In this week’s episode, we explore how creativity, humor, and connection can be powerful tools for mental health and healing.

Part 1: When anxiety starts taking over her life, Jude Treder-Wolff signs up for an improv class.

Jude Treder-Wolff is a creative arts therapist, writer/performer and trainer with Lifestage, Inc, a company that provides creative personal and professional development workshops and classes. She believes that creativity is a renewable resource that is the energy of change anyone can tap into for healing, change and growth. She hosts (mostly) TRUE THINGS, a game wrapped in a true storytelling show performed once a month in Port Jefferson, NY and brings storytelling workshops to the Sandi Marx Cancer Wellness Program and Seniors Program at the Sid Jacobsen Jewish Community Center and the Alzheimer’s Education and Resource Center on Long Island, the National Association of Social Workers in NYS as well as other social service organizations. She has been featured on many shows around the country, including RISK! live show and podcast, Generation Women, Mortified, Story District in Washington D.C., Ex Fabula in Milwaukee WI and PBS Stories From The Stage.

Part 2: Counselor Belinda Arriaga and emergency medicine doctor Nancy Ewen join forces to collect scientific evidence of the power of culturally responsive mental health care.

Dr. Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga, LCSW, is an educator, advocate, and visionary leader fueled by love and courage. As the Founder and Executive Director of Ayudando Latinos A Soñar (ALAS) in Half Moon Bay, she has transformed the farmworker community, infusing it with cultural pride and unyielding hope. Under her leadership, the Coast’s first affordable housing for farmworker elders became a reality, and mental health care for immigrants was reimagined with arts, culture, and community at the center. A beloved mentor and award-winning author of a children’s book on family separation, Belinda championed farmworkers’ needs during the pandemic and led her community’s healing after a mass shooting. From the southern border to the White House, her advocacy has touched countless lives and inspires change rooted in our collective humanity. A passionate educator, Dr. Hernandez-Arriaga teaches at the University of San Francisco, inspiring the next generation of counselors and activists. At ALAS, She has built groundbreaking partnerships with USF and Stanford to lead pioneering research on the power of culturally responsive mental health care. She has helped to publish works like There Is a Monster in My House, Cultura Cura, and Olvidados Entre la Cosecha, which illuminate the emotional experiences of undocumented and mixed-status youth. Belinda has presented ALAS’s findings at major conferences such as the American Psychological Association and the Pediatric Academic Societies, resulting in groundbreaking tools including the first-ever Spanish-language instrument to measure immigration trauma. Dr. Belinda's work has positioned ALAS as a national model for community-driven, mental health programs that champion the belief that La Cultura Cura, that culture cures. Belinda also co-founded the Latino Advisory Council in Half Moon Bay, helped launch the Latino Trauma Institute, and actively collaborates with Bay Area Border Relief. A former San Mateo County District 3 Arts Commissioner and inductee of the San Mateo County Women’s Hall of Fame, Belinda is an active civic leader. She is also a proud mother of three and holds a Doctor of Education from the University of San Francisco.

Dr. N Ewen Wang is a Professor Emerita of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics. She was Associate Director of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine for more than 20 years. Her career has been committed to serving vulnerable populations and decreasing health disparities locally as well as globally. She founded the Stanford section in Social Emergency Medicine, a field which uses the perspective of the Emergency Department (ED) to identify patient social needs which contribute to disease and to develop solutions to decrease these health disparities. As such, she directed the Social Emergency Medicine fellowship and was medical director for a student-run group which screened ED patients for social needs (Stanford Health Advocates and Research in the ED (SHAR(ED)). She has worked clinically and educated trainees and faculty globally, including at sites in Chiapas, Mexico; Borneo Indonesia and Galapagos, Ecuador. Her current research and advocacy includes investigating disparities in specialty care access and quality, including trauma and mental health. Dr. Wang also works with community organizations to understand best models to provide wraparound social and medical services for unaccompanied immigrant children, for which she has received Stanford Impact Labs, Center for Innovation in Global Health and Office of Community Engagement grants. She presently serves as a medical expert with the Juvenile Care Monitoring team for the U.S. Federal Court overseeing the treatment of migrant children in U.S. detention. In 2023, she was appointed as the inaugural Faculty Director of the Health Equity Education MD/Masters Program at the Stanford School of Medicine. Dr. Wang completed an Emergency Medicine Residency at Stanford and then a Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellowship between LPCH and Children's Oakland.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PART 1

It's 2005, and I'm seeing this guy Jake for about a year and a half. It seems to be going well. One day, he says, “I can't do this anymore.” That hurts, because I'm his therapist. I did not see this coming.

