{"id":7663,"date":"2015-07-31T09:35:02","date_gmt":"2015-07-31T15:35:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=7663"},"modified":"2015-08-02T07:31:49","modified_gmt":"2015-08-02T13:31:49","slug":"remembering-jane-estelle-she-saved-our-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2015\/07\/remembering-jane-estelle-she-saved-our-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Jane Estelle: ‘She saved our lives’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jane\"<\/a>

C. Jane Estelle, a beloved therapist in Billings for almost 30 years, died recently of complications of pneumonia.<\/p><\/div>\n

Paula McClave had been seeing therapists on and off for almost 25 years when someone suggested she try C. Jane Estelle, whom everyone knew as Jane.<\/p>\n

It took her a year to call and make an appointment, she said, \u201cbut it was the best thing I ever did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI had seen a lot of therapists, and I had given up,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I walked into her office and I said, \u2018Oh, my God, I have met my soulmate.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Another client, who asked to be identified only as Ruth, had a similar experience. Ruth was selling advertising 20 years ago and walked into Estelle\u2019s office to talk to her office manager.<\/p>\n

When Estelle came out to talk to the same person, Ruth said, \u201cI was immediately overwhelmed with a sense of place. \u2026 I knew that I belonged there.\u201d She went to her car, intending to drive away, but instead she went back to Estelle\u2019s office and made her first appointment.<\/p>\n

Maggie McBride, when she met Estelle, was mostly looking for someone to have stimulating conversations with, someone who shared her love of learning and exploration. She called Estelle and left a message, and Estelle later called back and left her own.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer voice on my answering machine was enough,\u201d McBride said. \u201cI knew right away.\u201d What was it she heard in Estelle\u2019s voice? It was \u201cwarm, genuine, really inviting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before long, McBride said, \u201cshe was a therapist, a mentor, a friend, a teacher. She was my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since Estelle\u2019s sudden death on July 23, her husband, Jim Jensen, has been flooded with calls and emails echoing those sentiments. Many therapists are important in the lives of their clients, but there is something unusual about the depth of attachment and even of love that Estelle\u2019s clients have testified to.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>\u201cI\u2019m starting to get emails from former clients who said, one after another, \u2018She saved our lives.\u2019 \u2026 It\u2019s just extraordinary the impact she had on people,\u201d Jensen said.<\/p>\n

Estelle, who had been in practice in Billings for 28 years, the last 24 in private practice, died of complications of pneumonia. She was 64. A celebration of her life is planned for 4 to 7 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 9, at the Yellowstone Art Museum.<\/p>\n

Estelle had a master\u2019s degree in art therapy from the Pratt Institute<\/a> in New York and for more than a decade was the only board-certified art therapist in the Northern Rocky Mountain region. Ten years ago, she earned a Ph.D. in mythological studies from the Pacifica Graduate Institute<\/a> in Santa Barbara, Calif.<\/p>\n

Jensen said her appetite for learning was enormous.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe read every day,\u201d he said. \u201cShe\u2019d read at noon. She\u2019d read when she came home at night. She was always curious. She always wanted to know more about herself, more about her clients, more about psychology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jensen described her as the epitome of the \u201cwounded healer,\u201d someone who had suffered many wounds, but had healed enough to use her experiences to help others.<\/p>\n

She was also the \u201cgo-to psychiatrist for other psychiatrists and for medical doctors,\u201d and she was proud of that, Jensen said.<\/p>\n

\"Jensen\"<\/a>

Jane Estelle with her husband Jim Jensen, who is also a therapist.<\/p><\/div>\n

Terry Smith, a longtime therapist now practicing at Billings Clinic, said he first went to Estelle at the beginning of her career, when he was going through a divorce. He didn\u2019t know what to do with his two young boys, so Estelle sat them all down and gave them paper and crayons.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would all be around the table and she would have us color,\u201d he said. \u201cShe would help put words to what my kids were drawing so that I could understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

To this day, when he and his sons have important things to talk about, they first sit and color together, Smith said.<\/p>\n

