Teaching with Creativity & Innovation

By Tracy DeCroce

If you didn’t know better, you might mistake Professor Christie Eppler, PhD, LMFT, for a theater director when she says, “I invite an extra chair into the room for my students’ anxiety.”

But the creative method is how Eppler, the School of Theology and Ministry’s Couples & Family Therapy Program director, helps fledgling therapists prepare for the emotional and psychological terrain ahead.

“It’s about balancing creativity and evidence-based practice,” Eppler says. “Just because there’s a rubric in front of you doesn’t mean there’s one certain way you should do things. You have to get comfortable with the questions.”

That kind of “creative and innovative teaching”—in addition to faculty mentoring and publishing in the field—is what the Washington Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (WAMFT) was looking for when it recognized Eppler as its Educator of the Year in December 2017, says WAMFT President Tess Wiggins Goodfellow, MS, LMFT.

“Dr. Eppler stood out as a faculty member who clearly demonstrates what this award is all about,” Goodfellow says.

Eppler’s path to teaching was a circuitous one, despite the fact that her mother was an elementary school teacher. “I always thought it looked like a lot of work,” Eppler says with a grin.

Therapy is full of ambiguity and messiness. That’s what I love. As we start to claim creativity, it becomes a huge growth area. You see a shift in thinking in response to actions and interactions that influence each other.

—Professor Christie Eppler, PhD, LMFT

She earned a master’s degree in counseling and guidance from the University of Missouri and a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy and a doctorate in family and child ecology from Michigan State University. Following that, she held clinical positions that included work as an elementary school family and child therapist and later as a mental health counselor at Seattle Pacific University.

Teaching captured her imagination in 1999 when she stepped in a classroom as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Michigan during her doctoral work at Michigan State University. She went on to serve on Seton Hall’s and SPU’s faculty before joining Seattle University in 2009. Today, she considers teaching her first priority.

Back to the chair.

Eppler doesn’t only teach theory. All her classes train students in the clinical skills necessary to “sit opposite someone.”

Students mine their own lives for issues to examine such as personal identity, emotional triggers and reflective reactions. Such personal exercises tend to produce anxiety, which is why Eppler invites the chair into the room.

Her method has a purpose. By training students to sit with their own discomfort, Eppler is preparing them for the day they will help real clients with challenging family issues or mental health diagnoses.

“Therapy is full of ambiguity and messiness,” she says. “That’s what I love. As we start to claim creativity, it becomes a huge growth area. You see a shift in thinking in response to actions and interactions that influence each other.”

Eppler says she “always knew there was something special about SU” even before she joined its faculty. She especially appreciates the Couples & Family Therapy program’s added dimension of multifaith insight and spirituality training, which enables graduates who become therapists to discuss faith or spirituality if their clients desire it.

“We won’t be experts in all faith traditions, but we can be curious and open to meet our clients’ needs,” Eppler says.

Recently, Eppler’s participation in the nine-month Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life, a Jesuit retreat focused on daily prayer and personal growth, influenced her thoughts about the relationship between faith and therapy.

“I came to see that everywhere is love … and at the same time there is openness for transformation,” she says. “When I see clients or my students that is how I want them to see things. By being fully seen and loved there is so much room for transformation.”