Immediately, this little committee starts going in my head. There's a critic going, "What did you do? What did you do? How did you ruin this? You've got to figure out what you did and fix it."

Then there's a missionary in my head going, "You've got to lower his fee because you charge too much. He lost his job and you're not that good."

Jude Treder-Wolff shares her story at QED Astoria in Queens, NY in November 2024. Photo by Zhen Qin.

Then there's my mother in my head saying, "You get paid to do this? Really?"

I feel my throat tightening up and my heart is beating a little bit and I feel hot. I know what's happening. I'm having a stress response, which is not supposed to be happening on this side of the therapeutic relationship, which is something I know. I've been a therapist for over 20 years. Although I did struggle with this a great deal when I first started in the field, I discovered that I have an anxiety that is rooted in a perfectionism and a you‑better‑get‑it‑right‑ism that is hardwired into my brain and my personality that I didn't fully appreciate until I was sitting in rooms with people going through deep trauma, tragedy, severe illness and feeling my emotions getting heightened and just swimming in self‑doubt. But I worked very hard on that so I could do the job and not burn out.

And it's been going well. It's been great until the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 where I was directly affected. Then I was inheriting all these clients that were going through trauma based on that and I start to feel some of these old symptoms coming back. It's disappointing because I even teach about this kind of thing with people.

Now, I know I have to focus on Jake, but I feel my brain is fogging up and it looks like I'm looking at him through a veil. Even though the room is small, it's like he's far away from me. Time is slowed down. It's only been seconds but it feels like minutes. You know what this is. It's the revving up of the old 911 call center in the brain that gets activated at the mere perception of some kind of threat. It's called the amygdala, which is Greek for “this can't be good.”

By the way, it works hand‑in‑hand with a neighboring brain structure that also is activated by intense emotional experiences, but it processes them and files them and forms memory and meaning, called the hippocampus, which is Latin for "I'm going to need a minute."

I know I have to respond to Jake, and I know all this, so I've got to shift out of this. I breathe, I plant my feet, and I lean forward to respond to Jake. As I do, he leans back, puts his arms over his chest and stares at the ceiling.

“This is your amygdala. What is your emergency?”

“Well, my client is disconnecting from me. He's checking out and I don't know what I did wrong, and I don't know how to get him back, and I don't know what's going…”

“Well, ma’am, we've done all we can. We have sent adrenaline to your heart and made it pound, and sent blood into your arms and legs so you can fight or you can run, or you can freeze. I mean, that's all we've got. Like, you keep calling us every 20 minutes. What do you want?”

And I'm like, “Well, I want to speak to the hippocampus.” I'm like the Karen of my own stress brain. “And I want to speak to the manager.” And I'm like the hippocampus, ever since I learned about the hippocampus, I think of my hippocampus as like a character in a Colombo episode. If he had to go to some bureaucrat office to get a document of some kind and there's a woman with files piled high all over her desk, and she's smoking and glasses on a chain, and she's like, “We're all backed up. We're all backed up. We're years behind, and then 9/11 happens and there's even more to process here. I got nothing.”

I'm trying to calm myself, so I breathe again. I lean toward Jake and I say, "Well, I didn't know you were thinking about stopping, so let's talk about it."

And he says, "Yeah, I lost my job. I joined the army. I want to go to Iraq.”

And there's so much to unpack in that statement, but it takes all of my strength to not say to him, “Oh, so it's not because I'm a bad therapist. It's not about me, it's really about…”

I'm really having this big struggle that I thought I had conquered. Now, you know how they say, you know you're co‑dependent if when you're dying, someone else's life passes before your eyes. There's a saying. Well, I'm having other people's life pass before my eyes. They wake me up at night, these trauma stories, things that I can't seem to file the stories. They're breaking into my thoughts, giving me anxiety a lot of the time.

I used to be able to go into the abyss of people suffering with them, as long as I could tap into this stream of creativity within myself. I called it the River of Hope. It could be the slightest, just subliminal River of Hope. If I could hold on to that, I could go there with them. And I feel this burnout is happening that is blocking it or the river has run dry.

My husband and I are a couple of science geeks. We love to go of the World Science Festival, which happens to be on. It's science talks and workshops and shows all over New York City. We go to talks about physics knowing that we won't understand any of it, but Brian Green is on PBS. We know we'll be inspired by, even though we won't understand it.