Jensen, who is also a therapist, said art therapy is particularly useful in helping people deal with trauma they experienced in a pre-verbal state. Children might draw a house with no windows, or bars on the windows. They might draw something floating on the page, or people with no feet\u2014people who are literally groundless.<\/p>\n

With training, such images could be used as the basis of a diagnosis. It used to be that 80 percent of her clients were children under 10, Jensen said, but in recent years more of her clients were women, middle-age and older.<\/p>\n

Ruth was one of those clients. She grew up in a very violent household and was sexually abused as a child. She didn\u2019t draw pictures for Estelle, but she wrote obsessively and shared her writings with her, and only with her. They used her own words to unlock her past and to begin to deal with it, and they talked a lot about fairy tales and myths.<\/p>\n

The tale of Snow White became a kind of touchstone.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn most tales and mythology, you don\u2019t come to life until you\u2019re older, especially if you\u2019re a woman,\u201d Ruth said. \u201cIt\u2019s easier to come alive in your 40s, and it\u2019s not necessarily Prince Charming; it\u2019s the birds.\u201d Ruth said she still takes great comfort in nature as a result of working through that particular fairy tale.<\/p>\n

Another client, Cora H., saw Estelle regularly from 1991 to 2001. During those \u201cvery intense\u201d 10 years of treatment, she said, she made hundreds and hundreds of drawings. She had had some \u201ctalk therapy\u201d in the past and had done a little art therapy with an untrained counselor, and she was skeptical at first.<\/p>\n

But she soon found that art therapy, properly used, allowed her to take the most difficult parts of her life out of herself and put them on a piece of paper. \u201cBasically, she saved my life,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

And though she will miss Estelle tremendously, she said, \u201cI\u2019m healthy enough not to be in therapy, which I did not think would ever happen in my whole life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. James Hollis<\/a>, director of the Washington (D.C.) Jung Society and the author of 14 books, worked with Estelle on her Ph.D. dissertation. He said he was \u201cimpressed not only with her intelligence, but with her capacity to access dialogue with the unconscious.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said Estelle practiced \u201cdepth psychology,\u201d which is \u201can effort to deal with the whole person. \u2026 The unconscious is not only the repository of our history, but also a cauldron fermenting conflicting emotions, drives, and values. How can we live conscious, reflective lives if we do not trouble even to discern what is going on within us? Jane worked in this most difficult modality, and I suspect her clients were much the better for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

McBride, the woman who made such a quick connection with Estelle\u2019s voice, is a math professor at Montana State University Billings. She said she wasn\u2019t sure how to describe her relationship with Estelle, since she didn\u2019t really consider herself as \u201cin therapy.\u201d<\/p>\n

She went to Estelle because she had three female friends in Bozeman who were all therapists, and she wanted to have stimulating talks with someone like them in Billings. She and Estelle would read the same books and talk about them, and apply what they had read to their own lives.<\/p>\n

Though she wasn\u2019t technically in therapy, she said, Estelle helped her rethink her life, to understand it and make her aware of who she was. The one or two hours a week she spent with Estelle \u201cmeant more to me than most of my time with other people,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

McClave said it was uncanny how close she felt to Estelle, to the point that they used to joke about having come from the same womb.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, it\u2019s like losing a sister,\u201d she said. \u201cShe was able to bring me out of my depths of depression. She was just there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not too long ago, she said, she told Estelle she didn\u2019t know what she would do without her. \u201cAnd she said, \u2018You don\u2019t have to. You have me for eternity.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paula McClave had been seeing therapists on and off for almost 25 years when someone suggested she try C. Jane Estelle, whom everyone knew as Jane. It took her a year to call and make an appointment, she said, \u201cbut it was the best thing I ever did.\u201d \u201cI had seen a lot of therapists, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[2876,2881,2880,2877,2879,2878,407],"class_list":["post-7663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-billings","tag-c-jane-estelle","tag-carl-jung","tag-dr-james-hollis","tag-jim-jensen","tag-pacifica-graudate-institute","tag-pratt-institute","tag-yellowstone-art-museum","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}