ABOUT RYKIE SMTIH
I have spent my life trying to understand what makes people more fully themselves.
Not better-functioning.
Not more productive.
More themselves - more alive, more whole, more capable of the depth and richness that a human life can hold.
BECOMING MORE ALIVE
This question has driven everything I have done. It drove me through a first career in corporate communications. It drove me to leave South Africa, leave everything familiar, and start again in a country where I knew almost no one. It drove me back into full-time study in my late thirties, into a rigorous clinical training in psychotherapy and expressive arts therapy.
And it is what drives every session I sit in now.
I am a registered psychotherapist and expressive arts therapist. I am the founder of The Art of Wellbeing. And I am someone who believes - with everything I have seen in clinical practice and in life - that people are almost always more than they currently know themselves to be.
THE WORK
What I do - and why I do it differently
Not just talking about it - moving on from it.
My practice is integrative. I combine evidence-based psychotherapy with expressive arts therapy - because the most profound shifts happen when we engage the whole person, not only the thinking mind.
I stay close to the research. Current neuroscience, epigenetics, trauma theory, the science of adverse childhood experiences - these inform everything I do. Not as frameworks to impose, but as maps that help me understand what is actually happening for each person, and what the work requires.
Expressive arts therapy is not art class. It has nothing to do with talent or creative ability. It is a clinical methodology that reaches what purely verbal approaches sometimes cannot - the pre-verbal, the embodied, the parts of a person that language has not yet found.
For many people, this is what finally moves something that has been stuck for a very long time.
WHERE THE CONVICTION CAME FROM
South Africa
Witnessed, not studied.
I grew up in South Africa during and after apartheid. I watched, in the communities and cultures around me, what sustained and systemic trauma does to people - not abstractly, but in the texture of daily life. How it moves through generations. How it shapes what people believe is possible for themselves. How it narrows the world.
I also watched what becomes possible when people are met with something that truly reaches them. Not a technique. Not a protocol. An approach that meets the whole person - their history, their body, their capacity for growth that has never been properly reached.
I did not have the language for it then. I have spent the years since building the understanding to go with what I knew in my bones.
That is what The Art of Wellbeing is built on.
A FIRST CAREER THAT SHAPED THE SECOND
The corporate chapter.
I do not need the corporate world to be tranlsated for me. I lived in it.
Before I became a clinician, I spent years in corporate marketing and communications - first at a national level inside one of Southern Africa's largest retail and consumer finance groups, then running my own strategic communications agency in Cape Town.
I did not fully appreciate at the time what I was learning. How people construct and communicate identity. How organisations develop culture - or quietly destroy it. How leaders earn or lose the trust of the people around them not through what they say but through how they show up. How pressure, sustained over time, does very specific things to very specific people.
That understanding runs directly through the work I do now with leaders and organisations.
THE DECISION TO START AGAIN
Starting from nothing.
And willing to do it.
Before I became a clinician, I spent years in corporate marketing and communications - first at a national level inside one of Southern Africa's largest retail and consumer finance groups, then running my own strategic communications agency in Cape Town.
I did not fully appreciate at the time what I was learning. How people construct and communicate identity. How organisations develop culture - or quietly destroy it. How leaders earn or lose the trust of the people around them not through what they say but through how they show up. How pressure, sustained over time, does very specific things to very specific people.
That understanding runs directly through the work I do now with leaders and organisations.
I have never advertised. Every client, every referral, every organisational engagement has come through the reputation built in the room. That is the only credential that matters to me.
Professional standing.
REGISTRATION
Registered Member, ANZACATA - Australian, New Zealand and Asian Creative Arts Therapies Association. The peak governing body for arts therapists in Australia.
AVAILABILITY
Limited availability in person - Wanagaratta VIC.
Online availability through secure video link.
HOW WE WORK TOGETHER
Practical information.
Sessions are available in person in Wangaratta and online via secure video for clients throughout Australia. I am not currently available to clients based in the USA or Canada.
I work with privately paying individuals, selected NDIS participants with psychosocial disability, and clients referred by government agencies and allied health networks.
The first step is a conversation - no commitment required, no form to fill in before we speak. Just a chance to find out whether this is the right fit.
Hope is being able to see there is light
despite all of the darkness.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
ARCHBISHOP EMERITUS · LEADING ANTI-APARTHEID ACTIVIST · NOBEL PEACEPRIZE LAUREATE