So we go to this talk on quantum entanglement, like you do for fun on a Friday night. Now, quantum entanglement, very basically explained, is that when subatomic particles interact with each other and impact each other. They're forever connected no matter how far apart they are. So if you create a condition of change in one of them, it will immediately and instantaneously be changed in the other particle no matter where they are in the universe. There's something Einstein called spooky action at a distance.

The only reason I can even say that to you is because the science part of it went right over my head when the physicists were speaking. But after that, these improvisers came out on the stage and they began doing scenes inspired by this knowledge, by this physics information. They create characters and scenes and it's funny and it's engaging. The way these players are attuned to each other, I'm inspired by the spark and the spontaneity of it, and also I'm able to understand quantum entanglement because I'm seeing the way they're playing it and my brain is absorbing it. I'm actually able to understand the material, but it's really the way the improv impacts me is the joy of it and the attunement that these players have to one another.

So, I feel like there's something about that that's like a therapeutic encounter, the dynamic of a therapeutic encounter. So now I've got to learn all about improv. I start studying it. Of course, the first thing I want you to know is the word improv comes from the Latin improviso, meaning “bet she didn't see that coming.” No, actually it means the unforeseen or unexpected, which I love the whole idea of it. It's unplanned and yet it can look like magic when you're doing it.

So I sign up for improv classes. I'm reading about it and I take this four‑day improv intensive at the People's Improv Theater with this fancy LA, California improv teacher. I'll call him Larry from LA. He's pretty famous and he's trained a lot of people, so I'm very intimidated by that, but I'm also excited by it.

Then when we get in the room, there's about a dozen other students. All of them know each other, except for one guy. I can tell he and I are outliers. We don't know anybody. They all know each other and they all know him. And that is a little activating just to feel like the outsider. Also, they've got more experience with his exercises that he's doing and they're really in there getting it right away. I feel like I'm catching up, just trying to keep up. I'm loving it but I also don't feel like I'm quite there with everybody.

So then Larry from LA says, “Okay, we're going to do scenes from a restaurant.”

Four people go up. This guy Izzy, who's the other outlier, is in the scene. Larry from LA points to me and he says, “You're the waitress. Take it away.”

So I go over to the table. “I'm Jane, I'm your waitress. I'd like to give you the specials.”

And Izzy says, “Well, I know what would be special. Why don't you join our party? Just have some fun.”

I say, “No, I'm working. I'm a waitress. I can't. I'll give you the specials, though.”

And he says, “No, come on. What would be special is for you to have some fun. Why don't you sit down with us?”

And I say, “No, really, I'm on duty. I'm working. I'm a waitress.”

Then Larry from LA jumps out of his seat and he says, "He made you an offer. You have to say yes to it. Why are you resisting it? You've got to say yes to it."

“This is your amygdala. What is your emergency?”

“There's a whole set of rules here that I don't understand. I mean, I don't understand this, like you say yes to something weird and I'm doing it wrong.”

Now, the perfectionism, you‑better‑get‑it‑right‑ism defenses just break down and I start crying in this room full of strangers, that were just a minute ago having a lot of fun. I'm weeping because I'm frozen. I can't think and I feel, you know in a movie of rain or a cartoon character, there's just rain on one person. There's just people staring at me and I'm crying and I feel him in that fog. I don't know what to do. I can't run out of the room. I don't know what to do.

And I look down and Izzy is reaching his hand into my fog. He's handing me something and he says, "Hey, I think you're having some allergies or something. Your eyes are watering, Here, here's a tissue." And he gives me an improv tissue.

And I say, "Oh, thank you, thank you." And I dab it on my eyes with the improv tissue. As I do that, as I make those tears into allergy tears and my improv tissue is real to me, I feel a shift.

Then Izzy says, "Come on, sit down. I want you to join us."

And I say, "Okay," and I do. I know that I'm crossing some kind of weird boundary within myself by doing this thing and stepping into a complete unknown. I don't know these people. We're going to create something together. But what I do know is this. The critic, silent. The missionary, silent. My mother, silent. I'm just aware of these people and what we're doing together. I don't remember this scene but it doesn't matter, because when that scene is over you sweep and you start a new one.

This begins my love affair with improv as a way to reboot my tired, stressed brain and to find spontaneity again. Because when we're improvising, you can't do it perfectly. You're just doing it to be present with other people and see what happens next. You can't get ahead of anything. You can't predict anything. You just are playing.

Sometimes, real magic happens. But when it happens, it's because of that attunement and that connection that is really about people paying attention to each other. Nobody is in control. And that, that's a very special kind of connection. You might even call that a quantum connection. The word quantum, the Latin for hope at the subatomic level.

