LCATpeanut Coaching
Writing- and art-based coaching
Empower Your Voice
🥜
with Liz Verna, LCAT
Licensed Creative Arts Therapist
Writer
Coach
Peanut
LCATpeanut Coaching One-to-One
One Session. One Hour. One Thing.
Twenty-minute intake, separate from your hour
We plan your session around what you want from your creative practice,
your goals for self-exploration,
and the writing and art media most accessible to your creative communication
Single Session: $325
Sessions are virtual
(and, by default, pants optional)
Come Back. As Often. As You Need.
No package. No countdown. No falling behind. Book your next hour whenever you're ready
$325 per session.
Either way, you leave with your own creative practice
to build on long after our work together ends
How It Works
LCATpeanut Coaching isn't therapy
It's walking around your subconscious with your creativity
It's writing, it's art, it's disrupting the noise
Clarity on patterns you didn’t see.
Permission to do what you feel pulled to do.
Proof that beliefs holding you back aren’t true.
You buy the journals.
The beautiful ones. Thick paper, gorgeous covers. You got them on vacation or at that bookstore on the Upper West Side. And then you never opened them. Or once. Twice.
You always meant to. But you’re busy. You’re tired. And you have nothing to write about. And what if someone found it and read it? Then what?
Those journals aren’t empty. They’re full of messages. Noise. Impulses to default to some other person, some other thing, some other time. Noise that has been playing on a loop so quietly you don’t hear it as a voice; you think that’s who you are.
But if you want to write, and you don’t, there are other things you want to do that you aren’t doing.
The problem is the noise. Creative curiosity makes it nervous: what if you discover that some of the fears it has convinced you are real are revealed to be much smaller, and maybe the limitations don’t exist at all? It wraps us in defenses and protections, behaviors we think are just the way we are. But are really just things we do to cope.
The noise doesn’t come out and say “don’t write.” It says “Sure! Go ahead and buy that journal,” and then it washes over you with exhaustion, lists reasons why later is better, and whispers about how your ideas are terrible every time you turn to writing. It lets you not be able to find a pen. It makes it too hard to find the time.
It protects you. From exploring, seeing, growing, changing, shifting.
It keeps you safe in a shell.
The shell is Not Now.
The shell is Not Enough.
The shell is Not My Turn.
But you are not the shell.
You are the Peanut.
Meet Liz
I’m Liz Verna. I’m a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist, a writer, a coach, and apparently the only person on the East Coast who doesn’t play pickleball.
In 2012, my marriage was ending, my father was dying, my bank account was imploding, and my three-year-old was noticing, so I tried to make the best of things. I cracked two molars grinding my teeth and suffered panic attacks and migraines, so, you know, mission accomplished.
When my dad died, all of the rationalizing, maybe-if-I-try-this lights in the laser show I kept on my marriage flickered off. We had moved into our new house three weeks after his funeral, and I could not understand how things could be disintegrating so quickly. In my grief, depression, and increasingly debilitated state, I couldn’t write, So, I decided to read my old journals, something I had never done before.
Every pattern, every warning, every sign of my failing marriage was there. I saw how I used my writing to vent my anger, closed the book, then ignored the same behaviors, again and again. I saw how I had stopped feeling my feelings, how I had embraced this idea that they were inconvenient. I could track the distance between me and my inner voice as it got quieter and quieter, repressed over the years as the noise convinced me that other people’s were more important. I saw how I had lulled myself into believing that enduring was living, raging was coping, settling was thriving, and that this was all there was for me.
I had written these things yet not read them, closed the book like I closed my eyes. It was only losing my Dad, and all the energy it took to continue the cycle of denial and blame and passive-aggressive dosey-do, that stopped me in my tracks.
A lifetime of listening to other voices left me disconnected from my own. So now I started to use my book as my source, to rent my power and self-esteem until I could afford to buy it. Writing became my accountability, my strategist, my cheerleader, my psyche Soloflex machine. Together, we wrote the story I wanted to write for my son, the one where I kicked shins daily, although I didn’t do that in real life. We just did the happily ever after part.
Writing, art, any creative practice gives you just enough space and distance to look at your feelings and behaviors and ask yourself, “Is this me? Is this noise?” It’s the difference between default and choice. Between “This is who I am,” and “This is who I want to be.” And you can do it yourself, in your own way, in your own time, and in your own pajamas.
Or someone else’s. You shall find no judgment here.
These beliefs, fears, dynamics, limits, and voices are not you. They are noise. And noise can be turned down. So you can hear the only person worth listening to.
Yourself.
Ready?
The easy first step, even to ask questions,
or to meet Liz.
She’s awesome.