Square Peg, Round Hole
Kim Valldejuli
Art Psychotherapist, Caribbean Practice and Research
September 8, 2026
Audio
About this Episode
Kim is an art psychotherapist who trained and worked in the UK, then went home. In 2011 she became the only art therapist in Barbados, working for the Ministry of Education under the title of counsellor, with no professional body, no peer network and a supervision arrangement that turned out to mean a bench in a busy public park. Later, in Trinidad, she was one of five art therapists who founded the Art Therapy Association of Trinidad and Tobago.
This conversation is about what happens when a Eurocentric model of art psychotherapy meets a culture it was never designed for. Kim talks through the peer group of Caribbean art therapists that formed during COVID, the thread they all shared (training that did not prepare them to reintegrate), and the doctoral research that grew out of it: the integration of traditional healing practices, ancestors, spirituality and embodied knowing into a profession that rarely discusses them.
Along the way she and Beulah get into boundaries that were never really boundaries, the stigma and family secrets around mental health in Barbados, why healing in Afrocentric models is not linear, and why the flow of knowledge between the UK and the Caribbean still only runs one way. It ends, as Kim puts it, drop by drop.
Kim Valldejuli
Art Psychotherapist, Caribbean Practice and Research
Kim, Art Psychotherapist, Caribbean Practice and Research
Kim is an art psychotherapist who trained and practised in the UK before returning to the Caribbean in 2011, first to Barbados, where she was the only art therapist in the country, and then to Trinidad, where she co-founded the Art Therapy Association of Trinidad and Tobago. She is currently the association's president, is based in the United States, and returns to Trinidad every year.
Kim's doctoral research explores the integration of traditional healing practices into art therapy with Caribbean populations, work that grew out of a peer support group of Caribbean arts therapists formed during the pandemic and an article for the International Journal of Art Therapy's special issue on intersectionality. In October the association hosts a Caribbean arts therapists' exhibition and community events in Trinidad, marking its tenth anniversary.
What You'll learn
- Why UK art psychotherapy training can leave practitioners unprepared to return to their own cultures, and what a group of Caribbean art therapists found when they compared notes.
- How migration, ancestry and history shape a community's idea of healing, and why traditional healing practices, spirituality and embodied knowing belong in the conversation.
- What "boundaries" mean in a culture where everyone knows everyone, parents stop you in the supermarket, and supervision happens on a park bench.
- The difference between linear, individual, Eurocentric models of healing and Afrocentric models where the healer is part of the community and the work is mutual.
- How stigma, family secrecy and negative framing of mental health show up in the room, and why the flow of knowledge between the UK and the Caribbean still needs to run both ways.