Thank you.

PART 2

Belinda Arriaga: Encuentro, a magical meaning, a coming together. I always feel my ancestors and my father guiding the way to meeting people that are making significant change in my life and our community.

You see, in 2011, I was doing pro bono work as a therapist in my community of Half Moon Bay, 25 miles from here in a rural community. A little girl was referred to me after being here at Stanford with the best and brightest doctors, trying to figure out why she was having so many stomach pains after almost a year of in and out of emergency rooms and hospitals in pain and found out that I think it's emotional, so they sent her to me.

It was in our time together that I realized she held so much worry about being Latina, about being a Mexican girl in Half Moon Bay, wanting to hide her identity, her Spanish, and in many ways had been forced to carry shame.

But yet, even in that, she brought joy and happiness and we couldn't quite figure out what was wrong, what were causing these pains. Until one day, she took out an art pad and she sat silently next to me. Without saying a word, she grabbed a marker and she drew a big circle and then she drew a small circle right beside it. And she drew cat ears and then the nose and the whiskers and the mouth. Above it, she put “Mama Cat,” and then the same with the little cat and she put “Baby Cat”. Then she drew big tears coming down their faces.

Belinda Arriaga and Nancy Ewen Wang share their story at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center in Palo Alto, CA in April 2025. Photo by Saul Bromberger for Stanford Impact Labs.

She looked at me, did not say a word but picked up a black marker and put a huge X, crossed out the Mama Cat and above it she quietly wrote “No Papers”. And above the baby cat she wrote “Papers.”

Then she looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “What is a baby cat going to do when the mama cat is taken away?”

It was that moment I understood the chronic pain she had been holding for years, the pain of so many other children I had seen and never understood because they didn't speak about this. They couldn't tell this story. But this is what I know is immigration trauma. This is what I understand is what I call undocu trauma. This is a trauma that's not in the DSM, but is real.

So I had to figure out a way to help Sophia rise up, to help her be safe. I couldn't compete with the politics of immigration, but I could find a healing modality for her. So I dug deep into my own soul to connect with what did she need, what was a medicine we could give her in what seemed in many ways hopeless.

I remembered the story of me as a young girl. I grew up in rural Texas and, in many ways, had to be forced to assimilate, to lose my language, to lose my identity because they told us that if you want to get to where you need to go, you had to lose your culture in the town that I was raised in.

But I also remember that I had an opportunity to live in the Panama Canal, and my parents would take me to these spaces where we would see the dancers dancing, the Panamanian dancers dancing with their beautiful dresses. They would sing and they would perform and my soul was filled with this magical pride I can't explain.

That is a power of cultura, culture. It was a medicine that I wanted to bring to Sofia to say, “You can feel proud of who you are too.” I wanted to create a cocoon of culture, wrap her up in a space where she could feel safe and proud in her family, and the many other children that were scared.

And so we began the program of ALAS. ALAS in Spanish means wings. It was a place that we built with a lot of love and care to grow mental health services, to grow the arts, le foco rico mariachi, accordion, dancing, a farm worker program, education, research, and more.

But as I grew this work, I kept telling funders and philanthropists, “Please, can you fund this program? Because we want to grow ALAS for more children.”

33% of our community is Latino, 55% are Latino and Latinx in the school district and we wanted to do more. And funders kept telling me, "Belinda, you have a beautiful song and dance program, but we need evidence. Where's the evidence that this is really about mental health?"

N Ewen Wang: Meanwhile, I was working at Stanford in the Pediatric Emergency Department. I sometimes wonder if I had met Sophia. My research was involved with large data sets looking at access to emergency care by vulnerable populations, including immigrants.

In 2018, when Trump's child separation policies became known and when there was the huge overcrowding and deaths at the border, I served as a child welfare expert for the lawyers who were the lawyers of these children. I remember trying to brace myself for the interviews of these children and the distress that I had anticipated was profound.

But I saw something that I hadn't expected at all. One of the interviews was with a 13‑year‑old girl but she came to the interview with a two‑year‑old who was hanging on to her hand. Maria, the 13‑year‑old explained that when she had arrived at the detention facility, this little girl came out of nowhere and just grabbed her hand and wouldn't let go.

So Maria scooped up the little girl whose name she didn't know, sat her in the lap and continued to explain that she had asked the other families in the cells, she had asked the Border Patrol if anybody knew where her family was. Nobody knew. So Maria had taken care of this little girl. She had slept with her. She had fed her. She had tried to play with her while they were waiting.

