I have known Heidi Pidcoke since the late 1990s, when we worked together at the Family Institute of Marin, a mental health nonprofit in Marin County, California. At the time Heidi was a Marriage and Family Therapy intern, working on earning her hours for clinical licensure. One of the great joys of my professional life is to be able to watch the people I’ve had a role in training go out in the world and build their careers, sometimes, as in the case of Heidi, careers that I’ve both admired and envied.

I remember the hours spent in my office talking over weekly supervision like they were yesterday. Heidi’s view of the world and of her role in it was expansive, having grown up for the first 11 years of her life in Brazil.  Since then she has lived in California Philadelphia, and Texas in the United States, London and Pretoria South Africa, Nairobi, Kenya and Geneva Switzerland. Originally born in Brazil, Heidi is a 3rd culture person, a child who grows up in a culture different from the one in which his or her parents grew up. She is trilingual, fluent in Spanish and Portuguese as well as English.

It is these experiences that we talk about in this episode of From Sparks to Light. Of a calling to serve others that led her to South Africa and then to Kenya. She talks about her work to heal the traumatic effects of generational violence through the mind body connection of somatic therapies.  In this time when the world seems smaller than ever, we talk about what it means to be at home in the world.

Heidi has a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr University and a Masters in Psychology with an emphasis in Somatic Family Therapy from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a trained EMDR practitioner with a multilingual international practice. She currently lives in San Francisco, California with her cat Milla.

To listen to Heidi’s episode, click here.