that, they’re like, “Oh.” And I say to parents, you know, like, if you affirm your child, you know, the worst thing that could happen is they grow up, and they end up like me. And they’re like, “That’s not a bad thing at all.” And I’m like, yeah, you know, I was very affirmed as a child, even though they didn’t know I was Autistic. I once went to school camp, and somebody drove the two hours, like, my mum had someone come two hours and bring me my safe foods each day, because she knew I wouldn’t eat otherwise. Like, those are ways I was affirmed. She just knew I couldn’t eat. I was a boarder in a boarding school, and my clothes got washed at home, because the detergent that they used at school, the smell of it, I couldn’t tolerate. So, I had all these sensory sort of things that people just went, “Oh, that’s just Chenai, that’s what she needs,” and it didn’t make me selfish, or obnoxious, or anything like that. It allowed me the space to turn up, and do, you know, lots of different things.
Value-wise, I guess, other values I have, sort of stuff around gender diversity, sexuality, or intersectionality, and looking at humans at the intersections of all their forms of diversity, and honouring that, and bringing it into the room as far as knowing, for a start, the way in which lots of frameworks view human is, you know, white, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied person, as a normative; and deviations from that can be viewed with a deficit. And approximation to normativity as well-being, and allowing humans to define well-being for themselves, based on their identities, and celebrating people’s identities, and advocating for people to be safe, just as they are. Because there’s so much violence certain humans experience, you know, so much ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, whatever it is, if we don’t know those things, name those things, and address those things as part of the therapeutic relationship, we just re-enact the violence.
We can’t say, “Oh, if you just do these things, these are the things that we know fix this way of being.” We have to say, “We also have to hold space for the fact that you are also navigating these other compounding issues, and they have nothing to do with who you are inherently, or your identity, they are as a result of these things in the world that are not your fault.” So, like, anti-pathologizing approaches, gender expansiveness, and I guess relational safety and co-regulation are key components. And, you know, when I talk about turning up with all my humanity, I’m very driven by, like, decolonial work as a huge part of my practice, and there are all these clinical frameworks that separate us, and it’s ‘them and us’ and othering, and it actually takes a lot more self-reflection, and reflexivity, and ethics to bring your whole self into a dynamic and take responsibility for yourself, not just as a clinician doing what they learned at university, but a human with their entire lived experience, their emotion, their feeling a little bit agitated from traffic this morning, and this and that, all the different elements.
And hold them somewhere in your understanding, and communicate what is appropriate, and take, I guess, responsibility for what you bring into a dynamic as a human. Because often our clients can feel things. Like, so often my clients say, “What did your face just do?” Like, and then I go, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize my face did something,” and then I have to wrap my brain around what was I just thinking just then when my face did that thing? And otherwise, humans can feel like gaslit if they’re just given words and it’s incongruent to what they feel and experience from being with you and around you. I guess if I were to sum it up, yeah, if I could sum it up, it would just be like, there’s no defaults, no right way of being. Just tell me who you are, and I’ll believe you.
Meg:
Thank you so much for sharing all of this today with us, Chenai, and I am really excited for people to keep learning from you and your talk in our Summit. As we wrap up, please let us know, what are you working on now, and where can we find you and your work online?
Chenai:
You can find me on my website, which is rainbowmuse.com.au, and I will start — and obviously I’m working on this podcast right now, so like, yes, Summit, I’m very excited to be part of the Summit, so watch my fun little video on that. I have been working on my PhD, so this little downtime, I’m doing a lot of auto-ethnographic research, which I’m getting the opportunity to be in South Africa and do some of that which is really, really awesome. Yeah.
Meg:
Thank you. I’ll link to your website and your social media on our show notes. Thank you so much for sharing with us today.
Chenai:
Thank you for having me.
[Ending music]
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