I also remember a little girl, maybe eight years old, who came to the interview where her eyes were shining bright. She was so excited that she was in the United States and she was going to San Francisco to see her mother who she hadn't seen since she was a baby.

I was so touched by the caring and the bravery and the hope that these children had and realized also that their telling their story was a way of hope and of strength.

Now, after the child separation policy and things at the border calmed down a little bit, I asked myself and my colleagues, well, what now? I felt that undoing was not enough. It was the lawyer's job to undo the cruel detention policies that were in place, but I was just a doctor. What I wanted was to ensure that the children that I had met and other children like them would, when they met their families, have a chance to heal from their traumatic journeys. But not just heal, go to school and learn and grow and thrive just like my children. But how? There's very little known about these children and the best programs for them. We needed to research into providing the best models.

Belinda Arriaga: Encuentro. The word literally means a coming together, a meeting one another. Something magical, soulful, a connection, unexpected, a wonder.

N Ewen Wang: So Belinda and I were destined to meet. We'd already heard each other's names. We had been referred to each other, but never met in person. Until one day, I was tired of Zoom, tired of those little squares, turned off my computer and decided to go to ALAS's bi‑monthly food drives.

When I got there, my breath was just taken away. The whole community was out there lined in the streets distributing food. And ALAS's headquarters is this bright yellow and pink house with these murals up and down the driveway.

Then I went inside and the pink walls were covered with these photographs of these kids in traditional costume dancing and singing and playing the guitar. The joy on the walls just made me laugh.

Belinda Arriaga: I couldn't help but tell Ewen the stories about how the children were thriving, how we were seeing a difference, that families were connecting, that they were building bridges, that they were rising up, that actually, the arts was an act of resistance.

I explained to Ewen that this was cultura cura in action, cultural healing, the medicine of our community coming alive. But how can we prove this with research?

N Ewen Wang : I was so excited when I heard Belinda talk about cultura cura, because in the research that I was doing, I was finding that there were a lot of organizations and programs providing resources in separate times and in places for individual kids and families, not taking into account, not having time to take into account where they were from. And cultura cura realized that these kids did not come empty‑handed. They came with a strong foundation and strength and resilience and culture. That's when I knew we had to work together.

I asked Belinda, “Would you like to do some research together?”

Belinda Arriaga: Well, at first I was a little hesitant because, for so long, we have known that research is sometimes done to us, not with us. But after meeting with Ewen and Ryan and numerous Stanford team members, I felt a real commitment and care that they were really there to be united in this work. So we said, yes, let's join together to do and tell the story that we had but had not been able to be shared widely.

N Ewen Wang: So, we use Stanford resources and our expertise with the help of the Impact Labs and other Stanford organizations. We took very good care to see what ALAS wanted out of the research. We did the questions and formatted the program the way they wanted.

Now, there were some hiccups, because even though well‑intentioned, Stanford is a large academic organization and not completely used to working with community as a full partner. So we had to resolve some IRB issues back and forth for months, some confidentiality. We had to decide who owned the data and be able to compensate our community members fully. But we did it.

Belinda Arriaga: We did it, and we had the evidence all along. The stories of the children, the stories of the family, the stories of the community. When we did our investigation and our work, we got to hear from them even more. It brought us back to one moment when we saw this little boy what we're calling cultural sensory, because everybody understands that sensory is how sensory integration is so important for healing trauma. But have we ever thought of what does cultural sensory look like?

Belinda Arriaga shares her story at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center in Palo Alto, CA in April 2025. Photo by Saul Bromberger for Stanford Impact Labs.

It was a moment that I walked in and this little boy was standing there Zapateando with all his heart, which means he was stomping and dancing, almost as to dance out his fear, his worry, his anxiety and then came up for air with the music. They told us, the mothers told us how this was breaking down barriers and their families crossing borders, going home through the song, through the canto, to abuelos, to grandparents, to be able to go places where they weren't able to travel because of status.

And children taught us about becoming cultural stewards and how proud they were to wear the trajes or to sing or to dance or to perform. We heard the parents talk about how walking in the pumpkin parade was a sign of not just the arts, but of resistance and of saying, “We will never be invisible again.” They are the evidence.

N Ewen Wang: Nuestro Encuentro, a coming together of academia and community, more specifically Stanford and ALAS and all of the community that we have now formed. I told Belinda that I was going to invite you all to the ALAS little house, and you can bask in the cultura cura there and plan the next encuentro.